Crap in games that people praise, that you loath.

[Wolf Kanno]

Same as the other thread but this time, what are some game mechanics, designs, or features that people constantly praise as "teh baest thing evah!" that have you scratching your head and wondering what magical pixie drink they must be on to get some enjoyment out of this.

To get this ball rolling...

Linear Dungeon design with no substance - By substance, I'm talking about whether the dungeon asks you to do more than just walk forward and fight enemies. I can tell you now that "looking cool" isn't substance, and I'll take a bland looking but puzzle rich dungeon over a road through a volcano where two titans are duking it out in the background. The visuals may wow for the first few minutes, but once you realize it's just background paper, the wonder is lost on me. This isn't to say I'm against linear level design overall, but some designers, mainly Squenix and EA, tend to be pretty lazy and feel their battle systems are all you need to make their pretty vistas engaging, and frankly I don't buy it.

Auto healing after battle/save points - I have never found a game to use these features and not be a bit poorer for doing so. They don't actually increase challenge, they usually do the opposite for me. It doesn't help that these games tend to use combat systems that come down to simply finding the right tactic than an actual challenge where you have to throw everything you have at it. None of this has been helped that years of item management style gameplay has taught me to show restraint so even when given the option to nuke the enemy with the big guns consequence free, I'm more likely to choose efficiency over grand standing.

Pandering in Fight Games - I don't know which bothers me more, dumbing down controls in these games to the point they do become button mashers, or building complex control schemes that only countless hours of dedication and a high end arcade stick can perform flawlessly. This used to be the genre that was the epitome of "easy to learn, difficult to master" and now I feel like that comma has been replaced with a period. I know this sounds like "how dare you not want developers to make games for just experts and novices" but my argument was that old school fighting games already did that. There is a lot of depth to Street Fighter II, which is why it still gets played today and remade constantly by Capcom, but it was also simple enough that a novice could get into it and still be competent. I'm tired of playing games where I'm either mashing one button for the auto-combo into a glorious super move or trying to memorize a twenty button input involving a counter clockwise, clockwise, counter clockwise, and seven buttons being pressed at once to perform a simple hadoken knockoff move. I feel the proper design for games is to be simple but with untold depth, not one or the other.

Moral choice systems - They would be so much better if games didn't make them so black and white. Morality is pretty subjective and when you simply relegate everything to such a black and white concept, it makes the games boring and predictable when the whole point of the mechanics is to do the opposite.

Open World/Sandbox - Man I hate what Ubisoft has done to this genre, it wouldn't be so bad if everyone didn't copy/paste it and threw in some MMO elements to add "content". While I appreciate non-linear design, I also appreciate structure and too many game designers tend to be as lazy as the Linear dungeon designers in this regard. I don't appreciate being given 20 square miles of copy/paste landscape filled with fetch quests and the same dozen mobs to fight. I don't like opening up maps by zigzagging every tower to fill in the quota, I don't like quest givers with talking bubbles and exclamation points to fill in an arbitrary list of samey quests. The scale of the world is appreciative, but loading it down with busy work just saps the fun out of exploration and the exploration would be so much cooler if the level design was actually interesting and more structured, with something to do that I know I'm not going to repeat a hundred times in the next twenty hours.