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 >:( "
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!
not just an online game problem for quite a few years now
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
And a single round takes so long! I don’t know how people have fun with these.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I just got done with Subnautica. Man, either I just had shit luck, or that game does NOT respect your time. It’s infuriating to me when I know exactly what I need to do to progress, but I’m blocked by not being able to find a single damn rock out in a giant ocean. I dug the story, but man I was glad to be done with it.
I enjoyed some parts of it, but I’m the same way. I was often scouting the world for that one piece of that one vehicle option so I could continue playing the actual game. Ended up spending as much time reading online guides and maps as actually playing.
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.
Destiny 2! The game is total trash. The combat is so fucking boring, its just nothing but bullet sponge bosses with simple ass mechanics.
I know that lots of people love it but man I do not understand lol
I’ve played Destiny 2 religiously throughout Warmind up to Shadowkeep, but after giving it some thought, I feel like I agree with you. Most of the fun I’ve had in that game was because I played it with my friends. We were happy messing around and shooting at each other’s backsides and maybe occasionally getting something done in the scarce 3-player content there was, kind of like a glorified hangout space, but if I had to play it by myself? I don’t know, chief. I do love the feel of the guns and the lore (up to a certain point), but I wouldn’t call the game itself a good time.
That may have been my problem, playing solo that is.
This should be in unpopular opinion lol. For me it is control. The combat feel tiring after 2 to 3 hours and the story didn’t caught on for me.
Control first hours were boring for me too, but end up got fun once they started throwing in more abilities like being able to jump into the air and do a ground slam. I wish they had introduced abilities a lot sooner, since beginning where it just telekinesis and shooting got repetitive fast.
Same here! Lame story and the combat felt terrible.
How is the story lame? It’s one of the most original stories I’ve ever seen in a videogame.
If you’ve never watched Warehouse 13 or read the SCP website, I guess.
I liked the gameplay for Control but the story never caught on for me either.
Interesting. I agree that the gameplay was meh, but the story and universe it takes place in really intrigued me. I was sucked in from the moment the checkpoint at the front of the building had a sign that said “no rubber ducks”. The dead letters dept had a lot of entertaining reading imo.
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 main grip with this game is how slow ans cranky everything feels. I miss the arcade feel of RDR1.
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‘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 have created and make a game that is actually good. But that is never going to happen.
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
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.
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.
That’s a very common complaint for the last, hell I don’t even know, 20 games or whatever.
I do agree that it’s the same thing recycled over and over.
If anyone does want to play them again, I highly recommend emulating them and accelerating the emulation to 2.5 or 3x speed. Makes it much more tolerable.
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 :(
I finished Fallout New Vegas but never really enjoyed my time with it. Was a boring open world with emotionless NPCs and a forgettable storyline. Tried Fallout 76 recently and it was still the same type of thing. I played the hell out of Skyrim though and loved it the whole time. Maybe I just don’t like an apocalyptic open world? People always seem to love Fallout but it’s just not for me.
Same everyone raves about new vegas but I enjoyed my time with fallout 3 much more (I don’t even want to talk about the number of hours I have on Skyrim…)
They have very different approaches to designing worlds. Fallout 3 and 4 have much more tangential and almost self contained wackiness going on that can be tonally all over the place, and FNV tends to be built all in support of a single tone and while it has wacky elements a bit more grounded.
Different approaches. What this means for me is that while I find the Fallout 4 main quest incredibly poorly written, I can largely ignore it because there are so many unrelated tangent stories that I do like a lot, and locations to explore in a kind of themepark of a game world. Whereas FNV doesn’t quite have that themepark level of variety as it is building a world that’s trying to be immersive in support of the main story.
I want to love Skyrim so much. I own it I’ve tried a bunch of mods I’ve played it probably 5 or 10 hours. I just eventually wander off looking at something neat the distance get lost, end up getting stuck in the terrain somewhere, get bored and find something else to do.
this is probably mine, too. i really, really wanted to like it… don’t know why it never clicked with me, but part of me suspects it’s the general aesthetic. i just feel like that whole “medieval” open world look is so overdone. maybe i’m expecting too much.
There’s one opinion that I’ve been afraid to say out loud forever because people are so passionate about it… Disco Elysium. I love rpgs and I love choice-based, narrative-driven games. But there were two main things which drove me crazy:
- I really didn’t like the writing. Honestly it felt like some fresh English lit major suddenly discovered big words and angst and went crazy with it. It was really cringy to me.
- I didn’t like the false paradigm of choices in terms of world views and beliefs, when the game very clearly sets them all up to suck. With a strong preference for communism. Like when you try to be measured and moderate the game actively negs you for being weak. Why give me the choice when you’re just going to punish me for it? And what if I have some anti-capitalist beliefs but don’t want to kill the landlords? It was just so extreme and off-putting.
I’m with you on this one. I got moderately stuck at one point pretty early on in the game (I’m not sure, but I think my save was probably bugged). Anyway, I put the game down and never touched it again. Didn’t feel like I had lost anything at all.
I’ve had a hard time finishing the game because of #2. DE is such a weird blend of “the devs thought of everything” and “all conversations are railroaded into insanity”. What at first felt like a game allowing the player to explore and develop political views in an alternate universe is actually more of a hamfisted, cynical parody of all possible idealogies. I think the moment I got South Park vibes (not from the writing, but from the " everyone is stupid " vibe) is when I was doomed to never finish it. That said, I actually love so much about the game, I want to enjoy and finish it. I just find it so tiring.
I agree. People were raving about this game and it was just a complete miss with me.
For one thing it was marketed as an RPG but really it felt more like some kind of point and click adventure which wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing but the writing style just didn’t click with me anyways. And, yeah, a lot of the choices in the game are just false anyways. After a few different starts experimenting with the different choices you just get railroaded into the same thing no matter what.
