I feel like The Witcher 2 had a good balance. You’re instanced in a smallish but very meaningfully designed map that’s big enough to feel like you’re actually exploring a bit

I was recently reading The Frugal Wizards Handbook for Surviving Medieval England and one of the characters who ultimately gets shot by an archer talks at length about how much he dislikes archers and how unfair they are

The indie game Sable had brilliant climbing mechanics. You have limited climbing like in most games, but you literally don’t need the extended climbing range for almost the entirety of the main game except for like one or two not-required missions, you only really need it to collect all of the collectables that extend your climbing range. You know how I know? I didn’t find the way to extend climbing range until like the very end of the game. Somehow completely skipped over it!

Oh don’t forget MechJeb. Some call it cheating, but ain’t nobody in the real world docking 2 craft in orbit by hand, so why should I be required to do so in my space-lite simulation game? Plus if your craft is weird enough (or your mission has become funky enough) you still have to do some things manually because MechJeb can’t quite figure it out

I’ve got kids, if I’m playing while they’re up I have to be able to drop everything on a dime to go stop them from managing to kill themselves because that happens about 3x an evening

There’s several games I’d like to play but simply don’t because I cannot pause. Like I get it, single player is just booting up the multiplayer server without networking so only you can join, but also it’s only a single player so they should be able to pause the engine whenever they want to

I love how for a chunk of Portal 2 you’re playing through the exact same chambers from Portal 1

I played Assassin’s Creed Origins during a free weekend a few years ago and it automatically set its own graphics settings and dumped you into the game without being able to access the menu so it looked like my screen was covered in patrolium jelly half the time. About an hour into the game when I could finally access the game menu I learned why. It set all settings to their absolute highest but resolution scaling was enabled so it was trying to render graphics my PC couldn’t handle then internally reducing the resolution down to 360p or so. Once I dialed in settings that my computer could actually handle without resolution scaling it looked a million times better

Ehhh it really depends on the game. Some games with loot boxes have zero need for them so even if it was an in-game mechanic for in-game items it still just feels wrong

Even freaking RuneScape had a keyring and that’s an MMO famous for using limited inventory slots as a game mechanic