recent: tears of the kingdom, or as i like to call it botw 1.2, its the same thing all over again just with one or two added gimicks, the open world is dead, npcs are boring and nintendo just got away with it like that
not so recent: i cant stand persona 5, joker and his entourage are annoying teenagers, the time management is a horrible gameplay addition and the artstyle is just a visual overstimulation
with that being said,~~ plz dont kill me~~
This will be an extremely hot take for some: Almost all recent online games are complete garbage that solely exist to make profit and create addicted user bases and they hurt what videogames truly are, a revolutionary and interactive form of art.
This is why I can basically only play old games or indies. Games shouldn’t feel like work or require me to pay tons of money. I play games to have fun, which I guess is a radical idea now.
games shouldn’t feel like work
Oh, boy. Let me tell you about Eve Online, aka, Excel Spreadsheet Simulator. You would LOVE that game! lol
I also mainly just post old games and indies, too. Modern games for the most part are pretty garbage due to the way they are designed to take all your money.
I have liked a lot of indies lately as well, but there have been a ton of good AAA games recently, for me at least. Elden Ring, TotK, Star Wars Jedi Survivor, Hogwarts Legacy, God of War Ragnarok, to name a few.
That is fair, besides the star wars one, I am generally interested. i think at the moment, I am most interested in elden ring. I’ll have to see how it runs on my hardware. I guess it will run well enough.
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 >:( "
not just an online game problem for quite a few years now
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.
Red Dead Redemption 2. Everyone goes on about how awesome it is, but I just found the story and gameplay really slow and dull.
RDR2 suffers heavily from the same problem as GTAV’s single player mode: it’s a movie posing as a video game and both aspects suffer for it.
RDR2 would have been great if it was just the part where you wander around tracking critters and collecting flowers and playing cowboy dress-up, but the game really doesn’t want you to do that. Not to belabor the point, but between how unpredictable the connection between “interact with item/character X” and “start mission with character Y” can be and the game’s tendency to fail missions the second you go off-script, RDR2 often felt like it was directed by someone who actively resented the concept of player agency.
You articulated my issue with it perfectly. In theory it was this amazing open world with tons of player freedom, but the minute you engage with the actual story at all you have no choice in anything. There was one quest where I HAD to rescue Micah and kill a butt load of people which really annoyed me given I was going for a white hat run.
There‘s this great video essay that basically agrees with you. Rockstar want to create these cinematic narrative experiences but that does not mash well with their concept of an open world.
My friends love it, but two hours in, I just feel worn.
Then I just drop it and never look back.
Can’t get it to stick.
Rockstar has been moving that way in general for years. They get so focused on the immersive and sim stuff, they forget that they made their name on over-the-top chaotic fun. Everything from GTA4 onward suffers for it, other than RDR1 that struck a decent balance between the approaches.
I was really enjoying it, but I eventually got bogged down in the sidequests, and it really could’ve used a low-gore mode. The bloody deer carcasses got to me after a while.
I think I might have preferred it if it were a little smaller and more focused on the main storylines.
I do intend to go back to it sooner or later though.
My main grip with this game is how slow ans cranky everything feels. I miss the arcade feel of RDR1.
Same here. It was so frustrating trying to play it.
Here’s a pretty awesome looking intricate and interesting world. No, you can go over there. Or there. Or do that
I‘m with you. I don‘t get why so many people praise the story and the gameplay.
The mission design is very disappointing. You have this beautiful open world with so many systems that you can interact with. It can be fun to just start some shit and watch the chaos unfold. But the second you start a mission, everything is scripted and like on rails. You have no real freedom whatsoever in how you want approach a mission. The missions are also not challenging in the least (apart from some jank here and there). It‘s mostly just one turkey shoot after another.
Story spoilers
The story is not all that great. It‘s just not believable that anyone sane would stick so long with a gang leader who does not make a single good decision and clearly goes more and more off the deep end. It is also too long and overstays its welcome by tens of hours. Especially the whole Guarma chapter is hot garbage and would not have been missed at all if it weren‘t there.
I made it through to the end. I had to see for myself where they are going with the story. But I was kind of glad when it was over.
I wish another studio could license the world that Rockstar created and make a game that is actually good. But that is never going to happen.
I still mostly enjoyed it, but I do agree that it’s way overhyped. The game has a ton of great and fun moments, but it also has so much filler that causes the sense of progression to really grind to a halt.
It’s a game that IMO would have benefited from leaving some parts on the cutting room floor, but otherwise it’s not a bad game.
Honestly, Stardew Valley for me. I’ve tried it a couple times and it just didn’t work for me. I wanted to like it, and I like the idea of it, but in practice, I hated the time management aspect and not being able to just run around and do as much as I wanted in a day (I haven’t played on PC with mods; I know there’s at least one or two that let you change that). I also hated the fishing. 🙃
As someone who loves stardew (I have 1000+ hours in it) I can see what you mean. I hope you’ll find mods you like, but maybe it’s just better to try other games like sun haven? Never played it myself but I read it eliminates exactly this time managing thing stardew has. And yeah, the fishing is hard. I heard “The fishing in Stardew is the souls-like in farming Minigames” a lot and I think it’s true.
The game is kind of a chore at first when you have to manually water your crops. Once you’re more established and have sprinklers you can really put a lot of the farming on autopilot.
I can see why the time mechanic is there but I agree it can be a negative point to the game. You’re not the first person I see complaining about this.
I liked the game enough but needing to get a rare fish that can only be fished at certain season, certain time period and only when raining to complete quests was annoying, as was needing to get out of the dungeon while I was having a good run because of time. It would have been better if there were alternative means to get the fish, like buying from the fisherman, and the option to camp in the dungeon.
I actually feel like Harvest Moon was more chill and relaxing. Stardew Valley stressed me out because I felt like if I didn’t manage my time properly I was doing it wrong which felt weird given the game’s message about leaving the demanding stressful work life of the city behind.
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.
I still can’t make it through any of The Witcher games. Smooth and satisfying gameplay is super important for me to enjoy a game, and The Witcher has always felt slow, clunky, unintuitive, and super menu-heavy. I’m sure the story is great! But I just can’t get past its gameplay.
Same here. I really want to like The Witcher 3, but after trying to play it for 10 hours without feeling any enjoyment, I just gave up.
I adore Witcher 3. That said I’ve always said controlling Geralt feels like driving a boat. God help you for the very few instances that you do platforming.
They added a different control style sometimes after release, didn’t they? I can’t recall the specific difference, but I think I used it for my playthroughs and it was less boat-y.
I’m playing mainly western RPG’s like that, but I also couldn’t get into The Witcher. The gameplay is fine actually (I played way more clunky games with lots of enjoyment). But somehow Gerald just never clicked with me, causing me never to feel really connected to my character and to what’s happening.
It’s sad because I can notice how good the games are, but I just really cannot get into it.
I tried to play Witcher 3 and the combination of strange camera angles and very “tradional rpg” style icons put me off (the later is a really sad thing to be bugged by but whatever)
However, I now have a PS5 and i believe the PS5 update has huge improvements including to camera angles etc, so I may give it another go.
It took me 3 attempts at starting The Witcher before I eventually got through it. I had just came off of Dark Souls 3 combat, so the combat in Witcher was especially clunky feeling. Eventually I moved into a new home, had nothing else to do, and proceeded to do nothing but play the game for 50 hours until I beat the game lol. I would say the story is worth it, but I agree that its kinda tough to get into.
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.
Didn’t play Skyrim at the time and the two times I’ve tried to get into It didn’t really click for me. I understand why people like It, mayo give another try sometime
Monster Hunter. It’s just so painfully slow and boring. Combat just feels clunky.
I recently tried to play MH: Rise and bounced so hard. They really need to consider how to ease new players to the genre into the game. The first hour included so much exposition, paragraphs of text, and detailed menu tutorials before I really had any context for why anything is important. I know that the games have always been this way, but it felt lazy.
I forget which monster Hunter game I played, but I dropped it before the tutorial/ into ended. I just want to pay a game, but read a book of history and how-to.
Got through all of that to play with a friend cuz we played the beta together and thought it would be promising
We were so disappointed we spent less time playing together than we did on the initial text/cutscenes.
I feel like World unintentionally offered a better experience with the Defender set. I guess it was brought in to help people “fast forward” to Iceborne content. But I was appreciating it even just for playing through the main game. I would use Defender weapons, with no Defender armor, dealing far more damage than I should have at that point in the game, and monsters still took a good 15 minutes; about as long as I would ever want a fight like that to take without getting seriously bored.
If I ever return to try Rise, I’m a bit worried that it will feel grueling.
Out of curiosity, which one(s) did you try?
MH World was the first and only one I’ve tried.
The Witcher 3.
It just feels so generic and suffers from one of the things I hate the most about rpgs. Endless sidequests that have nothing to do with the main quest.
Don’t hate me but I cannot get into Minecraft. I get so bored running around collecting supplies and building things, it feels like a chore each and every time I try it out.
For me botw was that game. I didn’t like the gameplay and many aspects of the game design. In contrast, I’m enjoying totk a lot more. It improved on a few aspects I didn’t like and the gameplay feels closer to what I want in a Zelda game. Overall I’d still prefer them to go in a different direction with the series though.
But in general, I’m not a fan of a lot of currently popular elements. I don’t need big, open worlds with a lot to do, that just gives me FOMO. I don’t want to build and manage stuff, and make a lot of decisions in my adventure game, I just want a good story and fun traversal and combat. And I don’t need 50+h of gameplay, I don’t have that much time and I usually start burning out after the 20h mark anyway.
honestly most competitive multiplayer games tbh like league (stretching the definition of everyone loves I know). I just have a hard time learning the game when I feel like I’m dragging the team down
I love competitive MP, but I totally know what you mean. CS:GO is what I play with my friends and bottom fragging just stresses me out. Gimme old school Quake duals or duos, or 1v1 fighting games and I’m happy even when I’m losing.
Any MOBA really, particularly League of Legends. A number of my friends played these obsessively, but I could just never get into it. I’ve sat in on quite a few Discord calls with people playing this game and I gotta say, not once did anyone ever sound like they were having fun. I’m not sure what it is, but it just seems like the genre attracts toxicity like no other, especially when playing with strangers. On the occasions I tried them myself, the gameplay just wasn’t engaging enough for me to want to put in the tremendous amount of time necessary to become somewhat decent at the game.
Yeah I could never get into MOBAs either. Weird thing is I thought my issue was with the control scheme and how abilities are assigned to number keys, but I picked up Diablo IV and I’ve gotta say I don’t mind it at all. Maybe its an implementation thing since Diablo is a very different type of game, but overall I agree with this. Also gives me overwatch vibes because everyone picks based off what their enemy team picks and get mald when your team isn’t 100% efficient. Not for me personally
And a single round takes so long! I don’t know how people have fun with these.
Honestly I kind of like the long matches, but it definitely negatively affects how often I play. For Dota especially it feels like if I’m going to queue I have to be prepared for an hour long game, and while I don’t necessarily have a problem with that, I’m not always feeling it.
Hots was great in this regard, matches would usually end within 20ish minutes. I really miss the golden days of that game, had tons of fun with it.
Borderlands: I mean the combat is fine and all, but the story is super weak. What is my incentive to keep playing? Just to click on more heads? There are better games for that (Doom, Quake, etc)
