Gaming

Escort missions and weapons breaking without a reasonably easy way to get/make more (glaring at you, Dead Island...)

Swimming/diving, it usually has terrible controls. My prime example is Witcher 3, swimming with Geralt feels like steering a freighter while underwater enemies can quickly move in all directions.

Also I generally don't like platforming, but that's just me.

Do this to get that to get this to get that One example is the Minecraft tech tree. Abosultely no choice whatsoever. I don't ever need to make a choice. Obviously Minecraft is now begining to take steps to sort this out. But it's been over 10 years and the system is ingrained into people's minds

QTE by far

When you enter a level and the camera pans over every important thing in the level before you can move. I'm not an idiot. I can discover the level on my own. Stop holding my hand.

The bane of my existence in any pvp game is crowd control mechanics.

In general, I hate every player skill in pvp games which take away the opponent's ability to play.

Someone already sort of mentioned this, but I don't usually like crafting and building stuff. So games like minecraft and animal crossing new horizons are out. For the latter, greatly prefer new leaf.

Fast travel that is just a game mechanic with no story ties in open world games.

Disclaimer: My main experience with games so far has been some Nintendo stuff, Fallout, and The Elder Scrolls.

Of what I've played I like Morrowind's fast travel system the most. You don't just open your map and click a button, you talk to people or use a spell/item. And NPCs mention these travel systems and story wise would use them.

I like Oblivion's (and to a lesser extent, Skyrim and the 3D Fallout's) the least. Time passes like your character walked to where you fast traveled but not much is timed so that has little effect on immersion. Too much of the journey has to have gaps filled in by the player's imagination because walking on the road normally has a lot of encounters and wandering off to check out random buildings and people. It encourages less exploration and taking some time with the game.

Obviously I want a balance, I don't want to be walking the same road with 2 wolf encounters a thousand times because it's between two areas I need to frequent. And I don't want 90% of my playtime to be traveling. But I also don't want to keep instantly fast traveling to all places and feel "lazy" and like I'm missing experiences and encounters. And I want more immersion. More character interaction instead of UI interaction.

Most open-world games have areas on the map that are blank until you "explore" them by climbing a tower of some kind and "activating" that region on your map.

This results in trudging blindly into the middle of every new area, ignoring interesting stuff along the way and beelining to the tower just so you can see the damn map. It's an annoyingly unnatural way to explore.

I didn't even realize that I disliked it until I played Far Cry 6, which has a much more organic and immersive landmark discovery process. You learn locations of interest from readables and by talking to friendly NPCs that you encounter in the world.

Edit: sp

Might be a bit too specific but limited-time battles in JRPGs. Not sure how prevalent it is nowadays, but the most recent one to do it that I've played is Persona 5 Royal.