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[Mephisto]

One of my peeves is blatantly unrealistic things in a game that is intended to be at least semi-realistic. The one specific instance I'm going to discuss could also fall under unrealistic damage above.

My most recent example is Spec Ops: The Line. Okay, yeah, your deity of choice decided to spin up a sandstorm and dump the entire desert on top of Dubai. I can suspend my disbelief in this instance.

Okay, you can hide behind a table for ten seconds and all of the bullets that your body contains will magically pop out. That's a given in the modern FPS scene.

But people fall when you shoot them. It takes one or two shots, not even well-placed ones, to drop someone with your starting pistol. That's great.

Then you progress and you run into guys in plate armor. I don't know if the military actually has anything for WP protection, but it seems like going into a burning area wearing a sealed tin can might not be the best choice of actions.

Then you progress some more and find a guy that you must kill. An unarmored ex-officer guy. Here I am with my sweet semi-auto sniper rifle thing. He doesn't notice me, so I place a bullet right between his eyes. Mind you this is a gun that can take out normal mooks by shooting in their general direction. He then proceeds to run behind cover and shoot back at us. It takes several such shots to down him. It got to the point where, after the level loaded, I would immediately empty my entire clip into his skull. That usually brought him down.

Then again, maybe it was all a

Spoiler (click to show/hide)

hallucination.

[alexandertnt]

Harmless attacks on the player

(related somewhat to Mrnocamera's post)

I do wish games would at least do something to make combat feel more dangerous and painful for the player. Even something like canned hit animations and decals would be nice (these seem to be rarely implemented for the player character in games that have them for the enemies for some reason). Instead, alot of games have you being shot, bashed, and sliced and not even so much as flinch.

Implementing realistic things solely because its realistic
Non-fun game mechanics whose only excuse to exist is that they are "realistic". It annoys be because there are a ton of other "realistic" things they diddn't implement (you may have to spend 30% of your game time feeding yourself, but you dont have to go to the toilet), so I dont see how this on its own is an excuse to implement something.

Being more emotionally affected by the injury and/or death of an animal than a human seems to be pretty common, yeah. At least when that animal is cute and fluffy .

[itisnotlogical]

Stupid amounts of hit stun

It's fine if I lose because I made a dumb decision, didn't notice somebody behind me, whatever. What isn't okay is if a single hit makes me lie on the ground like a jackass for five seconds.

Regenerating health

I'm not sure if I've talked about this before, but regenerating health is a special kind of evil that's been seeded in shooters in recent years that I wish would just go away. As long as there's cover and you're quick enough, there's no challenge. There's no incentive to do better because a quick enough player can always hide behind something and be back to 100% in a few seconds. There's no reason to explore the level either, since there's no need to look for medkits. There's no tension between encounters since you always arrive at the next in tip-top shape. Regenerating health is really the only kind of casualization that I absolutely cannot stand for.

[SealyStar]

Regenerating health

I'm not sure if I've talked about this before, but regenerating health is a special kind of evil that's been seeded in shooters in recent years that I wish would just go away. As long as there's cover and you're quick enough, there's no challenge. There's no incentive to do better because a quick enough player can always hide behind something and be back to 100% in a few seconds. There's no reason to explore the level either, since there's no need to look for medkits. There's no tension between encounters since you always arrive at the next in tip-top shape. Regenerating health is really the only kind of casualization that I absolutely cannot stand for.

Yes.

Maybe there's a better system out there than medkits, but it's not regenerating health. What irks me is when modern gamers think the system is "hardcore" and medkits are "casual", or that hide-n-heal mechanics are more "realistic" than medkits. Obviously neither one is really realistic, but it comes down to "superhuman healing factor" vs "conveniently fast application of medicine". And in terms of difficulty, it's much harder to scrounge about for health than it is to just dodge out of the way.

The only way regenerating health could be balanced would be if it took longer than it does, and there were markedly fewer safe areas to duck into while you heal. At least multiplayer is better than singleplayer in this regard, since most FPS SP missions are just linear advancement and pretty much anything you've already passed is a safe zone.

[USEC_OFFICER]

-snip-

Except for a blend of regeneration and medkits (which I am quite fond of), I'm not entirely sure what another alternative would be. All the other systems I've seen have been varitations of one or the other.

[Mephisto]

-snip-

Except for a blend of regeneration and medkits (which I am quite fond of), I'm not entirely sure what another alternative would be. All the other systems I've seen have been varitations of one or the other.

Goldeneye! also Halo, to a lesser extent.

You have armor that can be increased in various ways. You also have health that goes down but can't be improved.

[USEC_OFFICER]

Goldeneye! also Halo, to a lesser extent.

You have armor that can be increased in various ways. You also have health that goes down but can't be improved.

Goldeneye is just a medikit system with an additional bit of health added on. Halo 1 is the combination of regenerating health and medikits that I like so much. Halo 2 and up is two bars of regenerating health (as far as I'm aware).

[Catastrophic lolcats]

I said it in the original post and I stand by it. The STALKER/Deus Ex/System Shock method of having medpacks to be picked up and place in the inventory before being manually consumed is the best system. It works especially well in open-world and games where loot is a scarcity since it rewards both prior preparation and exploration.
I can only see regenerating health as a status of lazy game design now-a-days. It allows developers to spend to no longer create environments that were based around finding supplies to survive. The old "maze" level design philosophy is dead and all exploration has been sucked out to be replaced with narrow level tubes with cutscenes every tenth step, or flat lazy boring plains that get passed as "open-world".

Like all other systems it can be abused if not correctly implemented. The biggest misuse would be supplying way too many health packs so that players just don't hoard and consume them during major fights. 
I've always adored STALKER's unique blend of RPG mechanics and FPS. It's always puzzled me why the series didn't have a greater impact on FPS design and I'll still rate it as the only game to have done open world especially well.

[SealyStar]

I said it in the original post and I stand by it. The STALKER/Deus Ex/System Shock method of having medpacks to be picked up and place in the inventory before being manually consumed is the best system. It works especially well in open-world and games where loot is a scarcity since it rewards both prior preparation and exploration.

I do like this system, although it is best suited for RPG-inspired games.

Even though HL2 is basically linear and doesn't have an inventory, I did use the gravity gun to carry/throw medkits and ammo to places I knew I would return to later, or launch them off to a distant area I would get to soon. It was useful.

[Squill]

I'm pretty sure that in Halo 4/Reach, the health regeneration is either very slow or nonexistent. Maybe if you could regenerate health, but you had to dedicate time to it? Something like you have to stop and bandage yourself; almost Left 4 Dead style, but you carry unlimited healthpacks. Also, maybe there could be some sort of scanner/detection/perk that could detect and identify electronics, and it would light up when a medkit is being used nearby. So you can heal, but it's entirely possible that someone will track you down and kill you when you try to.

[Matz05]

Kinda like the Heavy's Sandvich in TF2?
When carrying it instead of a secondary weapon, you can occasionally pull out a delicious sandwich and chow down. This paralyzes you for a period of time in which he goes "Nomnomnom. Nom NOM!" quite loudly. During this (uncancelable) animation, you heal up. Heaven help you if an enemy comes across you.

[SealyStar]

Kinda like the Heavy's Sandvich in TF2?
When carrying it instead of a secondary weapon, you can occasionally pull out a delicious sandwich and chow down. This paralyzes you for a period of time in which he goes "Nomnomnom. Nom NOM!" quite loudly. During this (uncancelable) animation, you heal up. Heaven help you if an enemy comes across you.

That would work pretty well. It eliminates the ability to stay alive forever spamming packed medkits, while still letting you store them up.

[alexandertnt]

There's no tension between encounters since you always arrive at the next in tip-top shape.

That is the main reason I do not like regenerative health. If you do well and win, you go back to full health. If you do poorly and you win, you go back to full health (the end result of both of these seems the same and will not have any bearing on future combat. Whereas with non-regenerating health, doing badly in a combat situation could put you in a worse situation later).

Long-regeneration time wouldnt fix this either, as it would just encourage the player to stand around for a long time and wait after combat before moving on.

Boss battles that take god damn forever

Usually either through stuped ammounts of HP, or really small weak spots that are very infrequently made attackable.

AI that just magically knows your location

They just pathfind straight through the level to you.

AI that is hellbent on killing a specific target

Even if it is being attacked, it will ignore the attacker and go straight for a specific target and chase it. Somewhat common in RTS's, where you can shoot dead units while having the unit the AI is chasing run around in circles.

Since Im talking about RTS's:

RTS AI that cant handle walls

You wall yourself in (or even wall the AI in) and the AI just breaks.

[itisnotlogical]

A few RTS gripes of my own:

Actual-size hitboxes

It might break immersion a bit, but the early Command and Conquer games would be a million times less irritating if the tanks had smaller collision boundaries. I can't count how many base assaults have been foiled by leaving tanks unattended, assuming that they wouldn't bump into eachother endlessly while turrets took them out from well within their minimum range.

Unit portraits that don't match team colors

You can change the model colors in the game to match your team, there's no reason not to make the portraits modifiable. Half the fun I've had in Dawn of War is making my own Space Marines, but they still have the Blood Ravens portrait in-game.

AI that makes stealth completely unusable

I have never successfully used a Ghost in Starcraft, outside of the scripted missions where they're actually necessary. Most detectors can see farther than the Ghost can shoot, and there's no point in bringing other units to help the Ghost because that ruins the whole "stealth" bit.

[mastahcheese]

RTS AI that cant handle walls

You wall yourself in (or even wall the AI in) and the AI just breaks.

RTS AI that doesn't know that walls exist

Personally, I find breaking down the wall to be more fun that actually invading the town itself, but every game I play, the AI is so incompetent that it never builds any.