I've been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don't mind so much the fact that it's different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I'm bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.

Kindom Come: Deliverance is a lot of fun, until the very first time you have to fight more than 1 person. The combat system is horrendously designed, and apparently they fixed it in 2 by just nerfing enemies.

Fucking don't starve together. It's just ragebait and I'll not hear otherwise.

Really deeply disappointed by Claire Obscura: Expedition 33

The combat is semi-turn based, so it feels unnaturally slow and clunky. But then it requires you to respond to the boss animations with twitchy reflex commands if you want to have any hope of beating even the first couple of levels. So, I'm supposed to strategize on offense but twitch-defend on defense? Bleh.

The game also took a hard turn into gratuitous gore very quickly. And the gore didn't really add anything to the story or even the atmosphere. Especially when the opening scene is people turning into flower petals, implying the much more romantic melodrama. The scene on the beach is this sharply contrasted pile of mutilated corpses that took the game from sweetly sad to needlessly gross.

Like, if you want to do an Elden Ring knock off with some French flair, cool? But this got a zillion awards. It shouldn't feel so derivative and hack.

Literally any open world survival game.

ARK

Valheim

Rust

No Man's Sky

Grounded

The entire fucking genre is tired and tedious. Exploration is the best part of the game, but you spend 90% of the time base building, researching upgrades to your base, gathering more stone/wood/BS to improve your base, optimising the layout of your base, crafting automation to produce MORE stone/wood/BS to further improve your base. And all this with a cumbersome inventory or weight management system.

And they always look like absolute crap. It's either clean sci-fi structures that stick out like a sore thumb, or shoddy ramshackle buildings that look like they were slapped together by an ambitious crack head. So you spend hours placing decorations (that you also have to research and gather materials for) just for it to look kind of ok.

I fucking hate base building.

Among Us.

My friends kept suggesting it for game nights, but the social demands are just not compatible with actually hanging out with your friends.

When everyone's out and about, doing their tasks and getting murdered, we're all discouraged from actually talking with one another, for fear of revealing a dead body or whatever. Whenever there's a meeting going on, sure, we're "free" to talk again, but there's not enough time to talk about anything but the game. When you're dead, and thus finally relieved from the pressures of completing tasks or getting kills... there's still no chit-chat allowed, because ghosts "can't" talk.

It's worse whenever random players are involved; having to coordinate between voice chat with friends, and text chat with randoms, or worse, when the randoms are in a voice chat of their own, coordinating to be assholes.

The moment that finally made me say "I don't enjoy this game", was a round with two random players in it: one of them spent the whole round watching security cameras, and the other was blocking the one doorway into the room, both players working with each other and refusing to do their tasks. No way for the lone impostor that round to kill them both. When we started calling them out on this, they flat-out said "we're going to keep doing this just to spite you". Timer ran out with unfinished tasks. Crewmates lost.

As a teenager, I played a lot of the early Assassin's creed games, but fell off the franchise around Origins, when they stopped releasing to steam and kept it on the Ubisoft store, and in general fell away from gaming in general in this era.

Eventually I pick up Assassin's Creed Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla together, probably about 3 years ago and play each. I put about 60+ hours into the first two, and somehow put 200 into Valhalla, basically just mentally switching off and getting 100% of the content, which is a lot for Ubisoft game.

Perhaps it filled a good 'get home from work and crash' need for me, and the experience wasn't wholly bad by any means, but it's so bland. I've dropped off the franchise entirely now, after being an obsessed fan a decade ago when I was younger and more naive. The entire game basically has 0 positive memories attached, basically no memories at all, good or bad.

I tend to hold off calling anything that's not AI slop, but this game needs to be an exception. Assassin's creed doesn't deserve all the hate it gets, if you ever boot into the historian exploration mode and just walk around ancient landmarks hearing the development commentary, the respect for the historic is monumental across all the games, and in the gameplay there are lots of interesting aspects amongst everything else, but that everything else is very much the problem. Slop is the perfect word, it's blended pulp where the quality of the ingredients vary from gourmet to rotten, and I was the pig at the trough.

I could honestly give e the exact same feedback for the Lego Star Wars Skywalker Saga game. I have find childhood memories but that game doesn't have an ounce of passion in it.

These games aren't helped by the fact that the 3 games I played through after this era were Outer Wilds, Disco Elysium and Hollow Knight, which IMO are the three pinnacles of what games as a medium can be.

Destiny 2.

Every time Destiny 2 approached a point where you could call it improved, Bungie would shit the bed. They could never figure out what they wanted, was it a PVE game? Was it a PVP game? Was it a PVPVE game? Yes! Though it was a poor excuse for each compared to what could have been if they just picked a fucking lane.

Underrated grift of the decade by Bungie, Sony got hardcore scammed.

Not an avid gamer and play mostly indie.

Tunic. Was recommended for fans of Outer Wilds (fantastic game), but I see no similarities. Tunic's cover art looks like a Zelda ripoff, world borrows from Hyper Light Drifter, and the game plays like a Zelda + Hyper Light Drifter ripoff, but very poorly tested, unfair, and misleading at times. I get the impression that game designers had zero external opinions and very little playtesting.

Exploration is "bump into every nook and cranny to find a way forward". Bosses are absurdly difficult, clearly catering to the "git gud" crowd, and do not feel fair (as a counterexample, HLD felt difficult but fair). Puzzles are all backloaded to the latter half of the game, they are mostly fun, but at least one relies on a mechanic that is never hinted at nor used in the game otherwise. The untranslated manual, main gimmick of the game, is misleading at times. Midgame apocalypse / dark world is not that, it's... Night time (not putting the spoiler because that is just absurdity)

Yes, I finished it, and got the good ending, which only elicited "Um, ok?" from me.

Darkest dungeon

Cyberpunk 2077. The game seems so perfect for me, but after 4 hours, dropping it, trying again for 4 hours, it just wouldn't stick.

I do wonder if it was 3rd person if I'd enjoy it more. I tend to love visual environments, and I think the first-person perspective hurts the game (for me).

Porn games

Warframe. After 5k hours and multiple accounts, I cannot recommend it whole heartedly.

And for a lot of people that one is not going to make sense. The game itself is not bad or poorly made. My issues with that game are so small that for a majority of the players they will never experience the issues I've had. It's been a death of a thousand cuts, and unfortunately soulframe (the next thing they are making) has also left a bad taste after trying out. Each issue stems from the way in which the development team set about doing things (it's been 7 years, some people have moved on, they might have gotten better)

Wizard101.

I probably have over 10k hours in that piece of shit. Autistic obsession for like 5 years straight. Been playing on and off since it came out. Fuck Kingsisle, fuck microtransactions, fuck them lying about it being "free-to-play", fuck features that only exist to incentivize paying. I still like the game in some ways, it just isn't a good game.

Elite Dangerous. The early game up is brutal and you don't get much help. Mid game is very long and a grind. I'm only on a few engineering trees and still haven't left the bubble.

I haven't even gotten to end game.

I can't even do PvP because I get gonked too fast.

Mine is MTG Arena. I don't really have anyone I can play with locally so it's basically my only option but my God it's like a textbook example on how to make the greediest and shittiest user experience

Lego: The Hobbit

I give this answer in every one of these threads to raise awareness. My wife and I used to get a little drunk and play Lego games. It's a lot of fun, and a decent couch co-op.

We get into the Mountain, start screwing around with Smaug, and he flies off to burn Laketown. Roll credits. Game over. The 3rd movie flopped so hard they never finished the game. They don't say it's 2/3 of the story, and at that point it's way too late to return it.

Fun game, terrible experience.

Elden Ring - Beautiful game, but without the context of other FromSoft Titles, I'm not sure how you are supposed to enjoy it. Most people would say "well you're not supposed to enjoy it!" but it feels a bit like one of those restaurants where the gimmick is they are rude to you. The story is impenetrable, the "tutorial" pop ups lie, and quests are hidden behind specific actions that 90% of players would not organically try. That said, I completed it.

There was an incredibly steep learning curve with Elden Ring. But once I got to the Midgame, I was having a good time.

I didn't actually ever finish it, because I kept fucking off for 20 hours at a time just looking at all the pretty buildings and exploring dungeons. And I absolutely agree, it's really hard to pick up on what even constitutes as "Quest" in the traditional RPG sense. You just kinda find stuff and talk to people and hope you're moving in the right direction.

But I kinda consider that its charm. I feel like FromSoft can keep moving in this direction, shedding more and more of the interface, and eventually end up with a game where you're just a fucking person in a world who gets to do things. And maybe one of those things is to save the world. Or maybe you're just in this incredibly rich and deep sandbox, full of wonder and beauty, and you have a good time until you're done.

the "tutorial" pop ups lie

If you mean the messages you find throughout the game, almost all of those are written by other players. You can leave them behind too.

The story is impenetrable

actually thought the story was much more clear than in any of the souls games.

largely boils down to a bunch of cosmic forces trying to do their own thing or gain their own gains. we understand everything from the abandonment of metyr and her fingers, to the classic nobility/mythology relationship between the gods, lords, and extended family.

we know that gods can have two bodies, and that they can act against each-other. we see how the finger's influence has affected all of this, and how ranni the witch is actually in a state of escaping that whole situation by killing the important half of her older brother, and less-important half of herself in order to escape the two fingers.

there's way too much to even summarize succinctly, but i always find it baffling when people say the story is more vague than their other titles. lots of meat, and it all makes sense in the larger world they built, even if some questions are still left open.

also everything around radahn. what a tragic badass.

really love how scadu DLC resolved the family conflicts around 'kindly' miqella creating a sycophantic bubble that justifies his usurpation of other people's autonomy, etc. actions of mohg and malenia making a lot more sense when you realize that, just like everyone else, are just tools for the cause.

the cause being fucking his really cool older brother who doesn't seem interested.

i don't remember a whole lot in the souls-verses resolving anywhere near as clearly as a lot of the stuff in elden ring.

also i think it's much less "you're supposed to suffer," due to the RPG grow-as-you-explore vibe they went for, and many people complain about how you can make the game too easy, but i think it's a good balance that makes sense with the world you're exploring and how you explore it. except for the scadu DLC. the scadu DLC wants you to suffer.

I quit after the literal first enemy encounter you have in the game with I think a spider monster that is supposed to kill you?

That was really my bad, should have realized this is gonna be one of those games where you have to enemies with attack patterns that you waste time learning to overcome. Unfun gameplay imo

I just want to learn the lore which apparently grrm helped write. But then I suppose that's just a YouTube video to watch

PGA Tour 2K25 and EA Sports WRC - both iterations of previously released "sports" games. I know not everyone's cup of tea for "gaming".

I play both cross-platform with my family in other locations and it's a nice way to stay connected with them.

But for the golf game, forcing us all to buy new versions that don't improve on anything (or arguably make it worse than the previous release) while shutting off access to the previous is maddening.

For the rally game, similar sentiment, but also for not living up to the potential of the license/previous releases, not fixing issues that have been around since first release, killing off codemasters, and squandering the WRC license just to abandon the title.

Pretty much any moba. cs, r6, overwatch, lol, dota

I played DotA when it was a custom WC3 map (and Aoens of Strife in SC). Seeing it become this whole genre and esports phenomena was weird. I feel like I could never take any of them seriously.

I think DOTA2 came quite a long way from the cheese factory that was the original WC3 map packs.

I actually went with a friend to a tournament, and was genuinely impressed at how the game felt watchable in a way you'd hope for a football or basketball game to be entertainment. The gameplay was fast-paced and full of reversals. The announcers helped fill in what a newb wouldn't immediately know about different builds and strategies. You got a steady buildup of excitement into those final minutes, when a timely save or kill could swing the match. Even the creep farming had a bit of tension, as you watch the teams race for the upper hand.

MOBAs were a natural fit for eSports. I get why it took off. Shame it hasn't endured.

I used to screw around on the custom games and it's crazy seeing mobas and tower defense games take off when it was originally just nerds screwing around. It was so fun griefing footman wars and the hobbit and uther party and just about every game was griefable. Backdooring in OG DOTA would also really piss people off. Anyway I swore off LoL when it became a battle of keeping up with the meta and the stupid mini games that you had to play. Dota started doing something kinda similar with meta creep and I just don't want to watch hours of tutorials and follow the pro meta exactly to be at an elo where people aren't screaming the n-word over voice chat.

The only moba mode I thought was consistently fun was Ability Draft. It was so categorically broken and silly, but DotA 2 killed it off I think.

This is so true

Oh god, Destiny 2. Do I hate it? I'm not sure. I def don't like it and don't play it anymore. Something like, 1400 hours over covid, probably more. Sometimes I pick it back up and play for like 15 minutes and the feeling of meh is so overwhelming I wanna throw the controller. I got all the guns I'll ever need, my armor is completely maxxed out on multiple sets. My drip is impeccable. All of it is kinda worthless now because I couldn't tolerate the seasonal grind any longer. Having to go back to zero every 3 months when I've already mastered everything is gut wrenching for a completionist. "Oh you have to try this new gun, new build." Yeah and once I get it, a month later it will get balanced into oblivion.

Didn't hate it, but I just sort of slid off Baldur's Gate 3.

I love Larian's other games and even pre-ordered bg3 to play on vacation, but the combat just isn't as fun as Divinity 2. I kept trying to avoid combat but then I walked into a new area and combat started automatically and I just groaned and turned off the game.

I got to act 2, which isn't a lot of time, but it felt like it

BG3 was my first Larian game and I absolutely loathed getting into combat situations. It just took too long for the CPU to make decisions, I wish there was a fast-forward button for their turn. Overall, I didn't feel BG3 respected my time and felt I was constantly under leveled on every encounter, even on easy. Even when I returned for a 3rd attempt at the game and tried to save scum my way through, I felt it was way too slow. Never made it past act 1. I don't get the hype for it. I realize I'm in the minority with how well it scored and how much people praise it. I just don't see it nor appreciate it.

I played a lot of bg3. Every so often I think about playing it again, and then I think about how DND 5e kind of stinks, so I don't.

There are mods to convert it to Pathfinder 2e... But then I'd rather just go play one of Owlcat's Pathfinder games

I tried one of them and either I don't understand pathfinder, or it didn't work right, or I didn't enjoy it. My to-hit on my first attack of the round was like 65%. Missing is not fun.

I think I appreciate pathfinder2e more than 5e, but it's still got a lot of DND-ness in it.

Pathfinder 2e ruleset will mean your chance to hit is usually lower than it would be in DnD 5e. It aims for a much more balanced system so most things scale similarly with each other. As an example, as a PC if you are taking all of the important abilities for your class, the difference between your AC wearing a leather bikini is going to be 1 less than the guy wearing full plate.

I am interested to see bg3 on the pf2e ruleset though... I might have to check this mod out. I didn't hate the Owlcat pathfinder games, but they are on first edition which is basically just DnD 3.5 and really shows it's age at this point. Also, none of them are co-op with friends.

What do you think makes the combat system of Divinity 2 better? I usually hear the opposite.

I can't think of a single one. I stop playing games I don't like.

yeah, I checked my list of games on Steam, and of the ones with 20+ hours playtime, the only I didn't actively enjoy were some idle games, so they don't really count. Everything else I liked. I stick with meh books more than with games :)

If Genshin Impact was a Steam game, it would be the game from the screenshot for me (and if anything, 1.4k hours is a lowball - I've racked up over 500 hours this year alone on PC, not to mention the years before on mobile).

It would have been goated if it wasn't a gacha game and battlepass timesink, but now I can't recommend it to anyone, at least not if you're strong-willed and can resist the gacha and fomo or willing to try setting up a private server ... which I imagine people here on fedi might be more likely to be, now that I think. (The private server thing, that is.)

It would have been goated if it wasn’t a gacha game and battlepass timesink

I really loved the primary storyline and the artistry of the world.

I absolutely despised the grinding, especially the dungeons, where it feels like they just gave up on anything being fun. You'd walk through those big double-doors and be in some endless hallway full of slightly-too-difficult encounters. Then you'd get "Pay2Win?" dangled in your face.

Definitely understand how they made so much money. But fuck, what a waste of art assets.

I have a love-hate relationship with Genshin, and the only reason I'm still playing is that I love the exploration and I consciously ignore everything else in the game 😅 (aside from fun event minigames)

I used to be a lot more susceptible to fomo ("oh no this event is only available for 3 weeks, I should grind through it even if I don't enjoy the story or the minigames"), but Genshin trained my fortitude against its psychological manipulation, and now I don't even touch the story or any content I don't enjoy. Thanks Hoyo for making me care a lot less about your game lol...

It looks like Dragonsword, a single player gacha game, just released the other day if you wanted to scratch that itch.

I don't have a gacha itch. Genshin is my exception to the "no gacha" rule for one big reason (co-op that isn't region-locked) and I've just gotten some grasp on my time management. So describing Dragonsword as a single-player gacha isn't really making it appealing to me, and I really shouldn't be picking up a new game right now. (Not to mention that after looking it up, it doesn't seem to be a gacha, which is a big plus in my book.)

I was going to still wishlist it, but unfortunately, while reading the Steam page and reviews, I noticed a few major deal-breakers:

  1. Incredibly repetitive and exhausting combat
  2. Bad AI-generated English translation
  3. No English voiceover

And that in a game that prices itself above Deltarune.

(To be fair, I also think Genshin shouldn't be considered a free game weight-class-wise but a 40-50ish Euro game at least since that's probably the approximate average revenue per player Hoyo gets.)

That's a pretty damning breakdown, thanks for sharing your thoughts. I wonder though, if a game like that can't even attract current/former gacha players then maybe the genre really can't exist without the freemium payment structure.

In counter-strike you can win and still be angry with your teammates

This is the essential premise of all Soviet Womble videos

Dark Souls.

Got Dark Souls II to see what the hype was about, and 100%-ed it cuz I was post-surgery with nothing better to do.

Fast forward, and a friend gifted me Elden Ring, so, here we go again.

It's famous difficulty was just a combo of clunky controls and obnoxious health pools, which made mastering that type of difficulty really unsatisfying.

I gitted gud, but Dark Souls never gitted fun.

Same applies to Souls-likes.

I really wanted to believe. Fucking love the aesthetic, but that's about the only positive I can recall.

This is exactly how I feel. I just don't think they are fun most of the time. I don't think they are harder than the well controlled third person action games like Devil May Cry or Bayonetta, but I never feel like I can blame the cumbersome controls in those games like I can with souls-likes. Weirdly, the only souls-like that I ended up enjoying was the heavily memed/mocked Final Fantasy Origins. It had an interesting story (total inversion of the story of the first FF game) and had somwhat interesting skills and upgrades.

I've always somewhat agreed. I've played elden ring and some DS 3. I think the world design is very fun, and most fights individually can be fun. But at the end of the day every boss fight is a janky rhythm game that gets longer and longer.

I see the appeal, but the most I do like once a month is jump in Elden Ring for an hour or two where I bumble around exploring or upgrading my stuff, find a boss fight, and just learn the funny Osu!-like pattern to beat it. It never leaves me mesmerized or champing at the bit for more like I've seen some of my friends get obsessed with it.

I tried both Dark Souls 2, Dark Souls 1, and even Bloodborne. All felt shit and I literally couldn’t even find achievable goals from any of their starting areas.

I’ve played (imo) much better Soulslike games all the way through, like Tunic, Stellar Blade, and Another Crab’s Treasure. But FromSoft, ironically, seems to make the worst of them.

Breath of the Wild and moreso Tears of the Kingdom.

Not bad games. But not Zelda games.

BoTW did not play into the metroidvania that I felt defined a Zelda game. Plus it lent on the “sim rpg” style of eating, cooking, durability, etc.

Then ToTK just felt like a gimmicky cash grab. Copy paste terrain, “gadget building” straight out of some steam early access game.

Ultimately, both games felt like a hodgepodge of stolen concepts, slapped together. And the adoration that they received just makes me hate them more.

Same here, I really did not enjoy BoTW for many of the same reasons. It just felt more like a typical open world sandbox RPG, but that had been done better elsewhere. The lack of true bosses and level and constantly breaking equipment just made it unfun.

I don't think most people consider Zelda games to be metroidvanias, so we shouldn't hold that against those two games.

While I haven't played TotK, I did enjoy BotW, just less than other games in the series. I felt it was unique, had great atmosphere and music, was incredibly polished... but very shallow. The long, well-crafted dungeons were replaced with many mini-dungeons that only rewarded you with more stamina or more health. Every single time. I eventually stopped even stopped even checking out the shrines I found. Also, I understand why they implemented the weapon degradation mechanic, but it's definitely not for me. And the missing story. All the cool events in the world have already happened. Which fits the atmosphere, but it's less fun, and gives us less story-driven things to do...

I had a similar experience. Played through BotW and enjoyed the game, but it didn't feel like a Zelda game to me.

I kind of enjoyed BotW, but once the awe factor of the landscape wore off it was just a load of mostly unrewarding traveling to too many shrines that were too small. Combine the 120 shrines into like 20 that were 6 times longer each and they would have been cool mini-dungeons that I would have happily done, but as it was I was so bored. The main dungeons were good and I still put 80 or so hours in, but unlike everything pre-Skyward Sword I'll never revisit the game.

Then Tears of the Kingdom was like hey here it all is again but there's three times as much and this time there's no WiiU version to emulate so the performance will be so much worse. Nah.

No Mans Sky. At a certain point it all becomes meaningless.

I just replayed it a month, now about ten years after the last time I played, and I actually had a good time with it. They added a lot of stuff to actually do and it felt much more entertaining. It's still not going to be for everyone, but I'd say it more than matches what they original promised at least.

I keep trying to like it but it feels so boring.

Every now and then I try NMS again after like a couple of big updates have dropped and I'm like "bro this is the same game as before water you all on about" (exaggerating a little but that's basically how I feel). Still I can't hate the devs since they've poured 10 years of additional work into the game at no cost to us.

I got far enough that I had a freighter and a billion credits, and then trailed off. There wasn't any more interesting conflict or goals that I could see. Combat had become trivial. Material needs were met.

Maybe I should have finished the main story but that just seemed like a lot of clicking the map.

I sort of made that mistake when I recently played it, but I decided at some point not quite to where you were to just go through the main story. I regretted not doing it far sooner as it actually introduced some of the game mechanics via missions and made them make more sense. The story was better than I expected (read: my expectations were really low).

If you don't mind, I can spoil the story for you:

:::spoiler NMS story As you try to help Artemis, you discover that they're just a simulation of a different reality. Some time after you discover that, you have a choice to either keep a version of that simulation working or shut it off. I dunno what the text says if you shut it off, but if you keep it, Artemis isn't happy because now they know they're living in a simulation that they cannot escape. Advancing a bit further, you find out that you are also living in a simulation and that the galaxy you're in is no different from Artemis'. Atlas is the source of the simulation, but it is faulty for unknown reasons.

Advance some more and you're then given a choice to reset the galaxy into something "different" - mechanically, it only affects where you restart and how likely you are to find certain types of planets. :::

Oh, I guess I did get pretty far in the story, then. I think it wanted me to go to the center of the galaxy when I stopped. That's probably your last paragraph there.

And that point was after 3 hours, honestly.

Once you clear the first planet you've experienced everything the game has to offer as far as I'm concerned

I am currently paying through Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, and I have a love/hate relationship with it. On the one hand the story, the acting, the visuals, … are all top notch. However, they also made it impossible to play as assassin - even more so than in Origins. The protagonist constantly reminds the player to stay hidden, but then none of the bigger targets are killable in one hit. Having to use an assassination hit once, and then hide until they forget you, is no fun. Especially if you need to do that 5+ times for one enemy. Some of the later game skills help, but it’s still more fighting than assassinating. In an AC game. It sucks.

Even worse, there are a ton of scripted fights, where you simply cannot do assassinations. Open a door in a cut scene and immediately get jumped by five guys. Kill a whole camp and sneak up to the boss, only to start a cut scene where you brazenly and openly challenge him. It sucks.

But then there’s an emotional reunion or a cool side quest, and it’s all good again. Until the next fight.

Battlefield 2.

I only got into it because my gaming friends did. It was never very good, but my friends liked it because it was a much slower game compared to the arena shooters we played before and they wouldn't admit their reflexes were getting bad. The game isn't very realistic or very fun. You can bend realism for fun gameplay or you can have an unbalanced game if it's for realism, but BF2 was neither.

oh and another thing. The official maps are very repetitive and because stat tracking only works on them, they would be the only ones ever played. I've played some custom maps that were much better at LAN parties, but those rarely got played because a bunch of grown adults needed to have their rank for all to see.

Pokemon Legends Arceus. I rage quit after playing more than 200 hours.

On paper, it is the best Pokemon game for me. I can complete the in-game collection without having to trade with other versions of the same game. The end-game is moderately grindy and gives a fun sense of progress (catch 15 of this pokemon, defeat 20 of that one with ice attacks).

Unfortunately, the spawn rates are very very broken. When you first enter an area of a map, it is swarming with creatures, but as you catch or defeat them, they do not respawn. It takes some combination of distance and in-game time to get a map to repopulate so I have to travel away for several minutes, travel back, and then find that the map only partially refilled. Plus, there seems to be some sort of back-off that reduces the spawn rate of rare Pokemon the more often I clear a zone in quick succession which only resets when I teleport back to the hub area and teleport back. It is all very painful when certain Pokemon seem to have a 5 or 10% chance of spawning and the game asks me to catch 15 of them and then defeat 20 more.

And don't get me started on Space-Time Distortions, random events where a small part of the map gets unique creatures for a short while. The game does not explain how often they are supposed to occur, that certain player actions (like battling) pause the timer, and that in-game weather events can reset it. A player can wait hours for a distortion to appear before looking up the formula online and being told that the best strategy is too load into a map, put down the game for exactly 5 minutes, and if a distortion is not starting, teleport out of the map and back in, wasting a minute looking at loading screens.

Overall, it is so frustrating that I cannot imagine it is all intentional, but that it is caused by bugs that the developers never patched. I have heard that it is fixed in the new Pokemon Legends.

I never really stayed in one map for too long but now that you've mentioned it I do recall thinking things were taking too long to respawn during some specific mon grinding.

Z-A has definitely fixed this with more intuitive respawn mechanics, but it's got much more of a focus on battling and less on collecting this time around, so it isn't for everyone. Much more fun than the main series has been in a while though!

Octopath Traveler. I struggle to finish jepgs but I was genuinely enjoying it, until I stopped unlocking new skills and finding good stuff became an exercise in running around aimlessly.

Five Nights at Freddy's was just...disappointing, and got worse after the 1st. 3 at least had interesting atmosphere.

It's just jumpscares and frustration.

Expedition 33. I’m not a huge turn based fan anymore but gave it a shot because of the rave reviews. And initially I liked it a lot actually. It had the UE5 default realistic look I loathe but the combat was fun.
And then it became unfun. Severely so. I started to dread every major combat encounter.
But the reviews were so positive so I pushed thru, I hated playing the game but told myself I’ll see it through to the end, and I did.
I regret that. Having to keep playing despite disliking it probably soured my experience way more than if I had just stopped playing. On the other hand I now have the full picture of the game and know it doesn’t get better and it’s not worth finishing.
The worst combat encounters were the fights where the attack itself is a minute long cutscene, then without warning you get 150ms to time your party perfectly, or you die and restart. Unforgivable.

Easily the most controversial comment in here. I don't think e33 is considered very difficult unless you do the optional content which has ridiculous stuff. I loved the story and characters and think it's one of the most enjoyable and memorable RPGs of all time.

I generally enjoyed the game, But found myself disappointed by the story.

::: spoiler Tap for spoiler It’s bookends. At the beginning you see what terrible tragedy Lumiere is suffering, and wonder what sacrifice you must achieve to save them.

Ending: Oh, Lumiere is fucked either way, either today or very soon. Now it’s just a question of who you want to torment. :::

Yeah the story absolutely didn't grab me. Spent most of the time confused and asking myself lots of questions, then the big twist happens n I'm like yeahnah this ain't it chief. And the ending ugh.

::: spoiler spoiler I wanted one outcome in the binary choice and accidentally chose the option which gives me the ending I didn't want xD :::

Bah

Yes quick time based combat for that group fighting dynamic isn't a good match. If a game asks you to command a whole group of people, like one after the other, it's a good idea to make it more of a puzzle or "carefully select the right moves" experience. See: Occidental Heroes

Again, always seems to me that shiny new games which focus on aving great graphics are letting people down 🤔

Initially the parry and dodge mechanics are great. They're presented like an option for higher skilled players who are used to tight timings to get an advantage in combat while people more accustomed to the traditional "trading blows" style can still enjoy combat that way.
But the game never tells you that perfect parrying and dodging are actually not an option but the required style of combat since taking any damage later on is basically instant death. You're just not gonna be able to tank a full combo while ignoring the dodge and parry mechanics.
Oh and then the enemies do that Elden Ring delayed attack thing. I like ER but seriously fuck that game for introducing this style of attack pattern. Yeah let me just swing my giant sword but mid-swing take a coffee break... ER wanted to present a challenge to the absolute wizards who play Dark Souls SL1 no-hit, so why did E33 copy that?

Baldur's Gate 3. Game falls apart after the first act imo. Voice acting was great, first act is very fun and I can still play it, but I just can't manage to make myself even finish act 2. I do get why people like it, but maintain that as a game it was very much overrated. It's made my wife swear they should only do GOTY selection for the previous year after the full game has been released and played through entirely. I get the sense their early testing allowed for lots of tweaking an adjustment in the first act but they ran out of time to give the rest the same treatment.

I disagree on the falling off point. Act 2 has that funnel, pulling you into the final showdown at the end of the act. It is cinematic, epic, and such a great ending to the act that it feels like an ending to the game (which it technically is, since there's an optional ending at the end of the act). The problem really begins with act 3, since the tight narrative choices at the end of act 2 primes you for a tight, claustrophobic narrative for the third act as you race against the clock to the finish and instead... it's the biggest act in the entire game, with the most amount of side quests, most of which aren't optional if you want all of the origin characters to have good endings. You'll even stop leveling up about halfway through act 3, so the reward feedback loop really dies off in this act. Makes the ending so incredibly hard to complete.

I agree with this so much - the end of act 2 was such a narrative high I was excited to see how they topped it!

And then they didn't. And then I stopped levelling. It wasn't the climax to the story I was expecting.

I always struggled to describe what was so disappointing but you hit the nail on the head. Starting act 3 felt like I was sent in time back to act 1 - aimlessly wandering around the map until finally stumbling across the next main story point.

My Friendly Neighborhood.

Basically a Resident Evil game; BUT, you get far, far less ammo. The enemies attack via insta-grabs with no discernible lunge. They get back up from falling anytime you leave the room, unless you consume a duct tape item to keep them down.

I eventually realized I just wasn’t having fun by avoiding enemies every room. On top of that, the game has no music and makes you listen to psychotic muppets in the background in every room.

I loved that game for about half an hour. Never went back to it though and I'm feeling like I dodged a bullet

I already answered another title but I also want to say Tales from the Borderlands.

I hated this "game" so much that when I was finished I was genuinely offended by what I'd just experienced. First off, it's meandering and uninteresting, with characters that scream personality at you, not in a good way. And it's filled with the illusion of the choice, the episodic nature of the project immediately making actual choice a non-possibility. But worst of all, it had the audacity to present and market itself as a game. A small handful of "push button when lit" QTEs do not make your visual novel a game. Visual novels are great, just be what you are, a visual novel.

Fuck Tales from the Borderlands.

I was enjoying it until it got towards the end, where it kinda jumped the shark with the story and the way the characters were acting.

I honestly could never tell if it was a shooter or not, from the marketing. The character design and title is confusing to me

It's a machinima-driven visual novel that reads like bad fanfic just about irrelevant characters instead of the main cast, imo.

Fallout 4

Nms

The entire elder scrolls series now that I think about it, except maybe Morrowind but also Morrowind

Fallout 3 and NV were worth it, as were 1 and 2

Honorable mention to GTA5 tho I played the story to completion in the first few weeks after release and haven't touched it since, so not really the same but similar vibe

There's a difference between playing the game is great, but it's get boring eventually or the ending is tedious. Like playing elder scrolls and just doing running around and thieves guild and dark brotherhood is enough to be a great game by itself.

As much as I hate to say it, No Mans Sky probably. Has that same problem I get with playing Minecraft. Everything feels too empty and aimless for me.

Terraria is the Minecraft that's meant to be played. Actually has dungeon crawling and a world to experience. Minecraft is just 3D Microsoft Paint that decides to chase your cursor with a zombie every so often.

MC has at least the building part for me thats cool for some time. And the Modding and Server with friends part.

NMS has this boring flat tile building system and also just forgets terrain modification after some time or plants respawn into your buildings so you can even build on the ground...

Multiplayer is wonky and annoing and as far as i know it does not have much modding...

All planets feel the same after a few hours. The existance of medium Asteroids and Gas Giants is completely missing. And you cant build spacestations withoud weird stack up from plannet hacking.

I want to love the game cause like the idea and the ongoing support from the devs but when ever i try it again its just sad.

It's way worse about that than Minecraft, imo. I find Minecraft to be exceptionally boring, but building is at least passably fun (or was before hytale completely blew it out of the water), but it feels like NMS doesn't even give you a real creative outlet. From what I've seen even starfield is better than NMS for creativity, although i haven't played starfield myself.

Starfield? I would argue it's much worse than NMS, though I don't know how the current game is. Back when I played, a couple of months before the first dlc dropped (before the buggy update, even), you were extremely limited in choices for base building. You had like 4 or 5 prefabs of a living quarter which came pre decorated.

Starfield offers good ship customization (and stupidly talent-locks a lot of it), unlike NMS, which only added a tiny bit of that in an update last year I think

I get that problem with MC too.

MC I never get that with, though I haven't really played vanilla Minecraft in years so the sheer amount of stuff to do usually offsets that.

Iv been wanting to back to no mans, iv read good things about the updates, but yeah. Last couple times i found myself wondering what the fuck i am doing.

Like he said, it's like vanilla minecraft, so you have to make your own goals and your own fun. I spent hours just walking around collecting resources to build the things I decided I want that time. Hours more building my Corvette, Freighter and bases. If that's not fun to you, that's ok.

WoW. I sank hundreds of hours in vanilla. Spent forever getting tier 3 armor completed and most end game content completed and then Burning Crusade was launched. I was so excited that myself and about 15 guildmates road tripped from across the country to meet up and play in person for launch.

I remember crossing the portal and within 15 minutes a common mob dropped an item that was better than one of my tier 3 armor pieces. Pieces I had spent weeks farming for. I was so frustrated that I couldn't enjoy the next 2 days playing, even with everyone there. I got home, played a few more days, and had already replaced half my armor. I quit WoW cold turkey and since then have only logged in once in all these years.

I wasn't even that mad that my armor was replaced, I was mad that it was replaced so quickly, and not even at boss fights. It was normal mobs dropping rares.

I had a similar experience with BC, though I was only in tier 2 armor (our guilds just couldn't must the runs to get much of the tier 3 stuff). I played further than you did, but I realized that I had been really ready to be done with WoW for a while and had held on just for the expansion. It didn't revive my desire to play at all, and honestly I haven't wanted to play an MMO since.

WoW is a tough one for me because I played it for years and some of my all-time favorite moments in my life as a gamer are associated with WoW. But also those moments are extremely socially-dependent. Hard to extract from the experience what was the game and what was the joy of hanging out with like-minded friends.

And it's extremely difficult for me to judge now because frankly I think that WoW today is still an incredibly good game, especially as a solo player today, but it is impossible for me when playing it not to get sad longing for the absolute peak moments I've had with the game.

For me it's kind of like if you love cheesecake but can't buy the grocery store frozen kind because every bite makes you think of the perfect $200 gourmet restaurant version you ate once 8 years ago but will never get to have again because the restaurant closed.

This is one of the reasons I liked guild wars (1 and 2). They didn't do the gear grind. They added one tiny equipment tier early on in the game's life, and never again in ten years. They add different stat spreads, but that's it. (Ok, and infusions, which are like a single percentage point of stats.)

GW was my jam back in the day. I couldn't get GW2 to click for me because by the time I got into it, it was information overload and I found it hard to keep up. However, GW3 is going to be a no brainer buy when it releases.

Yeah I love that GW2 doesn't do vertical progression. I'm a casual player and kitted out my characters many years ago, and since then - unless I want to try out a new build - I don't have to touch them again.

Similar experience here. You missed the biggest turd though, flying!

So cool eh, no more need to walk eh!

What happened was that instead of roaming about with everyone else, you flew everywhere all alone (just point the "fly" in the right direction and wait ... Soo funny).

And to alleviate this they tried to make it so you "had" to walk everywhere first, before getting your "fly", but that just made it worse because now you'd be as slow as before but also alone, everyone else were flying.

Then it became a sort of dungeon-run slot machine, argh.

Vanilla was truly amazing though, what a game...

It's one of those great ironies, because flight was a requested feature since the beginning and being locked into fixed flight paths left people wanting free flight even more. Back in 2006-7, I don't think most people, or even Blizzard, could predict how much it'd hurt the social aspect of the game.

That was an integral part of the game design.

Those things, like underpowered weapons for example, is something "gamers" pester about and want changed, but any good gamedesigner knows better than to listen to them, it breaks the gameplay.

Today it's worse in many games because the "annoying" things still exist but you have to pay to get around them, and it just makes the gameplay suck. IMO.

I am completely turned off by mmo rpgs. I like my videogames to convince me that I'm not wasting time playing them; things with short levels or engaging gameplay loops....

Rpgs just take so long, and so little progress is made.

Now I haven't play WoW specifically, but these mmo rpgs usually have this problem where people get insane loot and xp bonuses for playing in a party. But nowhere in the game does it say "please for the love of God join a guild and play with them all the time!!" No sir-ee, so when people play in a guild or a party for the first time, they notice this. And many completely lose interest in the game, seeing how much time they wasted. I've been the same way.

The only mmo I've really engaged with for more than a few months on one go is FFXIV which for me is more of a social game with stupid amounts of random side content and a fairly relaxed long story to chip away at. Wow was just a series of ever moving goalposts. I've played loads of MMOs and the best ones are good because you're playing them with people tbh.

TBC was the worst for that. Modern expansions let you keep your high end gear for most of the leveling process.

How does one hate a game and play it anyway?

Sometimes you are high on hopium and copium, you're hoping that it gets better later on, or you just overlook some problems.

Sometimes you're already too used to the game, so it doesn't fully entertain, but it isn't "feeling" like a waste of time yet. This happens a lot with "endless" games like most MMOs and "game as a service"

I wouldn't go as far as "hate" but I've put a lot of time into games I ultimately decided I didn't like. Once I've decided that, I stop, but I'm an optimist and hope the game will improve.

Recently I've been playing Batman: Arkham Origins whilst waiting for my daughter to fall asleep. I was far too tired to pick another game so I played what was in front of me. Once I reached the end I uninstalled rather than do more open world stuff. Blech.

Balance patches and additions change the game.

You

  1. go into it thinking it will be fun or otherwise "good,"
  2. it isn't fun but you keep on playing, holding out hope that you'll get past the "slog" section,
  3. only after sinking several hours (as many as 1000 - or more!) into it, you decide you've wasted your time.

It happens all the time. Usually when a friend recommends a game to me, i hate it.

  1. the game is actually good and you enjoy it but some time down the line the devs completely fuck the game up
  2. the game is actually good and you enjoy it but underlying problems don't get addressed and new issues keep piling up, eventually you realize that your vision for the game and the devs' vision don't align
  1. Mass Effect series
  2. World of Tanks / War Thunder

Best examples I have for each

Dead by Daylight.

I stopped playing when The Walking Dead stream "Incident" happened. The worst thing about the game is the players.

I don't mean that they are not skilled at the game. I mean, they aren't, and quit matches at every minor inconvenience. But the way players treat each other out of the game is horrendous. Players will go out of their way to verbally assault you for no reason in particular other than you are playing the same game as them. If youre a streamer they will go to your stream, if you're a Steam player they will leave negative comments on your profile, or complain in the end match chat if you have a private account. They report you for just playing the game.

I have been called more names, slurs (none of which applied), received more death threats, rape threats, and whatever else in Dead by Daylight than any other game I have ever played online. Including League of Legends, Call of Duty, Halo, CounterStrike, and many more.

I don't play it anymore. Not because I care about what other people say in an online game (words don't change my mood because I don't let them), but because the developers just straight up ignore when Killer Main players complain or ask for stuff. The Survivors get stuff all the time, but if youre a Killer Main the game feels like the developers hate you personally. And I was done with that. Its easy to get into High MMR as Killer, and then literally every game becomes a sweatfest. Also, multiple Killer characters have been gutted and left like that for years while Survivors just keep getting buffed. I dont need any of that.

The gameplay is genuinely fun, when you don't get a 4 man SWF or Bully Squad, but the times the game is like that when you get to High MMR as Killer is basically zero. So the tradeoff isn't worth it.

Oh yeah I've had toxic survivor parties on so many occasions. Haven't touched that game in at least 4 years now though

No Man's Sky. Close to 300 hours across pc and ps4. I sunk a lot of hours into it when it was relatively new and still very sparse (well before the nexus). I end up playing every 4-5 updates, just to see what they added. Everything is a slog. I have been trying to hatch my living ship for what feels like literal years now. I always seem to be one resource shy of whatever tasks I chose for myself, yet I have billions and billions of spacedollars. I have half-finished bases across the galaxy. I never feel like I accomplish anything in this game, and feel like my time is always wasted playing it. According to steam I haven't played in over a year.

Eh, I didn’t hate it, I just found it rather disappointing. A huge amount of buildup, and even in-game— a lot of effort… Just for very little delivery.

This is a game and a game engine with nearly infinite potential, but once he got into it, once he started playing it, it just falls completely flat. Beyond a few initial and rather novel game mechanics, it just goes nowhere. Immedately

Like, the game devs produced this incredible game engine, and then just expected it to produce the game for them, and it didn’t. You have this incredible, infinitely generated open world, but there’s no game to play. No story.

It’s just… there. that’s not really much of anything to do. that is the major shortcoming. If, in the last 15 years, they bothered to fill this incredible space with anything worthwhile to actually do, it would be amazing

That’s why Star Trek online is still so active. It’s a nonstop universe, full of missions. Also, it runs very well on multiple platforms.

I'm relatively late to no man sky, the original scandal burnt the bridge and I didn't bother trying to fix it until about 5 years ago when it came up as an option for a space game to play with my brother. He ended up a bigger fanboy space engineer and NMS stayed the only unplayed game in my library until last year.

I genuinely feel like it's a great sandbox. That is to say, the fun comes more from the people you play with and your imagination than the sand itself. I genuinely feel that it would be my favorite game if I still had 2 or 3 friends to play it with. RPing as the haywired droid pilot of the Vagabond Moon as it smuggles goods to and from free space just doesn't hit without a captain and crew.

See, I like my own private world. I can just build it and run around and discover stuff. That’s why I loved fallout 4 so much. No man’s sky is great for that because it’s infinitely generative. But that’s kind of all there is in that game. It’s just a big open world. There’s no real “game” to that game beyond the first 30 or 40 hours of gameplay.

Unlike you, however, the one thing I hate the most in any game is other people. I wanna be alone and do my own thing. I never ever encountered another game player who has done anything than just fuck up my gameplay experience. maybe I’ve just had bad luck, I don’t know. But co-op playing has never been anything other than an extremely negative experience for me. other people are assholes.

So, when left on my own in no man’s sky, it’s fine in small doses, but it’s easy to get bored. Because there are no Ongoing gameplay objectives. It really wouldn’t be difficult to build into the game, constant ongoing objectives and achievements that a single person could achieve on their own. Repetitive missions, etc. Star Trek online managers to do it. And it doesn’t have to be combat (although, combat in no man’s sky is actually very well done and quite fun). No man sky has ongoing rewards for discovery and exploration stuff, but it isn’t really structured very well and the rewards are really rather small.

No man’s sky feels like a really fancy version of Second Life, but in space, where you can have a bunch of your own planets and build bases and whatever. And have entire fleets of ships. But to what ultimate end? It doesn’t seem like there’s any purpose to any of it. That’s what’s missing from the game.

I don't like Star Trek online because it's got too much combat. Star Trek is about philosophy and science, not phasers and proton torpedoes.

It's easier to create a game around combat than science and philosophy though

Then I guess I'll have to keep playing Fallen London instead

Oh wow a fallen London reference in the wild. I played that like ten years ago, and picked it up fresh this year as something to do during the workday.

The current festival is interesting. I missed the "hell is missing" story when it was new. Turns out climbing into the furnace is a bad idea, even in a dream!

Currently annoyed that I didn't bring the right thing into the waswood to get a particular item, and I can't draw the dream card to get one of those pearls. But it's a very interesting game.

It could also descend into total "pay for power" nonsense, but I have resisted.

Here, I have a present for you!

The following items can be spent in Estival Waswood Runs to acquire equipment:
**GCO**
-one of a variety of T8s - A Reverie of Heroism + Singed and Stained Work Gloves
-free - Sturdy Pick, Prelapsarian Speaking-Tube, that book with all the Underscores, Polythreme Drinking-Vessel, Poisoned Pen, Wax-Hardened Boots

**Starved War**
-3 Parabolan Orange-Apples - London Horticultural Society
-free - Strange Aeronaut, Hard-Earned Knack for Repair
-an Oneiric Pearl - Rank of Flight-Captain

**Coilheart Games**
-a Parabolan Parable - Distinction of Waking Fire
-Vital Intelligence and 2 Blackmail Material - Huffam's Good Graces
-an Oneiromantic Revelation - Coilbreaker's Prints
-free - A Fierce and Terrible Warmth

**Museum**
-a Vitreous Almanac, 75 Sightings of Parabolan Landmarks and 10 Memories of Light - Miniature Museum
-a Viric-Filled Mirrorcatch Box, 3 Emetic Revelations and 250 Venom-Rubies - Perfumer's Arts
-another Oneiric Pearl - Gebrandt's Address Book

**Hell is Missing**
**Presumably this is all, possibly not though:**
-1 Searing Enigma + 1 Oneiromantic Revelation - Gang of Outlaws
-Climbing into the Law-Furnace when offered - Dream of Law-Glass
-Oneiric Pearl + Baited Riddle - Urchin formerly known as Mister Dinners
-Free - Elephant to be Refuted

I heard all about how bad NMS was. Also overwatch. Then I went to university and one of the first friends I made was like "Those are my favourite games!" And I practically bit my lips to avoid blurting out "...um aren't they crap??"

Obviously it's not a big deal. I squeeze enjoyment out of shitty games myself. I found it jarring at the time because there was so much Internet discourse about both those games being not worthwhile.

I haven't spent as much time as you did in NMS but I have the same feeling. It feels like I should be loving this game but everytime I try to play it for more than a few hours I end up hating it for the same reasons you listed

Pokemon on the DS.

I spent like 3 hours and it was just the grindiest crap.

Unpopular opinion, I dislike all Pokémon games, I have never understood why ppl like pokemon unless they only like to collect. It isn't challenging, there is no story (I would call the story just random quests because of the lack of depth) and it is just a grind. And ultimately it doesn't really matter what Pokémon you pick most of the time, for example Aaron and all the evolve of it, I could play with only it until a water Pokémon came along. It is aimed for kids so I get why it is as it is but even as a kid did I have a hard time liking any of them, I never finished because I got bored, but I still got multiple versions of it because so many liked it. I am fine with it being easy if the story is great, but there isn't really any story either.. And maybe I would had been fine with it without the grind and the forced fights as a relaxing game but I do not know.

Rant over, sorry

I stand firm in the belief that the only sorta good Pokemon games are gen 4 and the originals, and even then it is a 'good for their time' kinda deal. The originals are highly flawed and i would never recommend anyone actually play them, but they did at least attempt to design an actual game. Gen 4 was the first generation that could be considered actually good mechanically and aesthetically, imo. After gen 4 the games almost universally stagnated where they didn't actively get worse.

People talk about the story sometimes and I'm baffled. What fuckin' story?

Evil org tries to take over the world, 10yo kid beats them with the power of ~~animal abuse~~ FRIENDSHIP. Absolute cinema, my friend

Werent all the gameboy pokemons like that? Its been awhile since I played one, but I used to go back every couple of generations and play a pokemon game. The map was a little different each time, but it always felt like the same game.

Yeah, everyone has their first pokemon game that they loved and every other game is so similar it falls off fast. At least for me the reason my first pokemon game is so beloved is because it was also one of the first video games I ever played front-to-back.

Pokemon also has the rare distinction that (at least for kids) the world and aesthetics carry some of the worst mechanics on their backs allowing you to finish it.

I don't know, it's the only one I tried and it was just grind grind grind... I just don't get it :-D

The most recent things that come to mind are games that are way slower and/or grindier than expected. One was Octopath Traveler, where after finishing all the characters' stories for chapter 1 (or maybe it was 2?) leveling starting taking a million years for no good reason. I wanted to just progress in the story but I was getting killed by everything. And it's not like the fights are interesting once you learn the basics of the (somewhat interesting at first) battle system. Unless I was missing something it's just a massive slog, worse than anything I can remember from the S/NES days, like the Dragon Warriors or Final Fantasys.

More recently it hasn't been quite to that extent, but Dave the Diver feels way slower than necessary. You make decent progress at first, but somewhere around the time when you make it to the sea folk village you earn money really slowly and the crap around the village has zero challenge at all, but takes awhile to get through.

Destiny 2. Best platform shooter I’ve ever seen. Worst everything else: monetization+FOMO, some really shitty loot tables, locking away paid content/sunsetting.
Kept going back because the core gameplay loop is solid. Kept leaving bc it inevitably got boring quickly.

Oh my god Destiny 2 is such a good example for me. I never played the first one, because I quit consoles with the PS4/XBox One generation. Got Destiny 2 for free with my video card, and was so excited to play, hearing so much about the first game. I bought the expansion pass and played immediately when it came out. I maxed out all three characters, did the raid, and played for a couple more hours, before realizing there was nothing to strive for.

The fuck is up with “We have a chat in the game, but nonono, you can’t actually use it to TYPE to people like, y’know, EVERY OTHER ONLINE GAME EVER—it doesn’t actually DO anything unless you’re in a party.” Also every weapon drop was exactly the same, no variance, no random rolls. Then they added in text chat, Woo!

…but made it OPT-IN, and nested the toggle in settings. Meaning NOBODY DID IT. Fuckin idiots on Reddit were defending the decision too, like “oh what if you don’t want to have that toxicity” THEN DISABLE IT IN OPT-OUT, don’t make it opt-in in the first place!

Then a few months after it came out, I told my partner “look I bet they put random rolls back in and fix a ton of QoL stuff WIIIITH the first full-priced DLC that isn’t included in the expansion pass so everyone has to buy it.”

Then Forsaken dropped, for full price. I don’t even care about the money, it’s the principle of it all.

I never bought Forsaken, never logged in again. Fuck you Destiny 2, I’m glad you’re dead. I wish you died harder, sooner, and less lucrative.

(Also more Reddit defenders were screaming “YOU DON’T HAVE TO BUY FORSAKEN, YOU CAN STILL PLAY” like fuckin EVERYTHING wasn’t locked behind the paywall now, and like I wanna support that shit by giving them more engagement to log for their investors…)

This game was so good for a few years. On PS4, I got to play all the OG cut content, it was awesome. I think I played up to Forsaken. I really enjoyed the lore, and I usually skip that stuff. I even have a ghost statue on my bookshelf, one of my only gaming nicknacks (8 bucks at target). I went back to play on PC a few years ago and I didn't have a good time. I was also pissed that I couldn't transfer my PS4 character (or I lost my dlc loot or something).

The moment I noticed they were docking xp back in the early days, I quit instantly. I enjoyed the game up to that point, but the way they had done that was just so dishonest that I have just never bothered with anything Bungie since.

Ooo I forgot about that one. And their horrible excuses like “oh we’re so sorry you think our algorithms are unfair, we’ll be more transparent about our great game mechanics so you don’t complain more”

Good one. This is probably it for me as well. I tried so hard to like it, but the whole thing felt like it was punishing me for not being there day one. A convoluted mess of whatever was leftover from what I assume was all the fun.

I was there Day 1 and it punished those players too. See my long rant touching on but two or three of the 50 issues I had with it hahaha

Hollow Knight is an tremendous game, but it is also a terrible game, and while I true ending'ed it, looking back I spent more than half my playtime annoyed and ultimately don't think the game is good when considered in full.

Wow, that's incredible. I feel pretty much the exact opposite (and don't get me started on Silksong, I'll rave for days) but that must mean there's a game I missed that's your Hollow Knight? Please tell me about it!

I dunno, I play a lot of indie games and stuff but I won't pretend to be some kind of refined critic or anything; many of my favorite games are pretty standard fare. But I do have my opinions and I'm happy to share them.

Are we talking just metroidvanias, or games in general? I'll start with metroidvanias:

First off, some people consider Shovel Knight a metroidvania, I don't really, but if you do then Shovel Knight is absolutely top of my list. That's basically a perfect game for me.

But after that, my favorite metroidvanias are, roughly in order:

Ori & the Blind Forest - what a game! People often say the best part of Hollow Knight is the atmosphere and environment and I think Ori's is at least as strong, and with an art style I enjoy more.

Guacamelee 2 - Look, I'll concede that some of the jokes (especially background gags) were questionable from the start and have aged like milk, but in literally every other way I think Guacamelee 2 is an actual masterpiece. Just does an incredible job of taking the metroidvania formula and adding great touches of beat 'em ups and precision platforming. Incredibly tight, fluid, and intuitive combat and controls, and I loved how the vast majority of moves/upgrades were equally utilized as combat options and traversal tools. I think a lot of people bounce off the aesthetic and some of the questionable humor before getting into the game, but goddamn I personally can't recommend it enough on sheer gameplay alone.

Guacamelee (1) Super Turbo Championship Edition - Everything I said about Guacamelee 2 just 2% less enthusiastically and about 8% less tight in controls.

The Messenger - Kind of Hollow Knight meets classic Ninja Gaiden? I feel like if you liked Hollow Knight then The Messenger is a really safe bet.

And now expanding outside the genre, here are some of my favorite non-Metroidvania games, but this time the only order they're in is indies/small games first:

Enter the Gungeon - I think this the hardest game I've ever played, period. It's also an actual masterpiece. I'm not good it, but I still absolutely love it. I'm late to the party and just purchased it in the beginning of 2026 and I already have over 100 hours in the game and I've only killed the past ("beaten" the game) once but I'm still obsessed.

Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark - If you, like me, rank Final Fantasy Tactics as one of your GOATs, you should play Fell Seal. It's not a perfect game, but it is the closest experience I've ever had to FFT (including FFTA and FFTA2!) while not feeling at all like just a clone game. More people should play this one.

Cassette Beasts - Everything I said about Fell Seal & FFT, except about Cassette Beasts and the classic Pokemon games.

Celeste - Everyone should play Celeste, and it has one of the best sets of difficulty options in gaming so everyone can play Celeste. On standard, it's delightfully hard as balls (at least the extra/side content), but if you're not interested in that kind of challenge it never makes you feel lesser for choosing to make the path easier for yourself. The gameplay is fantastic, the art is adorable, and the storyline is better than both. Play Celeste.

Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale - This one is super niche but if you like cozy shopkeeper games or spent way too long in chapter 3 of Dragon Quest 4, then you should play Recettear. Peak of the genre, imo, though if this is your niche then Moonlighter is a very close secondary recommendation.

Valfaris - Realistically this probably isn't quite "favorite" tier but it's damn close, and considering that I constantly see this game on sale for under $4 I think it merits mention. A really fun retro shooter a la Contra with some interesting mechanics (like having to choose whether to sacrifice max health to establish checkpoints) and one of the best, clearest parry mechanics I've experienced. Add in a metal-centric soundtrack composed by an actual touring metal musician and I just think Valfaris is an excellent little hidden gem that almost nobody knows about. I do not like the sequel very much though, sadly.

Hades 1 & 2 - I feel like these games are already huge but imo they deserve every drop of praise they receive. Great games and some of the best dollar values ever in gaming.

Disgaea 5 - I love the whole Disgaea series for so many reasons but 5 is unquestionably the peak of the series, imo.

And then finally just for context, my other favorites that are big enough I don't feel like they need to be recommended:

FFT (as mentioned), Dragon Quest 4 (best game on the NES and still underrated, imo), FF7, the Playstation Spider-Man games, Portal 1 & 2, Persona 5, Sid Meier's Civilization 6, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel (yes I think TPS is better than BL2).

Cheers ✌

I haven't played many games from your list, but I can attest to

The Messenger, Ori & the Blind Forest, Celeste, Hades 1&2

being very awesome games; (I'm also happy you mentioned The Messenger specifically, great game and awesome soundtrack!)

Wow one of the only people ever that has also played Recettear, I really liked my time with it but didn't finish.

I also didn't like hollow Knight that much and wound up leaving it at like seventy percent complete but I did beat Ori which I liked more.

Wow one of the only people ever that has also played Recettear, I really liked my time with it but didn’t finish.

Have you checked out Moonlighter? I think anyone who enjoyed Recettear should check out Moonlighter; it's a bit more focus and more Zelda-like, a bit less cozy.

Well damn, that's a super thorough answer! Thank you so much! ❤️

Those of that list I've played, I definitely enjoyed. Celeste in particular is special.

I haven't played Shovel Knight but I'm really intrigued by Mina the Hollower from the same studio, and will likely grab it sometime!

Have you played the Trine series? It's a platformer with similar atmosphere to ori and hollow knight.

I haven't. I'll add it to my list 👍

If you liked the messenger and shovel knight, you might wanna look into Bloodstained: Curse of The Moon. It was an NES style spinoff of the main Bloodstained game, and is a spiritual successor to the older pre-metroidvania castlevania. It's quite a fun little game, short and sweet.

Hollow Knight is definitely there for me. I've had trouble getting controller support on steam games (maybe this is intentional since they released a new controller?) so I've only been able to play keyboard... the controllers are clunky and the world at the beginning is empty and unengaging. I get that this is intentional design but I feel like it lacks clear direction for new players. The npcs speak with wall of text. No good for my brain.

I can't even imagine playing HK with M&K!

I also think HK's slow burn beginning is too slow. I did eventually get engaged but frankly the fact that I felt kind of ambivalent for much of my gameplay is a big part of my conclusion, though not as big as the design choices made for no motivating reason beyond to annoy players. The crossroads becoming blocked by infection is forever my #1 complaint about HK's design. It serves no purpose aside from annoying the player. There's no new skill challenge, it doesn't make the game any harder or more engaging, it's just tedious and time-wasting.

I find HK to be close to an amazing game, but I think from a game design standpoint the devs seem to conflate punishing with difficult, and that's just a philosophical divide that I find myself too far the other side on to connect with fully.

I tried it years ago and got stuck on the mantis boss, managed to get back into it around September cause I bought silksong on release to support the devs. Anyway I actually got through it that time and into skong which is a much better experience and one day I'll start act 3.

Imo bosses are the best part of HK, I loved every boss fight.

If Silksong was promised to be 80% less tedious, I'd buy it in a heartbeat. But from what I've heard, that's not the case, though of course I could be wrong.

There’s no new skill challenge, it doesn’t make the game any harder or more engaging, it’s just tedious and time-wasting.

Yes i hate this as well. Developers throw in things to make sure you have to spend more time playing the game. In most cases, they already have their money from you. They'd actually make more money by not wasting players' time, and instead convincing them to buy the next game that the studio releases.

ToME4 for me.

I was looking for a roguelike experience. It is hardly it, cause the single game run is about a week long, the default mode of play is with limited amounts of respawns (afaik about 7).

That, and that after spending some 250h+ in, i barely unlocked 30% of playable classes and races. The triggers are easy to miss, random (not in every game loop) or awkwardly specific.

It felt like I'm playing MMO RPG but singleplayer.

I’ve put 1000 hours into ToME4, mostly on Nightmare/Roguelike difficulty (no respawns, all enemies harder).

My main gripe with the game is that there’s not enough run to run variability in the game. Most Roguelikes give you very sparse equipment drops and consumables you need to carefully ration. ToME4 totally rejects that careful gameplay and just showers you with Diablo-style loot and eliminates consumables entirely, so that there’s no strategic resource planning whatsoever.

The game has some cool music and interesting character classes, but the lack of variety means you can execute the same character build every game if you want (you don’t have to worry about what you find/don’t find). That really defeats the purpose of procedural generation in Roguelikes, and is why I don’t play it anymore.

I played a lot of ToME and I can't say I actually liked it. The combat seems to bounce between trash mobs you kill without effort to unstoppable death machines, with few signals about which is which. Like I'd be cruising along killing orcs but suddenly I'm half dead. I think it'll just roll an enemy with a particular set of traits that's powerful, but I'm not sure.

I don't like this. In crawl stone soup, my main rogue like, you can tell what's what by looking at it. It even color codes things by threat level, and highlights in purple if they have unusual equipment.

Also, as you said, the whole shower of loot thing is really tedious.

What is ToME4?

A bit of searching makes me think it's a game called "Tales of Maj'Eyal"... Never heard of it though.

Man I love that game. I agree the length of the main campaign is way too long. I heard one of the DLCs adds an alternate campaign that is more like 10 hours long, which sounds like the sweet spot (that's about how long DCSS takes). So I'm looking forward to getting that at some point.

Oh, also, if the unlocks bug you, there's a workshop mod that just unlocks them for you, and doesn't block achievements. I highly recommend it

I recently had my fastest DCSS (dungeon crawl stone soup) win at like 1h50m without even trying to speed run. The core game has been getting faster in recent releases.

Whenever I'm considering a game, I always look at all the recent negative reviews. Depending upon what it is, I may or may not purchase, even if it was something I was quite looking forward to. I can't think of the most recent game that happened with, but something in the last year had some negative comments that felt spooky enough to keep me away.

The problem with game reviews is that all the mainstream outlets always overrate games and all online forum reviews always under rate games.

Usually, I'm just looking at steam reviews and, for the negative ones, for significant performance or bug issues.

Dota 2. 2000 hours and I mostly played in 3k mmr games. The game was fun, especially when I had 2 more friends to play it with and we were the majority of the 5 team and could turn the game in our favor. Playing with less people was 50% of the time a miserable experience, 30% of the time neutral and 20% actually fun. The team mates were just too conflictive in most games I played and the negativity just ate me down. I also didn't love the game as much to keep up with its constant changes. The last meta I remember was making Luna illusions to slowly chip away at towers till the game is over.

Typing this as I have a Dota stream in the background, lol. Also well over 2k hours in it. I haven't touched anything but Turbo every since it was introduced. But at this point I play one match evey 4 months, and that's with my SO. I don't do more than that because either teammates are toxic/griefing, or my SO gets toxic or I get annoyed at everyone else. Back in the day it would bring the absolute worst out of me. Now even if I feel like playing a bit more, I quit as soon as the negativity starts hitting. I just go play a single player game instead. It's rarely chill to play without a full stack.

I log in once a week to play ability draft. Nobody cares about the game in ability draft and it's a blast.

War thunder.

It breaks a little more with every update. Like watching an alcoholic be taken by the onset of a degenerative disease a decade after displaying a true brilliance.

This and World of Tanks have the same degenerative disease. It really sucks when you get maybe one or two good matches out of ten, and then you slowly begin to realize that the very obvious problems you see are not getting fixed and the developers are doing it on purpose. The only winning move after that is not to play.

I only hop on when friends are on. Some of us have been playing more Windrose and Helldivers recently, but WT is always around.

I can't wait for their patent on the control scheme is up, which I think is in the next few years...

I guess it's natural WoT and WT would go the same route in the end.

Sad and hilarious

Hate is an overstatement, but the game I have most hours on steam in (and likely will never surpass) is Europa Universalis IV.

Back in the day I used to enjoy the semi-plausible alt-history scenarios that would arise. Similar to real life but different in distinct and interesting ways that often could be traced to noticeable deviations.

Nowadays, it is much more arcade-ey and soulless. By the end of the game (1800's), the entire world is basically at the same technological level of advancement, constituted of soulless blob-empires that ends up looking basically the same each time albeit with slightly different flags for the blobs.

Yeah, Paradox tends to do that. Strip all the fun weird shit from their games for the sake of "balance", and then introduce so many new mechanics in their DLCs that old things break all the time. By making every nation equally good, they absolutely ruin the fun.

HOI4 has it, Stellaris has it, EU4 has it.

Though, the games all make for EXCELLENT modding bases. All of them have really fun mods.

Stellaris traded away so much of the games soul when they removed the alternate FTL drives.

Yeah I never imagined the end game of those historical map-painters would be good; either it ends right away or, like you said, stagnation.

I've only played one map painter game and I never went back to the genre because it was too complicated for me. This was like... 7 or 8 years ago TBF. I'm more interested in ones with base building elements or economic planning - Victoria and EV ask you to look at some spreadsheets and use that to guide your nation towards greatness. I would have given Victoria at least one other go since then but I bought it on amazon and lost the install I think 😒

I can heartily recommend gicing vicky 2 a try despite its' age (kinda clunky and less polished but plays fast, a campaign can be done in maybe 10hrs). It's actually the game that got me back into grand strategy during the pandemic. Pick it up on sale like I did or via yarr, heart of darkness is a necessary dlc and not included in the base 25$ price tag, kinda insane for a 20 y.o game.

EV - europa universalis 5?

Part of the problem with Eu4 is that they in the "later" (somewhere post 2018) updates aimed to make every nation "viable".

I got 60 hours in Death Stranding. I hate that fucking game so much and I never beat it.

I was gunning for 100% though, which can be tedious AF in this game.

I weirdly enjoy DS more than I thought. I only wish the paranormal encounters weren't there, they just feel like an unnecessary slog, I just want to worry about the terrain and weather stuff.

Seems that a lot of recent games are getting hate

I can name a few recently released games I enjoyed: Jenny the Witch, Eden's Eclipse, Unbeatable, Mahou Arms, Dead As Disco, and Homura Hime all came out this year.

None is AAA/Kojima affiliated though. Maybe that's where the issue is.

I tried this right after Baby Steps (which I enjoyed a lot), because DS was one of the inspirations for Baby Steps. I did get some of the same vibes from DS and the areas I visited were beautiful. The atmosphere is great and all. But even without 100% it just feels like a slog in every other way. I think I didn't even hit the 10 hour mark.

I don't even play this genre, and I typically have no interest in Kojima/AAA games, but I wanted to branch out and play something new I typically wouldn't consider playing… that did not work out, to say the least.

Helldivers 2 is a blast but somehow still so bug-ridden that I've quit like 3 separate times.

The utter absurdity of this game makes it fun regardless of the bugs and balance gymnastics. I've never felt as satisfied to reign down absolute madness on friends and foes alike as I have playing this game.

this is the really tragic part to me, you can tell there's all the bones, all the structure for a genuinely amazing game; and I believe this is why so many people picked it up and made it a hit and stayed for so long through all the bullshit, hoping it was just growing pains. The only thing truly holding it back is the developers constantly stepping on rakes. (Frequntly, rakes they themselves set down in their path!)

Like, it's still fun, but it could be so much better than it is.

Arrowhead has lost a lot of respect due to the way they run Helldivers 2 and I say it's quite deserved. Every time you get a new piece of kit it comes pre-nerfed. New enemies are often so intensely frustrating to play against that people will simply stop fighting them. Old bugs keep returning CONSTANTLY, telling me that their internal version control and review process is not working. If something is fun, they will stealth nerf it and hope we don't notice.

I have largely stopped playing.

Then stop fighting Terminids /s

It's a little glitchy at times, but I haven't noticed any major issues since the "terminal stuck in the ground" bug.

My characters arm still occasionally goes stiff on the ship. Some enemies might spaghettify to 100 feet tall. But that's just the beauty of Super Earth engineering.

I mean the whole mechanic of throwing a stratagem and having no idea what's going to happen when it his the ground is infuriating. Throwing an SOS and having NO ONE drop in is infuriating. Conversely joining a open lobby and immediately being kicked for no reason is infuriating. Getting stuck underground or in a random corner and having to kill yourself to get out of it is infuriating. The seemingly random difficulty of any particular mission is infuriating.

Stratagem bounce and "mashing stim key and the stim key does nothing, even hearing the sound, but no heals" are two bugs that have been in the game since launch; and the latter has become such a sore point for me that the moment it happens in a game and I die because of it, I just close the game for the rest of the day. Game wants to be a fuck today, it can go be a fuck to someone else, maybe see how it's behaving tomorrow. They say they recently "fixed" that one, but I'm positive this still happens.

When I saw their recent "you asked for a fairer fight" post about clamping down on super credit hacking, I just about did a spit take. Really, Arrowhead? We asked for this? I'd really like them to cite their sources, because I -- and almost every other player -- have been asking for these two specific bugs, in the game since launch, to be fixed since launch (to say nothing of other common player requests that have gone largely ignored or paid mere lip service to). And since launch, and in over 900 hours of playing, I have heard not one single fucking complaint from another player about getting free super credits. So again -- "we asked for this"? When? Where? How? I gotta know, so that I can use the same method to ask them to fix the fucking bugs we've all been begging them to fix for years, and maybe then they'll actually get fixed.

/rant

OMORI - oh, how I've despised every time story sidetracked and I had to go do random unrelated things (mostly fight) in the mindspace. I've heard that the other ending explains why things are this way, but I'm not going to play this overstretched shit again. IMO it's a 10-hour game artificially stretched to 20 (or 40). Also, since they've already created pretty much all facial expressions for combat, they could put them into the dialogues.

Both Nier games - I've heard that the devs' previous games didn't have good combat either, which begs the question of why they decided to turn yet another game into a slog, twice. As for the story, I could predict the events way before things have happened. Maybe I've seen too many games that came after and got inspired, since I only played them last year.

Chaos;Head Noah - for the 4chan incel protagonist and all the unnecessary graphic gore. The fact that world ends in pretty much every ending didn't help, either.

Automata combat is mostly a poor slog but I did get all the endings so I totally feel this

Haven’t played Chaos Head, but I have hated how much Japanese writing feels like children that never grew up trying to present “maturity” through pure shock value (gore, sadism).

Can’t forget the mystical phlebotinum that is Despair in the Danganronpa games (the odd hypnotic zombie force, not the emotion)

Elden Ring can't stand it

Elden Ring was utter shit.

It certainly doesn’t fit the criteria the OP is asking for. I noped out of that shit game pretty quickly.

Same. It was so boring. There was so much empty space, and when you got somewhere it was just a copy paste you'd already been through. Then there's the basic ass story that's capped off with the dumbest final boss I can think of.

It's not empty space, it's called the lands between.

Well it can kiss the lands between my buttcheeks because I want by $40 back!

Git gud.

My complaints with the game weren’t based on the difficulty. Elden Ring was just a lifeless world that used “open world exploration” to pad the playtime. In contrast, I loved Sekiro because it was a tight concise game with solid progression and a sense of exploration without needing to cross vast swaths of nothing in between each area.

Plus I tend to dislike games that use animation locks as an artificial form of difficulty. In Sekiro, you’re consistently the fastest character in the game. The game feels responsive. If you fail to parry an attack, it’s because you as the player failed. But with most FromSoft games, they use slow animations as a way of artificially introducing difficulty.

There's plenty of fast weapons in the game. The huge range of different playstyles with different builds is a big part of the appeal.

Elden Ring was just a lifeless world that used “open world exploration” to pad the playtime.

This is an ignorant take. It's fine if you didn't like the game but this is just objectively wrong. There's an enormous amount of information to be found exploring the world, it just isn't thrown in your face like most games.

It sounds like it would take a HUGE amount of time regardless of how good someone is, which is why I avoid playing it myself.

Checks "artificial difficulty" off my FromSoft bitching bingo card.

All difficulty in video games is artificial - the only real distinction is "difficulty I like" and "difficulty I don't like".

It's fine if you don't like Souls combat, but own your own shit and don't hide behind empty bullshit insults like "artificial difficulty".

Slow animations is a way to make multiplayer manageable. Add latency, and slow animations are barely reactable.

For the first 30 hours, bosses kept dying to summon jellyfish roll roll heavy attack roll roll heavy attack before I got to learn any interesting mechanics. I heard a streamer say that the underground stag enemy was a beautiful fight, but when I got there I kicked its ass and hardly got to see it do anything. If anything, the game is too easy.

The first time I played through I did it without summons and weapon arts to get a more typical Souls experience and thoroughly enjoyed it.

The second time I played through I cheesed everything with summons and Lion's Claw and had a blast too.

Rainbow Six Siege.

It was a combination of things. There was definitely hackers, some funky seasons, the grind, and toxic players, but at some point I went to launch and I was dreading playing it and thought maybe I'd feel better if I just uninstalled this? And sure enough, I did feel better.

As a former r6 player with >1000 hours and a negative review on steam, I can confirm.

I enjoyed it for a while but realised that it was effectively a subscription as the new operator was always very powerful. Then I switched to solely Linux anyway and haven't missed it much

The first few years it slapped so hard, and then somewhere down the line it felt like a chore playing. Weird

Destiny was exactly like this for me. I really enjoyed the first 20-30hrs. Then it was "just something to do" when one day I realized "this game actually kinda sucks" and I haven't played since.

Ever since they introduced Jackal then Nøkk the game lost its charm for me, I paid $50 for a semi-realistic FPS, while I turned a blind eye to IQ and Finka (and a few others) I never liked the idea of going invisible and seeing people’s footprints.

I bought the chibis of the original characters, purchased every elite skin offered, that’s how much I enjoyed the game.

Ubisoft lost a customer, and will likely not see me again until I see Linux support for their games.

I also stopped playing shortly after Jackal was released, and prior to quitting I have probably 600 hours in-game. I played from beta day 1 until then. Used to play with Macie Jay in Teamspeak. I actually started playing it again last year during Siege X and although the game is in a pretty good state, modern players just run-and-gun like TDM instead of reinforcing and using tactics and it just isn't the same

Europa Universalis IV, 244 hours. I don't think I understood a single thing of what was happening. And with every free update, some of the rules changed, sometimes in unpredictable ways.

I was told "don't worry, even the big-brains who plan out their entire campaign with spreadsheets don't really understand the mechanics". But that's no consolation, I felt stressed and confused for every single one of those hours.

May I just say that it's so nice and refreshing to see lots of people mention these supposedly amazing 10/10 games in this thread and hate them, I largely feel the same about all those titles. I used to think my taste was just broken.

I have an order of magnitude more playtime than you (though most of it modded to be fair), and I still play it regularly. It is absolutely not true that people good at it don’t understand the mechanics.

What is true though is that it’s an objectively bad game. Or at the very least is supremely frustrating. It’s “unplayable” in single player because the AI is braindead and that plus the actual mechanics will just hinder your fun, and it’s unplayable in multiplayer because it’s slow as fuck (plus you need like, friends or something). Plus past the early game the game becomes a huge slog, with infinitely wide countries spread across multiple continents with effectively infinite money just hiring all mercs.

The only way to win wars is often total or near total occupation of the enemy. I could go on for a long time explaining all the ways in which it’s a bad game. I guess I play it mostly because of familiarity than fun.

For a second I wanted to defend myself by saying "that's just what I was told", but I think that's not even necessary, it seems it really is objectively a very odd game then, even for people who know the rules.

I can understand getting fun out of a bad game, I had fun in Two Worlds and other janky titles. And I see some "famous" streamers like Sseth just enjoy completely breaking all the systems in a bad game. My trouble is that I can't recognize those systems in enough depth to start abusing them, that's probably one reason EU4 didn't click for me. I tried to just play it straight, and then you run into all those problems you mentioned. From what I casually observed in EU4 forums and the like, people really tear apart the systems to find anything that can be abused to their advantage.

I did have fun with it (for 262 hours) by setting very limited goals (i.e. forming The Netherlands as a trading empire). It helped to focus on only a few mechanics at a time and doing the same run a few times over.

I'm meaning to try out EU5 to do the same, but I haven't had a lot of time for gaming recently, and I want to wait for the first few expansion packs first.

Same with ck3. over 300 hours and i still feel like i dont know what i'm doing.....

I dont hate it though

The Sims. They keep changing things and making it worse.

I loved The Sims, especially with expansion packs like Makin' Magic. I still think that was one of the best expansion packs in the entire franchise. I'm firmly a The Sims 2 gamer, though I haven't played in years, because it's too addictive. The Sims 3 always performed so poorly for me that I never played past 3 minutes on each install. I was looking forward to The Sims 4, so I was so disappointed and shocked they managed to fuck it up. How are the freedom and customization worse than any of the previous versions, like wtf?

I recently bought Paralives, but haven't tried it yet. It might scratch an itch, however, probably not in the right way. All EA had to do was take the best of The Sims 2 and 3, improve performance and expand on customization. But I guess that would make them actually competent, and we can't have that.

The Sims will be a great case study for some future game design student, in how to take a massively popular IP and ride it straight into the fucking ground. It’s like EA intentionally makes the wrong choice at every single turn. You’d think that eventually they would stumble across the right thing to do, but somehow they seem determined to keep making bad decisions.

I really don't get the sims. Everything you do in it is stuff you can make yourself do in real life. It's a life inside a computer simulator. Except for easily getting a job and designing a house freely. That's certainly not tue case for real life me.

I do however really love The Sims Medieval. That's a game with epic replayability.

Everything you do in it is stuff you can make yourself do in real life.

That depends which of them, and the style you play it. I have played the Sims 2 for twenty years, and do not remember when was the last time I played some boring everyday life with a single family. I do things, like create huge family trees and play the entire neighborhood as one, tangling the relationships, and making drama and whatever I feel like. Murder mysteries, cults, monasteries, a nursing home for the elderly, fill big graveyards with a serial killer, build random stuff like an opera house or an art gallery, and run them as a businesses... Adding mods especially lets you play however you want. I even played a genuine Zombie Apocalypse scenario, with mods, that made the zombified sims npc's, that would attack everyone on their own, and infect the attacked, who would then soon die and turn into another zombie.

I'm glad that you enjoy playing with it that way, I've also started to enjoy role-playing and story writing elements more as I get older.

I would have loved Sims Medieval if it didn't have that roguelite meta progression where it expected me to restart my game from zero all the time and repeat the same quests over and over to progress the "god" unlocks. In every game I like long campaigns that I can sink my teeth into and build up meaningful progress, so this one aspect just sucked the joy out of any replays after the first run.

But I remember I loved the graphics (and music!) bc they used my fav Sims 3 engine, just made the textures prettier.

You looking into Paralives? I've enjoyed it in early access.

Weird, I got Paralives on launch and asked for a refund after 45min because it was nearly unplayable with bugs for me. It took ages to load, I couldn't edit my para because the sliders were covered by something, and I couldn't edit the buildings without the editor just deleting random stuff. My para also refused to do anything because she had low fun, but a bug was keeping her from filling her fun needs.

I might check it out again if it ever leaves early access, but I don't typically have high hopes for early access games.

Yeah I mean, they were pretty clear that there were gonna be bugs, but I can understand the frustration. For me it's about building houses, and playing as your character is just a minor annoyance needed to get more money. XD

I also had bugs on launch, but only a few and they were minor. Software is weird.

Yeah, they were pretty clear about having bugs, but at that price point, I was expecting a game I could actually play with some bugs on the side, and not a game that was broken at every turn. It seriously soured me on the whole thing.

I couldn't even build houses because the editor kept randomly deleting stuff, so I tried reloading an earlier save, but the roof and some walls vanished and parts of the house were no longer "inside" the house somehow?

Gave up on Sims too, I don't even care enough to pirate it no matter how trivial it is at this point.

I got Paralives. It's still very early, but it could get somewhere.

For now my main problem with it is it's very light on autonomous simulation. And though I like the idea of storytellers, at this point they barely do anything. I want freaking chaos in my game, and it should be more varied than just "Hey, what if sudden crush on that random person?".

The cards and progression system are good ideas though. Again, they need nore variety.

Almost 4k hours in ARK: Survival Evolved. I was one of the 10 players playing it on Linux, with a total conversion mod that was abandoned shortly after the dev was hired by Wildcard. I hated that game...but it was so addictive.

I'm amazed Chores: Survival Evolved wasn't higher on this list. So much potential, wasted, to cater to the worst gamers on earth.

Have you tried Palworld?

Accidentally stumbled upon Overwatch when a streamer that I follow played it a bit on stream while experimenting with other games.

It scratched an itch. I hadn't played competitive FPS in ages. All friends were either ignoring that genre or were playing games where a death kicked you out of the match basically (no respawn). That meant that you'd end up spectating a lot or waiting in queue if you played with them. Also the concept of a hero shooter and those abilities looked fun.

I sunk hundreds of hours in it, even got some proficiency in the workshop when that was released. I drifted more and more into custom games and ignored the ladder but still had fun.

Then there was a content drought. They were preparing for OW2 and neglecting the current game. It felt more and more like a chore. I played less and less. Then OW2 came out as a forced upgrade - you couldn't play the original anymore, there was aggressive monetization, 5v5 instead of 6v6 and most of my used synergies as a tank player wouldn't work anymore. I encountered way more toxic players than before (probably partly because of the influx of new players). Either the workshop and custom games were gone, or they were hardly played - I can't remember. Then I quit for good and haven't looked back.

Overwatch was BIG in my circle of friends when it came out, and many of my friends' first team-based shooter.

I had been playing TF2 and was deep into the characters and lore, and got a few of them to try it, but it sadly never really stuck. Overwatch just became the default shooter everyone was playing, and that didn't really change. I still play it with them, and I actually enjoyed the Stadium mode, since it brought something fresh to the game. Some recent updates (Jetpack Cat) are clawing away at that enjoyment, though...

I got a few people to try out Deadlock, which has big problems, but I feel is a lot better than OW. I'm not really into MOBAs, so I honestly hope i can convince some people to give TF2 a shot again.

I skipped overwatch. I was hyped when it was announced and thought it would be f2p to compete with TF2.

The price tag was a bit too hefty for my linking so I decided to wait a bit, figuring it would get f2p eventually.

Only when it did they managed to trash the game at the same time, so I just never bothered. Instead playing TF2 on the remaining active servers.

Since I cant afford a console or gaming PC, im stuck with mobile games. With that said Star Trek Fleet Command is a game I quit after sinking a year into it. I was an active member of a group the whole time.

This was several years ago when it became abundantly clear they were starting an even more aggressive push for microtransactions. It also became clear that the updates to the game were only for the benefit of the "whales" (big spenders).

I made the announcement to my group, parled my ship in a graveyard that most of the server respected, let those around my level harvest my ship, said goodbye, then deleted my account.

It was weird almost going through withdrawals and the sadness of no longer playing with my group.

Do you have access to a low-spec PC? There are plenty of great retro games and modern low-spec games that run great on very low-end hardware.

Ever play fallout shelter? There are emulators you can put on android phones to if you like retro stuff.

I just finished Batman: Arkham Origins. I kept hoping it'd become fun and then the game was over.

Everyone seems to say this, it's crap compared to the rest of the arkham series. I didn't really mind the collectathon aspect, and i kept on restarting with more difficulty added because I realised i could bag the achievements - then I realised i was incredibly bored of the game p, which might be why I wanted to test it on higher difficulties all the time.

City was the best one, I enjoyed origins and liked the setting but yeah it wasn't as good

I found the challenges to unlock gear utterly obnoxious, particularly as several key ones were very situational (notably the exotic takedowns one). Said gear wasn't required, obviously, but it meant I spent my time trying to find setups that would work for challenges rather than just playing the game.

The backtracking for collectibles was also extremely tedious.

I played through Asylum twice and loved Arkham City but Origins was just sort of plodding.

Marvel's Midnight Suns.

Supposed to be a tactics based card battler. I played 10 hours and I think I did 3 or 4 battles. So much talking and relationship stuff where saying just the right things out of 3 random options will help advance your status. Just really not what I wanted but too late to refund once I realized that the real game wasn't coming.

Oh yeah and so much running through the forest looking for shiny things.

Exact same boat. Endless enemies unless you manage to defeat all enemies fast enough is a bullshit design.

So much talking and relationship stuff where saying just the right things out of 3 random options will help advance your status. Just really not what I wanted but too late to refund once I realized that the real game wasn’t coming.

Oh yeah and so much running through the forest looking for shiny things.

Game devs keep on trying to make games for everyone. But then they end up being for no one.

I always felt Midnight Suns was let down because of how it was marketed. It was sold as that tactics battler and wore the studios XCOM games and I avoided it for ages even though the mystic sci-fi setting was right up my alley. Turns out the game is one of my favorites.

If they had said "It's Fire Emblem but less grid" I think it would have landed much better.

I really enjoyed the game, but I may have just gotten lucky with the timing. I wanted a slower paced decision-making game.

I do think the game would benefit hugely from a Quickplay and/or Challenge mode. The combat was a blast once it got going. That's the biggest thing keeping me from replaying it

Halo. Lord knows I've tried on multiple occasions. The controls are just ass. I can't get used to them. I want to like the game I really do.

Halo was the first FPS designed to be played on console controllers rather than with mouse and keyboard. That's why it feels like shit and why I hate it.

It's also why it was so popular. Halo definitely wasn't the best shooter of the year, but it was by far the best (and only) shooter on the Xbox.

∆V: Rings of Saturn is a top down realistic physics based space mining game. I love the game but the high frequency of random encounters made the game feel less like a mining sim and more like a space combat game where you have to survive against constant pirate attacks.

While all that sounds bog-standard for a space sim, it's the realistic science that kills it. High speed mass driver rounds from far off map, mining lasers outside the visible spectrum (only revealed with steam or dust) that will cut right through your ship, microwave beams that cook the crew alive and are impossible to evade - the game is not made for such weapons with the very limited combat format.

It became unfun to have a load of minerals that took IRL hours to harvest become scattered across Enceladus orbit as the added mass of minerals made my ship unmanageable during evasive maneuvers causing me to slam into an asteroid.

3,300 hours in Fortnite. The worst thing about it is that I spend money in it.

I think Fortnite is pretty fun with friends ... if you don't care about the battle pass or skins.

King's Quest III. The story is great but that damn wizard keeps appearing out of nowhere.

Factorio. I'm "only" 100 hours or so in. Don't like it one bit honestly but it's the main game my friend wants to play so I still just hang out doing whatever in it

What do you dislike about it?

It's just spreadsheets basically.

I get enough of that in my day to day life as a programmer; data flow, ratios, connecting the pipes, everything Factorio is just programming and spreadsheets.

Don't get me wrong, I say I hate it because it's not for me and drives me crazy. I recognize for others it's a great game and objectively quite well done.

Try playing with the mod Rampant. Deathworld settings if you can/want. It changes the mentality away from spreadsheet megabase optimization minmaxxing to instead be tower defense "slap something together and get it done, soldier!".

Makes it way more enjoyable for me as it gets rid of the perfection mentality and beings it back to being a game again. Things dont need to be perfect, and if you try to do so the bugs will just punish your fiddling by smashing your base. You gotta do things well enough to work but at a pace fast enough to stay alive. Whole different game. Way more fun, imo.

There's a few ways to play this game, saying this as someone who has sunk nearly 1000 hours over the years.

The main bus strategy is one of the most popular, and it is highly efficient. However this sucks all the fun out of the game for me. It feels like just tacking on yet another section of the factory and everything is already mostly figured out for you. The grid strategy with trains surrounding each square is even worse.

If this is how you guys are playing and it isn't enjoyable, try just going full spaghetti. Half the fun for me is trying to squeeze in some new area and figuring out all the turns, underground belts and pipes, etc.

And the game really opens up when you get to Vulcanus. Most people pretty much abandon their Nauvis base other than for a few things like importing science.

Yeah, I always ended up doing custom bases for each resource, and then tying it all together with trains. It kept things fresh, because main bus designs absolutely suck the fun out of it. A properly organized and optimized train network is truly a marvel to behold. I always avoided going full grid with my trains, simply because I wanted to avoid the exact “micro factory inside of each square” problem you touched on.

I used a grid for my trains, but only to make blueprinting easier. Nothing worse than bringing two tracks from different parts of your base together, only to realize they can’t actually mate because the damned tracks are off by one square (one started on an odd square, another started on an even) and the tracks literally won’t let you bend them into place to meet in the middle. The grid was simply a standardized track length, so I knew my intersections would always meet up cleanly. Basically, I wanted to avoid this problem:

But I also haven’t touched Space Age at all, so maybe trains are an old meta by now.

Tracks not being able to touch have not been a problem for years, I think.

I wouldn't say hated, but I've sunk almost 500 hours into Diablo IV and just feel like it's meh. Nothing particularly special about it.

I put 130 hours into it at launch and enjoyed the grind to endgame with my first build but the endgame grind was just way too much for me and I haven't picked it up since.

Quit after 9 hours.

I probably sunk at least that much into D2 (and more) but just fell out of love with D4 so quickly. It felt so repetitive and dull.

I just started playing this and question what the hype was.

Town of Salem would be another one for me. It's a game like "murderer," the party game, with a harmless innocent fsction and a dangerous mafia faction. The game devolved into foregone conclusions every match because everyone devised a formula for town to win 100% of the time.

You might like blood on the clocktower. It's a similar premise but with some key twists and some very interesting role options, depending on the script you run

Thank you I'll definitely look into it! Town of Salem seemed to bring me out of my shell a bit as a kid because I liked the test of logic

You might like blood on the clocktower. It's a similar premise but with some key twists and some very interesting role options, depending on the script you run

You might like blood on the clocktower. It's a similar premise but with some key twists and some very interesting role options, depending on the script you run

Jailor here TPLO

It did suck that there was a meta around Jailor. NK usually only won with NE working with them, or all/any

What i hate about TOS now is that its dead and making a lobby takes forever.

Dragon's Dogma 2. A lot of time is spent simply finding the quests and only the Sphynx ones are actually fun. Even the MQ is a shitty mess that leaves you more confused than you were when the game started, even when doing all the extra stuff needed to see the "true" ending.

The combat is infuriating because it pretty much never stops the moment you leave a city (and even in a city, large monsters can show up randomly and fuck you over like a gryphon randomly picking you up and taking you across the whole damn map to its nest) and no matter tour weapon or level, you never really feel like you get any stronger. It takes forever to kill even basic trash mobs unless you're a Thief using instant kill moves. Your pawns don't help much as their AI regressed from DD1, too.

For example, you and your pawns get moves that require team work, like a fighter can throw you up a ledge that's too high to jump or a mage can give you levitation; but they have to choose to initiate these, you can't ask, and even when they say something like seeing a chest that's one of those moves away, they never fucking offer to use them.

It also wastes time like a motherfucker. Lot's of waiting for quests to progress after random time periods, hella times where control is taken from you without warning like doing celebration animations after killing a dude or NPCs with absolutely fuck all importance initiate dialogue with you while traveling along in the middle of nowhere to sell their services as a pawn, getting fucked over by random monsters like the gryphon situation mentioned above, and more.

The most infurating thing about it is that DD1 wasn't this bad; it had some rough edges and climbing on big enemies was janky, but it wasn't an utterly annoying piece of shit with barely anything of substance behind it.

When I got to the doomed world where there was a timer, I dropped that game like a rock. I hate forced timers when I’m trying to have fun and explore.

Also, those goddamn harpies that would snatch you up in their talons and throw you off a cliff… They killed my entire party and the difficulty of it all felt insanely cruel.

Path of Exile. Spent probably thousands of hours in it for years. I even made my own home grown loot filter, not compatable with neversink's. I left after they kept trying to sneak archnemesis back into the game. Never liked the gamble crafting system, and it felt like every update made less and less builds viable in maps.

I still watch Chris Wilson's videos on YouTube though.

Did not play PoE1 a lot, but I have like 500 hours in PoE2 and I love some of the mechanics (souls-y combat, skills and supports, visual style …). It took me a while to realize the fact that it’s basically a medieval fantasy themed casino, and that just made me not wanna play anymore. Just couldn’t believe the amount of gambling as you even just approach endgame.

Edit: I also watch Chris Wilson’s videos on YouTube haha

Just couldn’t believe the amount of gambling as you even just approach endgame.

One time I made it to the tier16 maps by just following my intuition on a build and using loot I found. It was really fun!

Then the chaos trial guy one-hit me when I missed a dodge, and I realized I'd need to get the key things again to redo the fight. Nope. It's been fun but I'm done.

On subsequent patches, none of my characters have done quite as well. I also just can't figure out how to make ranger, monk, other ranger, go.

I begrudgingly put up with Puyo Puyo Tetris back when it was the only way to officially play Puyo Puyo in the west, but it is the worst thing that ever happened to the franchise. Only thing I hate more than the game itself is the impact it had on the series, because Sega has done nothing but lazily rehash it four times. It's been a full decade since the last proper main series game and there's still no word on when or if we'll ever get another.

Company of Hero's. I got into a mod community that did tons of pvp. After a various complaints of hacking and group drama, we figured out there was a visibility sync bug. Made me stop playing and never reloaded the game again.

I feel like that's more an issue with the people you played with. The game itself is pretty awesome.

Nah it was a technical issue in multiplayer, units that would show their owner as stealthed, were not. We reproduced it, and after that I was just done with it.

Metroid: Dread. Awful controls, and REALLY awful late-game bosses. Sucks, cause there's otherwise a lot to love about it.

Nine Sols. With only one exception, every boss started with a good, fun, design, and then felt compelled to escalate to the point that all the fun was ruined, and then keep going. Again, really sucks, cause there's a ton to love about it.

Interesting take with Dread, because it’s one of my favorites. The only section I legitimately dislike is
::: spoiler Tap for spoiler the one EMMA that can fucking see through walls :::
That one specific boss can get fucked.

Disgaea. I was trying to unlock all the classes and play with some of the monster classes but it was so tedious and slow that after 100 hours I looked up a power leveling guide and found out the optimal play was just to ignore the whole team strategy part of it and grind the main character into space. Dropped it then.

Disgaea is a weird one because what the game is and what the game looks like are two very different things.

It looks like a cute story-driven RPG, but that's like 2% of the content. The main game is and always has been a challenge to break the game through exploiting unbalanced systems.

Whether that's appealing or not as a concept with vary, but it definitely has almost nothing to do with the aesthetics and marketing of the series, weirdly

I was just hoping for interesting tactics and a simple plot, which it delivered at first... but as the game develops it's as you said, mostly about learning to optimize your grind through exploiting systems that are basically only documented in wikis (what do all the stats and attributes do? Google it.)

Extremely reasonable assumption, and not your fault that Disgaea is secretly something it doesn't really advertise well

Dota.

League for me. Played while I was in the US and my laptop was trash so couldn't play many games, also the uni monitored downloads so I couldn't pirate shit (didn't know how to bypass it back then)

Dark Souls 2. With the game just not being very good objectively and playing it during the worst period of my life I just can't even go back to it.

Subnautica. It continues to be stupid no matter how long I play it. You all have shitty taste!

Agreed. This is a game that I should love, but I am bored to death by it. Maybe it gets better later, but I never get more than a few hours in.

Meanwhile I had to stop playing because I was too scared

and I never even started playing because I was too scared xD base building yay, jumpscares nay

Not in my opinion. The best part of this game is that it ends.

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