Gaming

Crafting with survival elements, one button stealth attacks, random loot with stats in story games.

Not a gameplay mechanic but constant fucking talking mains and npcs

Swimming/diving, it usually has terrible controls. My prime example is Witcher 3, swimming with Geralt feels like steering a freighter while underwater enemies can quickly move in all directions.

Also I generally don't like platforming, but that's just me.

Fast travel that is just a game mechanic with no story ties in open world games.

Disclaimer: My main experience with games so far has been some Nintendo stuff, Fallout, and The Elder Scrolls.

Of what I've played I like Morrowind's fast travel system the most. You don't just open your map and click a button, you talk to people or use a spell/item. And NPCs mention these travel systems and story wise would use them.

I like Oblivion's (and to a lesser extent, Skyrim and the 3D Fallout's) the least. Time passes like your character walked to where you fast traveled but not much is timed so that has little effect on immersion. Too much of the journey has to have gaps filled in by the player's imagination because walking on the road normally has a lot of encounters and wandering off to check out random buildings and people. It encourages less exploration and taking some time with the game.

Obviously I want a balance, I don't want to be walking the same road with 2 wolf encounters a thousand times because it's between two areas I need to frequent. And I don't want 90% of my playtime to be traveling. But I also don't want to keep instantly fast traveling to all places and feel "lazy" and like I'm missing experiences and encounters. And I want more immersion. More character interaction instead of UI interaction.

Someone already sort of mentioned this, but I don't usually like crafting and building stuff. So games like minecraft and animal crossing new horizons are out. For the latter, greatly prefer new leaf.

When you enter a level and the camera pans over every important thing in the level before you can move. I'm not an idiot. I can discover the level on my own. Stop holding my hand.

Most open-world games have areas on the map that are blank until you "explore" them by climbing a tower of some kind and "activating" that region on your map.

This results in trudging blindly into the middle of every new area, ignoring interesting stuff along the way and beelining to the tower just so you can see the damn map. It's an annoyingly unnatural way to explore.

I didn't even realize that I disliked it until I played Far Cry 6, which has a much more organic and immersive landmark discovery process. You learn locations of interest from readables and by talking to friendly NPCs that you encounter in the world.

In FC6 it's even thematic, since you're guerilla fighters passing intel along by word of mouth.

Edit: sp

Those hints to success "difficult parts". Some games think their players are braindead. If you have some trouble or spend a bit too much time doing a quest or killing a boss, NPCs or game interface constantly yells at us hints to skip those "difficult" parts. Games are more and more aimed for dumb casuals. I'd rather have the satisfaction completing a challenge by myself. Lets not forgot that today's games are increasingly easier and shorter (and pricier) than before...

Do this to get that to get this to get that One example is the Minecraft tech tree. Abosultely no choice whatsoever. I don't ever need to make a choice. Obviously Minecraft is now begining to take steps to sort this out. But it's been over 10 years and the system is ingrained into people's minds

Open worlds with markers. It takes every feel of exploration from me and changes the open world part of the game to really long and boring interactive loading screen through which I must pass between (very often) very linear missions.

Games that require you to follow someone, and if you get too far behind, you have to restart.

Any puzzly or exploring games that suddenly introduce a twitch response element. Having to successfully jump onto a sequence of 14 wildly gyrating levitating rocks to get to my next “thoughtfully re-arrange some tiles” challenge has caused me to leave so many games unfinished. Basically if I can’t deal with it by mashing every button at random, it ain’t gonna happen.