Okay let me start with two heavy hitters right from the get go and don’t forget these are only personal oppinions and I absolute understand if you like those games. Good for you!
Zelda: Breath of the Wild - Not a bad game per se, but I don’t get the hype behind it. Sure the dungeons are fun but the world is so lifeless, the story non existent, the combat pretty shallow, the tower climbing is very much like FarCry but for some reasons it’s okay here while Ubisoft gets the blame…like I said I dont get why the game is so beloved. Never finished it after the 20 hour mark and probably never will.
Red Dead Redemption 2 - Just like Zelda not a bad game, but imho highly overrated. Graphics and and atmosphere are amazing but the controls are clunky and overloaded, nearly everybody is an unlikable douchebag who I would love to shoot myself at the first opportunity (maybe except Jack and Abigail) but I have to root and care for them. The game is just so long and feels very stretched, you already know that you won’t get Dutch because it’s a prequel and for an open world game you often get handholded in your weapon selection or things you can do because you have to wait for them to be unlocked by the game. I’m now nearly done with the game, playing the epilogue at the moment and I would say the last chapters are more entertaining than the rest of the game, but I still can’t understand why this game was on so many game of the year lists and I really wanted to put the controller down a dozen times.
So there they are, two highly controversial oppinions by me and now I’m really curios what your takes are and how highly I get downvoted into oblivion 😂
Doom: The Dark Ages.
Yes, it’s a pretty game. Sure, they hit their design goals, but it’s the design itself that I hate. It’s geared entirely towards close combat to the point where half the weapons are redundant or otherwise stupidly useless compared to others. It’s geared towards close combat to the point that the player’s projectiles disappear after a certain distance, while the enemies’ shots can travel much further. Sure, there’s plenty of ‘nice’ things they added to make it easy to churn around a bunch of groups of enemies up close, but it’s insanely dumb how it’s 100% of the game design. Especially because many of the maps are trying to show off large vistas and open areas, where it becomes VERY obvious that the player’s shots disappear while you’re being pelted by enemy fire just fine.
The extra game modes of flying and being in the mech are neat in concept, but so insanely underbaked they feel more like a waste of time task to push through than a cool extra part of the game to enjoy. They’re not mixed in with the on foot parts well at all and feel more like basic transitionary moments they attempted to add some gameplay to.
The attention to detail sucks, especially in the UI. A couple easy points demonstrate it: The most obvious is how their UI triggers work. You can click a button, and it plays the activate sound, but it’s not activating if you click it before the mouseover/highlight animation is done. In a similar vein, most affirmative interactions are a stupid wait for it long-press while going back to the mian menu from between levels is as simple as an escape key press. A purposefully slow forward with an instant back is just… pointlessly dumb. In a similar vein, while the game is showing you all the crap you did and found in the level, your only options are to sit there and get annoyed with the obnoxious, slow, and loud tallying of everything, or skip ahead to other pages and go back. Escape and space don’t skip or do anything there. Basically, there seems to only be one poorly thought out path to get to anywhere in the UI, with no convenient or standard alternatives implemented: Half baked.
The story and character designs were made by edgy teenagers. It’s infinitely worse than Doom Eternal or 2016. Old Ones are C’thulu ripoffs, most of the styling of Hell/etc are now just generic scifi with a bit more red, and many of the new designs are somehow more generic ripoffs of older doom. They pull inspiration from tons of other spooky things instead of rolling with the Hell themes or other established lore. So much of the added lore is just ripoffs of greek mythology and other things, too, like a boat to ferry souls and a bunch of other crap I don’t care to remember because it’s just not memorable, intersting, nor do they fit the usual themes of Doom.
In a similar vein, so much of the story is lackluster and uninspired. There is some interesting sounding writing hidden in the lore book, like why the slayer’s mount is half mech, but it’s simply stated in the lore instead of being a potentially cool way to introduce the mount or other things. So much of the game is ONE game loop (close combat) with few dynamic options and a bunch of extra half-baked fluff tacked on.
It’s frustratingly narrow sighted and underbaked to deserve to follow Eternal or 2016. It feels like it’s in some parallel universe from the other games, even from 2016 and Eternal.
I want to play the DOOM Slayer rampaging through a Hell inspired by 90’s metal, not some parallel universe written by edgy teenagers where he’s some glorified Master Chief ripoff with anger issues for a personality who’s just following orders.
you seem to spend a long time playing games you don’t like 😅
for an explanation of why people love botw: https://youtu.be/CZzcVs8tNfE
I completely agree about rdr2, but I didn’t play it that long before I just installed mods to let me duck around more and explore the beautiful world.
games i don’t like that everyone seems to love: games that waste my time with levelling systems that draw the game out way longer than it’s fun, which is most modern AAA games. I hate how people say things like “you get your moneys worth playing WoW because you’ll spend hours playing it” and “i liked portal but it was too short”, portal was good partly because it was short…
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With you on BotW. Love the dungeons, but in terms of the open world I never felt the oooh, the aaah, the escapism that everyone cooed about etc. Gliding was fun!
Maybe this is because I’ve never played a Zelda game before so I have no nostalgia attached to it?
Maybe this is because I’ve never played a Zelda game before so I have no nostalgia attached to it?
Don’t know about that, because I very much grew up with Zelda for the Gameboy, SNES and of course N64 and I loved them all. Maybe it’s just Breath of the Wild…
maybe this is because I’ve never played a Zelda game
Definitely not it. BotW is a great game, but it’s not a Zelda game. That’s my beef with it and TotK.
BotW was a game that drew from its roots, the very first Zelda game on NES.
Yes but poorly. There are no real dungeons and the open world has maybe 5-6 enemies total, everything else is just a variation on color and strength. That’s a far cry from the original game.
I agree that the mechanics and features are a mixed bag, but the core experience of exploration and freedom is what made Zelda, Zelda.
BotW also had like 12 unique enemies, excluding bosses and variations. It wasn’t a lot but 5-6 really doesn’t do it justice.
So I was curious about this and looked it up and there are technically 8 regular enemy types (bokoblins, moblins, lizalfos, chuchu, keese, octoroks, wizzrobes, pebblits, lynel). There are then also the different types of guardians, 2 overworld bosses (Talus and Hinox, I don’t count Molduga), and the yiga.
Depending on how you cut it there are then 8 up to 13 overworld enemy types. However, the real issue is you typically only encounter 3 maybe 5 (bokoblins, moblins, lizalfos / keese, chuchu) while running around.
I think the thing people forget when talking about variety is it matters how you use it. BOTW and TOTK basically have a few set grunt types that are what you predominantly fight, and it gets boring fast (in my opinion).
Edit/Note: I didn’t count stal/cursed enemies as they’re basically the same with slight modifications.
Slay the Spire. I could not get into it at all. Bought it because I love roguelites but this one is not for me.
Neverwinter Nights.
I’m not going to say it’s a bad game, but if I want to read a book, I’ll read a book.
- Abzu - hated the underwater movement controls
- Deponia & MechaNika - the protagonist is an asshole
- Papers Please - too stressful (works well as a piece of art, but wasn’t an enjoyable experience)
Last of Us, Uncharted, Assassin’s Creed, RDR.
I did finish one of the Uncharted series but they mostly go into interactive movies genre which I don’t find that interesting. The same with LoU but lost interest and never finished. AC (maybe II) was just annoying, the blending, erratic climbing/jumping mechanics… RDR, I should give them a chance, but the wild west setup inherently doesn’t do much for me. The same can be said about the “samurai style” games like Nioh, Sekiro etc. And I say that as a huge Souls games fan.
Checkers. You start with only one piece type and they go to the trouble to make all those squares and you only use half of 'em.
Skyrim, Limbo, Stardew Valley.
Minecraft. It desperately needs some QoL improvements for it to be anything but tedious.
That’s what mods are for, most of the game’s popularity is built around the community and not the vanilla game itself
Do you have anything to suggest? Me and a friend would like to re-dive into minecraft as a cozy co-op experience but we both have some experience with it from 2010-2018 and the new stuff that came out the last few years just don’t look that convincing.
I’ve seen modpacks mentioned, but there’s so many I don’t know where to start
I’ve also been a bit out of the loop the past ~4 years, but Feed The Beast is a good place to start. There seems to be a lot of variety depending on your playstyle. Some are technology focused, some are adventure focused, some are custom gamemodes like skyblock, There’s even FTB University which is a modpack to teach you how complex mods work.
Hollow Knight
Apparently not that much of an unpopular opinion though reading through the comments.
- GTA 3 ->
- Fallout 3 ->
- Skyrim
- Souls series and most games like it
- Halo
I don’t dislike it, it’s brilliant, the epitome of SupergiantGames’ beautiful craft, but I just can’t play Hades, it released after I had already burnt out on Dead Cells, Curse of the Dead Gods, Grime, Enter the Gungeon, Blasphemous, Gunfire Reborn, and whatnot, I can’t bring myself to play it because I had already explored the genre so many times…
I love Metroidvanias, 2D platformers, and generally even games that came before them that were similar in style but don’t meet all the Metroidvanias criteria. But I really really kind of dislike pretty much all of the Mario games. There’s a delay in the control scheme that makes timing difficult for me, and I can’t seem to get over that. I actually gave away Mario Odyssey because I couldn’t really play it well at all after about 10 hours. For me it’s not intuitive despite my like for both 2d and 3d Metroidvanias style games.