Artificial difficulty. If I can only finish a game by grinding for hours on end or after endless tedious fetch quests, I am going to be very disappointed. Like there’d better be something else real strong in the title’s favor or I’m likely to drop it altogether.

There was a time when making games more difficult by way of time investment made more sense from a design angle, but that time has long since passed. Some genres are more prone to it than others (with some niches even revolving around the idea), but imo it’s just lazy design in 9/10 cases theses days.