Mechanics in games that had the exact opposite results of their intended design

[Garrod Ran]

i tried to upgrade all the armors in BotW so eventually i stopped caring about weapons as anything more than a means to an end

guardian sword is temporary but Armor Set Bonuses are eternal

 

[Grue]

Was looking for this post, didn't take long.

You piling them up is your own dumbass fault.
You'd think you'd learn since as you progress you keep getting more...but Hey let me play an arcade game as if it was a simulator then complain when it doesn't jive.

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Calling someone a "dumb ass" for having a different experience with a game mechanic to you is pretty rude. Most of the mechanics in this thread can work as intended for a lot of people... But for others they have an unintended consequence. There's no right or wrong way to play a game. You can defend something without resorting to insulting people.

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Yeah, really.

 

[Chopchop]

Giving you exp for doing actions in Deus Ex HR. This is supposed to reward the player regardless of what path they choose to approach things in, but instead it entices the player to take as many paths as possible and/or the "best" paths. This is because some actions give more exp than others and some can be stacked. Like if I had a keycard to a room and a password to that computer in that room, I would still take the vent and hack both the door and the computer anyways because it gave more exp.

I can't remember if they balanced it better in Mankind Divided, but typically I don't think exp should be given out in that fashion in an immersive sim.

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Yeah, DXMD was aware of that issue and balanced things better. I think there were more exp bonuses for different actions and accomplishments, so you still grew at about the same rate no matter how you approached a problem.

I don't know if backtracking for more exp was still a thing though. I never tried it.

 

[zMiiChy-]

You're the guy that saves all the magum and rocket ammo through the whole game and ends up using it on the final boss, aren't you?

I got over that sort of thing a long time ago. Once i learned weapons drop like candy, i just used whatever weapons looked the coolest. Even high tier weapons can be frequently obtained in BOTW.

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The unremarkable weapons combat and lack of enemy variety already made combat encounters unrewarding on their own.

Having to exhaust disposable weapons just so I can end up fiddling in the menus and cycle through more garbage made it an easy decision to avoid combat most of the time.

The best part of the combat was the myriad of ways you could use the environment to your advantage.
I hope Nintendo expands on that and ditches shallow weapon durability.

 

[Pikelet]

To prevent bunny hopping in Half Life 2, the engine applies a force on the player character if you gain too much speed in mid-air. It doesn't correctly account for the direction of your speed though, and so if you are bunnyhopping backwards the force that is applied actually makes you go even faster.

The fix that was applied in order to prevent bunnyhopping actually made it significantly more effective.

 

[j7vikes]

By that same token, whenever I played Double Dragon II on NES as a kid, I would always start a two player game with "friendly fire" turned on. For whatever reason, you gained a life for every life lost by the second player, so you could double up your lives after a few minutes of grinding.

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great example and I still love the game. Start game and kill other player to go from like 3-7 lives.

 

[alpha]

100% agreed on Breath of the Wild and weapon degradation. It made me not care about weapons and not like fighting that much. And it wasn't for the reasons some have said (oh you just like hoarding etc). For me, it was literally about aesthetics.

I can always have weapons handy due to the system, but I don't want to still be fighting with those ugly ass early weapons. I want to use the cool looking shit like the laser swords. And if I use the cool shit, it breaks and then you have to just pick up what's around. Which is typically the aforementioned ugly ass weapons that your enemy was just using.

It made me really stop wanting to fight stuff and made weapon rewards in shrines and stuff completely empty for me. I only started caring about armor because it was permanent, so once I found it if it was cool looking I'd always look good. Even the Master Sword in that was like some Great Value knockoff that I'd feel like I got robbed on if I were Link and found out all of the other Links had a legendary sword without a battery.

I remember when you hear about the Royal Guard weapons and they're talking about them like it's some cool mythical equipment and I went, "who gives a fuck, it's going to break after a few fights even if you go and seek it out".

 

[ThLunarian]

Final Fantasy 8 had a scaled leveling system, so the mobs get tougher as you level up.

This is supposed to incentivize you to junction spells to your stats smartly and be able to overcome the additional challenge provided by the level scaling.

What it did to my dumb teenaged self was to make the game impossible to beat by the time I reached the end because I had hopelessly overleveled without bothering to junction all game.

What it ends up making you do when you know the score is to Draw and Junction as much broken magic as possible and run away from most combats, to keep the end-game enemies weak while you wreck them with your Strength that has 99 Ultimas junctioned to it.

 

[jman2050]

Not just the player leveling, but the individual skills. The "get better by doing" system sounds great but all it ends up doing is encouraging players to perform monotonous, repetitive actions in order to level up skills.

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The only game I've ever played that did this well was Rune Factory 4.

 

[eraFROMAN]

Leveling in SotN makes an already easy game much much easier because you can just grind your way to success. So, if you're grinding enemies for a specific weapon, you end up leveling up a bunch at the same time, diminishing the value of learning how to fight bosses.

I figure the XP system is supposed to encourage exploration, but you end up prowling the same room with high xp yield monsters and just brutalizing bosses. Game is still great, but I think Order of Ecclesia handled this much better.

 

[Mechaplum]

100% agreed on Breath of the Wild and weapon degradation. It made me not care about weapons and not like fighting that much. And it wasn't for the reasons some have said (oh you just like hoarding etc). For me, it was literally about aesthetics.

I can always have weapons handy due to the system, but I don't want to still be fighting with those ugly ass early weapons. I want to use the cool looking shit like the laser swords. And if I use the cool shit, it breaks and then you have to just pick up what's around. Which is typically the aforementioned ugly ass weapons that your enemy was just using.

It made me really stop wanting to fight stuff and made weapon rewards in shrines and stuff completely empty for me. I only started caring about armor because it was permanent, so once I found it if it was cool looking I'd always look good. Even the Master Sword in that was like some Great Value knockoff that I'd feel like I got robbed on if I were Link and found out all of the other Links had a legendary sword without a battery.

I remember when you hear about the Royal Guard weapons and they're talking about them like it's some cool mythical equipment and I went, "who gives a fuck, it's going to break after a few fights even if you go and seek it out".

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It made me stop thinking of melee weapons as such but as close range bundles of arrows. So everything in the game are arrows with different dmg values. Actually made the game worse in that regard.

 

[UnderNewOwnership]

Honestly I love the idea of a system where you level skills depending on their usage, but it's sooooo poorly implemented.

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Silent Storm / Sentinels (and Hammer & Sickle) had a cap on how much XP you could get by repeatedly doing something on a specific map. Ex. you could throw a knife to increase Throwing/Agility (raising skills also raised the associated stat/s), however the XP gain slowly decreased to almost nothing after roughly the 15th throw.

It was still abusable, since the limiter reset every time you entered a combat map, and there were a ton of random encounters (some of them pretty important, since you could get random special weapons or ammunition for them) where you could practice your skills after you cleared the enemies.

 

[OldGamer]

There's the "reverse bunny hopping" or "accelerated backward hopping" that was the result of the Valve coders at half-life ended up creating by attempting to code a push-back mechanic to deter regular bunnyhopping in their newer Orange Box engine. Speedrunners quickly found out that this push-back can be used to assist on reverse bunnyhopping instead. In other words, the mechanic introduced a way to bunnyhop faster than in the original game despite being designed to prevent it.

Edit: Looks like I'm not the first to post this.

 

[Cokie Bear]

They literally point out the end game area in the tutorial. That's how someone is supposed to know.

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They point out where the final boss is, not where the best loot is. Not sure how that negates anything in my post.

 

[Septimus Prime]

Leveling in SotN makes an already easy game much much easier because you can just grind your way to success. So, if you're grinding enemies for a specific weapon, you end up leveling up a bunch at the same time, diminishing the value of learning how to fight bosses.

I figure the XP system is supposed to encourage exploration, but you end up prowling the same room with high xp yield monsters and just brutalizing bosses. Game is still great, but I think Order of Ecclesia handled this much better.

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SotN's EXP system is actually broken, as it scales downward the EXP you get from enemies as you level up. I imagine the idea is so that you can't just keep grinding on easy enemies.

The problem is that, by the time you reach level 70 or so, every enemy gives you 1 EXP, so you're stuck just killing Spectral Sword over and over again.

 

[meph]

QTEs are intended to be more interactive than cutscenes, but instead just draw attention away from the actual cutscene to wait for button prompts to appear in order to pounce on them in time.

 

[Temp_User]

Twisted Metal 3's wonky 'realistic' physics was a huge misfire IIRC.

 

[eraFROMAN]

SotN's EXP system is actually broken, as it scales downward the EXP you get from enemies as you level up. I imagine the idea is so that you can't just keep grinding on easy enemies.

The problem is that, by the time you reach level 70 or so, every enemy gives you 1 EXP, so you're stuck just killing Spectral Sword over and over again.

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This actually explains a lot about why playing the game feels like it's sputtering out after a while. Thanks for this info!

 

[Pankratous]

BotW weapon damage. It was supposed to make me continually use new weapons, but instead, it made me not buy the game.

 

[SJRB]

I always save OP abilities or powers for moments when I really need it, but I feel that moment never arrives and have a "but what if I need it later" fear and I end up never using them.

Same goes for grenades.

 

[Redcrayon]

This is a good one. Why use a gun with such shitty range? I remember them being really lame in Deus Ex, also because they take up a lot of inventory space.

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Agree on flamethrowers in 3D games. I do like them in 2D games like Megaman X though- most of the enemies only take 2-3 hits and it hits constantly, so it's a good way of keeping momentum and also guaranteeing hits against annoying small enemies. Same for Contra.

 

[Zocano]

And exploration in BOTW is instead about traversing an expertly crafted open world with a plethora of distinct environments that has elevated the series to new heights critically and commercially.

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Lmao the presumptuous attitude in this post. Sorry some people don't like the way BotW took the series.

Like lvl 99 Pixel said, there's a completely different flow to "older" Zelda exploration, despite some of the chests being just rupees. It was generally more condensed but it felt less fleeting because the tools you acquired *were* permanent, even if they were just rupees. The loop of BotW had much more temporary finds (the breakable weapons) and thus the loop was just finding weapons to break during encounters so you can find more weapons to break during encounters. Once you realize that's *generally* the loop of the exploration, the illusion breaks and you can never reclaim it. It became annoying to explore rather than interesting.

The best parts were the guardians and the lengthier shrines because it's simply much more interesting to poke at a dense puzzle box rather than a large generally nebulous map with most of its points of interests being either fleeting rewards or the same 10 korok puzzles copy pasted across the terrain. The highlights of old zelda were always the dungeons and navigating and poking them apart and BotW failed to make a suitable replacement for it.

 

[Unknownlight]

Weapon degradation in Breath of the Wild. Encourage me to use more weapons? Nope! I've got an inventory full of good stuff and will run from every mob until I encounter something "worthy" of using these great weapons on.

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A lot of the problems with BotW's weapon degradation system would be fixed if the game actually explained how it works.

The more you fight enemies, the more weapons spawn. As you break more weapons, the game rewards you with more and more powerful and rare items. If you always avoid fights, then you obtain strong weapons much less frequently.

This system is the key reason why some players say "I hate BotW's weapon degradation! I end up never fighting because I don't want to waste my powerful items" and then other posters respond with "What are you talking about? There are strong weapons everywhere! You can never run out!"

Both sides are talking past each other, neither understanding how the game punishes and rewards different playstyles.

 

[Darkstorne]

Bonus points for the combo system in Street Fighter and GTA in general. Both were created because the prototypes had bugs.

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Yeah, I feel like combos in fighting games are the best answer. They were an unintended bug in SF2, allowing players to throw a string of attacks together far too quickly. The impact on play was too big to ignore, so it's now a highly polished feature we expect to see.

The Elder Scrolls Online has a similar unintended glitch that's been exploited to the point that devs have shrugged their shoulders and said "we can't fix it, so sure, it's a feature now." They added animation cancelling to the game's combat system, which is fine as many games do. But they neglected to program in specific frames of animations where attacks and skills would deal damage, and instead programmed the damage to be dealt right at the start of attacks and skills. So now the game's combat meta is all about cancelling your attacks into other attacks and blocks as quickly as you possibly can to maximize your DPS. It looks absolutely ridiculous lol

 

[Zocano]

A lot of the problems with BotW's weapon degradation system would be fixed if the game actually explained how it works.

The more you fight enemies, the more weapons spawn. As you break more weapons, the game rewards you with more and more powerful and rare items. If you always avoid fights, then you obtain string weapons much less frequently.

This system is the key reason why some players say "I hate BotW's weapon degradation! I end up never fighting because I don't want to waste my powerful items" and then other posters respond with "What are you talking about? There are strong weapons everywhere! You can never run out!"

Both sides are talking past each other, neither realizing how the game punishes and rewards different playstyles.

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Or for some like me, that loop, which I saw and understood well enough, fundamentally is not fun or interesting to engage with. The rewards being more temporary weapons makes exploration feel meaningless when what you find is just another temporary weapon to use and throw away. I'd rather have a world a quarter the size with every item feeling key to player power and skill/tool growth rather than existing as a fleeting moment in the span of my time with the game. I go through a long scripted sequence to be awarded with a flaming sword I've seen a half dozen times and will see another half dozen times. Real exciting.

 

[Black_Stride]

Weapon degradation in Breath of the Wild. Encourage me to use more weapons? Nope! I've got an inventory full of good stuff and will run from every mob until I encounter something "worthy" of using these great weapons on.

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Hahahahaha this is so true.

Only the worthy get to taste my good weapons.....how they didnt see that coming is beyond me.

 

[Gearkeeper 8A]

You know for botw 2, they should expand the durability system:

- Make enemies inflict weapon damage if they hit you with specific weapons or amor like piercing weapons.

-Strong hits from enemies should knock off you from your weapon
(like the biggoron sword case against ganon in OOT) some special enemies could parry or Counter your attacks and degrade your weapon health a considerable amount.

-make some thief enemies that can take your weapons or food from your inventory and throw them at you or give them to powerful allies to use.

-make spellcaster type enemies that can curse you and lock you from switching weapons or use a specific one.

-make mini bosses be able to destroy your weapon or armor from one hit if a specific situation appears.

-Specific powerfull weapons got a timer on them if the timer goes to 0 that weapon lose some power or gets destroyed but you could recharge that weapon by killing enemies or other conditions.

-link should get a base moveset with punch and kick so atleast you can defend yourself from enemies if you run out of weapons or ammo.

-the BOTW weapon system could be expanded so much more and losing weapons shouldnt be a hassle but a real threat, environment should affect weapon durability system in your inventory too, maybe make link steal opponent weapons too.

 

[VaporSnake]

100% agreed on Breath of the Wild and weapon degradation. It made me not care about weapons and not like fighting that much. And it wasn't for the reasons some have said (oh you just like hoarding etc). For me, it was literally about aesthetics.

I can always have weapons handy due to the system, but I don't want to still be fighting with those ugly ass early weapons. I want to use the cool looking shit like the laser swords. And if I use the cool shit, it breaks and then you have to just pick up what's around. Which is typically the aforementioned ugly ass weapons that your enemy was just using.

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"It wasn't for reasons you guys have said like hoarding" - immediately goes into literally describing compulsive hoarding complete with "but I like the way they look!"

I'm sure the lady in the trailer with garbage bursting out her windows really likes the aesthetics of the magazines and newspapers that fill every inch of her living space.

 

[Redcrayon]

A few off the top of my head. I can guess at the good intentions behind most mechanics that people, including me, don't like, but there's definitely some I think are done poorly but could have been great, and some that just aren't that good a fit for the game (or even the genre) in the first place.

'RPG reserve party members don't get xp' (good intention: cycle through characters to explore their abilities and change up combat)
I've always preferred games that have reserve units have an xp cap that equals lowest level of active member-1 or something like that. Otherwise, if the game expects me to spend hours grinding levels of extra units, on the off chance they throw in the next point for a single hour of play or the final boss, my heart just sinks. Which brings me into...

'In a 50 hour RPG, you need to use your underlevelled, underequipped, reserve party members. But for a boss fight' (good intention: sense of unity, of all reserves being part of the team)
If it's the final boss, and the game has given no indication they plan to do this, by having no requirement to level up and buy equipment for annoying reserves through an early section showing it, I'll likely just quit and watch the ending on YouTube. This brings me into...

'Strangely large party size combined with the above points' (good intention: epic feel of heroes from all over the world forming a force capable of great things)
It's good to have, say, the same number of reserve choices as the active party. I like it when RPGs have characters rotate in and out of the party due to plot requirements as it usually means character development other than for the 'chosen one' hero. But if there are 3-4 active members and 2/3 times that in reserve, then those reserves are also more likely to include a number of irritating tropey characters, on top of any idea of levelling up and keeping them equipped appropriately going out the window unless you want to grind.

'Very easy puzzle sections in games where you are playing as a competent adventurer' (good intention: pacing, making players feel smart)
I like environmental puzzles in games. The moment an RPG dungeon puzzle 'clicks' is great. But when, like Skyrim or Uncharted, it's so simple that it's an ancient tomb thwarting adventurers for centuries before the player can solve it in two minutes of trial and error, I just shrug. Any idea of sombre/oppressive atmosphere of ancient locations lost in the fear that pacing is one thing but heaven forbid that the player hasn't stabbed/shot a generic mercenary in the last two minutes.

'Poor stealth sections in non-stealth games' (good intention: varied pacing, get player to slow down and appreciate detail of environment)
I don't mind these when done well, but often they lack audio and visual ideas of what enemy guards/cameras can actually see, making it trial and error as the only feedback you have to learn from is an instant fail state. I like it when the game gives you vision cones for enemies or a meter showing how much noise you are making or something like that. At that point it's a puzzle as you have some info to work with. Otherwise I just hope it's relatively short.

 

[gogosox82]

Elder Scrolls skill up by usage.

You just end up casting shit randomly to empty your mana when traveling for a few skill up in illusion or destruction magic.

Same in oblivion with jumping around to gain agility...

Or stay in flames and keep casting healing and chung on mana potion... its pretty bad

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Or just make some broken ass potion and level your smithing instantly. Or enchant some gear that lets you make weapons that literally break the game. I swear, the TES series is so bad mechically that the best skills have nothing to do with combat.

 

[Iori Loco]

F-Zero X and GX have a bunch of unintuitive ways of gaining speed, like crashing into a wall at a certain angle:



Release the acceleration button during your boost to maintain the speed for longer, stepping into landmines intentionally to get a speed boost or even finishing races while destroying your machine before crossing the finish line.

 

[Redcrayon]

Breath of the Wild weapon degradation didn't bother me too much during gameplay. At the start I just wanted to see and try out new weapons anyway. By the midgame I tended to use archery, bombs and the environment as a first resort, and korok seeds had expanded my inventory a few times anyway. In the endgame I had the Master Sword. However, what that means is there are enough options not to have to use a mechanic, but that doesn't mean the mechanic couldn't be better. I felt that having weapons break after a few swings worked for fragile/ancient weapons, but the bog-standard 'soldiers sword' metal stuff should have had far higher resilience, trading off against slower swings and non-use during lightning/vs electrical enemies etc. It reminded me of Skyward Sword, where motion/melee is a major mechanic but I mainly used bombs and archery due to the motion+ controls being a bit awkward for left-handed players.

 

[timedesk]

Final Fantasy 8 had a scaled leveling system, so the mobs get tougher as you level up.

This is supposed to incentivize you to junction spells to your stats smartly and be able to overcome the additional challenge provided by the level scaling.

What it did to my dumb teenaged self was to make the game impossible to beat by the time I reached the end because I had hopelessly overleveled without bothering to junction all game.

What it ends up making you do when you know the score is to Draw and Junction as much broken magic as possible and run away from most combats, to keep the end-game enemies weak while you wreck them with your Strength that has 99 Ultimas junctioned to it.

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As a kid going from FF7 immediately to FF8 I really hated the Junction system. Materia had been simple but rewarding if you put the effort in, but Junctioning and the level scaling just made FF8 a painful slog. Combine that with the relatively low amount of equipment compared to other JRPGs and it felt like I was never making any progress. I appreciate the system's complexity now, but it still feels like a massive misfire.

 

[flashman92]

This was terrible. And it's so obviously terrible, too.

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And VC IV quadruple downs on this by replacing scout rush with an armored transport vehicle you can just drive to the finish line

 

[Zocano]

And VC IV quadruple downs on this by replacing scout rush with an armored transport vehicle you can just drive to the finish line

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I never played past the first game, they never addressed this design at all?

 

[flashman92]

I never played past the first game, they never addressed this design at all?

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I don't know about the PSP games, but VC IV still uses rounds to determine grade

 

[Jegriva]

I think I've blocked it out because of how pissed I was but I'm pretty sure ReCore's fast travel system actually made everything slower.

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I want to see a technical explanation on how ReCore loading were slower than the fucking streaming of assets in game.

 

[Jakisthe]

A lot of the problems with BotW's weapon degradation system would be fixed if the game actually explained how it works.

The more you fight enemies, the more weapons spawn. As you break more weapons, the game rewards you with more and more powerful and rare items. If you always avoid fights, then you obtain strong weapons much less frequently.

This system is the key reason why some players say "I hate BotW's weapon degradation! I end up never fighting because I don't want to waste my powerful items" and then other posters respond with "What are you talking about? There are strong weapons everywhere! You can never run out!"

Both sides are talking past each other, neither understanding how the game punishes and rewards different playstyles.

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I understood this loop and it was still terrible. Weapons which have higher damage values attached to them and enemies which are mechanically identical but with more health means nothing changes. The best case scenario is continual engagement with boring enemies and a super shallow combat system, none of which evolves over time. No thanks.

 

[Crispy]

I'd have to say the blade system in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was overly convoluted and detrimental to the game on multiple levels.

The specific powers needed to unlock exploration were a big pain, constantly needing to switch blades in and out of the party to get anywhere. It made exploring a large hassle.

I also hated the random way they were obtained. I'd end up with a boatload of generic blades I couldn't care less about and the animation takes ages. I ended up with about halve of the unique blades, because at some point I just couldn't be bothered to go through with the system anymore. So what was intended to be an addictive gacha style element, completely turned me off from engaging with it at all.

 

[BadWeddingSpeech]

That's fair. To me it solved the problem of never finding anything useful when exploring in Zelda games. No more finding a chest of ruppees you don't need in every chest.

It also added some organic unpredictability to the game. My load out was always different and so with the variety of situations you can find yourself in by exploring what I could do was always different depending on what I had. I wasn't handling every encounter with the same tried and true set up and that, at least for me, kept things fresh and fun for however long I played.

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Thats the reasoning behind it for sure. I get why some people like it. (I also think that they were just too effing brittle, it broke the flow of combat because I couldn't swing something more than a few times in the same battle). We will see what Nintendo does with the next one.

 

[Retromess]

I can't say for sure this was unintended, but I highly doubt when they made the Ninja class in FFXI, they intended it to be a tank.

It seems like the class was intended to be a scout/DPS/solo type class (with its many utility ninja spells, ability to self-destruct without losing exp, built in silence effect, etc), but two ninja spells it has (Utsusemi: Ichi and Utsusemi: Ni) allow the class to completely avoid damage.

Coupling this with high emnity gear and Warrior subclass allowed Ninja to effectively tank monsters and rarely, if ever, take damage. This meant your party could effectively kill things faster by having your healer DPS more, or in some cases, barely have a healer.

They eventually seemed to fully embrace the class as a tank, adding armor for the class that built in emnity and dodge and parry stats, necessary for tanking, but it's hard to think that was the plan when they first added the class.

Granted, this is all as of 2003-2005ish... I stopped playing the game after that so I can't say what other potential unintended classes or mechanics were used in that game.

 

[DrArchon]

I'd have to say the blade system in Xenoblade Chronicles 2 was overly convoluted and detrimental to the game on multiple levels.

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It was also detrimental to the game on a narrative level.

The game keeps shouting about how the relationship between driver and blade is precious and beutiful, with multiple characters falling in love with their blades/drivers, giving their lives for their blades/drivers, and blades lamenting that they'll forget about their drivers when they move on.

And then the game throws hundreds of garbage blades at the player, who'll inevitably either not give a single shit about any of them or they'll find them actively annoying. The mechanic is completely at odds with the message that the game tries to tell.

 

[Deleted member 33533]

It was also detrimental to the game on a narrative level.

The game keeps shouting about how the relationship between driver and blade is precious and beutiful, with multiple characters falling in love with their blades/drivers, giving their lives for their blades/drivers, and blades lamenting that they'll forget about their drivers when they move on.

And then the game throws hundreds of garbage blades at the player, who'll inevitably either not give a single shit about any of them or they'll find them actively annoying. The mechanic is completely at odds with the message that the game tries to tell.

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It's definitely jarring the way you can just casually release generic Blades. Especially since every time you do it, it's accompanied by a voice clip of your Blade sounded really disappointed that you're throwing them away.

 

[Aswitch]

QTEs are intended to be more interactive than cutscenes, but instead just draw attention away from the actual cutscene to wait for button prompts to appear in order to pounce on them in time.

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I'd disagree. I find myself to be more attentive watching a cutscene than I normally would knowing that stakes are still involved and that anything could possibly happen(during an initial play-through).

 

[Tuorom]

I don't understand the BOTW issue.

It was intended that weapons break easily. The mechanics of it do not create an unintended consequence, when people refuse to interact with the system that is a user choice, not a problem with mechanics.

The OPs example was a simple block button had an unintended consequence of adding too much complexity and having application in offense.
The BOTW example is weapon degradation working as intended but users not liking it.

 

[LakeEarth]

In Final Fantasy VIII, upgrading Squall's weapon would add a new possible "ender" to your Limit Break pool, each new ender having more damage with a new elaborate animation. The intention was to encourage you to always upgrade Squall's weapon any time it was possible to get better enders.

Squall's best weapon gave a Limit Break ender that did ridiculous damage. Mega broken damage when combined with 100 ultimas junctioned to strength. But the ender you'd get during a Limit Break was random. Thus, the more times you upgraded your weapon, the less of a chance you'd get the mega broken damage ender.

End result: You should NEVER upgrade Squall's weapon except for the last one. Then random chance gives you a 50/50 shot on getting the basic ender, or the broken one.

 

[ChrisD]

Flamethrowers in most games.

They have no stopping power and kills enemies slower than if you had just shot them with any other gun.

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Unless I'm misremembering, Helldivers' Flamethrower was actually a fantastic crowd control tool. That game in general had some awesome weapons.

 

[Ruisu]

Flamethrowers in most games.

They have no stopping power and kills enemies slower than if you had just shot them with any other gun.

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idk about the games you mean, but in Far Cry 3-4 the flames will make most enemies go into a state of panic where they're harmless since they can't attack you.
That's true for most fire weapons in those two games, and the main advantage the flamethrower has over molotovs or fire arrows is that the stream lets you keep setting multiple enemies on fire, while you can craft boosts that make yourself take almost no damage from any colateral fire that you might run into

 

[SolVanderlyn]

Ninjas being blink tanks in Final Fantasy XI. They were never intended to be tanks, but that was all they were really good at, and they ended up being the best ones. Pretty funny.

 

[Gunner]

There is a bug in Midnight Club 2 (all platforms). On certain vehicles (including the fastest in the game), using the handbrake beyond certain speeds will cause you to accelerate and also allows you to achieve a higher top speed than without. This works in conjunction with another glitch that allows these same vehicles to gain speed when also swerving left to right.