The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
I don't find my weapon breaking every 10 minutes fun, nor do I find the endless wandering with no context clues very engaging. I swear 90% of the stuff you have to stumble onto by dumb luck. It took me months to accidentally bump into that stupid maraca tree thing and expand my inventory. That's just dumb design.
In a mandatory cut scene, a character tells you "Head toward the dueling peaks, then, follow the road to Kakariko village." Hestu, the inventory expanding broccoli homonculus, is standing on the side of that road in a conspicuous location.
It's a game about free exploration, it's silly to expect the player to directly follow these instructions. Just make him part of the mandatory tutorial area or have him come to you after collecting your first 10 seeds or something.
I only found out about the guy after finishing the game.
I love these games, but I totally agree with you. I missed hestu and didn't find him for probably the first 15 hours of the game. Basically it took someone having pity on me and saying "just go here", Very frustrating.
It's not just the tree guy. The whole game's like that.
Here, let me give you another example of the counter-intuitive gameplay I encountered:
The volcano. It's hot. I need to travel up it.
First attempt: Check my available tools for something. Bombs, no. Timestop, no. Ice pillar, maybe? no. Swords, Shields, Bows.... no.
Second attempt: Explore the area, see a hotspring. Try to map out a route using hotsprings as a cooling source. No dice.
Third attempt: Visit all the major cities for info, nothing found other than the volcano is hot. No vendors selling any items that can help.
Fourth attempt: Circle around and try to find a tunnel, putting on all my desert gear to reduce heat damage. Catch fire regardless, no cave found.
Fifth attempt: Load up all my food and make meals, brute force my way to the base camp. No assistance there, have to teleport out.
Sixth attempt: Doing a completely unrelated hunt for a shrine, bump into the NPC selling fire resist potions at a horse stable. A horse stable I mostly ignore because the game lets you teleport everywhere!
Do I feel accomplished, finally finding this only way up the volcano? No! I feel like Nintendo just wasted my time!
Even worse, when I finally make it to the Goron city and buy the fireproof armor, I bump into a Goron who gives me half the recipe to make the fire resist potion. Not even the whole recipe. And he was far far beyond the base camp I brute forced to. If he had been in all the other cities, and with the full recipe, maybe this wouldn't have been such a challenge of dumb luck.
Wow. Seems like your approach must have been really off the beaten path.
From memory, I think I was offered a fireproof elixir by an NPC at the nearest stable, and by a traveling vendor further up that road, and was given the flamebreaker armor for helping an NPC about halfway to Goron City. (That last one caught my interest because the help needed was in catching fireproof lizards, which seemed relevant to my immediate needs.) Any one of those would have been enough.
Your experience must have been frustrating. Were you avoiding roads and NPCs, by any chance?
Nope, I talked to every NPC at all the towns, and on the roads. But, I didn't stop at any of the horse stables since I never had need of a horse. It's all cliffs and teleportation!
Edit: The fireproof armor NPC was only one part of the armor needed to make yourself fireproof, and of course he was at the base camp I had to teleport away from since I was on fire.
I think you only need one piece of the flamebreaker set to be fireproof survive in Goron City. You would need a second piece (or one piece and an elixir) to get closer to the caldera, but by that time you can buy a second piece in the city. You never need the third piece.
I went to the stables just to check out what was there, and discovered that they have quest information, quest triggers, rumors about the world, vendors that don't show up elsewhere, mini-game challenges with rewards, hints at the locations of Link's lost memory photos, etc. It never occurred to me that someone might miss out on all that stuff if they weren't given a reason to visit a stable. (Maybe the game gives a hint to go there? I don't remember.)
Sorry you drew the short straw.
I think you only need one piece of the flamebreaker set to be fireproof in Goron City.
whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat.
it's true!
But the game has established multiple times that a set only gives a bonus on full equip!
That's still true in BotW. (I think it requires the set to be upgraded as well.) The bonus from the Flamebreaker set is fire damage immunity, which can be handy when fighting certain enemies. You don't need that bonus just to be in a scorched climate, though.
I don't think I ever found a potion before clearing the area. I remember stocking up on food, like you, and eventually stumbling into the merchant selling me fire resistant armour.
The only reason I didn't brute force the whole way was I ran out of food.
Talking to NPCs to find out things about the immediate area is a major part of the game.
If you do what the King says, you'll encounter NPCs that have some early world building dialog, an easily climbed tower to start filling in the map and get the shrine sensor, four convenient shrines, one of which has the climbing bandana in it, great time to get that because you don't have a hat at all yet so the extra armor plus the climbing speed buff is excellent to have, there's a stable with a sidequest that teaches you how to catch horses, you'll find Hestu along the path up to Kakariko and likely increase your inventory (or learn that koroks exist), and then in Kakariko the shrine there is a combat tutorial, there's a fairy fountain nearby, plus Impa sets you on the main quest of the game. Having done four shrines, you can add a heart or stamina wheel sector. Pikango is here, and there are several sidequests in Kakariko to get stuck into.
Impa sends you to Hateno to get the memories sidequest going. Major location in the game with some adventuring and side questing to do, more expository dialog and world building, you get the camera and shiekah sensor, get sent back to Impa, and then you're kicking around in Kakariko with no immediate goal. You look out one of the exits of town you haven't taken yet and you see a wide open area with two visible shrines and a tower. Course charted, you get sucked into the Zora plot. Once that's done, you'll have Mipha's Grace, an additional heart, some more armor, and then the training wheels are off and now it's up to you to pick a direction to explore.
"I didn't do what the NPC said and didn't find something important the whole game" gives big "why don't my kids ever call" energy.
Wow dude, you go straight to insinuating we're abuser who's family abandoned them because we accomplished a goal without follow instructions to the letter in a video game?
It does remind me strongly of the people I've cut off, yes.
no reflection at all on how 0 to 11 that reaction is? Huh... Well, another to add to the block list I guess.
Ignoring your uncalled for insult, that's just not how I play games.
Once I was free of the tutorial area, I set off in a random direction and did my thing. I completed multiple divine beats before ever setting foot in Kakariko.
If I wanted to follow the direct path as described by NPCs, I might as well go play a linear game. I got to the destinations eventually, but almost never on the beated path.
Having tried and failed to get into it some 8 or 9 times, I have to agree. Maybe it's different if you grew up playing The Legend of Zelda, but I just found the visuals drab, the combat overly simple and yet slow, and above all like it was trying to be deliberately aggravating to play.
Not at all what one expects from one of the most acclaimed video games of all time, I do wonder how it would have performed had an unknown studio released it as their first game.
BotW and its sequel are so unlike any other Zelda game, I doubt having played or grown up with other Zelda games would be helpful.
How unlike are they though? I haven't played any of the other games, but from what I've seen the chief difference is the open world setting, the gameplay loop is mostly the same.
It didn't seem like a particularly well executed open world to me, either - while it did give the option to stray from the most direct route to the next dungeon, what you found if you did was mostly emptiness. It even had you climb honest to god Ubisoft towers to uncover the map.
Regardless, I felt like I was missing a frame of reference from the very start. It's just as well there was no sense of urgency to the central conflict, because I was given no reason to care about the stoic mute elf child or his damsel in the castle.
I'm really curious about your idea of a well-executed open world. Can you give an example? Also about the caring about the plot. I could argue your point about not caring about the fate of the central characters for any game.
This turned into a long un. Short version: These are both fair points, but ones you would expect a game heralded as the best of all time to do better.
Long version: That's a fair question, to me there's very few good examples and so many bad ones, which is why I largely avoid games described as such. For an open world setting to draw me in it must employ the aspect of exploration to reward the player with more than just gameplay resources - worldbuilding lore, storytelling or knowledge that impacts the main story.
The better parts of Fallout 4 did it well I thought, while trekking towards your destination you could come across an interesting looking building which can be explored to learn why it's full of super-irradiated ghouls or an extremely predatory deathclaw. The world is also dotted with little nuggets of environmental storytelling that have no bearing on anything but serves to add texture and context to the world, to make it seem as though it's somewhere people live - or at least lived.
I found nothing of the sort in Breath of the Wild. If you followed the most direct path to the giant glowing pillars the game invited you to use for navigating you may come across another goblin camp or fairy hiding under a rock, none of which compels you to keep exploring further save for the fact that you need a steady supply of weapons to replace the papier-mâché ones that are apparently in vogue. Other than the towers, the identical dungeon entrances and the occasional settlement the terrain is virtually featureless.
To your second point, it's absolutely true that no game can force you to care about the motivations of the protagonist, but most of them at least try. Link wakes up to a voice in his head, grabs a tablet and off he goes saving the princess. Why does any of this matter to him?
With the context of growing up playing The Legend of Zelda, you already know this - bees sting, birds fly and Link rescues Zelda. For someone new to the franchise it just seems gratuitous, and it's never expanded upon either. Link is as blank a slate at the conclusion of the story as when he woke, ready, presumably, to be put on ice till the next time Zelda needs rescuing.
Both of these criticisms can be applied fairly to any game, it's true. But Breath of the Wild and it's sequel are constantly highlighted as exemplars not just of the genre, but of the whole medium. It's fair then to expect something that's excellent in every aspect, which is absolutely not what I've found through many attempts to play them.
You've got a really good point. The fact that they don't gatekeep you using the previous dungeon's item is completely different than what Zelda games do as a tradition... BUT wandering around an open world and getting a lucky find that is critical to beating the game is so very Zelda 1.
Loved BotW but I played it with a 400% durability mod, at 1440p/144fps with graphical mods to make it even more beautiful hahaha
FWIW, I think they did a much better job in Tears of the Kindgom. Your weapons still break, but you can carry around a basically endless supply of monster parts that you "fuse" to whatever base weapon you happen to come across and it makes them powerful again. Sometimes all you need is a stick to make a good weapon. Still annoying, but waaaaaay less of an inventory management sim IMO.
I thought TOTK was worse cause now you're also managing the parts inventory. It was so frustrating to get to certain places and find out you didn't have the necessary parts (like a glider) to do certain things.
I even ended up using duplication glitches to skip resource scavgening and I still felt like I ended up wasting half the game managing my inventory.
I'll admit i rarely used the machine fusing, I was just talking about the weapon inventory system. I'd just pick up sticks or whatever was around and slam the first "good enough" damage monster part I had to it and kept going. It's a lot better IMO than having to hang onto all the good stuff and constantly be underpowered because "what if i need it for a boss?"
They also added a mechanic to fix broken weapons with the rock octorock but they didn't really make it obvious and its still weird they didn't let you repair weapons any other way.
Witcher 3.
I've started it 4 times and I never make it past 6 hours in, it's just painfully slow and feels like a chore to my brain.
Yeah, same for me. I never understood the hype…
It was sort of like the Bethesda formula except that every quest was actually interesting and well-written. Plus there's the part where taking down tougher monsters on harder difficulties requires appropriate prep, which made those fights more interesting.
I played that game for about 30 minutes. I got to one of the first areas, picked up some "fetch quests" where I had to kill some type of creature and return their pelts for a prize and some exp or whatever and I was like "Oh... A mid 2000's MMO with no other players. No thanks!"
I also remember feeling that all of the movement, animations, and actions were really jerky. Like nothing felt like it flowed correctly. Things were kind of "snap to grid". Not sure how else to explain it.
I also remember feeling that all of the movement, animations, and actions were really jerky. Like nothing felt like it flowed correctly. Things were kind of "snap to grid". Not sure how else to explain it.
I like witcher 3 but i fully agree on the movement. It’s better now that they changed it for the next gen upgrade but still really weird.
I'm similar. I did manage better after installing a bunch of mods. Lots were to mitigate/nullify systems I didn't want to interact with.
Mods to make equipment scale with level, autoloot, remove inventory weight, remove durability, and I'm sure I'm missing some.
It's still a slow game with floaty combat, and not my favorite, but I was able to see at least some of what others rave about.
For me it was specifically the Blood and Wine DLC. I was really engrossed in the story and when it concluded, I lost my motivation to keep playing.
I found nearly all of Disco Elysium's characters so unlikable, (especially?) including the player character, that I could not enjoy it at all. I think I like the systems in it, and I'm happy when an RPG exposes its dice rolls; the voice performances were all very good; I just couldn't stand it after 5 hours of trying.
You're definitely not supposed to like Harry as a person. He is at best insane and at worst a racist, mysognistic, alcohic drug abusing piece of human garbage. It is also very easy to be put off by even the good people because Harry has already wronged most of them and they have already had enough of his shit by the time you take control.
I don't know, maybe it's just because I relate to him but I do kind of like Harry. Yes, he's not a regular "good person", but he's also much more complex than just a "bad guy". He's flawed, tragic and ultimately incredibly human. I think he's a fantastic character, just like most characters in Disco Elysium.
I don't think I necessarily like Harry, but I sure as fuck empathize with him. Playing him as someone seeking redemption or trying to put his life back together (and SO OFTEN failing) was incredibly meaningful. You put it very well.
My heart welped for Harry in the dreaming sequence. Despite his best effort, Dolores wouldn't stay. Nothing he could do or say. The powerlessness made him incredibly vulnerable and human. Very realistic depiction of a broken love.
The final dream is my favourite moment in all of gaming. Complete heart wrenching and beautifully written, and really kind of pulling the whole game into focus and making all the pieces click into place at once. I still can't believe they made it so easily missable too, as it's kind of the fulcrum the whole game is balanced on.
It also never ceases to amaze me how Robert Kurvitz managed to distill the entire pathos of the whole game into three words to close it out, too.
spoiler
See you tomorrow.
I get that. But I consume a lot of crime fiction. The Wire, Guy Ritchie movies, etc. These stories are full of terrible people, but they don't make me feel like I'm trudging through a story with a bunch of assholes.
The main theme of the game basically centers around failure. How it manifests, how people react to it, how it affects them in the long run. Bitterness, apathy, delusion. Most of the characters are some kind of fuckup (except Kim, my beloved). Some of them are failures because they're fucked up, some of them are fucked up because they failed again and again, but either way it's an exploration of what that does to a person, what that does to a people, what that does to a town.
Some people just disassociate, some people give up and abandon their values to go with the flow, some people fight back impotently against forces they'll never overcome. Above all, I think it's basically about perseverance, one way or another, in the face of failure.
It's very raw, very bleak, very human. It's easy to feel vindicated when you strive and succeed, when you're a virtuous hero, but who among us is just a virtuous hero? It's much more complex and real to fail over and over and still get back on that horse, because what else can you do? The characters are supposed to be flawed, they're supposed to be unlikeable. The game is about exploring what it is that made them unlikeable: how much of it is forces beyond their control, how much of it is their own stubbornness and maladaptive reactions, how much of it is just trauma.
If you don't like exploring those ideas, you probably won't like the game.
I would like exploring those ideas, but it doesn't change what I said above.
The characters are supposed to be flawed, they're supposed to be unlikeable. The game is about exploring what it is that made them unlikeable: how much of it is forces beyond their control, how much of it is their own stubbornness and maladaptive reactions, how much of it is just trauma.
It's kind of a necessary aspect. You can't really effectively explore what persistent failure does to a town without feeling like you're trudging through a story full of assholes. If the characters weren't so abrasive and broken, it wouldn't really be the same kind of thing.
But I wasn't exploring failure. I was just annoyed every time I had to talk to Kuno or anyone else.
And if you keep playing you learn the tragic reasons why Cuno is such a little shit and, I won't post spoilers, but depending on your choices you can help him become way less of a little shit. It's roughly the same for most of the asshole characters: they're assholes at first, you find out why they're assholes and develop a lot of sympathy for them, and sometimes you facilitate their redemption.
Could be, but I didn't have the patience to see it. If that's what they wanted me to see, I certainly felt it could have been paced better. You mostly only hear good things about this game, but my friends list on Steam has about a dozen people who stopped playing it around the same time I did. I can't say why they put it down, as I didn't poll them, but someone I follow on Giant Bomb had a pretty similar reaction to the front-loaded negativity of this game very recently, so I know it's not just me.
Sure, but again that's the point. I can get why someone might not have the patience for it, but you can't really change the front-loaded negativity or pacing without sacrificing the whole message. It's a crucial aspect of the storytelling.
Honestly, people who give up on it kinda validate the themes. You and your dozen friends didn't persevere, like many of the characters. Giving up is one response to bleakness. That's not a value judgement, like I said it isn't for everyone, but it is kinda poignant that by checking-out you demonstrate exactly what it's saying, to some degree.
It's good because other people thought it was bad is certainly one way to frame it, lol.
Not what I said. Dropping out of a game because it's too bleak reinforces the game's theme of people dropping out of reality because it's too bleak.
Like I said, it's not for everyone. But you quit before the threads start to come together. If you don't care about those threads, that's your choice. You said you're interested in exploring the themes the game centers around, and if that's true you really should give it a real shot and give the game the time to tell its story. But the negativity and pacing are an aspect of that storytelling. People are supposed to be assholes, it's supposed to feel a bit like a slog, it's supposed to feel bleak. They aren't telling the story badly, you're just not interested in the story.
I gave it 5 hours. That's a real shot and the point of this thread. And I also thought the story that I saw thus far had a tendency to info dump too much, which I found inelegant.
Ah, yeah if you don't like info dumps then never mind. It's basically a novel in game form.
I finished it recently and I also didn't get what all the hype was about, but for me it was more the fact that none of the quests, main or side, were satisfying in the least.
I am a socialist and dont get offended at all if called a communist and finally I get why people may hate us, after playing this game.
Also, having to change clothes every 3 minutes brings me out of immersion.
It is very "snobbish" in its design despite beautiful art département stuff and voice acting.
The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild. As a die hard Zelda fan, I was beyond hyped for this one. Probably my biggest letdown in all of gaming.
- No real story to follow
- No cast of interesting characters outside of optional collectible flashbacks
- Repetitive, lifeless gameplay. No real dungeons or temples, every “mini dungeon” that does exist is the same copy pasted theme.
- No score of memorable unique music, just the MiNiMaLiSm of some understated occasional piano.
- Atrocious lack of enemy variety.
- a focus on exploration that rewards you with precious little given that any weapons your find will just break, and there are no unique combat or traversal items to unlock.
Came back to my save a couple times to push through, but the entire game is just the same 4 activities copy pasted 300 times with no variation or progression that makes your 50th hour unique from your first. It’s like. Soulless kowtow to Ubisoft game design in a once beautiful and innovative game series. Makes me mad just thinking about it lol.
Red Dead Redemption 2. The cutscenes are too long and boring.
Eeeh, the length of the cutscenes wasn't really what put me off but rather the fact that I didn't care about most of the people in them. I fact, I never got invested in any of the characters, including Arthur.
Their world building and dedication to creating complex systems are fantastic but Rockstar Games makes their characters so repulsive that I don't enjoy being around them or advancing whatever agenda they have. Same with GTA V (and presumably VI as well).
I agree. Rockstar makes truly impressive games, but I can't get into them. The characters and stories have no redeeming qualities from what I could tell.
Any game with unskippable cutscenes instantly drops dead for me. It's padding I don't want to wade through.
I gave up after accidentally doing things too many times. The hotkeys felt like an ever shifting mess and I got tired of constantly reloading after pressing the wrong one. It was a bummer because I loved the setting and overall feel of the game, just ran out of patience after so many times not knowing how to do the thing I wanted to do and half the time ending up doing something unintentionally violent.
Elite Dangerous has a zillion hotkeys as well but that feels more like gameplay and learning to operate a complicated ship. Accidentally wasting a heat sink with a wrong keypress is different from accidentally starting a fistfight with a random person when I meant to wave and say howdy partner
And some of them are unskippable.
So. Much. Exposition...
This is the one for me as well. The gameplay is simply horrendous. Just getting on and off the horse was a chore in of itself.
Don't forget to clean your horse off every few hours by brushing it in the same spot 3 times. Just... Why
Souls like games. I tried, I’m just not built for them.
Same, and I'm both happy and sad about that. Happy because I don't need that stress and anger, sad because I like the worlds in most of them and many of my friends absolutely love them and it'd be nice to share that.
Balatro should just be renamed to Flush, every single time I win it's because I use the "discard until you have a flush" strategy, and augment that with Jupiter, wild cards, steel cards, and jokers that give bonuses for flushes or single suits.
Flushes are satisfying when they work but you can definitely finish runs with pair or two pair decks
The pair will get you there. I know it sound crazy, but hear me out.
I plateaued at purple ante with flushes and two pairs, and had a eureka moment with pairs after some rng gave me a ton of mercury cards. My strategy to get through gold was to run nothing but pairs and try to get as many hands in as possible. You focus on getting some scalable jokers; my best were green joker and supernova. Then you get selective and find a good joker or combination of jokers to get at least x3 mult. At the same time take card packs, spectral, death tarot or whatever else can get more blue seal. I was able to beat gold stake with nothing but green joker and stencil, and I'm pretty sure I suck at the game.
I'm a huge fan of flush because of the versatility in builds, but they really stop being viable at blue stake. After that it's gotta be pairs or less. Flushes stop being viable
Here's the secret to Balatro, there are basically two strategies that work. Focus on flushes, or focus on two pairs.
Also, if you get that joker that makes all red cards the same suit and all black cards the same suit, then a 9 card hand always has a flush.
Likewise, two pair is extremely reliable, it's hard not to have it. Just get a bunch of blue seals and pump that two pair up to level 20+.
Finally, jokers that give you flat bonuses are fine, at least early on. But you really want jokers that have increasing bonuses, that get better every round.
There is a hidden third option: focus on jokers, play high cards or pairs. The idea is that you get all chips from jokers so it barely matters if you play a 2 or an ace or whatever, allowing you to ignore pretty much every boss debuff. You try to get to a point where you have scaling jokers scoring the chips, with a setup like this:
- a joker just giving extra chips (like the square joker)
- a joker adding mult (like supernova)
- a joker multiplying mult (like constellation or hologram)
The trick is that all of these should be scaling in the sense that their chips or mult go up as the game progresses, and that you need to play to that. Constellation, for example, gives you an extra x0.1 every time you use a planet card. See a planet card for a hand you never play (like any hand with more than 2 cards), you still buy and use it.
I hate Battle Royale shooters, all of them.
There is nothing I find more unpleasant than inventory management under pressure. I don't even have time to look at what I just picked up and figure out what it does before people are shooting at me. I say just pick a lane, you can be a competitive shooter, but skip the loot. Or go maximum inventory management, like borderlands or stalker, but not in a competitive multiplayer game.
Doom Eternal.
I like the original trilogy, adored Doom 2016, and I even thought Doom 3 was a decent game in its own right. So a direct sequel to Doom Eternal where Heaven gets involved and everybody says is bigger and better? Sign me the fuck up!
I bought the game and all the DLC. I played through to the end and beat the final boss, and I did not enjoy one second of it (I only finished because I can be a stubborn fool).
Things got off to a bad start when I had to sign into my Slayers Club account before the game would show me the main menu. Then when I was playing, it paused every few seconds to tell me that it couldn't connect to the server, which utterly kills the vaunted flow of combat.
And the combat. Ugh. Doom 2016 is excellently balanced, providing 10 fun weapons for different situations which let people find their own playstyles, and prioritising ammo drops when the player is low on ammo and health drops when low on health. Eternal fans claim that there is no reason to use anything other than the super shotgun, and I have no doubt that strategy worked for them, but I used all the weapons, and I don't think I used the super shotgun very much at all.
Eternal officially gives you nine weapons, but each of them has three different fire modes (except the super shotgun, which just has two fire modes and also a meathook), so there are really 26 guns plus two different grenades. And every single fucking enemy has a hardcoded weakness to two, maybe three attacks, and are barely hurt by anything else. These aren't weaknesses to individual weapons, but to specific weapons in specific modes, and some of those modes have to be unlocked by meeting specific conditions. Every single demon hits like a dump truck and moves like a motorbike, so by the time you have selected the specific weapon that will do more than a papercut, you have a completely different demon in your face. And the guns in this Doom game hold fuck all ammo even when fully upgraded. And getting upgrades often requires playing suboptimally.
Speaking of ammo, the chainsaw has been downgraded from powerful emergency weapon to tool for obtaining ammo. You can find the odd ammo pickup in levels, but 90% of the time, the only way to get more ammo is to chainsaw a weak demon (demons don't drop ammo otherwise). Because you can barely carry enough ammo to kill one heavy demon, I spent the 90% of the arena battles running around, desperately dodging attacks as I waited for the chainsaw to refill so I could get some ammo to shoot at the big demons. And the arena battles don't use waves; as soon as you kill a big demon, another one teleports in to replace it, so there is no respite until you get near the end. This did not make me feel like a berserker-packing man and a half. I felt like a weak, terrified wimp, desperately trying to survive. Fighting hordes of demons isn't epicly badass, it's a long, tiring slog, and at the end of every arena, I didn't feel empowered, I felt exhausted and relieved it was finally over.
To make an analogy, Doom 2016 is like an Italian pasta dish: a small number of high-quality, carefully-chosen ingredients that work well together. Doom Eternal is like making a sandwich of rashers, sausages, fried eggs, strawberry ice cream, venison, raspberries, spaghetti, and chocolate cake. All those things are great on their own, but the sandwich is just too much, and the flavours and textures all clash with each other.
I feel the same about Eternal. In 2016, once I got the upgrade that gave me infinite ammo while at full health and armor, I had some of the best fun in the game, using the railgun like a maniac
I didn't finish Eternal, I think I stopped before the cathedral where you'd kill the 2nd evil archbishop or whatever. Combat was annoying and the parkour more so
Playing though eternal for the first time right now. This is pretty accurate. I've been let down coming from 2016. Each encounter feels like I need to plan what happens in what order. That's so antithetical to Doom IMO.
Hit the nail on the head. I can’t stand eternal. I have maybe an hour or two into it. The game forces you to use certain weapons and upgrade them a certain way which is anti-doom. Doom is supposed to let you mindlessly destroy hellspawn in whichever way you see fit since you’re the doom slayer. I played 2016 with just the blaster most of the way to see if I could
I think it may be only me, but as someone who grew up with DooM II, even 2016 is... Way too colorful.
I also never really played those games as people who call them boomer shooters do now, with frantic movements and all that.
Doom and especially Quake IMO should be enjoyed as the dreadful nightmares they are.
God of War 2018
I gave it a full playthrough, but since then it has pretty much become my definition of AAA slop.
-
The game is littered with "puzzles". The solution is always obvious within seconds and on top of that you get commentary on how to "solve" it. They just waste your time.
-
Stats don't matter. Early on you get your first weapon upgrade, I think I tripled my damage. The very next enemy got some commentary about "showcasing" my new weapon. It took the exact same amount of hits as the same enemy type did before ugrading my weapon. Since weapon upgrade materials are fixed drops from bosses, everything just scales alongside you.
-
The battle system in general is a slog. 9 out of 10 times throwing your axe feels like the best option. Even the post game bosses are annoying at best.
-
Also, why is the camera so darn close. Your "cinematic angles" mean shit when the gameplay suffers from it.
-
There are so many "cutscenes" that have you walk at a snails pace. If your "gameplay" can be executed by a rubber band on my joystick, then just give me a proper cutscene. Annoying me isn't immersive.
-
You get awesome godly powers - for as long as cutscenes are running. Your super healing and mountain splitting punches mean nothing against any random draugr.
-
Probably some more things, but it's been a few years.
The story was fine, but I would have enjoyed watching a cutscene compilation more than playing the game. In fact that's what I did your second entry.
I gave up on trying/watching the second entry after realizing the first one just wasn't fun even in the "good" fights.
It felt worse than the worse games in the original series, the fights we're not as fun or satisfying, and the game pretty much helped spawn the "modern game" meme, felt gross after finishing it.
I felt exactly the same way. I only got to Alfheim (with the elf civil war?) before I realised I’d be doing the exact same gameplay cycle for the next 20 hours, and bailed out. The Wikipedia article explains the plot, and I don’t feel like I missed anything.
Automation games, such as Factorio and Satisfactory. Idk man I keep seeing people say they're digital crack, but they're just frustrating busywork sims for me. I'm more content just playing something like Terraria, where I feel like my progress is meaningful
i loved terraria too. especially the base building part of it. you could get super creative with your bases if you wanted. i had a beach base with a lighthouse, ferris wheel & submarine. a jungle base on stilts. a cemetery base with a big skull, a cozy Christmas snow castle base, a cave base with glowing orbs, lava, and a robot, etc
satisfactory took all that to 11 for me. instead of bases it's factories and it's a beautiful hand-crafted 3d world, instead if 2d pixel graphics. i had a lot of fun building so many cool things there. my last play through was 840 hours which seems insane to me.
Same, it just feels too much like I'm at work. It's probably fun if you're a full time streamer because then it is your job.
I sort of feel that way but I still enjoy some of them on the lighter side, but complicated af in other ways. I’m not smart enough for full automation in most of the games I play, because I’d wildly complicated, but I do enjoy very much learning how game mechanics work, so as long as I can go sufficiently far without any automation, or at most very basic automation, I very very slowly add it in many many hours after I’ve gotten sucked into the game. Usually not until several new games have been played, and dramatically fucked up because I can’t manage everything manually.
But stuff where automated base building is the main focus so everything else is kinda slow and painful.. I try to like it but it’s all just too much and also not engaging enough.
You definitely need to be a certain kind of person to enjoy them. I used to be, but not anymore. Now I feel myself getting older and more frustrated with every new recipe I have to automate to get closer to the actually fun parts of the automation games.
I love the automation but holy crap do not make me make 20 steps of 20 different widgets just to make one thing, that is the most frustratingly dull form of making things expensive to craft in any factory game. Just add more expensive materials not 20 unnecessary interstitial crafting steps
Satisfactory I liked (didn't finish yet) but factorio? not for me either.
That's funny, I like Terraria, but I kinda feel the opposite way, because building stuff serves little to no purpose, progress is generally dictated by going to specific places and talking to specific NPCs, killing specific bosses, finding/grinding specific items. It all feels relatively on-rails, whereas in Factorio everything I build has a purpose and no predefined way I have to do, and there are a lot of choices and optional things I can do.
Of course I'm not saying that to dismiss your opinion, just wanted to share my side.
Dyson Sphere Project. It's exactly the type of game I'd love, and I've tried to get into it 3 or 4 times, but it loses me after the first 4 hours or so.
For me it's Don't Starve. It doesn't make any goddamn sense. Early in the game I have to collect rocks and sticks and gold (IIRC) to make a "science machine" (WTF is that?) as a requisite for further crafting. And I found out the hard way that my character has to put flowers on their head to avoid dying from insanity. What were the devs smoking?
Don't starve is pretty hardcore if you don't know what you're doing. I love the game, and i absolutely suck at it. Every now and then you get lucky and the game seems pretty easy. Other times you starve and need food, but you're also insane and can't eat rabbits, and then it's winter and you die.
So... just like I said, doesn't make any goddamn sense.
Your comment makes me wanna go try the game out again. I have zero idea how to play it but, it might be worth another shot now.
A friend and I tried playing Don't Starve Together. We kept dying before progressing very far.
I love survival crafting games but Don't Starve is a bit too punishing for me. I gave it 20 hours of attempts before giving up.
Things can fall apart so fast and so easily and like you said, they just throw you to the wolves to figure it out or die
But it's not a matter of "figuring it out" if there's no logic to the items. I'm supposed to just combine random shit and hope something good happens? Seems pretty disrespectful of my time.
There is a tech tree, you unlock recipes by crafting newer machines or picking up new ingredients. It’s not random and it does make sense
It’s a type of game very similar to Dwarf Fortress: losing is fun. You need to die many times to learn how to manage survival. Learning basic recipes by heart, efficient cooking recipes, threats for a specific time of year etc.
I agree that it’s very punishing. I never made it past winter.
I understand how crafting and tech trees work, and I've played plenty of roguelikes and soulslikes. I'm saying this makes no sense (and I'm sure it's not the only example):
Early in the game I have to collect rocks and sticks and gold (IIRC) to make a "science machine" (WTF is that?) as a requisite for further crafting.
Seriously, where did this BS come from? And how the hell would I know this necessary recipe without looking it up? It's like the devs were like "I guess we need a crafting station. Uhh... throw together some rocks and sticks, whatever".
EDIT: The recipe is apparently shown in-game. But it's still astonishingly stupid that they didn't call it a "workbench" or similar like every other game.
Seriously, where did this BS come from?
The components to build a science machine in Don't Starve don't strike me as much stranger than those to build crafting stations in other games. In my experience, they're often unrealistic.
And how the hell would I know this necessary recipe without looking it up?
Did you miss the fact that the recipe is shown in the build menu?
Did you miss the fact that the recipe is shown in the build menu?
Maybe it is now? I don't believe that was present when I played years ago.
Maybe it is now? I don’t believe that was present when I played years ago.
I think you somehow missed it, mate. Here's a screen shot from the year of its release:
How long did it take you to find this screen shot ?! Good find!
A couple of minutes. I did a search to find a video from the right time, and quickly scanned through it to find a frame showing the science menu.
Fair enough, good find 👍
I could never get into Don’t Starve but Don’t Starve Together is a blast with friends and mods. The game’s old and developed enough at this point that I wouldn’t try to figure anything out on your own. Just look it up. You’re not gonna miss out on the “discovery”. The game is crushingly hard already.
If a wiki is genuinely required, then IMO that's a sign the game probably isn't designed well.
It apparently isn't designed to your tastes, but to say it isn't designed well would be to overlook decades of highly regarded roguelikes. Even Nethack, which is nearly 40 years old and still loved, requires lots of experimentation (and many deaths) to discover how things work.
No, I've played a sufficient number of roguelikes that don't have this level of BS.
I have tried to play Hollow Knight multiple times and I just can’t get into it. I find the art style clashes with the gameplay, it’s difficult for me to tell what is and isn’t a platform to stand on, what will and won’t hurt me. I also just don’t think the Souls-like system really works for me in a side scroller, I had the same issue with Salt and Sanctuary, it just wasn’t how I want to play one of those games.
Monster hunter. You need to hit the monsters like 1000x and they don't even have a health bar. Its like using a mixer: boring and takes long.
LoZ: The wind waker. I thought it would be like that one world in Paper Mario: TOK where you get a fast ship, but instead you get an extremely slow nutshell.
Elden Ring and Dark Souls 3 both bored me to sleep. I didn't find anything in their worlds to care about, and the meta-game of endlessly memorizing monsters' attack patterns just doesn't hold my interest for more than a few minutes. I guess soulslike games are not my cup of tea.
I had this with dark souls 2, even though I enjoyed dark souls 1(remastered)
No Mans Sky. I think my biggest turn off is the interface - its so unintuitive and slow, I just can't seem deal with it. I try it once every big update but that part of it doesn't seem to improve. I haven't tried it in a while.
The UI and every interaction is unnecessarily slow and that really builds up stress, not to mention the many times your aim is pretty fucking clearly centered on a vegetable or box or whatever, but the interact will target a nearby NPC because fuck you.
Learning alien words is one of the worst chores of NMS
The only game that I've refunded after 100 hrs, the breakup stings this one. When you realise it demands so much from your acceptance and tolerance of bad game design, wasted potential and cult-like fanbase. You may as well just do something else meaningful...oh well
I agree, but I would go beyond just "a game I don't like" to a much more controversial "this game is actually terribly designed".
Because of the way it's designed it's possible to randomly end up with a completely awful experience that ruins its "one time" playability for forever. I know this because it's what happened to me. In my very first time out I ended up at like a 70% progression point to the final answer. Not because I'm "smart" or "good" mind you, I just got "lucky". But it's not actually lucky, because it now means 70% of the game is useless to me. It won't help me get closer to the answer and it will (very frustratingly) take me back to where I've already been.
I think most people would counter saying the world itself is interesting/worth exploring on its own. But in one run I didn't at all become engaged with the world itself (which is very reasonable). Certainly not enough to give a fuck about trying to go out and learn about it for its own sake. If it had taken me more runs to actually make progress then maybe I would've become engaged tangentially while working towards my goals. But alas. And FWIW, I did more than one run. I think overall I played the game for 3ish hours before getting fed up with going in circles.
If random chance can render most of your game not worth exploring, that's bad design. Flat out.
I'm really curious how that happened if you don't mind sharing in a spoiler.
Sorry, it's been years and I don't really remember any details. I just picked somewhere that looked interesting found out some info. Then in subsequent runs I opted to head in different directions and they kept revealing information that pointed me back to where I had been the first time.
Am I understanding that you mean certain important locations are not fenced off until you find the clues that lead to such locations? This game is pretty wide open. I certainly went to some "useless" location, but if I remember right, there is one very important location that you may just find "accidentally".
I like the game, but it took some considerable effort to like it, plus a saving bug at the beginning that I had to solve, so I can understand why someone does not like it.
This is what I feared.
I actually got fed up at around 50% and went to see what this supposed amazing final reveal was about and felt horridly overwhelmed by the fact that it was actually one of my guesses.
Obviously never gonna play it again and the devs are blacklisted.
But in one run I didn’t at all become engaged with the world itself (which is very reasonable). Certainly not enough to give a fuck about trying to go out and learn about it for its own sake.
TBH, it sounds to me like you're just not a very curious person.
But in one run I didn’t at all become engaged with the world itself (which is very reasonable). Certainly not enough to give a fuck about trying to go out and learn about it for its own sake.
TBH, it sounds to me like you're just not a very curious person.
TBH, it sounds to me like you're just not a very intelligent person.
I only gave it one try when it came on game pass and I dropped it pretty quick. I wanted to go back to it after seeing how hyped everyone got but now I'd have to buy it and I'm just not ready for that kind of commitment
I agree on this
Rainworld. I've started it twice now and quit a half-hour in both times. I love a good side scroller/Metroidvania, but this one has one mechanic I can't abide: a time limit. You have to rush from shelter to shelter because the world periodically floods and annihilates everything out in the open. I just want to explore at my own pace game, thank you.
I think there's a remix setting that lets you turn it off completely
Well, now I have to worry I'm not getting the proper experience. Ha!
I'm going to say yes, but if you just can't enjoy the "proper" experience, but you enjoy it with the slight "cheat", then that could be better than not playing.
Worth noting is that the time it takes to start raining varies, food respawns, creatures move around. If you can't make it to the next shelter and die, you restart the cycle in the same way - but if you grab enough food to hibernate and go back to the same shelter, you might find it easier to progress on the next cycle.
Hmm. I'm just about done with Dave the Diver, maybe I'll give it a shot next.
Baldur's gate 3, the combat was frustrating and the dice rolls popping up in the middle of any skill check were annoying. I'm sure there are others but that's the one I can think of right now.
I really really wanted to get into this one but there were just too many story threads going on at once and I had fomo analysis paralysis about all of them
I just decided to go with whatever direction I take the game. No save scumming, just go with it. Forgot something? Fuck it, let's move on. There may have been a more interesting way of solving something? Fuck it, let's move on. This mindset was liberating and rewarding as hell!
I tried that my first time through and somehow bugged the game so that I could not actually complete the third act. I was so pissed off I haven't played it in years
Yeah, the game is frustrating and hard. I preferred their other game Divinity 2 significantly more.
RDR 2
I think I’m like 4-5 hours in and so far I’ve slogged through snow really slowly with some fucking assholes I just want to shove down a mountain.
When does it get good? Do I ever see the sun?
You should be close to freedom. The intro to that game drags a bit, for sure. If you stick with it, one thing I'll recommend is - take your time. The story tends to compartmentalize, kind of like the intro, so you can be better off ignoring it in favor of just faffing about (which is the best part of the game, imo).
I agree that the first 5 hours are kind of meh but it gets amazing once the world opens up
No idea why they started with all that linear mess. I persevered and it got much better. Very impressive and detailed open world once they unleash you.
Even though I liked it I find it to be the game that huffs it's own farts the most. Cowboy simulator
Yep. Don't know what it is but the game is just so annoying sometimes for no reason. And under the hood it's just the same gameplay loop as games like GTA. Go here, kill people. Go there, protect this guy. etc.
The Witcher Series
I just can't get into playing Geralt. I've tried getting into 2 multiple times, but just don't feel it.
Eve Online. I've played it 3 or 4 times over the years. It's such a good concept, but the interface is SO TERRIBLE. I am logistics gamer (factorio, satisfactory) and the player driven economy is SUPERB. However, doing the supply side is like pulling teeth. I cannot establish good, efficient production chains. I realize that it's a spaceship game about shooting other people. I'm not the target audience, but they seem to indicate that they need people like me, then don't support our playstyle.
Outer Wilds. I just couldn't get into it, kept playing first hour over a few times, couldn't progress, gave up. I know it's very highly recommended and I'll probably give it another try someday - but I'll have to force myself, it just didn't grab me.
Same. I wanted to explore cuz the environments were cool, but I can't handle games where progress gets reset on a timer. Makes everything feel rushed. Kills the exploration for me.
You're approaching the game from the wrong angle. Progression doesn't reset because there's no mechanical progression. The only way to make progress is to uncover more of the story so you know where you should be looking in the next loop, or how to get around an obstacle. It's a metroidvania of information.
That's exactly it though, progress isn't reset on the timer! The only progress that matters is what you've learned. If you've already figured out how everything works, you could start a new save, and finish the game on your first cycle.
I spent several days there, but didn't find story or characters engaging. Aesthetics and visual design didn't touch me as well. And knda same feeling I get from Blue Prince. The game feels very cool on intellectual level, but there's not enough emotional engagement
Well it sounds like you're not that into this sort of abstract puzzle game. That's fine, to each their own.
It's interesting, perhaps it's something about my personality, but I find that often I'm looking to escape from any sort of emotional engagement, so the last thing I want are deep characters. But interesting puzzles, a complex system with a definite solution, that's my jam.
I played a game once called Firewatch, a truly beautiful walking simulator style game with a whole lot of story and dialogue. As the story went on your character is building a relationship with a coworker, and at some point she starts to confess about being involved in something truly tragic, like no joke it got heavy as hell. And despite mostly enjoying the game up to that point, I just couldn't go any further. It was like, it's a walking simulator, I can't "lose" this game... but still, this feels too hard to play.
Side note, if these puzzle games aren't for you, probably skip Return of the Obra Dinn, also Tunic
Yeah, i remember that Fiewatch game. Didn't play, but watching it was so exciting. The perfect game for me is the one that makes you cry. And the genre doesn't matter. I love Disco Elysium, Dark Souls series, Hollow Knight dilogy, Celeste for many emotional moments they brought. And I felt like cracking a puzle in Blue Prince and unlocking a whole new area is less rewarding than just a dialogue from the game I like.
And yeah, i already tried Tunic, and actually dropped it, so you are right
Huh, it's been a long time since my playthrough, but I feel like the game was very "emotionally engaging", what with the struggles of all the characters, both the Hearthians you can talk to and the Nomai whose writing you get to read. I found the story really moving, and the nonlinear way it's told and the way it's weaved with the progression to be amazing.
It's one of the games where you have to stick with it for a bit before the story really grips you.
Cyberpunk 2077.
I don't care much for the story and it gets too much into the way of me trying to enjoy the world.
Also I despise that Silverhand guy.
Ugh, yeah silverhand is painfully annoying. I absolutely dislike the trinkets in this game. Collect garbage simulator. I also often heard how the city felt truly alive. I never really got that feeling. Yeah it's nice looking at all, but there are always the same 4 people at the same place talking nonsense to each other.
Oh man, I love all of it so much! I thought Silverhand was a riot the whole time. And I thought the whole "I'm dying and I need a fix right fuckin' now!" plot line just fit the world really well.
But you know, just cause I dug it, doesn't mean anyone else has to.
I loved the game. Hated Silverhand as well. In the original TTRPG Rockstars were a class of their own, but that was 1990 and it barely made sense at the time.
PvP in any context. I find going against other players very stressful, and even when I'm winning, I know I just made the day of other players a little bit worse, and that just sours the experience.
Call of Duty. Any of them. The campaigns are capable and fun, and I've enjoyed the ones I've played, but the online sucks so hard to me.
I first tried when they first came out, but the internet wasnt fast enough for the "who shot first quick fire twitch shooter". I would be on a bridge then teleport to like 5 different places in a second, then the killcam shows me that actually I was just walking into a wall while XxProSnip3zzxX shot me in the back. Wow I sure suck at this game.
Tried again a few iterations later and my first 5 games in a row the game had already started and my team was already caught in a spawn trap. We'd just be respawning into a firing line getting mowed down the instant we spawn. 0k 15d.
Finally got a real game going and I was just getting completely murdered by people who've never stopped playing and understand the maps perfectly and gun you down before you can even react to their presence.
I tried the battle royale one and it was really exciting for about 15 minutes. Ive got one life, im surrounded by death, i can hear fire going in all directions. Then i never see anyone. I run from likely location to likely location and theres nobody. Its just me. I start shooting in the air "come and get me, lets fight". Nothing. I see a tall building and think if I can get to the roof I can see where people are. I go inside the building. Im dead now. There was a guy perched on the lip on the inside of the door, waiting this whole fucking time just in case somebody walked in like I did. He's teabagging me now and punching my corpse. Such fun.
Gran Turismo 7 was the worst offender I've had in a long time. It was very pretty and very well put together but it just wasnt fun.
But a few years later and a YT rabbit hole or two and I decided to give it a go on a very basic simrig setup and... yep, theres the fun.
Oddly enough I found GT7 far far too hand-holdy. There is absolutely no way to pick the wrong vehicle for a race.
The non PP limited races are a joke, IMO those should have the payout linked to the PP of the car. You take a 450 into a 550 race, double payout. Take a 650 in, half payout. Also maybe dont call it PP because it makes talking about it sound like a dick joke.
IMO if you turn the difficulty up to hard and turn all the drivers aids off its plenty challenging for people new to sim racing, I see how veterans might find it a bit simple.
If I recall correctly, I turned off all the driving assist aside anti-lock brakes and still breezed through... simply because they don't let you buy the wrong car for a race. It felt like the game lost an entire aspect to it. The restaurant menu or whatever system it was only let you buy exactly the cars it took to win the next race, with everything else locked.
Back in one of the previous GTs (4?) I accidentally bought a Prius as a starting vehicle. It was, in theory, everything you'd need for a beginner car... but yikes was it bad. And I quickly learned about sunk cost fallacy trying to upgrade it. I made a similar grievous error in GT2 buying a Daihatsu Mira as my beginning car during a second run. I was targeting the K Cup and didn't think beyond those requirements. So I was stuck with something like 78hp going into the Clubman Cup, which didn't work at all.
Another mistake was buying a Chevy Nova (or maybe Camaro?) in GT6 for the legacy races, only to find out the heavy weight and rear-wheel drive made it impossibly difficult to turn without losing traction and having the tires kicking out from underneath. It was even too heavy to compete in a basic FR race. There was no fixing it. My driving style was too aggressive and I had to choose another vehicle.
All of those errors were learning moments that I brought forward in choosing my future cars. Learning what was in my budget, what upgrades I targeted first, and adapting when I got it wrong... all of that seemed gone in GT7. I don't even remember money being a consideration.
It's possible that I could have unlocked more of the "game" when I finished those tutorial-esque menus, but I had rather boot up the older games and just jump into a Sunday Cup with a fresh Silvia Q.
Ok yeah I feel you, I do miss that to a degree.
Some of the single player is still pretty challenging until you figure out how to cheese the AI. Running race hard tyres and a super lean fuel map so that I'm 2 seconds a lap slower than the fastest car but dont have to take 45 seconds to pit in a 10 lap race.
In all honesty single player GT7 is pretty much a training ground and sandbox for going online for real races. Which is fine if thats what you're there for but would probably piss you off if you werent.
Money does become a limiting factor once you start trying to complete the car collection menus or make sure you always have the meta car for the daily races.
I had fun in the online races, especially in VR.
Sonic Mania. For a game where you're supposed to go fast, it's terribly frustrating when you slug through each level because you don't know them well enough to fly through them. I feel like this game is more about memorizing maps and less about having quick reactions.
Yeah I feel this way about Sonic in general. You get punished for going fast in a game that markets itself on going fast.
I really, really tried to like Ancestors: The Humankind Oddysee.
Playing as an ape, swinging from trees, eating fruits and mating. It was a lot of fun.
But there are mandatory mechanics that drag it down. You have to discover everything to progress, and you have to bring your kids and tribe along manually. The cost of failing in combat is too high. You can grind for two hours to learn your area, and then lose your best ape and 2 kids to a panther with one second of quicktime events that you haven't trained for.
Building fortifications is very laborious and I couldn't find a good reason for it.
Training the clan to build weapons eluded me.
The exploration was amazing though, and if it was less grindy, more forgiving in combat (especially with more opportunities to practice, I mean, why not allow apes to initiate play fighting with each other where you could master the quicktime bullshit without such high risk) and a more independent tribe behaviour where they advance without having to be led manually, it could be a great game.
Dark Souls 3…it is a bit hard to jump in after its slower predecessor, for some reason unknown, I just like the legacy combat system better, can’t find the rhythm in the new one…
You're not the only one, I love each other sooulsborne but 3 has this weird frenzy about it that I don't really fuck with.
The thing that stood out to me was that a lot of enemies would dash past you or over you, breaking lock on, making the camera more annoying than in other games.
3 had too much of bloodborne into it unfortunately.
For me, it's Elden Ring. I wanted to love the game so bad but it didn't recapture the magic of Dark Souls 1 for me. I never get past the early areas of the game because I just get bored.
Elden Ring just doesn't make the experimenter part of my brain feel good. I want to try out everything and do everything and constantly adjust to the enemies. But, in ER you are much better off focusing on one thing and getting really good at it. The game is about mechanical skill and pattern recognition, not solving the enemy like a puzzle. So, I just get bored doing the same repetitive attacks and learning when to dodge the enemies. Maybe you get to do a little bit of fun planning by picking the right element or buffs but that's about it.
I was actually really sad about it, but I came to realize that I just want to play games that are very mathy and allow me to test out lots of builds and strategies. I've actually taken an interest in JRPGs as a result and I'm enjoying it so far.
Oh man, I totally agree with this. Plus they reuse mini bosses a bunch of times. The open world is a slog. I played 80 hours trying to explore the whole map and beat almost all of the bosses and got so burnt out I haven't picked it up since. Meanwhile I've played DS:R probably 10+ times since.
Magic The Gathering player?
I actually couldn't afford to play it really.
The only format I could really play was Pauper and I had some fun with it for a bit at my LGS. Then I just gave up because I wasn't making any friends at the LGS and I didn't want to keep spending money on it. I guess proxies exist, but I don't have anyone to play with 😢.
I actually really wish I could afford it, I play games like Slay the Spire to get the deck building fix without spending a ton of money.
MtG draft scratched this itch for me for a few years. With a little gaming of the system on Magic Arena, it's definitely possible to play for free or near-free once you get good enough at it, but I was already a veteran Magic player by the time Arena came out, and there are few things with a higher learning curve than draft.
You might like JRPGs with job systems. Metaphor: ReFantazio is a recent one. Final Fantasy Tactics and Bravely Default are a couple of my favorites in this vein.
Skyrim.
I tried it for 25ish hours with around 30 mods, mostly QoL stuff with a few other tweaks thrown in. I don't like 1st person melee combat (and the 3rd person camera sucks), so I went magic. I had a magic overhaul mod, but the best spell I found was just double fireball. Every time I tried other spells, I would think "this kinda works, I guess, or I could just kill them with double fireball." Combat got pretty boring, since every engagement boiled down to double fireball until out of mana, then use bow and arrow until everything was dead.
Side note: I evidently was bitten by a vampire at some point and didn't realize I had turned into one myself until several hours later when I received the message that my vampire powers had been fully realized. I was confused as to why guards kept asking me if I was sick and commenting on how I looked so pale.
When I first played Skyrim it was the "complete" edition with all the DLC. The game starts fun enough, I complete the intro, wander around a bit and find an interesting quest that takes me to a big city.
Immediately two vampires attack me. I know now this is the start of a plot hook for one of the DLCs, but it was so confusing. Suddenly I was forced to do a whole vampire side plot because every time I ignored it more vampires showed up.
I hope DLCs have improved since then because it was a terrible introduction to the game.
Nope. Dlcs being forced unto the player without reason or timing is pretty much the norm.
Fallout 4 is also annoying for this. I always install a mod to disable the dlc quests until i make my way to the quest givers.
The whole souls universe. It''s not difficult it's tedious. I get why people like it, it;'s got great atmosphere and design and ideas. just not for me.
I bounced off of Where The Water Tastes Like Wine. I didn't really even get into the gameplay because the narration in the intro just wouldn't shut up. You'd click an option, the caption would pop up, and then it would mail a request for the audio file to the developer. I'd have the caption read by the time the narrator started to speak, and the narrator talked the way old people fuck. I went "I don't have the patience for this right now, I'll come back to it later" I chose the Exit option from the menu, and the narrator started delivering a multi-line "everyone gets a break but you'll come back" dialog, which I ALT+F4'd out of the software and uninstalled it on the spot. Dim Bulb Games is one of many studios on my black list.
and then it would mail a request for the audio file to the developer.
🤣🤣
Yeah, I couldn't put my finger on it but I think you're right. Real shame because it seemed like the game was going to be right up my alley in terms of its subject matter. But it's just not an enjoyable experience.
I discovered it through its soundtrack. I was listening to West of Loathing's soundtrack on Youtube, which was partially or entirely done by the same artist who did WTWTLW's, so I got recommended some videos, looked up what it was, decided to give it a try, and...maybe if someone implements it for Apple II or some other machine that physically cannot support voice acting so we can dispense with the pretentiousness.
I mean, voice acting in and of itself is not a bad thing. Return of the Obra Dinn had just the right amount, for instance.
Granted, Obra Dinn's pacing problem wasn't about dialog. It was...You find a corpse, click, a musical sting plays, you get a few seconds of audio play, and then you see in glorious monochrome dithering the aftermath, and then you're stuck there for the exact amount of time that some music plays. If you immediately learned something, you can't do anything about it. If you learn a piece of information that puts something you saw earlier in a new context and you want to go back and look at it, you can't do anything about it. If you're not done looking when the music is over, you'll clunkily have to come back in here. And woe betide you if there's another corpse in that scene and you end up doing like five of them in a row.
I've heard that complaint before so you're obviously not alone with your opinion but I personally never had an issue with that mechanic.
It's not so bad when it's your first time through the game and you've never seen any of it before, when you're taking in the scenes for the first time. It's a bigger issue on the second playthrough, which...this game isn't designed for a second playthrough. The fun isn't in the mechanics and it isn't exactly a feast for the eyes (the monochrome dithered retro styling is interesting in full 3D and I understand it was a pain in the dick to get the Unity engine to do that, but it's still a bit...harsh), so most of the fun is learning what happened, and if you've been through it before, well.
Terraria. I've tried 3 different times now and I just can't get into it
There have been a lot of highly praised games that I simply couldn't get on with. The most recent is Kingdom Come: Deliverance. I've picked the thing up three times now and I just find it incredibly boring.
Any Soulslike anything. I have gotten my ass beaten by enemy NPCs in Smash Bros, and I have gotten my ass beaten by enemy players in Battlefield, and I stuck around with both until I got quite good (Smash Bros more than Battlefield, but still).
But Dark Souls, Demon Souls, Elden Ring... I've actually owned all of them and played none of them for more than a few hours at most. I got the furthest with Elden Ring but it's just not fun, it's harder than Smash Bros but about as fun as Ghost of Tsushima combat - which is to say, not very fun.
Oh also, Assassin's Creed: Valhalla or whatever the viking themed one was. I'm not a picky AC player, I loved the originals and I loved Origins and I loved many (though not all) in between those. But the viking one just had the slowest, least satisfying combat in the world. Which sucked since I'm Danish American, can't even live out digital viking fantasies, but pirate fantasies are a decent second I guess.
On the flip side, the Stanley Parable is so good that I haven't finished it because it makes my brain feel like it's tripping but in a disorienting and uncomfortable way. It's so good but I cant handle it for too long.
Honestly? Witcher 3. Heard so much good about it. Started it like 10 times. I hated the combat method. Made me hate the game.
Minecraft and others like it. I want something to work towards. Because in games where you can do anything and make your own fun, is too much after my days.
Try Vintage Story. It’s focused on progression and it takes ages (in a good way) to do anything.
The Witcher series, I just really hate the combat system
Oh, you mean the bits in between Gwent.
It's pretty one note. Put up shield. Roll around. Hit enemy. If shield gone, reapply. Works from the start of the game to the end. Except ghosts because you need to use your magic on showing them to make them vulnerable.
I've got like 30 hours in once and then just couldn't take it anymore. Can't remember what it was I didn't like since it has been quite a few years.
which one? the first had this weird "click on the enemy until they are dead"-system, where i can understand not liking it, but for 2 and 3 they changed to a more traditional combat system.
I'm just now playing the first one and yeah, that's weird. Choose correct weapon and style, Click, timed click. I haven't yet figured out how to use the weapons that don't work with the styles, what even do they do
It helps, when you realize the first one was meant to be played in isometric view, similar to diablo. the 3rd person view feels like an afterthought.
I've always wanted to learn to play rts online like starcraft or aoe2 but I just get beyond stressed out
Cyberpunk 2077. I thought I would enjoy it as much as Witcher 3, nop. But then again, I played it few months after it came out. Heard it got better, so maybe I will try again one-day.
Original Fortnite was garbage lol. Dunno how much its changed since, but I found it to be the worst f2p battle royale game at the time.
The projectile physics were cruddy, the weapons sucked, the building mechanics seemed like an abusable/spammable gimmick more than a proper feature, there weren't any vehicles, the rewards were non existent, the graphics looked pretty lame, the emotes had nothing compared to TF2 taunts.
I had more way more fun on some random Chinese mobile pubg knockoff with touchscreen controls.
Maybe its just me, but I feel like Fortnite just got lucky by being the first on the PC/console space that was free, so it exploded in popularity. Otherwise there were a ton of much better alternatives.
witcher 3. I just don't like the mechanics and the character.
Final Fantasy IX. I was a religious FF player before IX, and loved VIII so much despite all its flaws, because it really went for it with new ideas and atmosphere and the draw junction system which was hackable and broken but really interesting. In many ways the most Final Fantasy of Final Fantasy, despite the widespread hate.
But the devs got so conservative for IX, might as well have been playing Dragon Quest. And the load times and frequency and lack of variety for random encounters was just insurmountably tedious.
XIV is my favourite, none of the others I tried stuck, but I'm pretty sure it's an outlier
Are you me? I have the same exact opinion. I love VII and VIII. VIII is my favorite PS1 FF game and my top Final Fantasy game period. I have no problem going back and forth between VI, VII, VIII, X, XII, hell even XIII sometimes. IX just never clicked for me. I think a large part of it is, it's aesthetically the worst Final Fantasy game for me. The only character designs I like are Vivi and Garnet. The sudo chibi style is a bummer after VIII. I've played the opening scene 100+ times. I never got off disk one because I always lose interest. You're thrown into the Evil Forrest and spend hours there only to go to the Ice Cavern and spend hours there. They're the least interesting dungeons of any FF game back to back. That's when I usually give up.
I'm not a fan of monster hunter and souls games. I've given them try aftet try, but they just don't jive with me. Part of it is the jrpg aesthetic. I was never a final fantasy kid so it just doesn't hit me the way sword and sorcery do. I'm not a get gud player. When a game gets tough, I get weird and I love games that encourage me to do things unexpected instead of hitting me with a stick for not doing the expected. Monster hunter feels very similar on that aspect, I get no satisfaction for perfectly executing a button combo, I get satisfaction from finding an unexpected gear combo.
If they're your game, l love that for you. I like seeing people have fun. I just don't find it there personally.
cyberpunk. looked cool and i wanted to like it, but i find it somehow too meh
Did you play the latest Version?,
People always ask this, as if with all the updates the game isn’t still a buggy, janky, mess lol.
Its working perfectly fine for me.
no i pirated it and the only one with an installer that worked on linux was a few years old
Ok just to let you know. The first versions where horrible. Like there is a completly new skill sytem now. Its like a diffrent game.
Baldurs Gate 3.
I've tried starting it up like 3 or 4 times but I just find the combat to be too slow and difficult. I constantly get my ass handed to me and I just wasn't enjoying the progression. The most recent time I was save scumming but even that wasn't helping me progress quickly enough Tried bumping it down to easy but even that didn't help. In general I just didn't have the patience for it.
I liked the story and the visuals. It's just the combat mechanics were what turned me off.
Rainworld. It just doesn't feel fun to play.
EDIT:
Also any roguelike that isn't Dead Cells. I keep telling myself I like them but the permadeath mechanic is beyond frustrating. Not sure why I've stuck with Dead Cells, maybe it's because you still meaningfully progress between runs.
Dead Cells is a roguelite, due to the permanent upgrades that persist accross runs. A roguelike doesn't have this type of progress. If you like Dead Cells, check out their new game, Windblown!
If you like Dead Cells, check out their new game, Windblown!
Just tried it. I'm not usually one to take a risk on early access games, but the devs have a good track record. It looks good overall from what little I've managed to see. It iterates well on what Dead Cells established.
Same. The game is impressive and I respect it, but it's better when someone else is playing it and not me.
Its fanbase is small but very passionate judging by the content I see on YouTube. Lots of fan theories and lore videos and even fan animations. I forget where I first heard about the game, but it was a video about games that were badly reviewed initially but went on to gain some sort of following. The premise of trying to survive in a world that wasn't made with you in mind really resonates with me, but I can't get into it. The platforming is clunky and the visuals are hard for me to parse.
Same with Roguelikes. To try to tune up their playtime, they always seem to ramp up the difficulty curve to hell and back. I'm okay with games that eventually get hard as you adjust to mechanics, but so many of them just frontload giant walls of difficulty and insisting you need to "find the right abusive build".
I've had the Roguelike tag blocked on Steam, only picked up a few that were able to market themselves past that aspect.
Nier: Automata. The gameplay mechanics were great. The plugin chips for your skills is what I have been wanting in a game since the Megaman Battle Network series. The gameplay mechanics were great as well! They way you were able to use weapons for light and heavy attacks. It was great.
I could NOT get into that story. I beat the the story and discovered that the game continues. Turns out I have play through the story 5 times to get the full understanding of the story.
Hard pass.
I really wanted to like Last Epoch, played for probably 30 hours or so, just didn't feel like it was worth it to continue
Baldur's Gate 3. I dislike turn-based games. I thought I could get over it 'cause I really liked Neverwinter Nights and wanted to recapture that feeling of pulling all-nighters playing NWN back in college. BG3 just didn't hit the same.
Diablo, or Diablo 2, don't remember. Didn't really "get it". It seemed that you just walked around to the next foe, clicked a lot, picked random loot, and repeated endlessly, with nothing much happening. Maybe I missed something...
Nah that was about it. Fun to play on flights. I still play once in a while while a movie is on that isn't that good.
Oh. Ok. Guess it just wasn't for me then.
Can't win them all.
Red dead redemption. Just got really repetitive for me.
Dude I was gonna say balatro too. That game is fucking hard as hell.
I played it for a few days and man, it felt so unfair each time.
Slay the spire felt much more fair. When I failed then, it felt like it was my fault more often than not. In Balatro though, nah man. Shits rigged lol.
Elden Ring, Lords of the Fallen (the new one – I strangely enjoyed the original enough to beat it, but this one just didn't captivate me).
I also left Lies of P near the end, because I found a boss too exhausting to keep trying, and life got in the way at some point. Might pick it up again, eventually? Not too sure.
I played and loved Dark Souls 1 and 2, Bloodborne, Sekiro (particularly Sekiro), so it's not that the genre doesn't interest me. There's just something about the above implementations (and DS3, but I did finish that one) that didn't really captivate me the same way.
Get ready, this one’s sure to ruffle some feathers:
- BioShock
- Oblivion
- Any hero shooter
- R.E.P.O.
- Most overhaul mods for Halo games
Edit: typo Edit 2: I’m adding more based on what other people have said
- Breath of the Wild
- RDR 2
- Super Mario Odyssey
I fully agree with most of your list, except Bioshock. I love Bioshock and think it's a work of art.
Halo overhaul mods are definitely not my vibe, even back on the original PC port. They change too much about the game where they're just making a new game with Halo assets. My only exception to that is InfernoPlus's Cursed Halo which are just fun as hell.
No real opinion on most of these, but I'd like to ask when you played Oblivion? I maintain that its one of my favorite games that absolutely does not hold up
I find the repetitive demon portals boring and the story felt kind of meh. By far my least favourite tes game and I've been around since daggerfall.
But these days I try and stay clear of Bethesda, feels like they've outgrown their suit.
I was introduced to it around 2010 and I thought it looked mid. I then finally tried it in 2012 and it played exactly how I expected it to, which, in my opinion was not very well at all. I like Morrowind and Skyrim, though.
The big reveal in BioShock wasn't that big of a deal. Way over praised.
For me it's any roguelike (or roguelite) I try. I may find the premise of the gameplay interesting, but having to replay the run from the start (while very likely not learning anything new, because I can't repeat the situation that gave me trouble before) ruins it pretty quickly. Even the ones I kinda like (Rabbit And Steel and One Step From Eden) can't keep my attention for long and I end up playing them very rarely.
Metaprogression in roguelites makes it even worse because I know that the runs are gonna be unfair from the start to make the upgrades work.
Grand Theft Auto 4 - wasn’t fun to play, though I keep trying since I want to see where the story goes but get too jaded to make it far.
Fallout New Vegas - not sure why 3 and 4 vibes with me better, but every time I start new Vegas I just feel like I hit a wall before I make it to the strip.
Newer Pokemon games - this one is easy. I like to explore and find Pokemon. Current games are about and focused on battling. So no more puzzles and hidden corners. Pokemon Platinum and Soul Silver was the last game I had no complaints about. Legends Arcus is the last one I played and mostly enjoyed.
Majora’s Mask and Ocarina of Time - again Zelda is an exploration game to me and these 2 are combat focused. The 3DS version of Ocarina of Time was a bit more palatable to me, but I haven’t touched it in years.
Super Metroid. It's supposed to be a classic but I can't stand it. I just hate the way the physics feels so slow. Jumping and left/right acceleration just made the game feel terrible to play.
The Metroid prime series were great though.
Arc Raiders - bought into the hype and it's just looting part of battle royale without the actual gun parts.
Cult of the lamb, maybe I just suck at the game but I felt there was just nowhere near enough time to do anything, just a chore to constantly keeping the cult members happy
Heaven's Vault.
I gave the game multiple tries, because I love the idea of a language puzzle game where you have to figure out the language bit by bit, based on context, environmental clues, and similarities between words. I also like the story and lore I've seen so far, and would like to see more.
But I just can't get past how the gameplay is built. It feels like the game is trying to do multiple things at once and failing at all of them. Every part of the gameplay is slow, with long animations and slow cutscenes everywhere.
While playing you get dialogue opportunities with your robot, but taking them means you need to either stop what you're doing or risk missing things, or even interrupt them through an arbitrarily placed cutscene/dialogue trigger. And if you don't take them, you don't know what you'll miss.
Traveling between locations in your ship looks fun, but it's also slow, while also having dialogues happen during it. It also has the option to have your robot take over steering, skipping the navigation sending you to your destination... An option that shows up according to the developers' whims, so you don't know how long it might take to show up.
On my last playthrough I decided to try using a mod, I think it was called RuinVault, which speeds up animations and dialogue, lets you skip navigation immediately, and even has a button to straight up speed up time - and what killed that playthrough was when I was leaving a location and my character went "Hmmm, I think I have some of my translations wrong", and straight up forced me to pick a different option for some of my translations. It made me realize the game is basically forcing me to get the puzzles done "on time", instead of letting me actually figure them out. I thought I was playing a puzzle game, but if the game decides you're having trouble with a puzzle, it slowly forces you into the correct solution?
In the meanwhile Chants of Sennaar came out, and while it seemed simplistic compared to Heaven's Vault's language, it also felt like an actual puzzle that the game let me solve, and it could still tell a story through both environments and the text I had to translate.
I reckon I might just need to find a playthrough video to watch because playing the damn game is just endlessly frustrating.
Ark raiders. It was fun first, dropping randomly and going into abandoned buildings to loot stuff and watch out for any machines but after I played the next mission with friends, I died, lost my whole equipment (I was happy for having a nice weapon with some mods), I realized that you lose everything when you die. The other players just immediately shooting at us the next mission didn't help at all. Never touched the game again and uninstalled it right afterwards.
It's just too frustrating. The items I loot can also be collected from a chicken in the base so there's no need to play the game at all.
Dishonored. I was excited because of the reviews, but couldn't vibe with it. I found it ugly, thought the world was uninteresting, and the forced stealth mechanics are frustrating and unfun to me.
Metal Gear Solid and Kojima games in general. I think it’s a Kojima trait to make his games feel more like work than fun.
I managed to get into Death Stranding (on my second attempt) and came to understand the vibe. But I have little interest in delving into the sequel until I’m a retired old man looking for some purpose to life.
I am very interested in what he does with movies, though.
Death Stranding. Felt like controlling a drunk Uber Eats pizza delivery guy with a bottled foetus. Can't see the point.
That's kind of part of the point. That's how the game starts out, but as you build up infrastructure (literally with the help of other human players that you'll never actually interact with, thank god), traveling gets faster and easier. Until you're driving delivery trucks down massive highways, and traveling over mountains on zip-line networks.
And that progress parallels the story in some ways.
Alright, if you promise me highways and zip lines I'll give it another shot.
It does take a bit of time to get to that point, and the game is a little frustrating for a while. Which, it sounds weird to say but it's true: is kind of intentional and parallels the story. I get why people might not like that.
Quick tip if you do play: the game doesn't really tell you how OP the "press both triggers to steady yourself" move is if you start tipping over left or right. The screen might tell you to hit RT if you start leaning left, but sometimes it's easier to just hold down both triggers for a second. You can do it while moving too (at least in DS2, been years since I played 1).
Also, play the Definitive Edition if you can.
I honestly loved the game. The asynchronous online stuff hit my dopamine receptors in just the right way. Still haven't finished the second one though.
Thanks, I'll give it another try.
Lmao
Black Myth: Wukong
I wanna like it. I just can’t get into it.
Farthest Frontier. I love city building games. That's my genre of choice. Farthest Frontier is pretty but not much else. The underlying engine is jank at best. The numbers the game spits out at you don't make any sense. I really think it's doing incorrect math sometimes. The game stops throwing citizens at you around 50 pop. It'll grind all progression to a halt for 20 minutes then drip feed you new citizens. All this while you're sitting in a town begging for workers with 10 free houses. It's incredibly slow to the point where you end up doing nothing just waiting for the game to catch up. I can handle that if the underlying systems make sense(see Ostriv), but they don't. Everybody praised Farthest Frontier in early access then on launch as if it was the second coming of Banished. I've had nothing but a frustrating time with it.
Terraria. Hate me.
I am not the fan of looking up guides and other info out of the game, and I also kiiiinda suck in full sandbox due to, generally, not being good at setting my own targets.
Like give me some final task and I am happy to work towards it, but with no target whatsoever I am kinda lost.
However, last I played Terraria was decade ago so stuff may have changed. xD
Well, hollow knight. It should be great for me.
But the whole signaling of the world and characters doesn't work for me. So I am constantly poking in the dark and not really having fun feeling incapable of even finding where I should be going.
Lol, I feel you with Balatro. Played on and off for the past year and reached a 6/8 at most. It's fine for a quick short run every now and then but i do not get the obsession with it.
For me one is Ghost of Tsushima. Must've started it like five times before finally deciding I just don't dig katana fights.
Another is Baldur's Gate 3. I rally want to like it and it does look like a properly polished game, but man I hate the DnD dice roll mechanic with a passion.
-
Every JRPG with random battles. All of them. Chrono Trigger. Final Fantasy. Phantasy Star.
-
PvEvP Extraction games. I tried Arc Raiders during the closed alpha. I tried Dark and Darker. I tried Dungeon Stalkers. I tried Sea of Thieves. I tried The Cycle. None of them were fun to me.
-
MMORPGs. I really want to like this, but I hate how they fall feel like a theme park. Elder Scrolls Online Morrowind is the one I played the most, and being a fan of Morrowind,it was disappointing. I feel like I am waiting in a line for a ride whenever I am around other players doing an activity. I hate to say it, but Destiny 1 was the best feeling MMORPG I played because I didnt feel like I was waiting in a line due to other players. The zoning between solo and shared areas felt the best I guess.
Chrono Trigger doesn't have any random battles? I remember liking it more for that reason.
I think in the pixel remasters for Final Fantasy 1-6 you can disable random battles but then you have to play on easy.
Hm I kind of don't understand your MMORPG experience. I have never played eso so I can't comment on that but for example gw2 has basically none of these problems. I can understand for example in FFXIV when you play dps and quene for specific dungeons or raids alone that waiting doesn't feel nice but at the same time you can do other activities while waiting. If you play a healer or support this problem is normally mute
Guilty Gear -STRIVE-
Played it and played it. There was just so much loading time. Loading to get to the main menu, loading between matches. I never even bothered going online. I beat it with all the characters. Then beat it again with a few without losing a round.
No joy. Sold it and got the Street Fighter 30th Anniversary Collection instead.
You spend far less time loading on an SSD, if you've upgraded since then. And it admittedly has a poor PvE experience even compared to its contemporaries.
I sold the version I had. It was the Switch version, so load times were to be expected.
For what it's worth, on a platform with the proper horsepower, I'd say the PvP experience makes it one of the best fighting games ever made, but if the single player content is important to you, you're better off sticking with Street Fighter 6, the last 6 games out of NetherRealm Studios (Mortal Kombat and Injustice), or Tekken 8. Definitely do not play Mortal Kombat on Switch.
Yeah I loved SF6 and I'm tempted to get a recent MK entry even they are iffy on Switch because they go on sale all the time.
I can totally understand that Strive is a great game. Everyone who played it with me loved it. Once the match started it was a joy. Anyway, maybe someday I'll get a beefier console or start using my computer for gaming.
Oblivion Remaster: I loved Skyrim, but this game felt not as fun as Skyrim to me. Not sure what it was. Maybe it's just nostalgia for Skyrim and I don't have the patience for those kinds of games anymore.
Hollow Knight: The platforming always felt clunky and the constantly having to Google shit to figure out where I'm supposed to go next without spending 4 hours backtracking turned me off. I much prefer the Ori games to Hollow Knight.
XCOM 2. I love enemy unknown/enemy within, but bounced right off 2. There were so many little details that just made me quit after about an hour. In comparison, I've run through the other dozens of times.
Teardown
Some levels just feel like a grind
I did not like the timers
Half life and HL2
It wasn't all that fun to me, and gave me motion sickness. It didn't get into either of them
TW3, Elden Ring, WD2, BG1, PoE( I hate real-time with pause with a burning passion), slay the spired (hated the RNG and just the combat system in general), Dishonored (the world makes me too sad to play), Monster Hunter series (combat too slow, hard, and uninteresting + too much farm and micro optimisation), Hollow Knight (had it refunded, looks like I don’t like Metroidvanias), Cuphead, KCD (wdym I can’t save scum 😭), Nier Automata (same reason as dishonored), Terraria, Daggerfall, Fallout 3 (started playing after NV), no man’s sky (hated the planet generation and ambiance), FFVII ( got stuck in a “what do I do now ?” moment), MGSV (amazing game, truly, but I hate the skulls)
I however loved Balatro
Some of the above were added after being reminded by other commenters
Red dead redemption 2. I really just can't ever get into Rockstar games, I hate the controls, they really just feel bad, so much that it makes it unplayable to me. Having watched a playthrough, I can kind of understand the hype behind it, but haven't found any enjoyment in it myself.
Breath of the Wild. I just don’t see the hype. The weapon durability system really turned me off from the game.
Long games, campaigns or story.
Just let me crank out a couple of games, please. I will never become "invested" in your story, I don't care for it one bit. It's like some people enjoy movies, but not series. Same for me. I just don't like it
Most open world games I can't seem to get past a few hours. I've started RDR 2 about 4 times now, Watch Dogs/Assassins Creed games probably more than that and even stuff like Forza Horizon (I love FH1 though) is part of that too.
No matter what I try, I never even get to the end of the campaign in PoE, or PoE2 for that matter. I just get bored.
Witcher 3
The combat isnt very good compared to… souls games.
For starters, Skyrim. I genuinely wanted to like it since the PS3 era, but it just wasn't my kind of RPG.
Assassin's Creed: Black Flag. I loved the first AC games, but there was something about AC:BF that just made me dislike the series from this game on. I just couldn't get into it. After a few missions, I turned it off and never went back to it.
Doom 2016. Idk why it's not my vibe. Eternal is much more accessible I guess is the word I would use to describe my experience. It's difficult for me to care about Mars but Earth? It's pretty badass fighting there because you know logically the humans don't deserve what the demons have done to them.
My experience is the opposite. I found Doom Eternal too platformy. Super Mario Galaxy from hell. 2016 wasn't masterpiece, but it was fun enough for a playthrough.
I prefer 2016 over Eternal. Better story. Better levels. Better atmosphere. The gunplay and arena battles in Eternal were great and would get my adrenaline pumping, but it felt like the game was basically made for those battles and didn't have any other substance.
I prefered Hellsinger over both of them. Shorter and got my ass kicked constantly, but liked the game mechanics more.
I've played more hours of Doom and Doom II (plus lots of mods) than I care to admit. None of the recent versions grab me like the originals. They are simple and fun, can be hard and devious.
Doom 3 is to dark with horror and jumpscares. Not fun. Doom 2016 forces you to melee and glory kill. I'd like to choose how I play. Not fun.
As a huge survival horror fan i have tried getting into Alan wake 3 times over the course of 10 years and i just can't. Game just feels janky and the enemies and game mechanics feel more annoying than scary.
Deponia just has such an unlikeable protagonist, that I bounced off, even though I'm a fan of point & click adventures.
Reus is too complex and grindy. I liked the premise, but in practice it wasn't fun to play.
Sims 3 I kept returning to every few years, but each time I quickly got bored of the daily life management gameplay. I like to experience stories other people wrote, not come up with my own.
FNAF. So much hype and it was just screamers, and frustration. Each part after got worse, except 4 was kind of...the plush minigame is ok, and the lore. Basically, it's just an interesting story with completely shit games attached.
Hunt: Showdown
The teams just hide around the objective and wait for the timer to countdown. Anyone that goes in first to kill the monster just gets picked off by the camping teams. Then as the timer approaches zero the remaining camping teams just all have to engage in what's essentially team deathmatch. It's the same every round. It's super boring.
Cairn. It's the least enjoyable part of new Zelda games, on repeat.