Breath of the wild. I loved Zelda games up until then, and everything after is so fucking boring. I don’t get it.
Same. I love LoZ, but I cannot for the life of me get into BoTW. The weapon breakage is infuriating and overall it’s just kind of… boring.
It feels cozy and comforting to me
Weapon degradation seems to be a serious and genuine complaint that a lot of people have with BotW and TotK but for some reason it never seemed to bother me as it has others. I totally understand the criticism but frankly I always had a full stock of good quality weapons - particularly with the Fuse function in TotK - and never ran low or out of decent weapons on hand.
I think they were implemented to try to force gamers to think about other options to take down enemies rather than brute-forcing every battle which appeals to me, but it seems to have angered a significant proportion of people. From my perspective, it helps to engender the puzzler aspect of Zelda games in a novel way - viewing battles as a puzzle to be solved for maximum efficiency rather than how well you can strike and dodge.
The problem is that I don’t want to use different weapons. Some people play Monster Hunter with a bunch of different weapons depending on the hunt, but I don’t, and the game respects that. In a game like BotW I don’t want to use my cool thing because then it will go away and I’ll be sad.
I think some previous Zelda entries did a much better job at making bosses feel like puzzles, particularly Link Between Worlds. In BotW you can just eat a feast and mash buttons.
That happened to me with halo infinite.
Lol yeah halo is meant to be scripted, choreographed action sequences - not final mission just banshee past everything happening on the ground.
I would have expected someone to say with Halo 4 rather than Infinite.
BotW and TotK are such weird games to me
They built these big beautiful worlds, and designed some really cool mechanics
And just kind of did nothing with them.
TotK was a bit better, but still fell pretty short.
Also it’s so weird that TotK is clearly a direct sequel to BotW, but there’s almost no actual continuity between the games. There’s a handful of characters that are missing without much of an explanation, and other characters from the previous game act as if you’ve never met them before. I get that for gameplay reasons you kind of have to start things over from square one in some ways, but it just felt weird.
And the weapon degradation never really felt fun to me. I feel like at the very least once you get the master sword and recharge it to its full power or whatever you should have that as an option that just doesn’t wear down, even if other weapons that do break might be better suited for the task.
And having to go out and farm a thousand different fish and master parts and whatever else to upgrade your armor is just bullshit.
The world felt very empty to me. Hyrule is a very old kingdom, so there should at least be some throwback to the older games like ruins, a history lesson, or something, but the game lore is a void. Not to mention the lack of villages, or even just mention where the people, or if they all died then show that. It’s just empty. Like nothing ever existed. Any ruins you do see has no tieback to anything outside of that game.
Welcome!
This is what I felt like when Ocarina came out on the 64.
The cycle repeats
We had OoT then Majora’s mask.
Then what came after those two masterpieces was the cartoony Wind Waker and Legend of Zelda was never the same afterwards.
Wind waker is my favorite of the series. To each their own
Blasphemy
I’ve always thought that BotW was a good game, but a terrible Zelda game.
My brother tried so hard to get me into it. I was all, “Where are the dungeons?”
Assassin’s Creed
Firewatch. I liked the visual style but everyone raved about the writing specifically and I thought it wasn’t great. I don’t want to shit on them too hard because they did try, and you can’t control how other people hype your work, but I found the characters really flat.
I found the characters pretty flat as well. Neat atmosphere, though. I’m not really into that type of game so it was something new and interesting to me.
I also finally made the time to play it at a rough time in my life, and oh boy, let me tell you, your personal circumstances at the time of playing have a huge effect on how the game makes you feel if you give in to it. I actually found it pretty helpful, tbh. It helped me process some shit because it gave me the opening to think about some stuff I was kind of ignoring, even though I thought I’d processed it.
anyways yeah that’s how I found myself crying half drunk in my basement alone playing a video game
still. the writing was meh. it was neat, but it was meh, and honestly, the mehness is kind of part of it. it’s not some big crazy thing. it’s just some average people doing average people things, nothing special about them, and it allowed me to think about my own stuff instead of the characters’ stuff.
I appreciate it for its atmosphere and art style, but yeah the characters and the plot a are quite meh.
Control. It felt like being lost in an office building. Dull.
I don’t care about the story, but when I played it when it was free on PS Plus, the gameplay is bad to me as I constantly get lost in the building. The protagonist has superpower but in the game it really doesn’t feel like so. I can throw stuff at enemies, then what? There is a fight where in the beginning I fight two or three enemies with guns, and it sucked because I don’t know where they are when I’m hiding behind cover. And taking two or three shots I’m dead. It’s a shitty FPS game in disguise of a Sci-Fi action game.
FPS? You must be thinking of a different game.
Any game in the Halo series.
Criminal!
Anything Bethesda. I can never play more than a couple hours before I get bored.
They have a bit of a “if you’ve played one you’ve played them all” problem
I think most are carried by their modding communities at this point which can be so involved they fundamentally change every aspect of the game.
There’s definitely some nostalgia glasses.
And I dunno where you started, but I’ve been playing BGS since Oblivion, and couldn’t even get through an hour of Starfield. It played like a upscaled Xbox 360 game, with all the jank, yet none of the charm, more filler, all the loading screens, yet somehow ran like molasses. I have no idea what folks see in that game, despite the premise basically being made for me.
it’s oblivion in space.
Oblivion’s side quests (and into) had charm though. Especially the Shivering Isles, that was great.
Undertale. I tried playing it a few weeks ago, but the controls are clunky and the story isn’t really entertaining. It was just boring and annoying.
I couldn’t stand it either, and I grew up with NES/SNES JRPGs and thought it would be right up my alley but for whatever reason the humor didn’t reach me in the slightest and I couldn’t be bothered to finish it.
More recently I tried Afterplace which also has a meta theme but the gameplay is more like a simplified Zelda and I really loved the writing.
I think the game’s good side doesn’t really show until you beat it. And with the context that moral choice game systems were a trend and up to this point extremely shallow (infamous series, army of two etc).
I couldn’t get into it either though to be honest, but I enjoyed reading about the lore and the games it inspired.
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All contemporary multiplayer FPS games. I went through a phase where I had 5-digit frag counts on Quake more from time spent than talent, and I got tired of it, but people just pour ENDLESS hours into multiplayer FPSes…
Multiplayer co-op FPSes, on the other hand, are freaking fantastic. There’s a reason why my friend group gaming rotation is primarily composed of Deep Rock Galactic, Left 4 Dead 2, and Vermintide / Darktide.
Sadly a lot of popular indie games, I really like a game where I can feel like I’m living another life in it, get to be someone else for a while, and that just isn’t a thing in most indie games because of the limited scope that comes with a small development team. There’s games like MotorTown or Stardew Valley, that have what I’m looking for, but those are unfortunately rare so I often have to turn to AAA games and damn it’s hard finding a good one of those.
I literally want to claw my eyes out because of how popular indie rogue-likes are. And that people can argue with a straight face that these are not just as good, but preferred to a big budget game, will forever baffle me. I get that everyone has their own tastes … But it feels like they are taking the piss.
The crafting survival indie games have been good to me for that. Subnautica, zomboid, Ark, rimworld, my dino survival simulators. I have a hard time finding AAA games that do that outside of Red Dead Redemption.
I don’t know about the other games but it feels kinda disingenuous to plump Ark and Subnautica in the same category as small team indie games.
If you like survival games, may I introduce you to Stalker G.A.M.M.A?
Elden Ring. It’s like they just glued inconsistent creature ideas next to each other. Every couple of hundred ingame meters you come across a different biome with different creatures that appear nowhere else and has a boss that visually and equipment-wise completely out of place. It feels like fighting your way through dozens of puzzle-pieces forced next to each other without any explanation why. You have to try to make your own story as to why things are the way they are and any criticism of the game is shot down by the worst stereotypes of gamers.
I legitimately feel like ER is one of FromSoft’s weakest titles. It doesn’t come close to the DS trilogy for me, and unironically I feel like Nightreign is a better game in the same vein, as the faster paced sandbox works far better for the fast, clusterfuck bosses ER is known for.
Elden Ring will always be pretty special to me, but as far as being FUN, it’s not in the same league as Nightreign.
I thought that was just the point of the game? that it’s a fighting game with some minor open world aspect to it between “levels”
honestly I know fuck all look about dark souls and the videos of gameplay that I see give me this impression
Balatro. It becomes a spreadsheet sim very quickly, in my opinion. I think part of the reason Binding of Isaac and Hades feel much more timeless to me is that every run has this sort of intuitive randomness vs this just full rng you have to counter with math. Balatro feels solved, and while I guess you could count Hades max heat run as “solving” the game, the replayability of it feels much higher because builds feels more dynamic than “make number go up faster”.
Some people like spreadsheet sims.
For me, the most boring aspect of Balatro is the first couple blinds. Holy shit am I tired of “you MUST play a flush or straight.”
Try plasma, it upends the whole formula.
Thank you, this really describes my feelings towards that game well. The first few runs were great with experimenting and stuff but then you try for higher stakes and quickly fall into the optimal strat flow where it’s kinda boring unless you get ridiculous runs but i don’t wanna wade through meh to get that one god run that’s actually fun.
All games are spreadsheets if you look hard enough
It’s not breaking the illusion that’s the tricky part.
Players will optimize the fun out of any game if given the chance
Interesting that you say hades has that intuitive randomness, one of my biggest complaints for hades 1 is that you can basically force whatever run you want every single run. It felt like a roguelike for people who hate roguelikes. Isaac otoh I totally agree, its my most played game by far really love it.
I agree with the person that said you can spreadsheet-ify any game really, and in that way I know how you feel with Hades. I’ve been playing on a relatively young save lately before digging into Hades 2 and it’s been very refreshing not having all the trinkets and rerolls to really get exactly the build I want. Though even then I feel like there will always be some deviation from your plan, but you’re still given tools to tune your build to what you wanted, and you can still overcome the rng with skill expression. With Balatro I often felt I was just loosing a run because I didn’t get a necessary card or something that felt much more out of my control.
Totally agree with Isaac showing this the best. I’ve got friends that have thousands of hours in that game and still come across combos and interactions between items they haven’t found before.
Not that quickly that you dont get your money’s worth though. Balatro is a good mobile game honestly, for a quick run when you have time to kill, but I wouldnt find myself sat at my PC playing it.
Agreed. I didnt get into it until I played on the phone.
That quickly, I can’t with this utilitarian consumerist take, like, you didn’t buy a game, you bought a minimum specified undetermined quantum of enjoyment. It’s so sterile. It’s like saying, yeah the first part of the movie was great, but then it turned to shit, so you got your money’s worth of enjoyment points so you’re overall on plus. Sorry for sounding harsh, it’s a pet peeve of mine, I don’t like to consider games some sort of staple commodity to wring out enjoyment stats out of and then discard, it’s more to the experience than that. It’s like watching half a painting, you get some enjoyment out of it, not all of it, but halfway there, so that makes it worth it.
I don’t think so.
You determine your own worth of something. But thats literally what paying for something or a service is. Balatro is worth its price to me, I can play it for hours now, not touch it an play it for hours in a year, two, whatever. Someone made a nice game, I buy it and play it, it’s about as simple as capitalism gets in games.
Not everything has to have infinite value forever, I will get bored of a game and will never play it again, does that mean I should have never bought it and enjoyed the experience it gave me??? Am I missing your point here or is that just a wild take?
You don’t, entirely, and saying that is like saying “well love is just biochemistry. It’s all just molecules interacting.”
And yeah. That’s ONE way of seeing it, a very materialistic and wholly insufficient and even trite way of looking at it devoid of human soul and the actualities of living that experience.
It’s basically a resignation to what capitalism is trying to sell you- units of something, you become a statistic, it’s not the enjoyment of the food, it’s about a sterile transaction between patron and chef, where you get so and so filled to such and such a degree, and that has some specific arbitrary value in money.
It’s just such a consumer zombie way of perceiving the world, I just can’t.
I’d like to live in that idealistic world you have in your head, but we don’t live in that, humans are selfish by nature, so we have capitalism. Doesn’t mean we cannot control it, keep it fair. One person makes a cool piece of art? Sure, I’ll pay them. You are looking far too deep into it, I’m sorry. You’re going to stress yourself out.
No, capitalism is selfish by nature, it makes and promotes people to be selfish. People are genetically altruistic and cooperative. Things, and ownership, and selfishness, is what makes society bad.
You are looking far too shallow into it, and you will stay a slave to that paradigm.
How do you think we ended up with capitalism
Outer Wilds.
I have played it multiple times and it has never hooked me. I keep meaning to go back, but I don’t know if I will
Have you played it?
Yes, though I doubt enough to fully understand the appeal. I think I may just hate vehicle controls in any game ever made.
Oh vehicle controls are definitely a valid issue to have with the game. They are pretty well designed for controller use. However well designed is not the same as saying they are easy to use. True 6 degrees of freedom controls between orbits are definitely complex.
Sad to have that blocking enjoying the story or more accurately solar system spanning puzzle box.
I found the story intriguing, but the time loop is way too short. Every time it gets interesting, the world resets, you have to get back into the rocketship and fly back to the place you’ve been before. It’s an absolutely unneccessary padding mechanic.
I agree! The time loop was okay when I was just exploring more or less aimlessly but it got super stressful when I started finding leads I wanted to follow…
Any of the Five Nights games, fortnite, roblox, and basically any sports game that isn’t something like Skate 1-3.
Everyone loved Journey but I returned it after just under two hours.
Isn’t the whole game around 1.5 hours long in total? oO so you returned the game after you finished it?
I didn’t finish it but I have no clue how close to the end I got. I didn’t realize it was that short. Either way I did not enjoy it at all even though the internet raved about how good it was.
I enjoyed Journey and I don’t mean to cast it in a bad light, but I think a lot of it is about the ‘era’ its from.
It released when there really wasn’t a lot of indie games on the consoles and most people really only played games from the AAA lineup. So for many players it was a unique high quality ‘indiefied’ experience that didn’t rely on classic tutorials, voice acting, or whatever.
If you had played nontraditional storytelling games from that time or played Journey much later, it may not have the same impact.
That’s an interesting perspective. I think I tried it last year so quite a long time after it was released.
I think it came up in a discussion of “what games can you only play once?” and I had just finished Outer Wilds which was also on that list so I was excited to find something to fill the Outer Wilds hole in my heart but Journey wasn’t it unfortunately.
Balatro.
After I finished the first run, I was like “cool, now the number I need to beat is higher. So what?”. Which is strange, because I love deck builders, I like beating higher numbers like e.g. Brotato. But for some reason I could not be bothered with Balatro ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Hmm… In my opinion you can’t really compare Balatro and Brotato. You’re right, both games are about making numbers big but the way, they scratch that itch is completely different in my opinion.
Of course the gameplay loops are different and when you’re more into the action oriented approach of Brotato, Balatro just might not be for you, but that’s not my point: In my opinion in Brotato you build your character and when everything goes right you reach a point where you begin to scale and roll and become pretty much unstoppable for the rest of the run. In Balatro you have more RNG caused variance in the main gameplay loop so you might have a rounds where you barely win and rounds where you draw just the right cards and destroy the Blind.
For me, a Brotato run feels kinda more “linear” while a Balatro run has more ups and downs even when going well.
