Generally, when a team of developers spend months and miss countless family dinners drafting, pitching, designing and programming complex mechanics into their games, it is on the assumption that players will find them important during their playthroughs. After all of the work that they put in, it would be a social faux pas to say the least for players to just ignore them all together. It would be a bit like going to a fancy dinner party and only eating the Cheerios you brought from home.
However, there are some games where this is absolutely possible and you can make your way through the entire thing without engaging with the mechanics that the poor developers put so much time and effort into producing. Below, I've itemised a short memorandum for all of the mechanics that, despite all of the hard work put into making them, you can just ignore entirely, you monster.
Vague spoilers ahead for Bioshock, Yakuza 0 and one mission in GTA: San Andreas
Bioshock's hacking
Bioshock was a defining game for its generation. Its inventive and wonderfully written story blended well with its tense and atmospheric gameplay to create an impactful experience that commented not just on its characters and setting but also metanarratively on linear game design as a concept. It also had a bloody terrible hacking minigame.
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| (Image property of Irrational Games and 2k) |
At various points while you are exploring the doomed city of Rapture, you can find various machines which can be hacked to do anything from unlocking safes to making hostile drones friendly. The problem is that the hacking minigame is like dunking your whole head in a bucket of piping hot molasses because it is simultaneously incredibly slow and horribly painful to navigate.
The idea of the minigame is to swap pieces of pipes to create a path for water to flow from one side of the grid to the other while avoiding alarm tiles. This is a real pace-killer of an activity and it doesn't take long for locks to become really annoyingly tricky to hack, inspiring in players only frustration and a need to pee thanks to all of the running water animations.
Thankfully, this important mechanic is made redundant very quickly because, after only a few areas, you will come across the U-Invent machines which allow you to craft Automatic Hack Tools. These improve hacking by just doing it for you, effectively wiping the minigame out of existence entirely.
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| (Image property of Irrational Games and 2k) |
While I could hear Ken Levine and his development team quietly weeping in the back of my mind, these tools allowed me to beat all of Bioshock without having to hack anything myself. Quite literally the only time I completed the hacking minigame was at the very start when the game was teaching me how to do it. By the end of the game, I had enough materials to craft more hacking tools than I could carry, allowing for smooth sailing past all of the locked safes and hackable drones that I wanted. After that, the only challenge that I had to contend with was an army of splicers, hypnotic suggestions and the machinations of the city's many colourful psychopaths. Perhaps smooth sailing wasn't the right word for it.
Pokemon's X-Items
The Pokemon games over the years have carried many labels; colourful, exciting, family-friendly, bizarre, poorly-optimised, transparently designed to sting as much money from man-children and actual children as possible, and hey isn't that Pokemon design just a woman in blackface? One of the few labels that the series is never really painted with though, is difficult. It makes sense, after all if you ignore the aforementioned blackface-mon, the games have always been designed with a wide audience in mind.
However, The Pokemon Company's attempts to avoid a court case for bullying children have meant that there isn't often much need for some of the games' more helpful mechanics like its items. While some items, like healing potions, will see regular use from players, others are often doomed to line the bottom of players' satchels throughout their journey to the Pokemon League.
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| (Image property of Game Freak, Nintendo and The Pokemon Company) |
In my experience, the items that are most often thrown onto players' garbage piles alongside early-game stocking stuffers like Sunkern are the X-Items. These items are designed for use in battles to temporarily boost one of a Pokemon's stats like their attack or speed. In essence, they are performance enhancing drugs which would feel much dodgier were it not for the fact that Pokemon is already just fictional cockfighting. The problem however, is that, as mentioned, Pokemon games are some of the few that children are able to handle alongside potty-training and thus, you very rarely need to go full Lance Armstrong to win a battle.
What's more, even when the difficulty of the games ramps up around the Pokemon League or the post-game areas, these items still don't always see much play because they are single-use only and many Pokemon will naturally learn equally powerful or better moves that achieve the same goal like Cotton Guard or Swords Dance.
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| (Image property of Game Freak, Nintendo and The Pokemon Company) |
As a result, X-items are often doomed to be picked up and never used, which probably sucks if you're the developer responsible for putting them into every game but might make your life easier if you're a member of the World Anti-Doping Agency.
Fallout companions
When it comes to the post-apocalyptic RPG series Fallout, there are many things that fans are happy to point to as reasons they enjoy the games. These might be the setting, seeing the impact of your choices upon the story or the gun play, assuming you aren't talking about Fallout 3.
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However, one of the other key ingredients in the Fallout formula that many players associate themselves with are the companions. These are characters that you will meet around the wasteland who will latch onto you like the world's chattiest blood-sucking leeches before following you wherever you choose to go on your adventures across the American wasteland. These characters are often the ones who receive the deepest writing and most personal quest lines which they will happily explain to you by unblinkingly staring and expositing because you gave them one bottle of soda and now they trust your with their life.
Herein lies the rub though because, while many people are happy to attach themselves to companions, these carefully designed pieces of walking world-building are entirely optional. If you're anything like me, you might prefer to travel through Fallout's blasted hellscape alone to avoid listening to companions commenting on every rusty can or dead body you walk past and so that you don't have to worry about their AI having Vietnam flashbacks and attacking random passers-by. In fact, some games in the series like Fallout 4 even give you perks like Lone Wanderer that boost your stats when you are travelling alone, giving you all the more reason to ignore them entirely.
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| (Image property of Bethesda Softworks) |
It's at this point that I should acknowledge that each of the Fallout games will usually have a section where a companion is required to achieve a certain goal like tracking someone down or opening locked doors. However, these are usually very short and you can immediately dismiss the companion afterwards at which point you will hear the game loudly sigh over all the lines of flavour-text dialogue that you're now going to miss.
Yakuza 0's business management games
You know, for a series that claims to be about family and organised crime, the Yakuza series contains a lot of activities which have nothing to do with those two things. Whether it's karaoke, slot car racing or video games you play by urinating on them, there is no end to the non-Yakuza activities that you can do in Kamurocho and Sotenbori.
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However, while many of these activities are just fun distractions designed to efficiently and effectively make your hardened mob enforcer look as stupid as possible, some carry with them important additional benefits. In this way, very few side activities are as important to their respective Yakuza games as the business activities in Yakuza 0.
In the game, each of you characters gets a side business to run, real estate for Kiryu and a cabaret club for Majima. Each of these play like your mum's favourite free-to-play mobile games got dropped into the middle of your crime sandbox. However, despite their pedestrian nature, both carry very important benefits in the form of vast piles of money that can be earned from each as well as, for completing each one, access to your characters' fourth, incredibly powerful fighting style, making them central to your progress in the story.
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Or at least, they were supposed to be. You see, both are fairly tedious with a lot of time-consuming elements and annoying caveats that are thrown in on your way to completion, providing ample incentive to avoid engaging with them all together. As a result, you can get around these seemingly very important side activities by just power-levelling the other 3 fighting styles so that, by the time you reach the end of the game, your characters can fight like a 6'2 Bruce Lee made of concrete.
If money is your concern, then the game provides a pretty effective alternative in the form of the walking ATM Mr Shakedown who tries to mug you and, if you beat him, will be forced to hand over all of his takings. While he does make for a very hard fight, you can cheese him easily with the Slime Gun which fires a special kind of elemental damage that Mr Shakedown has no defences against because I guess he was traumatised by a Kids' Choice Awards when he was a boy. Thanks to these exploits, you can effectively skip both characters' side stories and gleefully leave their businesses as crumbling financial wrecks. Let's hope that the time you saved can provide some consolation to your soon-to-be unemployed business partners.
GTA: San Andreas's stealth mechanics
During the lifetime of the PS2, the Grand Theft Auto series went through three main entries in four years. As a result, by the time Rockstar North were working on the third game, San Andreas, they had already achieved many of the things that the company had set out to do. Thus, by way of innovation, they decided to pack San Andreas full of new mechanics as a way of giving players options for how to play their game however they saw fit.
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| (Image property of Rockstar Games) |
One example of these new mechanics, alongside things like swimming and going to the gym was the ability to crouch and sneak around the environment unnoticed. Think Metal Gear Solid by way of The Wire. This mechanic is introduced to you fairly early in the game when one of your many moronic childhood friends gives you the task of stealing a successful rapper's rhyme book so that their music can sound marginally less like sandpaper for the eardrums.
What this mission demonstrates to you is that, with the new stealth system, your character CJ is able to ghost his way around the environment, using silenced pistols and knives to take down his enemies while avoiding all-out gunfights against heavily armed opponents.
However, other than about two missions later in the game, this is the only time in the entire story where stealth is even remotely mentioned as an option. Unsurprisingly, you spend the rest of the game doing the standard GTA thing of machine-gunning police officers and firing rocket-propelled grenades at cars full of rival gang members and their extended families. As such, stealth very quickly falls by the wayside in favour of things like shootouts, car chases and having fun.
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| (Image property of Rockstar Games) |
In some ways, you have to admire Rockstar for allowing players the option to use stealth if they wanted but, when most missions were very much not designed with that approach in mind, it's hard to feel bad for neglecting it in favour of the rocket launchers and jetpacks that they also offered alongside it.
Conclusion
So, those were just some of the times when games gave us a new mechanic that they were really looking forward to watching us play with only for us to throw it back in their face like a custard pie to a clown. By way of a summary, it is always nice to see developers innovating and trying to provide new stories and ideas for how players can engage with them but, at the same time, they can't all be winners and when they aren't, there's no shame in going about things your own way.
Perhaps, next time you find yourself ignoring your new game's mechanics, just spare a thought for all of the developers with their extensive programming backgrounds and university degrees and try not to think too hard about how you would explain your actions should you ever find yourself in the same room as them...