8 Video Game Mechanics That Were Too Complicated

It's always great to see a video game come up with a clever and creative mechanic we haven't ever really seen before - at least not quite like this. 

It's tough to do, and so frankly who can blame most developers for leaning back on the tried-and-true mechanics they know will work with most players instead?

But to the same token, sometimes developers offer up strange, left-field riffs on these concepts which are ultimately injected with so much added complexity that it becomes a net-negative to the experience overall.

And that's absolutely the case with these video games, each of which introduced a feature or mechanic which ended up being a bit too complex and arcane for its own good.

There might've been some interesting ideas there but it was just too mired in busy-work for its own good, or perhaps the developers did a poor job of actually explaining how the systems worked.

Whatever the reason, these mechanics left players en masse complaining that they actively undermined the game's sense of fun, enough that some of these features were heavily revised when the games in question were remastered...

Let's kick things off with The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, which despite being one of the most beloved RPGs of all time also made a total hash-job of one of the most basic aspects of any RPG - leveling up.

Rather than level up in linear fashion by killing things and completing quests, players would only do so every time they improved their major skills by a total of 10 points, and only upon leveling up could attributes then also be raised.

Coupled with the game's poorly thought out enemy-scaling mechanic, this arcane progression system had the tendency to result in extreme unbalancing, with players often accidentally encountering huge difficulty spikes by being under-powered through no fault of their own.

This pissed players off enough that some created their own mods to give the game a more conventional, experience-based leveling system, and in addition to follow-up Skyrim offering a more streamlined means of leveling, the recent Oblivion remaster also mercifully revamped it.