recent: tears of the kingdom, or as i like to call it botw 1.2, its the same thing all over again just with one or two added gimicks, the open world is dead, npcs are boring and nintendo just got away with it like that
not so recent: i cant stand persona 5, joker and his entourage are annoying teenagers, the time management is a horrible gameplay addition and the artstyle is just a visual overstimulation
with that being said,~~ plz dont kill me~~
I’ll probably get roasted for this but… Pokemon. It just seems like endless copy/paste and might be one of the laziest game franchises I’ve ever seen. I’ve really tried to get into them. I was there when the Pokemon cartoon started, I saw it rise to the phenomenon it is today, but damn if it isn’t the most boring grindfest ever.
I got sick of Hades. Everything that happened in the house before and after runs was great, it was just I shame I had to repeatedly slog through a run for half an hour to get new conversations. I came to the conclusion that roguelikes probably aren’t for me.
This will be an extremely hot take for some: Almost all recent online games are complete garbage that solely exist to make profit and create addicted user bases and they hurt what videogames truly are, a revolutionary and interactive form of art.
Potentially worded a bit abrasively but…kinda yeah. They rely so heavily on fomo, gacha, and other skinner box tricks to keep you playing other than FUN. Just remember what happened to Titanfall 2: "ohhh it was SO FUN it just didn’t have the events and grinding and stuff I wanted >:( "
How dare they keep the chores out of my fun videogame. Now how am I going to press my dopamine button?!? Huh?!? Think it’s just gonna happen cause I grapple 180 no scoped a guy with a kraber???
I need checklists! Grind! If the game isn’t a part time job I can’t even conceptualize it being fun!
Didn’t see anyone else mention it, so I’ll say MMOs. Pretty much all of them. WoW, FFXIV, Guild Wars 2, Star Wars one (can’t remember the name). I really like the idea of MMOs, having a huge shared world that feels alive, tons of lore, epic quests, but I just find the gameplay loop so boring. They just feel like endless busywork to me.
The content and world in MMOs feels superficial. I much prefer a tightly constructed narrative with deep, meaningful character development. The Last Of Us is a great example of this.
This may just be old man nostalgia talking, but at least part of that spark feels like its gone because the genre became too popular and information flowed too freely.
One of the things I distinctly remember about older MMOs, especially Pre-WoW ones, is how so much information was basically just passed on from player to player. You’d join a guild, because the guild forums are where you could post maps and strategies and the like. But your guild forums were also mostly just private to you, so useful stuff could take a long time to leak out.
With the rise of wikis and big, well connected social communities, a lot of the exploration element of the games is just theme park rides and the mechanical experimentation gets analyzed to death in the first few days because of how collaborative everyone is instead of everyone being stuck in smaller groups with non-perfect info.
Any game that has daily login bonuses or a bonus for playing every day. Animal crossing pocket or whatever it is. Pokémon go. A bunch of afk phone games. A bunch of gacha games. It just feels so shallow to me. Like, I’m not being manipulated to play something, I just end up feeling so guilty to lose a streak I’d rather delete the game.
While not a daily login bonus, the weekly and monthly tasklist of Forza Horizon 5 killed the game for me. It triggered some sort of fomo and I would rush in every week to grind the new tasks/events. That burned me out very fast, so I could not enjoy the rest of the game.
For me Skyrim, The Witcher 3, botw and all souls games.
Skyrim never clicked, it just felt buggy and empty and punishing. Trying to climb that mountain just so a yeti can beat you up? Great, here is your save spot form 15 min earlyer, please try again. I know that’s why it’s fun for so many, I just hated it.
The Witcher 3 was too… much dialogue. Most of the time I can play 1-3 hours every couple of days. And in the Witcher you walk 15min through beautiful but otherwise empty forest, killing 1-15 something, walk back and talk like another 15min with the guy who gave you the quest. It’s really deep worldbuilding, but when you don’t have a lot of time it’s more “damn, what happend last?” 5min walking “ah, that happened” takes new quest, so much talking…“ah damn, my hour is gone, so I finish the quest another time.” PC off.
Botw cause the world felt empty and everything broke in an instant and I’m the player ending with 50 healing potions, 10 big scrolls and so on cause MaYbE I’ll need it another time. Doesn’t match with botw. TotK is so much better handling this, cause you can craft any good item in an instant.
And Souls Games are just a broken mess. They’re not hard by default, they’re hard cause of all the buggy and mushy controls. It never feels crisp, it’s just a big blob and maybe your character rolls or maybe it feels like an invisible wall, who knows. Games like Jedi Fallen Order in hard mode or Hollow Knight were so much more fun, cause the controls were crisp and everytime I lost, it was because of me. I did wrong and not some squishi spaghetti code.
It’s funny, your description of Souls games echoes how I feel about 3rd person action games that aren’t made by FromSoft. To me, Dark Souls 1 felt like the crisp combat I had been wanting but never getting from stuff like God of War or the older Monster Hunter games. Bloodborne refined it somewhat, and to this day, that style of 3rd person combat is my favorite.
Crazy how perceptions of a game’s controls are so individual. Our difference really illustrates to me how hard it is to nail a game’s “feel.”
It definitely is! I have a lot of friends who love the souls games and tried to convince me to give it a try over and over again. And one of them speaks about the controls like you do. It was an interesting evening figuring out how different our views of other games were. That’s why I love the variety of games. You can never have a game everybody likes or even feels the same for everyone. And that’s also why I love threads like these, cause even though it seems like everyone likes X or Y, every game will be disliked by someone.
@Mandy
1)Any competitive online multiplayer game.
2)FPS games.
3)Any game with subscriptions or unlimited microtransactions.Monster Hunter. I don’t understand any of it. I tried rise and generations and I just… I just don’t get it.
Terraria - I just don’t understand what you’re meant to do or why it’s interesting.
I actually really like TOTK though, it’s a big improvement over BOTW with a slightly more alive world and the vehicle creation stuff is fun.
Idk if I’m just dumb or something but I have tried to play terraria on 5+ separate occasions and the controls and UI just DON’T make sense to me. Like how to craft?! How to equip? How to do stuff? It was just so confusing. I tried on mobile and steam deck. I even looked up the controls online and mapped it out. It just never clicked for me. I felt like an 80 year old using a smartphone for the first time.
DOTA, or any MOBA. I’m an old-school RTS fan and for whatever reason these games slide off me like water off a duck’s back, despite being told multiple times from different folks that I’d probably like them.
I wouldn’t say I hate Witcher 3 but it didn’t engage me at all because of the “everything sucks” aura it gives. There’s nothing really nice to look forward to or that makes the fight against the Big Bad worth it. However, now that I’m writing this, maybe that was intended and I should get back to the game with the mentality of a jaded mercenary only doing it for money, as I believe the Witchers are supposed to be.
As a fan I think that sounds like a good way to view it. That said, I found surprising moments of beauty all the time, maybe because they stand out more?
For me it’s the GTA games since San Andreas and Red Dead Redemption 2.
I still try GTA V and RDR2 once in a while as I love the worlds in those games. But they always feel grindy really fast and just don’t manage to hold my attention. A shame, as RDR2 looks gorgeous and I love the western setting, but the gameplay just doesn’t connect with me.
Also doesn’t help that each time I want to try picking GTA V or RDR2 up again I end up starting from scratch as I have no idea what the control scheme was. Another thing that just doesn’t resonate with me I guess. Perhaps it’s better with a controller, but as an avid mouse & keyboard guy all my attempts to use one ended with utter frustration.
For me, GTA has always been like “I can play the story and get a car as a reward, or I can just steal a car”. So I always start to steal my way up, until the cops become too powerful. Then it turns into a senseless shootout and once I’m dead, the game is done for me.
It’s fun for an hour or so, and that’s that then.
Hollow Knight. On the exploration side I didn’t like the way the map works. On the combat side it just felt… weird? Like, it’s not really clunky, but I just couldn’t vibe with it. Beautiful game though, "100 and something. "-percented it just for the aesthetic. But I will probably never replay it; wasn’t worth the time I spent with it.
When you take about the way the map works do you mean needing the charm to see your location and buying the maps, or is it all the back tracking?
Buying the maps and using the charm for position. I found the idea neat in concept but annoying in practice.
I totally get it, there were times where I was a little frustrated looking for where to buy the map. But overall I liked it. Needing to use the charm for position was annoying. It was kinda pointless and made you need to menu a lot more just to swap stuff.
Removed by mod
That’s funny, I was thinking of finally picking up Cyberpunk since I’m winding down on tears of the kingdom. I’ll still give it a shot but if it’s like Witcher 3 I don’t think I will enjoy it.
I didn’t pay a lot of the Witcher 3, but I completed cyberpunk. They are very different games. It has a slight rpg system where tire character levels up and get new abilities. But it’s its own thing.
