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.
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 >:( "
Red Dead Redemption 2. Everyone goes on about how awesome it is, but I just found the story and gameplay really slow and dull.
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.
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.
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 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.
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.
I think this CAN work if you naturally enjoy the game, but don’t want to make decisions about your game plan when you boot up.
I like Deep Rock Galactic. When given 15 mission options, I get choice paralysis, so it’s nice to have dailies/assignments that at least push me into a particular one just to get started.
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.
it doesnt just feel like copy paste, thats quite literally what they are doing, there is plenty of evidence online to show that they do but hey, if you can make whatever low effort thing you want and people still buy it why bother trying?
There’s no problem with copy/paste, games do that all the time (look at portal, most of that game is reused half life 2 assets). I think the problem is that they’re just not doing anything interesting with the games. If the games were good it shouldn’t matter if the Pikachu model is reused or made from scratch.
That’s a very common complaint for the last, hell I don’t even know, 20 games or whatever.
The pokemon fan games have been way more inventive than the mainline games for a while now. I just recently have been getting into pokemon infinite fusion and it’s FANTASTIC
I so badly want to play infinite fusion but I cant seem to get it to work, it crashes everywhere I’ve tried to play :(
Every game after Black and White is copy paste garbage, but everything before that is pretty damn good.
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.
Monster Hunter. It’s just so painfully slow and boring. Combat just feels clunky.
I recently tried to play MH: World and bounced so hard. They really need to consider how to ease new players to the genre into the game. The first hour included so much exposition, paragraphs of text, and detailed menu tutorials before I really had any context for why anything is important. I know that the games have always been this way, but it felt lazy.
Got through all of that to play with a friend cuz we played the beta together and thought it would be promising
We were so disappointed we spent less time playing together than we did 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.
Oh. World is a bit faster compared to old school MH. But if you ever want to give the series another try, Rise is faster and flashier.
In general I recommend trying the games with a friend or a guide. The games themselves are not good at helping players “get” them.
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
I guess I’ll take the hit for this one. Dark Souls.
The combat can be really fun and I had a great time fighting the bosses but the slow, careful crawl between boss fights is just so dull to me that it’s not worth it.
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.
Souls games.
I like difficult games but I just don’t enjoy the gameplay of Souls games. They feel sluggish and repetitive.
Please give sekiro a try if you ever get a chance. It’s like dark souls but for people like us that want good fun gameplay instead of constant bs :D
Have you tried Nioh/Wolong? While I really like the Souls games for the exploration and world design I much prefer the faster and more complex combat of the Nioh games.
I love Nioh, great game! Haven’t tried Wolong yet.
Same for me. I enjoy the Nioh games, but don’t like the Dark soul games
I tried Nioh, I think last I remember I came up against a boss that could instantly kill me in a single attack, at the end of a gauntlet of enemies. It wasn’t even that far into the game, so I just dropped it since it was clearly the exact kind of bullshit difficulty that Dark Souls is known for.
I played Elden Ring for 2 hours and then refunded it. I don’t like that combat style at all.
Finally scored a PS5 a month ago and bought elden ring with it. Same tbh. I am okay with the idea of patterns and reading telegraphed fights but it just feels awkward.
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.
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.
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)
Honestly, Animal Crossing (new & old). What’s sad is it really is a fun game if you have a good attention span and no depression. I have a hard time keeping basic routines so logging into a game regularly was really challenging for me. By the time I’m reminded of the game it’d be weeks or months since I touched it. In the old game this meant everything you worked on has been undone and you have roaches. The newer one is better about overgrowing weeds and I haven’t got roaches yet, but the neighbors notice your disappearance and have some things to say about it. Last time I logged on one of the characters was so personally slighted by my disappearance I just logged out after the conversation. I haven’t logged on since. When I can keep up with it, it’s fun and cute. When I can’t I’m made to feel guilty for hurting the feelings of an unsympathetic AI. At least my friends in real life understand depression and it’s ability to steal my motivation. I do miss Sherb tho.
