2 picks for me: Stardew Valley, most boring shit ever, I don’t see the appeal, seriously how the hell did that thing sold 20 million copies?
And Witcher 3, I own that game since 2019 and I regret buying it, funny thing is that I’ve finished Dragon Age 1 and 2, which are kinda same genre but I actually enjoyed those games. I guess the old BioWare sauce carried those games unlike Witcher where there’s nothing to enjoy in its massive pointless world.
I’m right with you on Stardew Valley. Might be because I’m a city kid but I just can’t connect with the game. I know that it’s supposed to be “cosy” but my idea of cosy is a downtown apartment, not a farm. It just doesn’t work for me.
It’s not cozy for me because I suck at time management. I heard there’s a mod that disables the penalty for getting home late though
Its not an accurate representation of a farm, just to make that clear. It’s a very much romanticised little village - and there’s plenty of indoors, if that’s what you like. Eg, your house, which you can upgrade and decorate, the villagers houses and shops, the mines. That said, I wouldn’t have described it as ‘cozy’, I would say more ‘chill’.
Same on Witcher III. I’m the target audience of that game - I love RPGs of all kinds, have played all the classic series like TES, Baldurs Gate, Planescape, Icewind Dale, Dragon Age, you name it. I even play ttrpgs multiple times a week.
I wanted to like Witcher III so bad that I forced myself all the way through the game to an optimal ending. But I just never started enjoying it. The world just feels… Flat. Fake. You do exactly what CD Projekt Red envisions or you hit a stone wall of empty game world.
Despite the skill trees and inventory and all of it, it just doesn’t feel like an RPG at all. It feels like a Disney ride on rails.
Also Gerardo just a boring ass protagonist, the only cool thing about him is that he’s sleazy. But that’s it. At that point I better watch porn. Same goes for BG, but that game the main problem is the gameplay
You definitely did not understand Geralt.
Helldivers, the gameplay is fun but I just can’t do GaaS games. The constant “seasons” and shit requires.more attention than my actual children do.
Deep Rock Galactic has nailed the formula with seasons as ways of adding things with using them as FOMO. Missed skins and loot from previous seasons used to just get recycled into the RNG loot. Now they added a system to toggle and play missions as if you were a in a previous season and earn the old loot.
Elden ring
i played like two hours and felt no difference to demon souls, i was like “yep, that sure is a lesser version of demon souls”
I’m gonna drown in downvotes once I say that I don’t like the Grand Theft Auto series. I’m actually serious, I never understood the appeal for those games.
Final Fantasy. Haven’t played any of them, and I’m not interested in playing them at all.
My first Mario Game was Super Mario World, as such I don’t understand why Mario 1 and 3 are so beloved. Groundbreaking they might be, fun they are not.
Any time I got the Mario All Stars Cartridge out and said to myself “I am completing Mario 3 today”, after a while my mind went “or I could actually enjoy a round of Mario World” and did that instead.
KotoR and Mass Effect. They both just feel so stilted.
I won’t allow mass effect slander. Don’t give a fuck about star wars, you can trash it
Lol I’m the opposite. I won’t allow KOTOR slander. Don’t give a fuck about Mass Effect, you can trash it.
KOTOR had a great story and I was finally in the Star Wars universe, just flying around and exploring the universe.
I do admit the early part of the game is a bit slow, but once I was jumping from planet to planet it was awesome.
(Come to think of it I found Mass Effect equally boring when I started it. If it had been Star Wars I probably would have stuck with it, but since it wasn’t I just found it boring.)
The first Mass Effect game was mechanically clunky. Some of that was really on display with the early combat, which might have been a big barrier.
Mass Effect 2 tossed a lot of the mechanics of the old game, turning combat into a cover shooter with squad commands for special abilities. At the time there was some complaint from the hardcore RPG community that combat was dumbed down, but overall the reaction was that it was smoother and less annoying even if it lost some nuance.
The story of ME1 was a bit of a deeper and more esoteric mystery. At times it could seem meandering, even if the high level ideas were solid. ME2 was “I’m building a team” as you assemble party members towards a clear and signposted final goal.
Tell me why you love it, I’d love to be able to give it a second chance.
I’m not the person you’re responding to, but I love the story. It’s one of the best sci-fi stories in games, with tonnes of memorable characters and moments.
Gameplay gets better as you go through whilst the story suffers a bit, and they have their issues, but there isn’t anything else quite like them even now.
I just love being Shepard. He’s always can say the right thing, being cool, corny, gets the girl (this is something I’ll never get), being an asshole with little consequences, beats the galactic menace… Is so much fun as a shooter too. Plus the universe is very rich an complex if you want to explore it, I don’t, except for the mandatory stuff plus the important side missions. Yet I managed to get all the achievements.
Witcher 3 used to be like that for me. Everyone kept telling me to do the Bloody Baron quest; did it, didn’t care for it, and stopped playing the game. Four years later, I decided to give it another shot and I liked it a lot and finally understood why people like it.
I didn’t really like the witcher 3. Found the combat wasn’t that great and I spent most of my time walking around talking to people or trying to repair my weapons . I didn’t get very far into the game though so I’m not sure how much that changes later in the game . I did like the card game Gwent though .
When I tried playing it there were a couple quests near the beginning where you get to choose someones fate. Nether answer is a good one and I felt bad whichever I picked. I stopped playing at that point.
I stopped playing after I saw how slow and clunky the combat was, and how the spellcasting is basically 5 different colours of the same spell.
Doesn’t matter how good the story is when the gameplay in between is a snoozefest.
Any first person shooter. I’m just not into something that requires that kind of reflexes and precision, especially with a first person perspective where you can be killed instantly from behind.
I agree. On top of that, I get motion sick really easily, so I can play a lot of FPS games for about 15 minutes max.
First person shooters are just dumbed down point and click games.
It is like they just removed the entire puzzle element, so you can play brainless.
That’s not fair, mostly within the context of multiplayer. The puzzle is outsmarting other players.
For real. What a reductive analysis of a large and varied genre.
You can literally call any game a point and click game.
Or if you develop wrist pain… most FPSs just go right out the window. Or you play on controller and get whomped by the mouse and keyboard players.
Controller is actually better in most modern FPS games due to over tuned aim assist. Gone are the days of mnk supremacy in fps games
Maybe I’m just bad then. Wouldn’t surprise me 😬
The way it’s worked for a few years is that the bottom half of controller players are about even with the mid tier mnk players and then the top tier controller players are better than the top tier mnk players.
It’s not an issue if you only play casually, but if you get into the high level competitive stuff it quickly becomes seen.
I wish I was bad enough to not be part of the group affected. Games would be so much more fun
Sucks to suck?
If your need to feel better than other people is the only thing fun about a game, it isn’t a good game.
ROFL!
No, I play it for the same tickle I get from pressing myself to extreme in rhythm games. It’s just gotta suck to not be good because you won’t get that intensity. You’ll just feel clumsy and not get to spend much time alive.
So far as comparison goes, I can’t say I don’t enjoy that some. I’m the top ranked project muse player and definitely feel awesome about that.
Some friends tried to get me into Destiny 2. It seems really pointless. I recognize the mechanics and aspects common to other games but somehow it just never clicked with me.
I put 1.2k hours into it during lockdown. Not enjoying Destiny 2 is probably the best thing that’s ever happened to your wallet tbh
As someone who enjoyed the tiny sliver of the free part of game, are the story missions worth paying for?
The good main stories are Forsaken (can’t play this anymore afaik), The Witch Queen (may be worth it), and The Final Shape (from what I hear, no context on this one). There’s also some good stories in specific seasons but I don’t know how they’re handling older seasons and whether or not you can still play them. Back when I was actively playing they were cycling them out every year.
A lot of the value in these is the endgame content though. Unless you’re interested in the loot game, lost sectors, exotic missions and/or plan on getting a group together for dungeons and raids, I don’t think it’s worth it. If all you care about is the story, I think you can get much better stories elsewhere.
seriously, I tried playing with my friends for like 2-3 months and had to spend at least $100 just to get the DLCs to play with them. Great investment at this point…
Yup, that tracks. I think it was a total of about $150 for me starting Y3 and up to the beginning of Y4. When D2 is good, it’s REALLY good, and nothing quite compares to grinding that game with a bunch of friends who are also super into it.
My friends I used to play with I actually met in-game when I was F2P. I couldn’t buy the DLCs myself at the time so they just bought me the DLCs (which I still think is wild and I’m unbelievably grateful for). But the content got stale as hell at around Y4 and they stopped playing for the better part of a year. By the time they were back, they still didn’t wanna do most of the content and I was getting burnt out on the power grind every season. Raids became more about the loot, less about having fun. Eventually we all kinda fell off it. By the time I could pay for it myself, only some of them were playing sporadically, and the monetization kept getting more and more insane (like fuck Bungie for thinking dungeon keys were a good idea).
I really miss those days though and I’d pay in a heartbeat if it meant playing like we used to.
Yeah, that makes sense. I’ve had some runs like that on games that were great but just aren’t ever coming back, like PSO and even Half-Life DM or Quake. I agree the monetization is extreme.
I was trying to play with my friend from elementary school, who I had reconnected with after several years. Him, plus a couple of his friends who i sort of know from years ago too. Destiny is his favorite game and he’s been at it for 12 years straight, which is cool, because he knows everything and I could learn from him, but the other two were fairly new, and I was brand new, which unfortunately falls into his tendency to want to be the cool guy who knows everything and tells everyone what to do. Also, we couldn’t play ANY other game, just Destiny 2 for 4 hours a night. Also, I have a bad habit of getting overly drunk around that time. So, it didn’t quite work out. Might still talk to him in the future and might still play Destiny 2 sometime (sorry if that was overly personal ha).
I had a co worker a few months ago say they needed to head home to their second job after work, curious I Inquired further and it turns out he has just been busting out ~40 hours a week of destiny 2 for a few months now while also working 40 hours a week at our job.
To be fair we work from home 2 days a week so I’m sure he had some cross over work/destiny time.
That sounds about right. It’'s easy to spend ridiculous amounts of time playing during a good annual expansion or particularly good season, especially if you’ve got a clan that plays and raids regularly and/or you use the LFG discord. I used to be the same way, 40-50hrs a week at my peak. But I was in college, I don’t know if I’d have the energy for that and a full time job now.
Ditto. Dull as dishwater
Minecraft.
I played Terraria for a bit and I kept getting into the headspace of wtf am I even doing playing the game?
Anytime I touched Minecraft it felt the same.
I’ve played other, similar builder/mining games, most notably satisfactory and DRG, both of which feel like they have more direction than Minecraft or Terraria.
I don’t need much of a push to care enough to progress through a game; an interesting mechanic, a fun playstyle, interesting things to do and achieve… For the most part I’m really laid back when gaming. I don’t really get involved in PvP at all, so anything cod/modern warfare/fortnite/whatever, I’m not interested in. I’d rather work cooperatively with people to achieve a goal. Even something like left4dead or counterstrike is pretty decent in my mind. Some competition is fine, but free for all and/or small teams in large battles (like with many Battle Royale games), when it’s almost entirely PvP, no thanks. There’s always trolls and people who take the game far too seriously, and those are the kinds of people I don’t want anything to do with.
I struggled with Terraria because a lot of the mechanics were not obvious. There was a logical progression to get more powerful stuff, and even some fairly good quests and bosses to fight, but you either happen across them and you’re wholly unprepared for the encounter, or you have to follow a guide to get the event started. It was a bit convoluted, and the game didn’t really explain anything about what you needed to do to move forward. Minecraft feels like the same stuff. It’s all exploration and discovery based, basically at random. I know there’s some “end game” type stuff in the game, which implies there’s progression, but idk, it’s all kinds of obfuscated.
Compare with satisfactory, which is largely open, but has a pretty clear set of skill trees and progression. There’s no “end” to the game, just endlessly creating items.
There’s direction there. It’s not a lot, and nobody is going to tell you how to get to the next thing, just that it exists and this is what you need to get to it. There’s a hundred different ways to get to that objective, and you have to find your own way.
DRG is basically an endless grind of matches. Procedurally generated, which keeps things lively, but an endless set of essentially the same thing every time. You can get upgrades and cosmetics the more you play, but it’s the same gameplay every time you get into a round.
DRG still has a better plotline than twilight… I mean, Minecraft.
Just getting dumped into an open world with no idea what you can do, or what you should do, isn’t really my jam. I tried with Terraria. No thanks.
I tried to like FTL, I really did, but it’s just too much RNG for me.
I get the complaint, it feels like it could be so tactical and strategic but often you get fucked by bad luck. But that’s kinda rogue likes for you I guess. Wonder if there was a way to design it differently.
I’m having that problem with slay the spire currently. I’ve spent 50 hours trying to beat it with the witch character, and keep getting fucked by the RNG. FTL I’ve beat with every ship/variation on normal, but it takes a lot of Memorization or looking up events to make sure you’re not screwing yourself. Into the Breach is way less RNG.
All Mario games except for any Mario Kart. I didn’t even like the games as a kid, and I still don’t get their appeal because to me the platforming aspects are simplistic and not engaging enough. I can enjoy other platformers though.
Animal Crossing. I have friends who became obsessed with that game. They wouldn’t stop pestering me about how much I would love it, and how I should start playing so we could trade turnips or some shit. Anyways, I bought it. What a weird thing to be obsessed with. It was boring, childish, and pointless. But it was hugely popular for a period of time.
I bought it for the same reasons and also hated it. It just felt empty and boring. I then had to bite my tongue so hard when those friends would start gushing about their latest Animal Crossing thing.
Fucking chore simulator. My roommates couldn’t be assed to do their actual chores, but every morning during covid they’d get up and make sure their fucking farms had whatever the shit they needed.
Covid did wonders for that game. It came out right before the lockdown, and people suddenly had free time and a reason to escape to a happy place.
