Now I realize, that some might argue that games are to entertain first, and waste time second, but there's a breadth between "enjoying the vast field" and "being forced to trudge across the field because the important quest giver can't be assed to move into town".

Things like that. Such as: (to my opinion)
The Personified Menu: Nothing says personal like being forced to find the person you want to manage settings. At best a cute gimmick, at worst, Animal Crossing: New Horizons internet connectivity menus, where they apparently took the meaning of 7 layer networking a bit too literally.

Quest Complete! Now walk: Congratulations! You found the wabberjock or Princess Flan. Unfortunately, this dungeon is a dead end, and you have to walk back 50 floors to get back to the surface. Have fun, bucko! Bonus points if the quest item disables your normal exits.

Some assembly required: Being forced to no matter how far you progress in a game, manually assemble tedious small bits to make big things; especially if their ingredients are trivial or practically innumerable.

The Haystack Beckons: Being told the location of something important with an inexact location. Bonus if the location is randomized or the item can move.

Transport! The epic saga of glorified waiting: You've been to this location at least 3 times, but you're still forced to watch the thing play out, (or worse, directly control it) instead of being able to snap your fingers and skip to the actual location. Bonus points if the developers designed a hub but forgot to utilize it.

And now the filler arc: Time/Day/Event based RPGs where there's dead air between the important events. Bonus if you can't actually do anything in that time and it's literally just wading though button prompts.

Buy it, you whale!: Any game that has microtransactions in order to skip levels or directly access later content ahead of the progression curve. Bonus if this comes with with an arbitrary stamina system too.

You got the thing! Now get the hell out!: In objective/collecting based games, getting kicked out whenever you collect one of a thing instead of being allowed to continue other objectives. Bonus if you can accidentally trigger an exit, or get shunted towards a point of no return.

Well, that's probably enough examples, what are your personal choices?

drm,mtx, fetch quests, backtracking

Non-interactive cutscenes, particularly when they're not skipable. I want to actually *play* the game, not just watch events unfold.

Insta-fail segments (particularly stealth segments), especially when the game doesn't usually have insta-fail mechanics. (Zelda games starting from Ocarina of Time are among the chief offenders here.)

Harsh penalties for failure, particularly when the game overwrites your save so you can't even choose to return to the last state you saved.

Not a fan of story progression being locked behind X amount of side-activities, like Just Cause 2 and Mad Max. I'm also not big on collectible gathering like Assassin's Creed or Batman games, but at least you can skip those.

How about "Beat the game X times for the real ending", AKA the Ghosts n' Goblins Gambit? I feel that's one last example I'd squeeze in.

Though yes, unskippable cutscenes (especially when they're delivering plot/direction critical things), Instant Failure, and bad end railroads are pretty terrible too.

Actually, to me it's "bonus points" if the game has a spell that allows you to teleport out of the dungeon, but arbitrarily disables it. Final Fantasy 2 and 4 both do this at certain points because they decided to put a cutscene when leaving the dungeon. (At least in the FF4 case there's a different spell you can use, but you have to cast the spell repeatedly rather than just once, and each time you have to re-open the menu.)

Also, black screens and load screens. In this day and age, with computers and storage being as fast as they are, there's no reasonable excuse for area transitions to be non-instant, especially when accidentally going back to the previous area. (Fancy graphics is not a reasonable excuse.)

Oooh, right. These are good. Especially when you combine them with other fun units like, "Must be 40/100 with Faction Z to progress the story", when Faction Z are genocidal maniacs who'd you'd rather dump into the sea and then burn the sea to cleanse it.

Reminds me of Reagents in Ultima 4 and onward. The need for reagents is actually one reason I often prefer Ultima 3, which doesn't require reagents to cast spells; you only need MP which regenerates on its own. Except that sometimes there's a game where the whole point of the game is that you do side stuff to unlock the endgame, in order to allow for the game to be non-linear.

Super Mario 64 is a good example of this. Technically speaking, each of the game's 120 stars is a side activity, but you are expected to do them, and almost all of the game's content involves them. (You need 70 of them to beat the game without glitches, anyway.)

Of we can look at Romancing SaGa, where, to trigger any of the endgame quests, you need to have fought at least a certain number of battles. The intent, of course, is that the player would play through side content, which is the bulk of the game, and fight battles along the way rather than just walking around in one area, killing monsters, until the endgame is accessible.

Grind in games. This is one of those things that seemed to start in MMORPGs, but I don't want to have to repeat the same action hundreds of times to progress. I don't have the time or patience.

Cutscenes that you can't pause and that you can't replay once you've passed that point in the game, especially if they skip if you tap a key. If you want a skippable cutscene, make it something you've got to really, really, try to skip - e.g. hold e for 5 seconds type thing. There is some great story exposition that comes through cutscenes, but if you can't pause it or re-review once you've "watched" it once, then you might as well have not bothered.

Yeah, the Build-a-Ritual Workshop was never a popular mechanic for me. It actually kills Secret of Evermore. Instead of spells & MP, it's alchemy and limited ingredients. You can buy some alchemy ingredients, but most have to be found in the overworld. One. At. A. Time. This can lead to progression dead ends where you basically reach the middle of a dungeon and realize, "Oops, ran out of X, better go back to town!"

To me, having to wait 5 seconds to skip a cutscene is too long.

When a lack of accessibility isn't disclosed on the game's store page. I'm referring to things like every game that only gives a seizure warning AFTER you launch it for the first time. It was a complete waste of my time to have bought, downloaded, and installed the game in the first place. No warnings on any store pages. No warnings on trailers that rarely show actual gameplay.

So after seeing the seizure warning, I get to waste more time uninstalling it and requesting a refund. Someone else gets to have their time wasted on approving a refund on a game that I wouldn't have bought in the first place if there was adequate warning.

Also this isn't GOG's fault as the games that do this are guilty of doing this on every store - GOG, Steam, Epic, anywhere else.

I didn't mind it in Secret of Evermore, except for some issues with reagent availability at certain points, the fact that some formulas were permanently missable, and the fact that some of the formulas came so close to the end that you don't have enough time to level them up. Otherwise, I didn't mind it, because formulas can be leveled through usage (a mechanic I wish were more common), and ingredients are the *only* requirement; you don't also need MP, as you do in those Ultima games.

Also, I like the idea of having to choose which formulas to equip at any given point, rather than just having them all available. (With that said, it's good that you don't have to permanently throw away formulas.) Actually, the issue I have is when options can't be changed before they're first relevant.

For example, I don't like controller vibration. Arc the Lad 2 supports controller vibration, and there's an option to disable it, but unfortunately you can't disable it until *after* the intro, and the controller vibrates at one point during the intro, *before* you have a chance to disable it.

Text speed is another issue. Some games default the text speed to something painfully slow, and you can't change that until after the intro, which of course has text in it.

Games filled with fetch quests (ie Dragon Age Inquisition), giant maps filled with same objectives over-and-over (ie UbiSoft open worlds), and excessive grinds for story continuation.

Now, if the minute-to-minute gameplay is exceptional, many of these issues are tempered by that fact... but... IMO most games (at least in the AAA space) are mediocre minute-to-minute affairs and that amplifies everything mentioned above.

- "Grind for the sake of grind" (often in order to advertise pay2degrind / "booster packs" DLC, for which the game has been designed to be more artificially grindy than had it been released without them). I'm pretty sure half this stuff is only enjoyable if you have some mild OCD and it sates some "ultra completionist" urge. If you don't, then it's "obvious cheap padding"...

- "Crafting for the sake of crafting". Crafting is fine for "survival genre" games but when it gets shoehorned into ordinary FPS's it ends up feeling fake as hell like the devs are trying too hard to make them seem "deep" as a substitute for making a more engaging game.

- "Unlocking utterly trivial skills for the sake of unlocking". Things like unlocking plasmids in Bioshock or augmentations in Deus Ex make plot-related sense, but having huge skill trees with utterly trivial skill gains "carry 5% more money", etc, feels fake as hell in the "look, we turned our obvious FPS into a 'deep' RPG because of this big skill tree" sense.

- Checkpoint-only saves. Far from being some "evolution" over quicksaves, in reality they are popular amongst game developers because 1. Consolization ("we designed for console controllers that have no F5/F9 keys"), and 2. Forced replays add to measured in-game time whilst quickloads do not (ie, you can turn a 12hr game into a 15hr "gameplay" by forcing the same area over & over. Double bonus points if you place a checkpoint before a lengthy unskippable cutscene Ubisoft style...