Scrappy Mechanic / Wide-Open Sandbox

• Easily the most widely loathed missions in Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag were those requiring the player to tail NPCs on a journey, with special vitriol reserved for "eavesdropping" missions, which required the player to remain within a (very narrow) radius from the target.
• Batman: Arkham Knight: The Batmobile is widely considered the game's biggest hindrance and is the primary reason it is the lowest rated of Rocksteady's Batman: Arkham trilogy, not because it is badly implemented - on the contrary, many of the game's missions and puzzles make very good use of it - but because it is oversaturated. The developers obviously realized players would prefer to use Batman's gliding mechanic to driving. Their solution? Throw in an out-of-place mechanic where the batmobile would transform into a tank and fight drones. While this was tolerable at first, the game seemed to place more and more emphasis on it as the game went on, with tank missions becoming longer and more frequent. What's more, the changes made to ramp up the challenge were seen as more annoying than anything, with the stealth missions where the player was forced to stay out of a tank's line of sight and attack it from behind - while driving a tank - receiving the most vitriol from fans and critics. It doesn't help that a lot of the Enemy Chatter is Character Shilling for the Batmobile, and half of the Riddler's subplot is forcing Batman to drive through obstacle courses, like obstacle courses are riddles..
• Grand Theft Auto:
  • Grand Theft Auto (Classic):
    • Your one-star wanted level never goes away, unlike in future games, even if it's something as petty as running a red light or accidentally hitting a nearby car on the streets.
    • The physics engine is so notoriously wobbly that it's common to accidentally hit a nearby car. This becomes a problem when you have a wanted level because a police car can "attach" to your car, resulting in an instant explosion with no warning.
    • You cannot redo a mission if it is failed. Unlike later games in the franchise, where you can redo a mission if it's failed, you have to restart the current level from the beginning.
  • Grand Theft Auto III:
    • Unlike other future GTA games, the gang hostility was a common complaint. If a gang is hostile towards Claude, he will be shot at if he is seen by the gang member. This wouldn't be an issue if it weren't for the fact that certain missions trigger the hostility, one of which is already hostile towards him since the beginning. Once you kill Salvatore, you may as well forget going to Saint Mark's because their shotguns will slaughter you in seconds, with crack-shot accuracy too.
    • It also introduced the stamina meter, which means Claude will get tired if he gets tired. It can be nullified by completing the Paramedic side mission, but it's widely considered a very difficult side mission...or you could tap sprint repeatedly to circumvent being tired.
  • Grand Theft Auto: Vice City: The police spawning. In an effort to correct III's laughably easy-to-avoid police (once you got used to the game's quirks), they overdid it. It's next to impossible to lose even a two-star wanted level without going to a Pay 'N' Spray. This is because once you hit two stars, the cops continually spawn everywhere. No matter how far away you get from those following you, no matter how inconceivably remote of an area you attempt to hide in, they will show up. Also, see the supercop glitch.^note This exists in all 3D GTA games, but seems to most commonly happen in III, Vice City and San Andreas. SA and onward adjusted this, but it's still really hard to get away from even a two star level until IV.
  • Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas:
    • The player must feed CJ every 48 hours in-game time, otherwise he starts getting hungry and his stats start decreasing. This can be an issue if the player is trying to do missions.
    • The rhythm minigames got a bit of dislike because of it clashing with the game's mood and being tedious if the player is playing San Andreas on an HDTV. In the PS3/XBOX 360 remasters, it was Unwinnable for several people because of significant input lag. Not surprisingly, rhythm minigames were not brought back in any future GTA game.
    • After you unlock gang wars, be prepared to have your territory attacked by rival gangs. It's possible to skip them by doing a random side-mission to nullify the gang attack. It does not help that you lose all the territory you claimed after you are dropped in the countryside by C.R.A.S.H., and don't get it back until much later in the story.
    • In the PC version, cheat codes are encrypted using hashes, where the game consistently checks your last recorded inputs and activates a cheat if the produced hash corresponds with a code. The consequence of this is that alongside the intended cheats there are plenty of unintended ones too. For example, the refill health cheat is officially 'INEEDSOMEHELP', but is more popularly known by one of its unintended derivatives, 'HESOYAM'. The problem arises when the unintended cheat codes include strings of inputs that correspond to things you could easily type during regular gameplay, such as cheats that only need a certain combination of WASD presses; the most infamous of these is likely the 'overcast weather' cheat, which can be activated with 'WWDWASWWDWAS'. There are many documented instances of speedrunners or players aiming for 100% completion that get their attempts invalidated because of these accidental cheat activations.
    • The enemy AI's weapon accuracy is also notoriously unreliable in this game. At its core, enemies are programmed to become more accurate when the player enters a vehicle to compensate for the fact that you are moving much faster. But the parameters for downgrading the accuracy back to on-foot levels are iffy, and in many instances it fails to do so at all. This often leads to cases where enemies will suddenly get the ability to kill you with an ultra-accurate automatic weapon in less than a second, caused by the fact that you may have entered and exited a vehicle at some point earlier.
  • Grand Theft Auto IV:
    • The friendship system is best described with the following words: "NIKO, IT'S ROMAN! LET'S GO BOWLING!" Rockstar North must have realized how annoying this system was too, as they made it optional in the first DLC pack, The Lost and Damned, and removed it altogether in The Ballad of Gay Tony. Even worse than just receiving incessant calls from your, by the end of the game, numerous friends what feels like every ten minutes, inevitably interrupting whatever it is you're doing, they always want you to come and pick them up for whatever activity, despite them possibly being an extremely long drive away from you. They'll then have the nerve to complain about you being late, to the point you frequently lose approval. Oh, and accepting an invitation from one friend won't stop another from calling as well, and turning the second invitation down will still lose you brownie points with that person, despite how you're obviously otherwise occupied. Not to mention that you can also randomly receive a text from a friend you haven't been out with in a while complaining about not seeing you, complete with an added loss of approval. By the end you're left wondering why all of Niko's friends are so incredibly codependent.
    • PC users have an extra thorn in their sides with the lousy helicopter controls. It's very difficult to fly them well, and it gets even worse if the scenario requires you to enter aerial combat with them. On top of this, it is still possible (as always) for your friends to call you while flying.
• Minecraft:
  • Minecraft Java Edition's long-lasting refusal to add controller support. Even with all the arguments for why using mouse and keyboard is better, this has been a long-standing sore spot for players who lack the dexterity to use a keyboard, simply prefer to use a controller, or wish to play multiplayer on one computer. The only way to get controller support with Java is to rely on third-party mods, and while ones like Controllable are excellent, mods can be counter-intuitive to install, can cause a veritable potluck of problems, and often aren't compatible with the latest version of Minecraft which forces their users to either remain on older versions longer than vanilla players, or use Bedrock Edition which will lock them out of access to a lot of mods, servers, and access to their friends' Java worlds.
  • The hunger system when it was introduced in beta 1.8. Before this, food instantly restored your health. Once hunger was introduced, food no longer were instant heals (Potions of Healing covered that), but instead, food takes about 1.6 seconds to fully consume and they restore hunger points instead. Keeping your hunger full gives slow health regeneration but letting the meter fall too low prevents you from sprinting and letting it go fully empty will damage you and even outright kill you if playing on Hard difficulty. What makes it worse is doing too much physical stuff (running, mining, etc) will make you hungry more quickly and every piece of food has different amount of saturation, which determines how full you stay until the hunger meter starts to drop again. Naturally, you aren't told of this. It was downplayed after the 1.9 Combat update, that made the regeneration at full hunger much faster (though still consuming the same amount of saturation or hunger points).
  • On Xbox 360, those tutorial captions that always seem to show up when you're underwater, being shot at by a skeleton, or having a Creeper run at you. You also can't jump or swim up until you respond. Not that big of a deal, until you get into 2 block deep water or drop into a hole.
  • 1.8 added a way to get mob heads. Unfortunately, the only way to get them is to have the mob (zombie, skeleton, or creeper) be killed by a charged creeper. This entails waiting for a thunderstorm, hoping for a creeper to get struck by lightning, staying at a distance where the creeper neither kills you or despawns, bringing a mob to the creeper, and then not dying when the creeper explodes, which is very difficult, especially on Hard or Hardcore mode. Needless to say, not many people were happy with the unnecessary difficulty in obtaining a trophy.
  • Repairs with anvils. Repairing any one item on an anvil (say, your diamond sword with Sharpness V, Fire Aspect II and Knockback II) gets much more expensive in terms of experience, and even more expensive when you want to rename it. At a certain limit (39 levels of experience, to be exact), the anvil will decide that an item costs too much experience to repair and refuse to let you fix it.
  • The combat revamp in 1.9. While it makes facing monsters more challenging and fun, nearly everyone agrees that it ruins PvP combat and turns the originally fast-paced duels into slow games of waiting for your opponent to drop their shield. If you join a PvP oriented server (minigames, factions, etc) don't be surprised if they abolish the new system by making all swords have a million points in attack speed.
  • A lot of the bigger servers rely heavily on commands, but not all of them use the same commands. Okay, so you would type in /help so you'd know what you can and can't do, right? Well, some servers don't give /help permissions to visitors. That's right, you need commands to play on the server, but you're not allowed to know what they are!
  • Building with stairs will make even the most experienced builder groan. Sure, they can add a lot of character to a building (especially when used in making a roof), but they're incredibly fickle and hard to place in the correct position. Half the time, you'll have a sideways-facing stair when you wanted it to face forward.
  • Harvesting pumpkins or melons while holding pets can be quite the juggle. Since they won't leave your side, the danger of them getting crushed by a pumpkin or melon is very real and telling them to sit can impair their usefulness if the player forgets to undo it. One must wonder why they didn't do anything to fix that yet, like having the produce push them out of the way instead.
  • Raids. Take everything that makes Wandering Traders so bad and add an event onto it. The way it works involves killing a group of wandering illigers; mobs that can pop up at any time around the player. They all wield crossbows, which makes them long ranged attackers. Although only hostile if you get close to them, if you don't want to do a raid, you'll have to put up with them wandering around, trampling crops and making it impossible to sleep in your bed while they're around. If you do kill them, you get afflicted with the "bad omen" status, that last for about two in game hours (which the game doesn't tell you about) meaning that you'll have to steer clear of villages until then if you don't want to deal with a raid. And it doesn't have to be an actual village to trigger it; simply being close to three or so villagers is enough to cause one. If you have a villager breeder set up close to your base, you either have to spend the time as far away from your base as possible, or kiss your base goodbye thanks to raids having several mobs that destroy blocks. Combine this with several mobs being Demonic Spiders^note Ravagers in particular hit like tanks, about take out a near quarter of diamond armors durability unenchanted by themselves and you have a very tedious, very annoying event from start to finish. Fortunately, if you know about the Bad Omen (it is visible in your inventory like other effects), it can be cured by drinking milk like any other effect.
  • The revised world generation can make gathering certain resources incredibly tedious. In the old days of the game, biomes could appear next to one another without much thought, meaning snow biomes could be located right up against desert biomes and other such silliness. The devs ultimately revised it so it now takes into account adjacent biomes into consideration when generating the land. While it's certainly realistic, it also means that you'll often end up with two repeating biomes stretching onward for miles. Worst still, the world generation seems to greatly favor warmer biomes as oppose to cooler ones, making it so that ending up with "desert-savanna wastelands" that go onwards for tens of thousands of blocks, often stretching far beyond oceans frustratingly common.
  • Some villagers can spawn as Nitwits, meaning they can't obtain a job and will never provide any trades. They're just as common as other villagers, thus causing them to take up space that could have been taken by useful villagers.
  • Parrots like to drop off of a player's shoulder for a ton of reasons, including falling off a block. Given the game's terrain, this can cause a ton of annoyance while transporting them.
  • While Llamas can be outfitted with chests and grouped up to make a caravan, they can only be controlled by Leads. This practice is tedious at best, and they become obsolete altogether once Shulker Boxes enter the picture.
  • Most of the Wandering Trader's trades, which are decided at random, are rip-offs that primarily ask for emeralds in exchange for plants you can easily find around the overworld. He might, however, carry uncommon items like Nautilus Shells or Blue Ice.
  • Being underwater, in general. Swimming is finicky at best and downright frustrating at worst, owing to the player's habit of abruptly lurching in directions when you're trying to move with a bit of finesse, made all the worse by your ever-dwindling oxygen. Even using flight in Creative Mode, which normally ignores all physics, isn't immune to randomly lurching or stuttering when moving underwater. Worse still, is if you're trying to place blocks and any underwater plant comes anywhere near your hitbox, rather than just placing the block over the plant the block will be randomly placed in an empty space nowhere near where you wanted it. Finally, mining takes forever underwater, meaning it might actually be impossible to break your erroniously-placed block before you run out of air. Add in the stomach-turning gurgling of Drowned, which occasionally spawn with infinite tridents, and you'll never want to go within a thousand blocks of water ever again.
  • Fishing. Cast a rod and wait about 30 seconds on average to have an 85% chance of catching a single unit of food, and a 15% chance of catching something else, and you have to sit there and do absolutely nothing else since the entire process is manual. It's the absolute least efficient means of obtaining food in the entire game, worse even than beetroot, but you also have a 0.8% chance of an enchanted book or a nautilus shell. This is the only reliable way to get nautilus shells, and those enchanted books are the same as a level 30 enchantment and can include treasure enchantments. This means if you want either of these, and even if you have a rod with maxed-out Lure (speeds up catch rate) and Luck Of The Sea (increases odds of treasure), you can easily waste tons of time fishing and walk away with nothing more than a couple of stacks of mediocre food and a few bits of trash.
• Palworld:
  • Egg hatching is widely disliked due to how time consuming it is (egg hatching progress is determined in real-time) and how finicky the heat system is (and falling out of the proper temperature range can extend egg hatching time up to twice as long). Thankfully, there is an option in world settings to disable the time for egg hatching and make them hatch instantly.
  • Breeding also gets its share of criticisms. Unlike egg hatching, the timer cannot be disabled in the world settings and it is determined in real time. Furthermore, the frequency of Passive Skill mutations occurring makes it hard to pass down the Passive Skills you actually want to the offspring, causing wasted time and eggs.
  • The requirement to hold down a button or key to craft items, construct buildings or hatch eggs is despised for being pointlessly time consuming. Version 0.1.5.0. added an option for continuous work by pressing the work button once.
  • Base building was never a particularly liked mechanic, but of the buildable pieces, stairs and triangular roofs were particularly despised for their finicky building requirements. The 0.1.5.0. patch loosened the building restrictions for them.
• Red Dead Redemption II has the Naturalist role update in the Online mode, which is loathed by players for numerous reasons. But one of the big ones is that if you kill a certain number of animals while playing the game the main NPC, Harriet, locks you out of interacting with her for five to ten minutes. While it's bad enough that the update essentially has a mechanic that prevents you from actually playing the content you paid for to begin with due to a fairly arbitrary rule change, it gets worse; hunting (i.e. killing animals) is a vital part of both several of the other roles the game has had you pay for (it's the whole core of the Trader role, for a start) and generally playing the game, as you gain several valuable items from hunting and crafting. And furthermore, that's just if you deliberately kill animals; the mechanic doesn't distinguish between hunting and accidental kills or self-defence, meaning you get locked out of playing the role regardless of whether you actively hunted animals, accidentally ran over a squirrel that got under your horse's hooves without you being able to do anything about it, or killed a wolf to stop it ripping your face off. Essentially, the Naturalist role is a mechanic that forces you to choose between either not interacting with a huge part of the rest of the game in order to complete it, or experience frequent frustrating delays preventing you from doing so. And it doesn't help that Harriet herself is also The Scrappy due to her obnoxiously self-righteous Cloud Cuckoolander personality.
• Terraria:
  • To prevent healing spam, using any healing item will give a Potion Sickness debuff that prevents taking more for a minute. (Forty-nine seconds with a certain accessory.) This is considered fine in normal gameplay, but against bosses, it can feel like forever before the player is allowed to heal again.
  • Rain in an early game playthrough for players trying to farm herbs, as it summons annoying Flying Fish and nullifies the blooming conditions for Fireblossom. In Hardmode, the Angry Nimbus enemy appears, which can easily kill an unprepared or unexpecting player early in Hardmode if they do not find shelter or have no means of fighting it off.
  • Blood Moons and Solar Eclipses, respectively a night that increases enemy spawns and a day that spawns special powerful enemies on the surface. They're intense fun at the earlier points they can happen, but once the player gets better gear and good weapons, they turn in to one-shotting truckloads of weak enemies and hoping that they don't overwhelm the world's NPCs. And unlike most other events, which end after killing a certain amount of enemies, these need to be waited out.
  • The Angler's quests. He will ask for a fish somewhere in the world, which can be obtained by fishing in a given biome long enough, and giving it to him will net a reward. The problem is that the rewards are completely random, the quests can only be done once per in-game day, and three of the prizes are needed to craft a convenient high-tier item that has information and home-teleportation all in one (saving inventory slots). Because of this, getting unique items from him is a Luck-Based Mission that requires waiting whole in-game days just for a chance at getting something, and making matters worse, he can give duplicates of the same item the player already has. There's also an achievement for doing 200 of these quests, and it's one of the lowest-obtained achievements in the game. There is an item that fast-forwards time to the next dawn and thus getting another quest in with less time, but using it has a cooldown time of one in-game week. Then are the quests that cannot be reasonably be done at a certain stage of the game, such as if he asks for a fish on a Sky Lake before having the tools to conveniently find and reach one, or if he asks for one in a Mushroom biome when the player has yet to find one.
  • The Goblin Tinkerer can reforge a weapon or accessory to change its modifier at a cost, which can greatly boost its properties. This is disliked by most players due to being a Luck-Based Mission, where by complete chance he can give a bad modifier to a powerful weapon, and the only way of undoing that is to pay him more coins to try to reforge for something else. Some times, the player might make their Solar Eruption Godly on the first try. Other times, that Celestial Shell might keep becoming Angry and Spiked for a while, before finally settling on Menacing, the accessory modifier that is a direct upgrade of the previous two. The Tinkerer is seen as a huge money sink because of this.
  • The Torch Luck mechanic added in Journey's End was so widely despised that the developers revamped it after two patches, so that there was no penalty for using regular torches in the wrong biome and added an event that once beaten, allowed regular torches upon placement to be converted to the proper torch for the biome.

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