Heavy RNG.
Weapon spread in a shooting game? Sure, understandable.
A bit of damage range? A little 93-117 range never really hurt anyone.
And I can see the necessity for random drops. But 0.1% chance for something that only happens like once every 5 minutes is awful. Please don't.
And even crits are sometimes fine. As long as they're not absurd, like doubling damage.
But oh my god. Do I hate hit/dodge chances, heavy crits, CARDS, absurd drop rates, and things that are like "hits random spots within this area".
PLEASE.
Melee weapons that only hit where the crosshair is pointing.
As if it's just a gun shooting invisible bullets.
This includes smaller games like Blockland, and much larger games like Elder Scrolls.
Though for Blockland, it'd be something you can mod in. And for ES, who knows how many more bugs it'd create. So maybe those are bad examples.
i dislike a lot of common MMORPG design tropes i guess
One of the biggest for me is when a game has both race and gender selection. And you have non-human races. Male, totally not human, big, scary looking. Female, pretty much looks human but has a couple of things that the male has. Like a tail or horns. Or even worse, everything but the face and torso.
Furry example, but an example nonetheless. The females look much more uncanny in the game than they do in the illustration. The rest of the 3 races in Archeage are just humans with different names. I think one of them has pointy ears.
integrated tutorial at beginning of games that arnt seamless at all...
just in your face, 4th wall, talking to you like you are stupid, instructions.
Even worse when your character responds to it in confusion.
"Press the X button to jump!"
"What??? What's an X button?"
no stop. don't do that.
Also on the subject of 4th walls. Games that are 'meta' and don't do it right. Like OFF for example.
A character or two will talk to the 'player' and you're just 'controlling' the main character, and all the things he does are your decision. Or you could've just not did that and left the game to have it's stuffty story be just a little less stuffty.
Very shallow amount of depth, but 'vast' in size alone.
"Oh our game has a very, very huge map/lots of planets to explore!"
And then there's pretty much nothing to do in it. Or if there is something to do in it, you're just doing the same things everywhere. Tiers don't help.
Games that have gutted/mishandled multiplayer but still continue to sell themselves as multiplayer games.
I believe Sacred 2 used to still say it was multiplayer for a while after the servers shut down, but now it's saying single player.
The Ship and C&C Renegade had issues with multiplayer after transferring ownership. The newer owners of The Ship didn't have the licence for things used to make the game, and the old owners didn't just transfer the server over to them, leaving them to host their own server on their own IP, but unable to actually update the game to make it connect to their server. There's a workaround, but the game definitely died because a majority of the remaining population likely didn't bother looking for one.
C&C Renegade went through a couple of ownership changes. First developed and hosted by Westwood. I'm guessing there wasn't any more profit in hosting the game, so they still kept rights, but a team called XWIS begun to host C&C Renegade for them. This was fine and all other than the fact that the XWIS servers would let players register accounts and connect to the servers even with an invalid serial code. So the community-made anti-cheat program was updated to kick players out for having invalid serial codes.
Well, fast forward I don't know how many years later. EA bought rights to C&C, and sold Renegade in the C&C Collection on Origin (as well as a physical thing that gives you coasters and codes to unlock the games on Origin). Unfortunately, installing Renegade doesn't give nor ask for a serial code. In the background, it was just set to all 0s. This of course, triggers the community-made anti-cheat, effectively barring any players that bought the game through Origin. This may have changed at some point.
Games that have a variety of rarities for items around your progression. The rare ones of course being much better, making everything else seem like junk. The junk you're going to find every 10 seconds.
And then they decide to shovel the rare stuff at you throughout the entire game, either through quests or 'level up rewards' or something stupid. Making loot almost entirely pointless.
