Gaming

Love:

• Base building. Fortifying against enemies and being creative is a blast.

• Exploration and big worlds. Games like Borderlands, Fallout and Far Cry with unique environments and ambiance.

Hate:

• Escort missions. After all these years they're still not fun.

• Excessive health bars. Having to carry several different kinds of potions, etc. One of my favorite games is Dark Cloud for the PS2, but I think it had health, mana, weapon health, thirst and effects like poison that never cleared until you took a certain potion. I believe I used a GameShark or similar to get rid of thirst and weapon health.

Not something I essentially hate, but I roll my eyes every time there is a running-out-of-a-crumbling-building-before-it-collapses scene in a game.

Starting with what I dislike: collectibles (or pickup upgrades). They spread these out over the levels and I find myself scouring the map to see if i didn't miss anything. It ruins the pacing of the game. Some examples of my recent plays that do this are the Last of Us games and the Mass Effect trilogy. If the game is build around exploring your surroundings, it's a different story of course.

What I really like in games is character building and i love it when a character improves depending on your playstyle. A very solid example is Skyrim's leveling system. It just feels more organic.

I strongly dislike ingame teleporting and pause menu quick travel. I'd much rather the game have more ways for me to get to where I'm going than simply materializing wherever I want to be.

Let the travel itself be part of the game instead of just a way to link the "real" parts of the game together. Make it fun and fast to move around, add unlockable shortcuts, add more in-universe traveling options. Let me get to where I'm going myself instead of doing it for me, and make it fun to do so.

Especially in open world games, not only is this the most true, but they're the worst offenders. Literally what is the point of making an open world and then letting people skip it? You see everything once and that's it. If you make an open world full of opportunities to wander and explore, and then players want to avoid it as much as possible via teleportation, you have failed as a designer.

I love when games use as few invisible walls as possible, and don't stop you from exploring weird places or even out of bounds. There doesn't even have to be a reward, just the feeling of getting somewhere where you're not supposed to be is enough. Ultrakill and Anodyne 2 both do this really well.

I also love rich, responsive, low-restriction movement mechanics, which kinda ties in with the first point. I love when games let me chain all sorts of moves together for wild bullshit midair acrobatics, zipping and bouncing and flinging myself all over the place constantly. Good examples are Ultrakill, Pseudoregalia, Sally Can't Sleep, and Cruelty Squad. On the flipside, Demon Turf is a game I hated and dropped quickly because of how artificially and pointlessly limited the movement felt.

I mostly play turn based JRPGs. My main gripe with any video game is excessive interacting with menus and inventories. I want to play a game, not enter submenus of submenus to change minute things. So here's some features to combat that:

Queues: lining up research or skills to learn, so I don't have to enter the fucking menus after every battle/minute.
Skill/Equipment sets: let me save my setups. Give me a few slots, and a warning if some part of that setup is used by another character. Heck, give me a way to save whole party setups, so I can have e.g. fire-killer team of ice-themed abilities on all characters. Or just have a standard ability set for progression and a second, temporary one for skill learning or whatnot.

Chained Echoes and FFVIIR had some good QoL improvements, but how many times do I have to shuffle materia or accessories, just because I'm leveling something? Every second encounter, because something is maxed and I have to swap it out for something else?

And Inventory management, that can make or break a game. Some of those submenus take half a minute to enter before you even do anything. Astria Ascending (I don't recommend) was awful in that regard and guilty of everything mentioned above.

Fucking menus man... Give me some elaborate customizable skill setup slots and queues, please.

The junction system in Final Fantasy VIII. The magic system is based on the amount of spells you have left in an inventory and you can also equip them to your character's stats. If you don't take the time to acquaint yourself with the system your stats will take a dive because you're casting spells like in a more traditional game. The upside to this is if you hoard enough spells and equip them to the right stats you can be unstoppable since early game.

I hate the overwhelming number of currencies and crafting supplies. I shouldn't need to have to gather so much of this thing and so much of this other thing (neither of which are labeled clearly, what they are and how to find them) to craft things. A small number of things makes sense, e.g. metal and powder to make ammunition, but when this potion requires 5 different plants and that potion needs 7, only some of which are common between them, it's an unnecessary time suck.

Then, when I have an abundance of various supplies, I have to go to the blacksmith to repair my armor, run over to the jeweler to craft bigger gems, then go to the chest to stash things, go over here for various upgrades, and over there to craft the next potion I need. Why can't all these things be in one place or at least right next to each other instead of scattered all over town?

Combos. I don't like them when they're intentional by the developer, they need to be something that you feel like you've discovered on your own. I hear Baba is You is pretty good about that.

I recently observed a game of MtG where a newish player was playing a scry deck, some premade or something, had a guy who would scry every time a creature dropped, and a guy who would place counters every time he scried. He'd edited the deck slightly, added a creature that spawned tokens every time it received counters. Managed to get them all out at once before realising what he'd done; straight up had to ask if tokens count as creatures dropping because he wasn't sure if infinite combos were real. That's a good feeling, because it's something he did, not something that was given to him.

Contrast League or Overwatch or whatever where the devs have specific ideas about how characters should work and will aggressively destroy things outside of that. Or just modern Magic.