Equipment can be upgraded, but only through an enormous amount of tedious grind for tiny incremental improvements.
By halfway through the upgrade tree, all the equipment is overpowered and will make any boss fight trivial, including the final boss of the game. All additional upgrades are meaningless.
You don't get to see the real ending unless you fully upgrade all the equipment.
Huge amounts of foreshadowing, but the story is already very predictable.
Motion controls.
Very long unskippable cutscenes before all bosses.
Hitboxes that make no sense whatsoever.
Voice Actors that really want to be somewhere else. (perhaps with full bladders?)
All cutscenes are slideshows.
A huge open world, with massive Travel distances and no fast travelling, and theres nothing to explore.
A currency system where the game has a normal currency that you can earn via tasks but that currency is artificially nerfed because there is an additional “premium” currency that is only available either in extremely paltry amounts that have to be saved over months of grinding or spending actual cash. Also there’s a ton of stuff that can only be purchased with large amounts of premium currency
A subscription for basic services like multiplayer or a song catalog even though you just paid $70 for the game
High paced action game that suddenly grinds to a halt for a forced stealth section that was clearly tacked on and poorly designed
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Escort Section where the person you're escorting moves at a slower pace than you do, forcing you to jog, walk, jog all the time.
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Want to quit the game? Sure go into the menu, click Quit Session -> Are you sure? -> click Yes -> Loading Screen -> Game menu -> click Quit Game -> Are you sure? -> click Yes -> Loading Screen -> Unskippable game title intro -> sub menu with Quit Game, Continue Game, New Game -> click Quit Game -> Are you sure? -> click Yes -> Loading Screen -> Desktop
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- Lonely? Don't worry, the main character is never going to shut up and will comment on every single thing with lines that won't get old at all.
- Yeah, you can play with your friend... After hours of gameplay, once you both have this super special item and only for certain, boring ass missions.
- You need an account, and we have no native sign up so we're going to open up a completely different window while you try to drag your mouse awkwardly with the controller. Yes, the cancel button is very close to the confirm, no there's no confirmation, and yes you'll have to start this shit from scratch.
- Escort missions, but the escort won't get out of the fucking way, and your shots can kill them.
- Currency systems that are just currencies within currencies, within currencies.
- The items are easy enough to see, but you have to be in just the right location to pick it up.
- There's a save screen, but nothing actually pauses.
- I know 99% of games use similar buttons for different functions, but what if we switch it up, just for giggles? Let's make "jump" the R1 button!
- You can drive, but it's on ice physics. And, yes, there will be a chase sequence that's going to take you a very, very long time.
If singleplayer:
A complex transmog system that has gacha style of different 'currencies' (shit tier crafting ingredients) and layers of abstraction, some of which functionally require being subbed to a battlepass which allows you to purchase some necessary key items to the transmog process only after you've done all your monotonous dailies for 3 weeks without missing a single one.
If multiplayer:
'Radiant' style quests revolving around escorting a low health, brain dead at path finding npc, which walks slower than your run speed but faster than your walk speed, through a PvP combat zone, who frequently has random mental breakdowns and must be reassured everything will be alright through a 22 step dialog tree process, which is largely randomized everytime, in order to keep them moving.
You and the npc can be killed during conversation segments, which you cannot exit from at whim, you must complete the dialog tree successfully to regain control of your character and exit the 'cinematic dialog' mode.
UI is 30 different sections that are marked with obscure pictures instead of words.
The tutorial explains things that are exactly the same as every game ever (like moving around, moving the camera, etc) but does not explain or even mention the mechanics that are unique to this game that not even someone who is an expert in every game ever would think about. Then tell the player to do a thing you didn't explain at all how to do.
I swear to fuck, this is the standard for a lot of games these days. I really shouldn't have to look up a guide or wiki to get the fuck out of the tutorial area.
Don't forget to never fix game breaking bugs.
30min of gameplay, more purchasable with expensive unbalanced DLC's.
Loot boxes. Because a game is not addictive enough to kids without gambling.
Worst storyline, unrealistic characters.
Add more useless content, like new skins and hats, instead of fixing bugs.
Change mechanics every now and than causing loads of players to loose everything or making expensive purchased items useless.
Make the game subscription based after 6 months, when everyone already bought the base game and extra content, and aren't eligible for refunds anymore.
Make the game pay to win.
Ask EA to publish your game.
Make travel time waaaay to long, no fast travel.
Have way too many collectibles in places which are easy to reach but take a looooong time to get to, with at least 1 per set glitched somewhere impossible to reach.
Did I already say "more DLC's"?
Make multi-player server based, have those servers crash often.
Abandon the project while there's still a massive player base because you're working on the next money-grab piece of junk.
Complain constantly the people leaving bad reviews are just too dumb to understand the concept.
Oblivion's leveling system lol. Make it both possible to level yourself too much AND not enough! Then make every enemy in the game scale. Make a skill level up as you move and another level up as you jump!
4x type games that don't tell you how values are calculated. "Oh, but there's a wiki!" That's great, but not an excuse.
The last one is Starfield in a nutshell
30 minute cutscene that dumps a lot of exposition and it ends with a timeskip into the tutorial.
Every mission is like this one from GTA:VC. Easy to fail, frustrating controls, annoying camera, long, unskippable intro and you can't save during it. Add minute-long loading times and it's perfect.
Have to make permanent choices early on. Get poor, half-assed introduction into lore that is way overcomplicated.
Just like real life.
As someone who hates souls games, make sure there are undodgeable attacks by enemies. Example, you’re walking past a wall and something attacks and kills you from behind. Also, make sure there are huge bosses with ambiguous hit boxes and indeterminable strike locations so dodging is weird and dumb.
Mind you, Monster Hunter World forces every player of a hunting squad to view an unskippable story mission cutscene in their own hosted instance before being able to join another player's session of the same mission.
Lots of watching the cutscene in a solo hunt, abandoning the mission, then joining on a friend.
Choices once made (purchasing armor) cannot be undone later. Buy a half-assed weapon in round 1, fill that slot forever and never be able to throw it away later.
Does not run fluently on a modern computer in 2024.
You have to spend your earned money after every round. You cannot save it to learn what skills you actually need and then bulk-buy later.
Requires internet connectivity even though single-player.
When you die you have to re-start from the beginning. From the very beginning.
Enemies get way harder as you progress through the game and upgrade your weapons, making all these upgrades essentially useless.
Earned levels increase your character's size permanently. As your character grows, it can no longer sneak into small tunnels to catch precious loot.
Game is not open-source.
