Games

I like most game mechanics to some extent. Creativity in combining game mechanics is key to making an outstanding game imo.

However, I don’t like things that force a time limit. I play games as an escape. I don’t like feeling stressed by a clock while I’m off the clock. These can be literal timed missions or things like a food/water meter. Escort missions also suck for similar reasons.

I think difficulty in a game should come from overcoming a foe, traversing harsh terrain, or solving a puzzle. If the game is hard because I have to stop what I’m doing to feed myself, or I have to rush to complete an objective on a timer, it just becomes work.

Peaceful exploration

I don't know the name of it, but I really enjoy the sort of gameplay where you roll up to an enemy compound or something, and then you just sort of chip away at it and cause chaos until it all falls apart.

The sort of thing you'd do in Farcry, where you'd snipe some dudes, plant traps, shoot the tiger cage so the tiger would get out and eat people etc.

Save anywhere

Survival mechanics like S.T.A.L.K.E.R and New Vegas, dont give a damn for building mechanics though unless its simplified down to a simple upgrade system like Skyrim Hearthsfire DLC.

I like systems that allow for outrageous combos, whether unintentionally or by design. Roguelikes and roguelites usually have them, but it's almost entirely luck based. Dynasty Warriors 8 allows for plenty of OP combos if you manage the right weapon attributes. Skyrim and its ~~broken as fuck~~ perfectly balanced enchanting + alchemy (or Morrowind's even more perfectly balanced permanent fortify attribute magic)

Games with high mobility mechanics like titanfall, echo point nova, doom eternal, destiny 2 strand hunters.

I've only realized it recently that I'm obsessed with simulator games. Eurot Truck Simulator 2, Software Inc, Minecraft? Rollercoaster Tycoon, etc.

I love fluid movement. Doing things in a state machine is usually the way to go in 2d platformers, which is what I mainly make. I like when your character can move around without issue, so double jump, sliding, rolling, attacking etc.

I do enjoy game mechanics that interact in emergent ways that weren't fully planned out by the developer in games like Dwarf Fortress.

The controls for the Skate games, especially 3, are great.

It's easier to say what I don't like. Open worlds and crafting mechanics, they are just so boring

You know what I miss? The Ultimate Alliance games from the PS2 era. Isometric view. Build a four-person team of Marvel characters. Some team combinations grant group buffs, like having all four members of the Fantastic Four will increase your XP gain. Equip your characters. Pick from an array of comic canon costumes, each with their own abilities. Some combinations of equipment or costumes will also grant bonuses like having everyone wear their Age of Apocalypse costume.

The whole thing is an action RPG where you play through some big comic book crisis. Lots of opportunity for villain and hero interaction. Cool cinematics.

It's a rock-solid platform, but I don't feel like I see it used nearly enough. I remember playing an Ultimate Alliance on 360 and it just wasn't as good; smaller roster, fewer costumes, less interesting in general, despite the better graphics.

I vaguely recall hearing something about one on the Switch and that Midnight Sons was a bit similar... but then again I don't recall hearing much else about those games except for their existence, so they can't have done very well.

Not a game mechanics maybe but more of an engine thing i guess. I just love simulations. Good VR combat physics, elemental stuff like water, fire, smoke, crumbling stuff. I love a world that feels dynamic but not necessarily realistic that makes sense of itself.

Detailed completionist checklists.

If I have cleared an area, I want to have it reflected in an overview screen.

If I'm missing an item, I want to know which enemy drops it, where I can find it, or how I can craft it.

If I need to pull out my phone to check a wiki, then the game has failed me.

There's something to be said for exploration games, and in those cases, the details should be obscured until the player has cleared 90% of the area, or gotten past the boss (or something like this).

More floaty, less realistic platforming. Thugs like double jump, or somehow your character has less gravity when they jump, stuff like that. Stuff like that. As a general platformer lover, I really enjoy more fictional cannot be done IRL physics in games.

Inventory Tetris

Parry and riposte mechanics make me happy. Idk why exactly, but something about timing a parry and making the enemy entirely helpless for the followup is just great.

Roguelikes and roguelites tend to be my favorite. Ones where each run is new and you can toy with different builds and usually get pretty OP toward the end (or get cut down early because luck wasn't in your favor or you made a mistake).

Among plenty of the other things mentioned, I enjoy “diagetic interfaces”. Ways of interacting with a game’s systems that stay grounded in the reality of the setting of the world. Dead Space is a prime example, but I’ve been enjoying a lot of the crafting in Vintage Story for this reason. The smithing in particular has had me hooked for a while. Hammering out my armor and weapons voxel by voxel made finally suiting up and feeling ready to take on a boss that much more satisfying.

I love anything with a tech tree or a skill tree or items that improve based on usage. The ratchet and clank games have such a great mix of all of those things, I end up spending a bunch of time just leveling up the guns!

Intricate character building with multi-class synergies. Is. My. Shiiiiiit!

Small wonder I love BG3 and Owlcat's Pathfinder games.

Dynamic skill leveling: maybe it's not an actual stat with a number you can watch go up as you keep using a particular play style, but I like when games let you and your gear get stronger together the more you use them.

Puzzles, traditional or unique, as well as physics and spatial-heavy thinking.

I'm an absolute sucker for a hidden traitor mechanic. Boardgames like Battlestar Galactica, Werewolf, and Secret Hitler (the latter of which might be my absolute favourite board game). More recently I've just started playing Among Us (I never got into it during its ~2020 peak) which is the first time I've seen the hidden traitor translated well into video games (unless you count that one minigame from Jackbox Games).

I used to think i didn't like fighting games, but I fell in love when I found a game with characters and mechanics I really liked (Mark of the Wolves) and realized that technical skill means nothing unless you have good fundamentals and can read and react to the opponent. Now KoF XV and SF6 are two of my favorite games and I have a lot of fun playing and practicing :3

I love the histogram system from Zachtronics' games. I find it much more useful to see my score compared to the proportion of people who got a similar score, than a leaderboard rank that doesn't mean much.

Hard to learn complex mechanics in simulation, such as target management analysis in dangerous waters, any of the jobs in space station 13, eve online

When I think about it, I get a silly laugh out of the contradictory game mechanics in the game Descent.

See, you're flying around in a hovercraft, through tunnels in asteroid mines, with zero gravity. But somehow or another, when you save hostages, somehow gravity has them stuck to the floor and not just floating around. Oopsie! 😂🤣

Source code for Descent is available, anyone care to fix this inconsistency?

I'm a sucker for crafting and breeding systems that allow you to customise equipment and/or characters. But it's really hard to find good implementations of the idea, most have some obvious flaw:

• Pokémon (breeding) - in early games RNG plays too much of a role, so it's hard to get what you want. Late games don't fix this, instead they allow you to skip the process altogether (see: hyper training).
• Niche - the breeding part of the game is actually really good, a shame that the rest of the game is a slop. For example gathering food gets a PITA once you got too many nichelings, and yet you want them to support your breeding pairs.
• RimWorld (Biotech; germline genes) - arbitrary restrictions that must be lifted through the usage of mods.
• RimWorld (crafting) - now we're talking. If you pay close attention to which materials you're using for which tasks, it pays off in the long run. There's some luck involved, but you can get perfect (legendary) stuff fairly often if you know what you're doing.
• Leaf Blower Revolution (leaf crafting) - the game encourages you to craft a lot of leaves and salvage most of them. That's fine, it's easy to get cheese anyway. The problem is the sheer amount of beer that you need to get the properties that you want in each leaf.
• Monster Breeder (old Flash game) - the game is a bugfest, and the lack of any sorting system makes you have a hard time even knowing which monster you should be breeding with which.
• Minecraft (tools and weapons) - vanilla has a really dumb system that doesn't fit well in a game that encourages hoarding piles of materials into chests. The mod Tinkers' Construct fixes this, and makes the system next to ideal.

Plus a lot more that I didn't mention. Sorry for the wall of text.

I like strategy games that allow you to design your own units such as Warzone 2100 where you select different components to get different functionality or Endless Space 2 where you pick a ship hull type and then assign different modules to adjust the combat stats or add special abilities. The production cost of the unit changes with your selections in whatever the base game currency is and/or requirements for specific resources.

This gives the player the freedom to adjust their forces to fit their play style, their economic situation or to accomplish specific objectives or strategies. It also breaks the rock/paper/scissors aspects of unit combat in more simplistic games and creates far more complex unit interactions, and the potential to win with clever design rather than just numbers of units.

I'm currently a big fan of the 'trading' enemies and then planning your attacks system in Sniper Elite.