This is a followup to @[email protected] ‘s recent thread for completeness’ sake.
I’ll state an old classic that is seen as a genre defining game because it is: Myst. Yes, it redefined the genre… in ways I fucking hated and that the adventure game genre took decades to fully recover from. It was a pompous mess in its presentation and was the worst kind of “doing action does vague thing or nothing at all, where is your hint book” puzzle gameplay wrapped in graphical hype which ages pretty poorly as far as appeal qualities go.
So many adventure games tried to be Myst afterward that the sheer budgetary costs and redundancy of the also-rans crashed the adventure game genre for years.
Horizon Zero Dawn. It felt more like a tech/graphics demo than an actual game. Still haven’t finished it and can’t see myself doing it. I don’t know how they managed to make robot dinosaurs so boring.
Also every call of duty after the original modern warfare 3. Yes, including black ops 2. I actually think black ops 2 was one of the worst call of duty games, the overuse of the three lane cookie cutter map design really screwed up multiplayer FPS games for a good 5 years after its release.
Also another controversial take, skill based matchmaking is good and more games should implement it. It forces you to actually play people at your skill level and prevents pointless pubstomping. If you want to have mindless fun with long killstreaks, just play against the AI/bots.