recent: tears of the kingdom, or as i like to call it botw 1.2, its the same thing all over again just with one or two added gimicks, the open world is dead, npcs are boring and nintendo just got away with it like that
not so recent: i cant stand persona 5, joker and his entourage are annoying teenagers, the time management is a horrible gameplay addition and the artstyle is just a visual overstimulation
with that being said,~~ plz dont kill me~~
This will be an extremely hot take for some: Almost all recent online games are complete garbage that solely exist to make profit and create addicted user bases and they hurt what videogames truly are, a revolutionary and interactive form of art.
This is why I can basically only play old games or indies. Games shouldn’t feel like work or require me to pay tons of money. I play games to have fun, which I guess is a radical idea now.
I also mainly just post old games and indies, too. Modern games for the most part are pretty garbage due to the way they are designed to take all your money.
I have liked a lot of indies lately as well, but the have been a ton of good AAA games recently, for me at least. Elden Ring, TotK, Star Wars Jedi Survivor, Hogwarts Legacy, God of War Ragnarok, to name a few.
Potentially worded a bit abrasively but…kinda yeah. They rely so heavily on fomo, gacha, and other skinner box tricks to keep you playing other than FUN. Just remember what happened to Titanfall 2: "ohhh it was SO FUN it just didn’t have the events and grinding and stuff I wanted >:( "
How dare they keep the chores out of my fun videogame. Now how am I going to press my dopamine button?!? Huh?!? Think it’s just gonna happen cause I grapple 180 no scoped a guy with a kraber???
I need checklists! Grind! If the game isn’t a part time job I can’t even conceptualize it being fun!
not just an online game problem for quite a few years now
Monster Hunter. It’s just so painfully slow and boring. Combat just feels clunky.
Out of curiosity, which one(s) did you try?
MH World was the first and only one I’ve tried.
Oh. World is a bit faster compared to old school MH. So there goes my initial hope. But if you ever want to give the series another try, Rise is faster and flashier.
In general I recommend trying the games with a friend or a guide. The games themselves are not good at helping players “get” them.
I recently tried to play MH: Rise and bounced so hard. They really need to consider how to ease new players to the genre into the game. The first hour included so much exposition, paragraphs of text, and detailed menu tutorials before I really had any context for why anything is important. I know that the games have always been this way, but it felt lazy.
Got through all of that to play with a friend cuz we played the beta together and thought it would be promising
We were so disappointed we spent less time playing together than we did on the initial text/cutscenes.
I feel like World unintentionally offered a better experience with the Defender set. I guess it was brought in to help people “fast forward” to Iceborne content. But I was appreciating it even just for playing through the main game. I would use Defender weapons, with no Defender armor, dealing far more damage than I should have at that point in the game, and monsters still took a good 15 minutes; about as long as I would ever want a fight like that to take without getting seriously bored.
If I ever return to try Rise, I’m a bit worried that it will feel grueling.
I forget which monster Hunter game I played, but I dropped it before the tutorial/ into ended. I just want to pay a game, but read a book of history and how-to.
Honestly, Stardew Valley for me. I’ve tried it a couple times and it just didn’t work for me. I wanted to like it, and I like the idea of it, but in practice, I hated the time management aspect and not being able to just run around and do as much as I wanted in a day (I haven’t played on PC with mods; I know there’s at least one or two that let you change that). I also hated the fishing. 🙃
The game is kind of a chore at first when you have to manually water your crops. Once you’re more established and have sprinklers you can really put a lot of the farming on autopilot.
I can see why the time mechanic is there but I agree it can be a negative point to the game. You’re not the first person I see complaining about this.
I liked the game enough but needing to get a rare fish that can only be fished at certain season, certain time period and only when raining to complete quests was annoying, as was needing to get out of the dungeon while I was having a good run because of time. It would have been better if there were alternative means to get the fish, like buying from the fisherman, and the option to camp in the dungeon.
As someone who loves stardew (I have 1000+ hours in it) I can see what you mean. I hope you’ll find mods you like, but maybe it’s just better to try other games like sun haven? Never played it myself but I read it eliminates exactly this time managing thing stardew has. And yeah, the fishing is hard. I heard “The fishing in Stardew is the souls-like in farming Minigames” a lot and I think it’s true.
I actually feel like Harvest Moon was more chill and relaxing. Stardew Valley stressed me out because I felt like if I didn’t manage my time properly I was doing it wrong which felt weird given the game’s message about leaving the demanding stressful work life of the city behind.
For me botw was that game. I didn’t like the gameplay and many aspects of the game design. In contrast, I’m enjoying totk a lot more. It improved on a few aspects I didn’t like and the gameplay feels closer to what I want in a Zelda game. Overall I’d still prefer them to go in a different direction with the series though.
But in general, I’m not a fan of a lot of currently popular elements. I don’t need big, open worlds with a lot to do, that just gives me FOMO. I don’t want to build and manage stuff, and make a lot of decisions in my adventure game, I just want a good story and fun traversal and combat. And I don’t need 50+h of gameplay, I don’t have that much time and I usually start burning out after the 20h mark anyway.
Didn’t see anyone else mention it, so I’ll say MMOs. Pretty much all of them. WoW, FFXIV, Guild Wars 2, Star Wars one (can’t remember the name). I really like the idea of MMOs, having a huge shared world that feels alive, tons of lore, epic quests, but I just find the gameplay loop so boring. They just feel like endless busywork to me.
The content and world in MMOs feels superficial. I much prefer a tightly constructed narrative with deep, meaningful character development. The Last Of Us is a great example of this.
This may just be old man nostalgia talking, but at least part of that spark feels like its gone because the genre became too popular and information flowed too freely.
One of the things I distinctly remember about older MMOs, especially Pre-WoW ones, is how so much information was basically just passed on from player to player. You’d join a guild, because the guild forums are where you could post maps and strategies and the like. But your guild forums were also mostly just private to you, so useful stuff could take a long time to leak out.
With the rise of wikis and big, well connected social communities, a lot of the exploration element of the games is just theme park rides and the mechanical experimentation gets analyzed to death in the first few days because of how collaborative everyone is instead of everyone being stuck in smaller groups with non-perfect info.
Destiny 2! The game is total trash. The combat is so fucking boring, its just nothing but bullet sponge bosses with simple ass mechanics.
I know that lots of people love it but man I do not understand lol
I’ve played Destiny 2 religiously throughout Warmind up to Shadowkeep, but after giving it some thought, I feel like I agree with you. Most of the fun I’ve had in that game was because I played it with my friends. We were happy messing around and shooting at each other’s backsides and maybe occasionally getting something done in the scarce 3-player content there was, kind of like a glorified hangout space, but if I had to play it by myself? I don’t know, chief. I do love the feel of the guns and the lore (up to a certain point), but I wouldn’t call the game itself a good time.
That may have been my problem, playing solo that is.
Monster Hunter. I don’t understand any of it. I tried rise and generations and I just… I just don’t get it.
You should try world if you can. Rise has too much systems bloat in my opinion. World was my first monster hunter and I have over 200 hours and I am still not done. Rise added so much stuff with palicos and palamutes that I couldn’t be bothered to do. It tipped the scales just a bit too much towards systems bloat in my opinion. I haven’t played generations but from my understanding, it isn’t as modernised as the current iterations of monster hunter so that may be causing you some friction.
Souls games.
I like difficult games but I just don’t enjoy the gameplay of Souls games. They feel sluggish and repetitive.
Please give sekiro a try if you ever get a chance. It’s like dark souls but for people like us that want good fun gameplay instead of constant bs :D
I played Elden Ring for 2 hours and then refunded it. I don’t like that combat style at all.
Finally scored a PS5 a month ago and bought elden ring with it. Same tbh. I am okay with the idea of patterns and reading telegraphed fights but it just feels awkward.
Have you tried Nioh/Wolong? While I really like the Souls games for the exploration and world design I much prefer the faster and more complex combat of the Nioh games.
I love Nioh, great game! Haven’t tried Wolong yet.
Same for me. I enjoy the Nioh games, but don’t like the Dark soul games
I tried Nioh, I think last I remember I came up against a boss that could instantly kill me in a single attack, at the end of a gauntlet of enemies. It wasn’t even that far into the game, so I just dropped it since it was clearly the exact kind of bullshit difficulty that Dark Souls is known for.
I just got done with Subnautica. Man, either I just had shit luck, or that game does NOT respect your time. It’s infuriating to me when I know exactly what I need to do to progress, but I’m blocked by not being able to find a single damn rock out in a giant ocean. I dug the story, but man I was glad to be done with it.
I enjoyed some parts of it, but I’m the same way. I was often scouting the world for that one piece of that one vehicle option so I could continue playing the actual game. Ended up spending as much time reading online guides and maps as actually playing.
There’s one opinion that I’ve been afraid to say out loud forever because people are so passionate about it… Disco Elysium. I love rpgs and I love choice-based, narrative-driven games. But there were two main things which drove me crazy:
- I really didn’t like the writing. Honestly it felt like some fresh English lit major suddenly discovered big words and angst and went crazy with it. It was really cringy to me.
- I didn’t like the false paradigm of choices in terms of world views and beliefs, when the game very clearly sets them all up to suck. With a strong preference for communism. Like when you try to be measured and moderate the game actively negs you for being weak. Why give me the choice when you’re just going to punish me for it? And what if I have some anti-capitalist beliefs but don’t want to kill the landlords? It was just so extreme and off-putting.
I’m with you on this one. I got moderately stuck at one point pretty early on in the game (I’m not sure, but I think my save was probably bugged). Anyway, I put the game down and never touched it again. Didn’t feel like I had lost anything at all.
I’ve had a hard time finishing the game because of #2. DE is such a weird blend of “the devs thought of everything” and “all conversations are railroaded into insanity”. What at first felt like a game allowing the player to explore and develop political views in an alternate universe is actually more of a hamfisted, cynical parody of all possible idealogies. I think the moment I got South Park vibes (not from the writing, but from the " everyone is stupid " vibe) is when I was doomed to never finish it. That said, I actually love so much about the game, I want to enjoy and finish it. I just find it so tiring.
I agree. People were raving about this game and it was just a complete miss with me.
For one thing it was marketed as an RPG but really it felt more like some kind of point and click adventure which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing but the writing style just didn’t click with me anyways. And, yeah, a lot of the choices in the game are just false anyways. After a few different starts experimenting with the different choices you just get railroaded into the same thing no matter what.
Genshin Impact or as I recently started to call it Genshit impact
-Microtransactions -Botw 0.01 -Visuals are not original -Bad touch controls besides having 99% of its players playing on mobile.
Any MOBA really, particularly League of Legends. A number of my friends played these obsessively, but I could just never get into it. I’ve sat in on quite a few Discord calls with people playing this game and I gotta say, not once did anyone ever sound like they were having fun. I’m not sure what it is, but it just seems like the genre attracts toxicity like no other, especially when playing with strangers. On the occasions I tried them myself, the gameplay just wasn’t engaging enough for me to want to put in the tremendous amount of time necessary to become somewhat decent at the game.
And a single round takes so long! I don’t know how people have fun with these.
Hots was great in this regard, matches would usually end within 20ish minutes. I really miss the golden days of that game, had tons of fun with it.
Yeah I could never get into MOBAs either. Weird thing is I thought my issue was with the control scheme and how abilities are assigned to number keys, but I picked up Diablo IV and I’ve gotta say I don’t mind it at all. Maybe its an implementation thing since Diablo is a very different type of game, but overall I agree with this. Also gives me overwatch vibes because everyone picks based off what their enemy team picks and get mald when your team isn’t 100% efficient. Not for me personally
For me Skyrim, The Witcher 3, botw and all souls games.
Skyrim never clicked, it just felt buggy and empty and punishing. Trying to climb that mountain just so a yeti can beat you up? Great, here is your save spot form 15 min earlyer, please try again. I know that’s why it’s fun for so many, I just hated it.
The Witcher 3 was too… much dialogue. Most of the time I can play 1-3 hours every couple of days. And in the Witcher you walk 15min through beautiful but otherwise empty forest, killing 1-15 something, walk back and talk like another 15min with the guy who gave you the quest. It’s really deep worldbuilding, but when you don’t have a lot of time it’s more “damn, what happend last?” 5min walking “ah, that happened” takes new quest, so much talking…“ah damn, my hour is gone, so I finish the quest another time.” PC off.
Botw cause the world felt empty and everything broke in an instant and I’m the player ending with 50 healing potions, 10 big scrolls and so on cause MaYbE I’ll need it another time. Doesn’t match with botw. TotK is so much better handling this, cause you can craft any good item in an instant.
And Souls Games are just a broken mess. They’re not hard by default, they’re hard cause of all the buggy and mushy controls. It never feels crisp, it’s just a big blob and maybe your character rolls or maybe it feels like an invisible wall, who knows. Games like Jedi Fallen Order in hard mode or Hollow Knight were so much more fun, cause the controls were crisp and everytime I lost, it was because of me. I did wrong and not some squishi spaghetti code.
It’s funny, your description of Souls games echoes how I feel about 3rd person action games that aren’t made by FromSoft. To me, Dark Souls 1 felt like the crisp combat I had been wanting but never getting from stuff like God of War or the older Monster Hunter games. Bloodborne refined it somewhat, and to this day, that style of 3rd person combat is my favorite.
Crazy how perceptions of a game’s controls are so individual. Our difference really illustrates to me how hard it is to nail a game’s “feel.”
It definitely is! I have a lot of friends who love the souls games and tried to convince me to give it a try over and over again. And one of them speaks about the controls like you do. It was an interesting evening figuring out how different our views of other games were. That’s why I love the variety of games. You can never have a game everybody likes or even feels the same for everyone. And that’s also why I love threads like these, cause even though it seems like everyone likes X or Y, every game will be disliked by someone.
It’s funny because to me Skyrim wasn’t punishing enough. The game literally lets you get away with murder. I would’ve liked more lasting consequences for your actions in the game.
Couldn’t agree more about Tears of the Kingdom however I’d go one step further and say I can’t stand Zelda. I’ve played a fair few including BotW. Thought they were complete garbage.
The other for me is any game made by FromSoftware, and to that any “soulslike”. The game design and gameplay of these types of games are atrocious imo. It has always bewildered me how much love they get. I can’t comprehend it.
Total agreement on all points.
I tried Sekiro, really gave it a solid go for a couple weeks, thought it was insanely difficult but I was getting the hang of it…
Then the tutorial basically ended. Fuck that game. The difficulty scale looks more like a cliff that turns over your head. No clue how anyone can enjoy that kind of thing. How is it enjoyable or relaxing to die 30, 40 times before beating a boss??
Any game made by From as in their Souls series or that includes Armored Core and Another Century’s Episode too?
Honestly I haven’t tried Armoured Core or others prior, the Souls series was my first introduction to them.
For some context, what are some games you enjoy? Or, perhaps, do you think are underrated?
(As a Zelda fan who also enjoyed but did not complete Elden Ring)
I have a broad taste, but tend to focus on more narrative RPG/Action Adventures.
As for underrated, I loved This is the Police but don’t think I’ve ever really heard it talked about.
I have the exact same opinion as you do. I really don’t understand the hype around zelda games.
Fallout: NV and Skyrim. People kept recommending them to me but neither really clicked. I put about 20 hours into each before just kinda dropping them and not looking back. Even tried mods since everyone says they’re better modded, but just found I was spending more time modding the games than playing them. Maybe Bethesda games just aren’t my thing.
I agree about Skyrim. The entire world feels dead, the npcs are lifeless. It’s really hard for me to feel the world and the story. The Witcher 3 came out only 4 years later and it’s several orders of magnitude better to me.
I agree wholeheartedly. I don’t feel like Bethesda has innovated with their RPGs in a single meaningful way since Oblivion. Every single game they make just feels buggy and samey, and the “systems” don’t make up for the synthetic quality. Games like Prey, Stalker, The Witcher, CP2077 or Elden Ring all take various approaches to the idea of open ended gameplay/questing/story/experience and they all do so many individual things better than Bethesda’s games. I’d rather play a game that gets a few things right with a narrower focus, than just doing a lot of everything “just okay.”
Here’s hoping Starfield does something genuinely refreshing.
It’s kind of odd the New Vegas is singled out here, because I’d agree that both Fallout 3 and 4 have these issues to varying degrees, but New Vegas was not made by Bethesda. Completely different team of writers and developers than the Fallout 3 and 4 teams.
So much so, that there is quite a heated schism between FNV and Fallout 3 & 4 fandoms.
