Quick time events.

Carry weight.

Hiding content in New Game Plus. Making me play a game twice just to artificially ass replay “value.”

Timer that can be skipped with paid currency.

Since all the obvious answers have been covered, I’m gonna dig deep on a genre nobody but me even plays anymore anyway.

Character-based asymmetry in versus puzzle games. It’s never been remotely balanced, and I don’t believe it ever could be.

Suppose I put you in charge of developing a balance patch for Puyo Puyo Fever, Puzzle Bobble 3, Magical Drop, Meteos, etc, you could just name any other puzzle game that has this. What changes would you make? What changes could you even try to make?

If you look at something like a fighting game, characters have large movesets, and every move has a bunch of variables attached: startup, active, recovery, hitstun, damage, meter gain. Which means there’s a lot of surface area for developers to adjust and fine-tune until the cast hopefully feels balanced enough. Even if they don’t get it right on the first try, they can gather data from players and use that information to figure out what needs to be patched.

Puzzle games have little to no room to even try to do this. So when you try to give character choice a mechanical effect on gameplay, but they only do one thing like a dropset or garbage pattern, there are almost no meaningful buffs or nerfs that can be handed out when it turns out that Void Hole is kinda good and Skeleton T kinda isn’t.

Super Puzzle Fighter II Turbo HD Remix famously tried, and, well, an attempt was made but it ultimately couldn’t do all that much. The tiers got shuffled around slightly, but it’s still Ken Fighter.

Anything pay to play ruins it for me.

Poorly done procedural generation where it’s a waste of time to explore. The first Remnant was pretty bad about this, with small setpieces scattered throughout the levels that looked interesting but usually only contained basic enemies and one or two empty pots. Filling out the map was a chore that was almost never worth the effort - almost never because sometimes there was a unique drop hidden in a level just to screw over anyone who got sick of fighting through hundreds of empty buildings and decided to stick to the main path.

No natural health/mana regeneration. I hate games where you need potions to survive or are limited in your spell usage just because you do not enough mana which was finished earlier.

Anything that is 100% chance and just wasting time, with no meaningful way for the player to influence the odds. For example, how fishing is implemented in some MMOs like ESO: you can eat a buff food and use the correct bait for the water, but beyond that you’re just waiting in agony until the random timer dings. Then you do that 12 times before moving to the next hole, etc. “Waiting” isn’t an enjoyable mechanic.

Archers interrupting your attacks. Fucking archers.

Holding a button to do anything/everything. I can see the logic of where it may be useful, but it doesn’t need to be used for everything. So damn annoying.

*Oh, and similarly, forcing excessive submenus to do basic things, like continue a save from the main menu. That should be one, maybe two button presses, not 4+ along with a confirmation. I’ll never understand games with stuff like that.

QTEs

Fucking RE4 Original

Games that have long scripted sections you can’t skip and sometimes even save. Next level, you’ll have to move around and answer questions so can’t even go take a shit.

Witcher 3 and Cyberpunk both had sections like that. Loved the games, hated that bullshit.

Not really a game mechanic, but as an achievement hunter I freakin’ HATE speedrun-achievements. The longer the game, the worse it is

QTE, including those i have to align those bar that goes left and right, or those tap a button quickly, in any game that isn’t point and click adventure game. It’s not fun in God of War, and it’s not fun in Dying Light.

Also extreme hand-holding tutorial that force you to click button or do certain action else your progression is refused. This happened a lot in mobile game, which i basically refuse to play.

Maybe not the worst, but I’ve been playing old RPGs and I really hate mandatory loss fights in late game or NG+. Radiata Stories was a fantastic game but I was bonkers powerful on my second playthrough yet somehow lost a fight to a humongous chud asshole for plot reasons. Rare misstep in that games story, honestly.

Best example of subversion of that trope, though,b was in Dragon Quest 11. If you know, you know, but I won’t spoil that, lol.

I don’t like durability mechanics when its clearly there just to waste your time or money or whatever. Any game that makes you do more hiking to repair benches than fighting is either getting a thumbs down or I’m going to download a mod.