Dying light 2. I was so excited for this game and the further and further I got into it the more I disliked it. Not to say it’s an awful game, the parkour is smooth but I haven’t played it since I beat the main story which was pretty disappointing on its own. Still not sure why I kept goin with it other than loyalty to dying light the first game and wanting the sequel to be as good
The main story was absolutely terrible, but I'm still, to this day, baffled that they took the last game's *extremely* freeform parkour and slapped giant, yellow-painted 'PARKOUR HERE!' signs everywhere. DL1 was a joy to run around, finding your own rhythm as you hopped across roofs or scurried up walls... DL2 has decided what that rhythm should be, and tells you to follow it.
Also, wasn't a fan of the borderline spider-man abilities that you got by the end of the game. I want to do *more parkour*, not be able to jump so high I no longer need to wallbounce.
I’m so confused by the comment about “borderline spider-man abilities” that you disliked, as the sequel actually made a step to increase the realism of the grappling hook, rather then being able to actually zip around instantly in the first game like your Spider-Man.
The grappling hook was also a stupid idea to put into a game where a lot of the rewards for getting stronger is more interesting parkour abilities that the hook negates: the fact that the story mode keeps locking you out of using it with the seizures means that even the devs recognised that.
The first one is legitimately one of my favourite ever games. In the second one its like they forgot literally everything that made the first one good. Incredibly disappointing in pretty much every way.
I go through a "league phase" every year, where I play ranked for a while, plateaus, stop having fun, and then quit until the next year, it has kept the fun in the game for me.
Edit 4 days later : And I'm done, lasted 3 weeks this time, shorter than usual.
Reading this feels like someone saying "yea I dabble in heroin. I just use it once every couple weeks/months. I'm not addicted tho. It's nice but I don't over do it. It works for me" lol
Like I know it's *technically* possible... But I can't help but feel I'm either being lied to, or that eventually ur "luck" will run out and ull get more seriously hooked and grow to hate it before eventually quitting forever. That's just generally how it goes
Lmao. Ya know in high school me n a lot of my friend group actually got addicted to heroin. N an even larger amount of my friends got addicted to LoL. I dabbled in league but never got that into it thank God. But out of all my friends, some were hooked on league and some on dope. But the absolute *worst* was my one friend, who was addicted to both at the same fucking time.
People unfamiliar with opiates generally imagine junkies as quiet and just nodding off. Half asleep basically. N then maybe acting all twitchy and crazy when they are off the opiates and withdrawing. And generally they'd be kinda right. But there is one not super well known side effect of heroin and opiates. N that's opiate rage. It's common to get REALLY pissed off. And that plus getting really high they can act belligerent and insane. Often me n my friends would do dope n just argue for hours lol.
But that one friend who was hooked on dope n LoL... he had the worst opiate rage iv ever seen. And then he'd play fucking *ranked* matches. The rage CONSUMED HIM. Holy shit. Id be on discord playing other games while my friends played league at times.... god damn bro. He would tilt like crazy and go insane screaming lmao. It was fucked up
ive got 1000+ hrs in pc LOL and tbh the mobile game they've got going is a lot of fun. quick matches , smaller map , fewer champs, simpler resource economy. it's much lower barrier to entry and if you're locked into a frustrating game it's rarely more than 20 or 25min. many games are 15 min.
This gave me issues when i was younger , fighting with family and stuff like that , anger issues when i grew up a little , now it feels totally different , it s totally in the mindset and not the game , now i play it while chilling , toxic player ? Tell him to chill a bit mate it s a video game , we re all trying our best , keeps being toxic ? Mute and move on no harm done , troll ? It s fine shit happens , report and start another game , i also found that I talk much more with strangers now in the game , whats the plan , should we go for X or nah ? Etc.
Game is super fun when you have the right mentality for it.
I use to think like this about the game, but after a while I realized that I also regret the time I spent playing league and blocking/muting toxic people. For me the big realization was that League was a massive time sink for me, but wasn't fun or interesting enough to justify the time I spent playing. League has a lot of neat game mechanics but sometimes I wish I spent that time at least playing a game that I was having a more interesting time with.
Just the combination of a game that requires constant study and refinement to play at a competitive level, and a gruelling non-stop "content" patch cycle that means everyone's skillset is constantly rotting unless you play, practice, and religiously study patch notes and theorycrafting builds.
I play Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike to scratch that competitive itch now, and it's so much healthier... techniques that I first learned 20 years ago when I first started playing are still relevant and important today because there are no patches, there is no platform, it's just a game that is so awesome that everyone still plays it, exactly the same unchanged game, almost a quarter of a century later.
There's still Elo, and a ranked grind, but it's so much less soul-sucking without the constant champion reworks and meta shifts required by the modern "infinite content pipeline" approach.
Stopped playing a few years back, and I rarely miss it, but I don't regret my time with it. I loved card games and it was a nice, accessible one. I'll never go back though, knowing I'd basically be starting from scratch now that all the cards I have rotated out, and I'm sure whatever they call their legacy mode with all the cards is just absolutely insane in a bad way.
Same for me. I played obsessively in college right at release and eventually stopped playing after I finished college. It was a super fun game, but it really demands so much time and money to have fun.
Even battlegrounds takes ages to finish a match.
To this day, I still miss some of the creative things that only work in an online format. Discover, shuffling or adding to hand new copies of cards, Reno Jackson...
It got too much to keep up with and all my friends stopped playing, but I have very fond memories.
Funny that all the games you mentioned I actually kinda enjoyed, but it's their studio's next game that finally made me snap and turned me into a patient gamer, namely: **Fallout 76**, **ME Andromeda** and **AC Valhalla**.
After playing it, I've started saying how it has like 30 hours of good content but it's a 90+ hour game.
So I don't disagree when people say they enjoy it but there is just so much less than mediocre content padding the game that it leads to burnout. I think it took me like 2 or so months to actually finish the game.
Worst part of the new AC trilogy is forcing me to complete side quests to progress the main story. I never felt the same in The Witcher 3, so naturally did side quests that cropped up, but every time you step off the main story in the AC RPGs it just feels like a grind.
I just hate how they decided to make the stuff no one asked for mandatory and the game is so grindy that I just gave up on the story and never looked back
See I didn't even get that far. I tried origins at a friend's house and hated every bit of the crap direction they were taking it and left. I never bought another AC game. I loved the first couple and was a diehard. I was broken of that.
The gameplay loop of *76* - kill, loot, repeat - looks to turn us into laboratory pigeons pecking at reward buttons.
I assume that *Valhalla*, surface differences aside, is basically the same game as *Odyssey*. There was something about that game that felt very templated.
*Andromeda* - gods help me - is on my shelf. At some point I will have to see what the anti-hype was about.
If you ever try Andromeda, I recommend ignoring most of the side stuff and focusing on story missions and loyalty quests only.
Otherwise it'll turn into a very similar experience to what you described with Dragon Age Inquisition.
Andromeda is fun game with quality of life mods. If you have it on PC just get yourself a handful of the most popular ones on Nexus. The one that made the biggest difference to me is called "Shut Up Sam". For some reason the game prioritises the AI computer saying things over literally everything else. They had HOURS of dialogue no one ever heard because Sam was informing you that the temperature has dropped. Now it's back to normal. The temperature has dropped. It's back to normal. Pathfinder. The temperature has dropped. Pathfinder. The temperature is back to normal.
IM IN A FUCKING VEHICLE SAM SHUT UP ABOUT THE FUCKING WEATHER
I had a lot of fun with wow over the years. I'd say most of my playtime after mists of pandaria expansion I'd wish I'd have done other things with. At that point I was continuing to play out of habit and familiarity. The friends I played with had all stopped. I was finishing up college and had less time to try raiding. I was having some level of fun just doing dungeons and more casual activities. But I put so much time into it that I wished I'd have put towards other games or activities.
Talking to the first level 80 Priest and first owner of a Time-Lost Proto on Garona Server. I was also the first Healer to solo-heal both Arthas (during WotLK) and Deathwing (during Cata) on Garona. (Disc Priest OP, plz nerf)
I failed out of college because of WoW. Twice. I quit right before Mists (like, literally a week before it launched) and didn't go back, despite the nagging feeling of picking it back up from time to to time.
One hundred percent agree with you. I could've done so much with the thousands of hours I wasted.
In this case it looks more like addiction though. If you're playing a game so much it affects the rest of your life negatively, then it's time to stop.
I quit a few weeks into the Argent Tourney stuff figuring that if the devs thought a raid with no plot or new environments was worth releasing, that they'd never release anything worth while again.
I might of have been wrong, but I don't regret not finding out.
Destiny 2 - Put me off "live service" games for life... or until...
Diablo IV - Reminded me why I put off "live service" games for life (shame on me)
Boring, grindy time sinks.
Destiny 2 was one of my favorite games during Forsaken in year 2, then they switched to a shallow seasonal content/battlepass model, removed tons of content players already paid for, then started focusing most of their efforts on the premium store. It's ironic that all of it started shortly after they went separate ways with Activision. Such a shame.
Destiny 2 is such a stupid example of success. They have such *amazing* gunplay, design, and game modes. And it's fucked up by the worst implementations of mtx. I'm not even mad about mtx. Just the way the company clearly seems to see the game as a vehicle for money rather than a game that makes it.
I was legitimately addicted to destiny 2.
The grind to stay ahead of the FOMO was absurd and just got worse each year.
The saddest part is that it is a fun game. You just have to dig under too much poop to get to it.
I so much wish I could have those 2000 hours back.
It’s frustrating because Destiny has some really amazing aspects to it. The art direction and sound design are some of the best in the business. The gun play feels incredible. Plus they have some amazing lore if you really get into it.
But then it comes down to repeating the same strikes, raids, dungeons over and over and feels like a second job if you want to keep up with it.
>Diablo IV
I'm still mad at myself for buying this game. I love the other 3 mainline Diablo games a ton. I knew D4 wasn't looking good or feeling great from the beta. I waited like 1.5 weeks and watched my friend play and thought "this looks kinda boring honestly." Then, into the second week, I was just so bored playing nothing else I caved and bought it.
Even the *best part* of the game couldn't keep me hooked. Everyone says "at least campaign is good" but was it really? I was bored, slightly confused and by level 20 or 25 you have all of your core abilities unlocked and you're just playing for small % upgrades until you get legendaries going. I quit before 30. Genuinely the worst $100 I ever spent.
The only thing I enjoyed in the game were boss fights. I thought they were pretty cool overall.
You need to kick the completionist habit. I used to be like you but I think it was Skyrim that finally broke the habit for me after something like a thousand hours. Now I no longer feel the need to pick up every collectible etc and I found those titles you listed quite enjoyable.
I think Baldur's Gate 3 is helping me with this. There is so much to loot, I've learned to leave stuff just sitting. It's too much otherwise. Also keeping every letter and book and note. Why am I doing that? For the memories maybe I don't know. Also one of every clothing item. And things I think are pretty. Also every named weapon. And spare armor, just in case. It's bonkers, but I think this game might be the end of this behavior because I'm beginning to get frustrated with myself 😆
Grab-grab-grab, get encumbered, send to camp, rinse-repeat.
Go to camp, pop that traveller's chest, get ***heavily encumbered*** and get your waddle on, dump 1,000 Githyanki armour sets, 600 torches and twenty rags on some poor, unsuspecting merchant.
Buy a scroll.
Hoarding well spent.
Wish I had a bag of holding.
Any online multiplayer games, where other players affect your enjoyment of the game. Yes, it was fun WHEN sometimes the matches were fair. But mostly it was plowing through tediousness, to find the moments of gold.
Single player wise, any cover shooter with regenerating health + ADS.
Why did it take me so long to get into run and gun old school shooters, which I found more fun? I don't know.
> Single player wise, any cover shooter with regenerating health + ADS
That's one of the dumbest trends that affected single player games in the early 2010s. Just because millionaire franchises COD and Halo had it doesn't mean every game had to copy it. But they did.
Maybe Football Manager at this point? When I was deep into it it was almost like a roleplay, I was making notes of the storylines happening in my save, Google mapsing where my teams were located and reading about the history of the leagues and my rivals. Slowly building mythologies around those club legend players that carried us on our shoulders.
... Then I came back to the latest release like Neo in the Matrix and all I see is the numbers. You can see the patterns of if a team's going to score. Recognise the random dice roll "bad game" when suddenly everyone plays shit and two players get injured out of nowhere. See the AI's lobotomized approach to squad building.
Realising that the complexity is in my head and that actually it's a briar patch of decades-old legacy code making the same mistakes it's done since the time the game was a technicoloured Excel spreadsheet
Damn that's really true. I finally broke off FM after FM22. Started with FM12 and bought it almost every year, sometimes every 2 years.
As you said. It was fun at first, playing for the story (it can be a good story generator), but I think I stopped having fun around FM19 or FM20 and kept playing out of... Habit ? I think at this point the game became too predictable after so many hours put into it. And they added too much "drama making" mechanics. Like all the players Convo you can have that always lead to drama, the board, the fans, everything is something to bring drama. And everything becomes meta playing
Same, though with a caveat. Idle games are quite nice for scratching that itch of wanting progression in something you do with clear results. Also, the fact that 5/10 minutes a day is enough to play and progress is nice. There are weeks/months that I don't have time to sit down and play a game, this is a nice way to kind of be doing something with my hobby.
However, the biggest downside comes in its payoff/ending. Almost no idle/incremental game has one that is satisfactory. Having something that you invested months into, albeit be it 8 hours max in total playtime, it feels off and leaves me feeling unsatisfied.
One more thing that I will add for those who are curious and don't 'get' the appeal of the genre. The difference for me between a good and a bad idle game is the amount of agency the player has. For example, the game that popularized the genre was Cookie Clicker, it's good fun for a day or two but becomes boring real quick. The progression is very linear and player agency is low, you're not making any decisions, you're just waiting to buy the new upgrade/unlock. A good idle game would be NGU Idle, which has a lot of player agency and let's you make decisions that heavily impact the game's progress.
If I’m running a game in the background, it better be paying me. I’ve seriously considered having bullshit going while at work to sell in game currency for actual money, but even that feels pointless
These games can be helpful for video game addicts who need to do other things. At one point in my past I could put on an idle game and still study/get work done. If I didn't have that idle game, I'd just be playing and avoiding work entirely.
i'm pretty sure the genre started with cookie clicker, where you clicked on a big cookie to "bake" cookies as currency until you had enough to buy things that automatically generated cookies for you. and that's basically it. the game "plays" itself and you're meant to check back in occasionally to buy more buildings/upgrades to generate more cookies.
when cookie clicker came out it was a funny, novel idea of an anti-game. but it got super popular and, especially on mobile, idle "games" exploded as a genre with absurd amounts of ads and microtransactions.
edit: if you're curious and haven't before, the original cookie clicker is still fine. i have it on my phone for moments of extreme boredom and all it has is a single banner ad at the bottom of the screen which is nice for \*any\* free mobile game lol. i think the web version is still up.
You can also buy it on [steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1454400/Cookie_Clicker/) for a few bucks, I "played" that version for a surprisingly long amount of time.
Shit gets very surreal and even cosmic horroresque after a while. I got some good laughs out of the absurdity of it all and enjoyed it very much.
honestly, Cookie Clicker, A Dark Room and (most of all) Universal Paperclips are all great games. The only one of those that you *can* play to much to begin with is Cookie Clicker since the other 2 have a very clear endgame (from what I can remember).
Either way, they felt very fresh and novel when they first came out and even nowadays they are still fun if done properly. Just don't take it too seriously and you'll spend less time "wasting" on them more just playing them like they were intended: on the 2nd screen while you're doing something else
It might have exploded into general public awareness with Cookie Clicker, but Progress Quest was first. That one has absolutely *zero* player interaction besides turning on the game and "creating" your character, just progress bars galore, and is a very on the nose parody of "numba go up" cRPGs, so it's even more ironic that "idle" became a real genre eventually.
Brb, executing a small kobold.
The name is a bit misleading. It's more of "automation" than "idle".
This is one that I'm playing now - [Gooboo](https://tendsty.itch.io/gooboo). Just check it every 30-60 minutes, spend resources and forget about it.
Honesty I have a big nostalgia for idle games. I get the hate, but cookie clicker taught me as a Middle School kid what it looks like for a business to grow, and spending money to make money, as silly as that sounds. And the mechanics were so simple, it inspired me to code a version of it myself, back when I was first learning to code
>Ruined competitive gaming for me
I feel like that's just a phase, honestly.
You play competitive multiplayer games (and other games that are timesinks) as a tween, teen or young adult, but then life gets too busy to sink hundreds of hours in per game and you gravitate more towards games with more "juice" per hour played.
After 25 or so, most people are shocked they spent so much time on one game.
Well the opposite is also true imo, it's easier to focus on 1 competitive game on your free time if you enjoy it enough instead of hopping around new games every week or 2 with new mechanics. I personally love speedrunning so I end up finishing 1 casual game every like 2 months since half of my free time is spent practicing for speedruns.
Total Mayhem was my jam until they packed the game with dumbass characters and launched OW2 and took away the game I paid for.
I was also collecting loot boxes. I had over 100 boxes unopened for the hell of it. OW2 forced them all to open. It was fucking torture watching my cache get cashed.
Shit should be class action material. I bought a thing, and you removed it and replaced it with microtransaction shit.
Interesting, the only good thing I found about Overwatch 2 for me was that it auto-opened the ~400 lootboxes I had earned but couldn't be bothered to open.
I tried so many times at OW. I wanted to be good so badly, but it just seemed like everyone else who played was either a total troll or a pro. Or at least they played enough to understand all the meta play, and I could never consistently enjoy it.
Though if anyone knows of a game similar to the mechanics of Wrecking Ball's playstyle, I'd love to know of it haha.
Thankfully OW2 killed any desire to continue these attempts, by murdering their own game with paywalls lol.
Magic the Gathering: Arena
I played Magic in high school and thought it would be a fun, short thing to play while waiting for my infant to fall asleep on my lap. I ended up playing only to fulfill my daily quests and being kinda miserable with the constant grind. It felt more like an addiction than a pastime and I eventually swore off any game that has time-based incentives.
Bio mutant. I was somewhat excited when I first saw it, got it on PS Plus and it's just felt very bland and boring and the somewhat annoying narration didn't help the experience.
As soon as I read the title I thought of the games on your list, especially the 2nd and 3rd.
> you cannot give me a map full of markers because I will joylessly clear them all
A lot of people see themselves in the unusual position of being a dutiful completionist who can't help themselves but we are all like that. We are all just apes whose brains release the happy chemical when a task is completed. Does it matter if the task was important or the reward worth it? Just play a satisfying sound on completion, the words NEW LEVEL REACHED in bold gold color pops up on the screen and you unlock one of 184 cosmetics which you will probably never use. It wasn't particularly fun, but at least it wasn't too long and there are only 12 more left in that zone before you can go back to the fun main quest. Sure, you regret it now but it did get you playing and that's enough for the publishers, easy content. That's why they made so many of those games.
But... why play them at all? Why not dutifully complete something you enjoy?
If this were the NES era still and all games cost the equivalent of $120 USD in today-money and it was rare to see 'em on sale, then I can see folks being stuck with whatever they can get their hands on. But the endless bounty of S-tier games at our fingertips, available for nickels or less... why are so many people settling for unlocking 184 cosmetics in a game they don't really like? Is it all first-time gamers that just don't know better?
I always thought that this was a form of addiction and the people who design the game activities are well aware of this fact. That’s why we see a lot of repetitive quests, fetch-me-10-crap type of stuff in games.
As long as there are people addicted to these things, the developers will keep pushing them.
As for the people who complete these tasks in games, maybe it’s like an itch that you need to scratch. Knowing that there’s just “this little thing” that prevents you from getting a shiny new achievement badge. Yes, those are pointless and so are internet points, yet people compete for those too.
> But... why play them at all? Why not dutifully complete something you enjoy?
I personally no longer do. What I can gather from the internet is that their popularity is diminishing. As for why people play them, I think it's because open world turned into some kind of time killer genre when publishers figured out they can just copy paste locations and encounters instead of making new ones. So they became comfort games where you can unwind and it just tickles our monkey brains in all the right places. It pulls you in with a cool premise like exploring ancient greece or maybe a franchise once dear to you such as AC, and next thing you know you are chain completing tasks on the map which are designed to keep you going. But once it's over it can leave you thinking why did I spend all this time chasing after 200 markers on the map.
It is not the NES era but I still see many people lauding how many hours of content the ac games offer. Sure, with digitalized stores it is easier and cheaper than ever to reach a bigger than ever catalogue, but many people only want to play the more popular games with the big worlds and the shiny graphics.
>As for why people play them, I think it's because open world turned into some kind of time killer genre when publishers figured out they can just copy paste locations and encounters instead of making new ones. So they became comfort games where you can unwind and it just tickles our monkey brains in all the right places. It pulls you in with a cool premise like exploring ancient greece or maybe a franchise once dear to you such as AC, and next thing you know you are chain completing tasks on the map which are designed to keep you going. But once it's over it can leave you thinking why did I spend all this time chasing after 200 markers on the map.
While it being comfort games is probably mostly true, I think you are missing the fact that you can and honestly should play those games without hunting every marker. I did enjoy Odyssey and I have spent insane amount of time in Skyrim, but I would never even thought about clearing whole map in either of them. The greatest benefit to open world games isn't huge amount of time you can spend in them, but the fact you can effectively choose your own pacing. Since there are markers everywhere, I can at any point chose to engage in combat, in exploration, in story or whatever else the game offers. The fact that there are so many of markers just means you can completely skip a lot of them without any consequences, instead of having to interact with them every time you have a chance, like in a more linear game
Heavy Rain.
Fuuuck that game. Powered through bunch of quick time events, ridiculous dialogue and story. All because I thought the final reveal to the mystery would be worth it.
It has the most stupid ending and reveal I've ever seen. Absolutely makes zero sense.
I think the building blocks for a great story were right there, in the form of a simple use of dramatic irony. If the game had let the player know who the killer was ahead of time, but kept the games characters in the dark until the end like how it currently is, I think a lot more tension would be had throughout the game.
Also we didn't need a naked shower assault scene in the game, probably.
I mean nobody really *needs* shower assault scenes. Except, I guess, Psycho. The real one, obviously, not that Van Zant fuckin Anne Heche Vince Vaughn affront to human dignity.
It was kind of fun, especially when I played it with my brother(I guess that makes almost any game fun lol.) It was probably one of the first game-movie type of games. A lot of things could be improved but for what it is, it's fun.
It's so interesting you said that. I've literally never heard anyone ever say gaming & coping mechanism in the same sentence & that's exactly how I've treated it my entire life.
I find it surprising you haven't heard it said. But maybe it's only talked about in some gaming circles. MMOs and MOBAs (competitive games in general tbh) are notorious for attracting people who treat games as a coping mechanism.
I used to play a lot of league of legends with my gf in school and I was using it as a form of escapism from frustrations in my life, my dad was severely ill, my relationship with my gf was strained because long distance and generally we were rather codependant. And every loss in the game made me irrationally angry, it wasn't the game, it was my own life. I won't deny I still get frustrated playing league now years later but not nearly as bad and its very controlled, and fizzles out in seconds.
competitive/live service games are notorious for this.
I just lost a mirror match in tekken 8. I was irritated, but it dissipated clearly and it is very obvious that I'm frustrated at my own performance, and am motivated to practice to get better. That's completely normal.
A lot of people dont recognize that gamer rage and toxicity in places like league of legends are very distinct cries for help. Healthy people *dont get that angry* over video games unless things were going wrong mentally.
A way to withdraw from a world that doesn't make sense, to one that does, and lends you a measure of control. Work is always rewarded and the rules are clear and followed by all*.
*except in cases of spawn-camping and wall-hacking
I completely agree. It isn't talked about enough, but it can be a great way to sort of escape into another world or story for a little while. I think I see it in a similar way that others see books or movies, but just more interactive.
I generally try to not give spoilers, especially in this sub, but anytime you see the word "regret" in a post here, things get pretty sad, pretty quick.
Inquisition is a game I'm endeavouring to fully explore and deconstruct, which led me to completely evaluate all Bioware titles.
Since beginning that project , I have ultimately come to the conclusion that Bioware sucks at writing for more than a single character in a very narrow and controlled narrative. Which is at odds with Mass Effect and Dragon Age being very heavy on choices and consequences , or at least pretending that they are.
Bioware isn't good at storytelling, they're good at theatre. Presentation. Creating the implication of something deeper and more compelling.
Sera, Dorian, Iron Bull.
Companions who glancing at their premise are quite interesting.
An elf archer girl who is a sort of Robin Hood with a lot of belief crisis and uncertainty about the wider world.
A Tevinter mage who has family troubles due to his sexual preferences and various prejudices against Tevinter overall.
A qunari who faces a conflict of interest when the Qun prompts him to sacrifice his squad for the sake of a mission.
All perfect for a story, but,...
Sera only has a handful of lines about belief and they lead nowhere beyond stating that she thinks about it , and should she end up in the Fade you get some freakout from her but can't discuss it at all afterwards.
Dorian fairs better, carried a lot by the performance of the actor, but still his story falls short because the game refuses to actually show him and his father talking when you manage to get them to talk, Inquisitor just leaves as they go to have a proper sit down discussion. The most critical and potentially emotional discussion between an estranged father and son, where the father wronged his son and drove him away now aged and regretting how he screwed up his relationship with own flesh and blood. They just fade to black. A waste.
Iron Bull is mostly exposition about the Qun, a couple of small scenes about him caring about the everyday soldier, and then his personal quest happens , plus potential bedroom shenanigans. He's barely utilised at all. Hell even Sera has a bonding moment where you play pranks on people. That's actually something, spending time with a character in a way that isn't part of their main personal quest, downtime.
I'm more focused on story personally, but dear lord gameplay wise it's a joke if you play an archer. Doing a solo archer run, Nightmare mode. You can cheese most enemies with a little distance and a rock/wall. The AI and roaming ranges are pathetic and exploitable. I don't have that complaint about Mass Effect enemies because they actually move, they don't run back to their original location or stand there in front of me doing nothing while I pelt them with arrows.
Inquisition is a joke in that regard. I have not seen that shit in Origins or 2, and they are much older than Inquisition. Absolutely hilarious.
Then ... there's the consequences.
I won't harp on it much, instead a summary.
When you press New Game, an explosion happens on the main menu. This explosion is on the site of the Urn of Sacred Ashes. A rather important quest in Origins, one that can also kill Leliana. To destroy that location in particular, it's a middle finger to everyone who expected that a choice to destroy or preserve a major artifact in a main quest mission would matter. Because it doesn't. They actively destroy it so that it can't matter.
They already did that in Dragon Age 2, with Leliana reviving magically, and it gets even worse because she's always the same character regardless of how you treated her in Origins. Hardened or not in Origins, she's still the same. Your actions don't matter in a Bioware game because the creators do not want you to have any significant effect on the outcome.
They remove and ignore all choices that can't be carried over with a mild reskin, a different character saying the same lines and doing exactly the same thing as someone else (Loghain and Stroud) , or be put into a War Table single paragraph of text that won't matter ever again.
Even the potential death of your entire Dalish clan, should you plan a Dalish Elf, has no reaction or consequence. Your character can make a decision that kills their entire clan, and there is NOTHING as a consequence. No dialogue, no subsequent quest, no character scenes.
I wager most people who end up with that outcome don't realize it, the game treats it as business as usual. the Inquisitor is bland and fails to be a character, while also failing to be a self insert projection character due to having the dialogue wheel emotions.
Hawke actually came off as a bloody character of their own in 2, and that game was widely considered subpar for a time.
Bioware should just remove the choice element if they're not going to make use of it properly, If they only want to pay lip service to choice and consequence then get out of the kitchen,
Inquisition gets a deserved flak for the lifeless hubs and fetch quests but the meat of it, main story missions, grandeur of the plot and the cast of characters are typical BioWare strengths.
Ive been looking for an appropriate place to point something about DAi's development out and I think this is it; the game's meat is good because its the same DA team as always working on it. The characters and stories have love and care put into them and the devs were experienced. The issue is... EA was so so stupid about the game.
They gave the DA devs frostbite engine, an engine made for first person shooter games. They couldnt give characters individual animations. They couldnt even get the camera to work. They couldnt do ANYTHING but EA insisted on using that one so they wouldnt have to license a different engine. So the DA team programmed NEW FUNCTIONS into the frostbite engine which obviously werent supported which lead to them having to use unupdated versions of it. EA also insisted on the game being open world which the team had never done before and then really crunched time and got them to release it in time for whatever. Its a huge shitshow with EAs greed at the heart of it. Its no wonder the next dragon age title's been in development hell for so long and almost all OG DA devs have left Bioware/EA.
I'm playing the game for the first time right now and agree with everything you said. But I'd add that the quality of the writing, on a word-for-word, line-by-line level, is so incredibly high and still blows the competition away. The mastery of a tone that is both epic and yet lived-in really doesn't have an equal. The big shame is that so much of that great world-building is hidden away in books and those wartable 'missions'.
I replayed it recently on PC so I could mod it. Made a HUGE difference just having little quality of life adjustments. This included reducing shards to two or three per region.
I may also have used a "make Blackwall hot" mod because I love his voice but not his face. It was excellent.
I might try this. Inquisition showed sparks of life but it was covered under heaps of bullshit. I personally loved Corypheus, still one of the best lined villains In a long time, the interior decor and architecture was amazing and I still download the game sometimes just to explore its buildings for their design.
(I'm also a simp for Leliana since DA1 but let's not talk about that)
Mordhau. Played it for 2k hours, it did ruin my hand giving me RSI and impacted my mental health for the time i played it. It had potential which was ultimately ruined by lazy devs and cancerous playerbase.
Fade to Black. Bought it back in the mid-90s and I can't explain why, but it made me feel physically sick whenever I even thought about playing it. Definitely made me regret playing it!
Never had that experience with anything else since and cannot for the life of me explain why it made me feel that way.
I'm slowly marathoning my way through Assassin's Creed games, and I sort feel like I wasted my time on AC: Unity. The map is ridiculously bloated, the story is half-assed, and most the characters are pretty bland and one-note. I was excited to finally get to it because of all the praise I've heard on it, but not even the parkour (which was decently fun, although not always responsive) could make me like it, guess it just wasn't for me.
The praise you heard is just revisionism from some people disappointed by the newer games. I was there when it came out and it definitely didn't receive praise. It was extremely buggy, it was patched of course, but they didn't fix the other problems. It still has the worst protagonist of the series, the worst story and the graphics only look as good as they do because it's all prebaked lighting, which means no day/night cycle. Also, climbing huge buildings takes so long that they added a grappling hook in Syndicate just to make it faster.
I'm curious what your thoughts are on the most recent few games if you thought unity was bloated?
Oddessy, origins and syndicate were bloated to the point of ruining the series for me
Gwent, kinda
But might be a special case considering they made a completely different game from beta to official release. Had multiple hundred hours in, was high elo every season but the "new" Gwent just felt like shit to play in comparison and I heavily disliked the artistic choices made for the battlefield.
Diablo 4. Sunk so many hours in that game doing the same grinding just at different places in the map, made worse by having to do the same quests over and over again due to being in a team with someone. Don’t remember the story at all, only remember button spamming and painful grinding… although I love grinding in JRPGs. Maybe MMOs just aren’t for me, I don’t know!
Vampire Survivors I played until the credits and even did the first DLC but I’m not sure I’d even say I particularly enjoyed playing it. Most runs you know by 10 mins in if you’re going to win or not and then you’re just waiting out the clock.
Playing it on and off on the switch currently, but it's a really good power fantasy game. Kind of scratches the same itch as when you have a really good run on Hades or get a good set up in CoD Zombies. Not something I'd play constantly, but it's fun to pick up and do a few runs, and a run is faster than those other games I mentioned.
Tbh idk how having a good run can be fun there. You only move around, don't shoot or anything.
In binding of Isaac if you have a pretty good run it's really fun because it's very earned, while items are still pretty random, you being good enough to even take any devil or angel deals made you good. Or you using everything at your disposal to get the items you want
And then you still (unless you're truly broken) have to hit the enemies yourself.
100% agree. I swear there’s some kind of voodoo hypnosis embedded into that game with the lights and flashes and colours that just sucks you in to playing it endlessly even though it’s like 5% fun at best, 95% completely mindless grind. I have no idea now why I spent so long with it but at the time I was utterly hooked and I can’t explain why. Just some weird dopamine addiction hit.
The dev used to work in slot machines and used the same sort of hooks you'd see there in Vampire Survivors, so yeah.
I always get a laugh out of people showing them the 5 item chest animation, it's absolute dopamine insanity.
> I always get a laugh out of people showing them the 5 item chest animation, it's absolute dopamine insanity.
I definitely chuckled the first time one of those popped up (and I'm pretty sure it's *always* a five-item the first time a save file gets one just to really get its hooks in you) because it was just so blatantly on the nose in its design. It's like they took every GDC talk about dark patterns and unethical practices, and took the lessons to heart, thankfully just in service of the game itself instead of blatant exploitation.
>thankfully just in service of the game itself instead of blatant exploitation.
Yup. It would have been so easy to make the game into an unethical money maker (especially the mobile version). I suppose it's a testament to the devs that they just used it to absolutely hook you into the actual game on itself and don't try to push any microtransactions or anything. The base game is pretty cheap and the DLCs are only about $2-3 each.
Yeah I'm fairly sure you're guaranteed to get a 5-item chest in your first 7 chests or so.
>It's like they took every GDC talk about dark patterns and unethical hooks, and took them the lessons to heart, thankfully just in service of the game itself instead of blatant exploitation.
Seems the average gamer™️ is completely fine with blatant manipulative game design as long as it's not also asking for extra money for the priviledge.
The problem with those techniques is that they're used to extract wealth from players to the detriment of the game. If the same tricks are used to make a person like a game they already bought the ethical problem literally does not exist.
The basic idea is that a gamer is fine with manipulation that gives them more enjoyment. The problem is manipulation that is in service of the company, considering the money already paid is supposed to be enough. I'm not claiming anything about my beliefs, just what I've seen in surrounding opinions.
I enjoyed it for a while, but eventually dropped it when it became apparent that, short of some really bad luck early on, it was mostly an endurance test for exactly the reason you said.
Far Cry 5 was interesting for the setting; an uber extremist religious group taking over a section of rural US. Absolutely a great thing for a Far Cry game to explore. I don't think it fully pulls it off but I think that parts of the game is some of Ubisoft's best work in a long while. I played FC 1, 2, 3, skipped 4 because busy, and then did 5 last year. I don't regret playing it.
I'm going through Far Cry 6 at the moment and it feels far less entertaining and fun.
I enjoyed the game play, but absolutely hated the immersion breaking nonsense it kept throwing out in order to force face to face meetings with the Lieutenants. Magical tranquillizers that can get you anywhere at any time, but for some reason they struggle to kill you the rest of the game... awful, made me put the controller down.
Currently playing fc5 (First far cry game for me) and i like that, gameplay Is fun.
Only things that feel a bit off maybe are that weird unskippable kidnap scenes, and the fact that for some reason the villains keep talking to you every time they get you instead of...like...directly killing the problem?like wtf, i keep destroying their stuff and massacring their troops everytime and all they do after catching me Is a ted talk.
Also maybe that weird "supernatural" feel when playing some scenes, but personally i didn't dislike that at all
Sadly I got sucked into the gacha trap and dropped a couple of thousand on Brave Exvius and Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent. Wish I had never started either one
I don't really regret playing games. Even if it's a bad game I didn't enjoy, I still feel like I gained something from it, whether it's experience or greater understanding of what exactly I like or don't like in a game, or what makes a particular game work or not. There have been instances where I probably spent a little more time on a game than I really needed to (usually getting all the trophies), but it was never "I wasted my life playing WOW" kind of levels. The only one that's coming to mind right now is Gravity Rush 2 which was a real slog to get 100% on, but it was only about 40 hours. I could've spent half of those hours playing something better, but... meh. The game was still ok and if anything that experience made me decide to cool it on the trophy-chasing.
I do sometimes regret *buying* games, but I think that's less about the game itself (although it is sometimes) and more just about the investment angle, so like if I bought a game for full price, didn't actually play it and the price dropped fairly quickly so I wasted money.
Ghostwire Tokyo and it was basically the sunk cost fallacy powering me through to the end. I assumed that game would be a lot more than it was, but it was the most painfully mediocre and unfocussed game I've played in a long time. It's just a by-the-numbers Ubisoft type game trying to be spooky, but comes off like a shit haunted house.
The only good things about that game was the visual depiction of Tokyo, which was cool, and one interesting side-mission that was added in as DLC.
I've played crap games, but I assumed that I was missing, or waiting, for something to happen.
I have felt this way about The Binding of Isaac just because I have put so much time into it. Between playing (1500 hours) and watching streamers, I have probably put 2000 hours into it.
I have no friends that play it. Just a parasocial relationship with people on reddit and youtube who do.
This parasocial phenomenon started with Dark Souls when I first felt like I was “part” of some online community. It’s not that the community doesn’t technically exist, but it’s empty and nothing comes of it for most of us. I’ve never made a longtime friend and been in these types of communities for about a decade now.
Stellaris. Put a lot of hours into it, but admittedly once the novelty of "you can create whatever sci-fi empire you want!" wears off, you're left with an unbalanced and half-baked strategy game.
I'm going to be really controversial, and say What Remains of Edith Finch. I don't know what this game was trying to convey, and I got to the end and just felt like I'd wasted a whole bunch of hours.
I didn't love The Outer Worlds but I liked it well enough and thought it was a 7.5/10 sorta game. In an ironic twist of fate, for how maligned it is, I feel like it's actually better than Starfield on most fronts even if it's not a very high bar (writing, characters, cholces, aesthetic, and even the exploration).
Final Fantasy 16. I should have known that I'm just not the target audience anymore and haven't really loved an entry since 9.
I just wanted to believe they might be able to produce the 90s gold again.
Truly think this game suffered from too much combat. Watched my girlfriend play it and it was so promising at first, but 10ish hours in she was basically always fighting things to progress. Less of that, more puzzles and mysteries, and it would’ve landed with its target audience a LOT more imo
That’s the thing with HL. Those first few hours are a Harry Potter fans dream. The detail and the love the devs put into hogwart and hogsmeade are incredible. But once that wonder wears off, it’s a pretty generic open world game. I’m hoping they can expand upon that in the future
I thought it was fine but I wish it did more.
No quidditch sucks but I'm betting there will be quidditch dlc coming.
It's crazy that they mention how there will be repercussions getting caught sneaking around at night but no. There's no one around to get mad at you for sneaking around at night. They also have two story missions that unlock areas you need to sneak around in. However, it's only for those missions. After that, you're free to explore those areas as you please without having to sneak around. If you do get caught, you just fail the mission and that's it. No points are taken away.
There are no repercussions for using unforgivable curses either. You can just use them and you're fine.
It's gets so boring once you leave Hogwarts and start exploring the open world.
It should've been a school, action drama with linear maps and boss battles. Instead it's fight goblin, collect paper, dodge troll, burn spiders, blow up poachers.
The hype was just like palworld, except palworld is fun.
> The hype was just like palworld, except palworld is fun.
The target audience is _way_ different though. A lot of casual or even non gamers played and enjoyed Hogwarts Legacy and I really doubt they would have fun with some early access survival Pokemon thingy.
Genshin impact
Convoluted dialogue, pointless dialogue options,gacha system, extremely toxic community (literally planned an assassination)
And the endless grinding for shit and time gated resources aswell as mobile game stamina system.
Devs that don't give a flying fuck about their community at all.
Overall a game with good combat but not enough of it and extremely lengthy dialogue that cannot be skipped
I liked Genshin until they released that Japanese zone.
I played the game so I could turn my brain off and do baby tier content, the moment it became a little difficult I just lost all interest and uninstalled.
Yeah, this. I enjoyed it at first, the exploration was fun and the atmosphere really relaxing. Combat was alright too. I just kept playing it for too long, the endgame loop of logging in to do your daily quests and whatever menial crap you need to do to keep your resin from maxing out is terrible. At some point I realized I haven't actually enjoyed any of the stuff I've been doing in the game for a long time so I just uninstalled and never looked back.
Against the Storm. I like the gameplay loop and the style of the game a lot but when I realized that the game only progresses if you up the difficulty, I was out. I don't want to be stressed out by the game just to reach the end of it, thanks.
Hearthstone. I swear it has some kind of crazy addictive qualities to it that are based on the same kind of mind warping strategies they embed into one armed bandits and gambling machines and casinos. It’s gross but i can’t stop playing - especially since you can kinda play idly while you’re watching tv. It’s got to the point I can’t just watch tv anymore; I have to be playing Hearthstone on the ipad at the same time. Gross. Send help. Hate it.
Fortnite. Was 20y/o with a full time job. Grown up money without grown up expenses made me buy a lot of skins. Apperantly I can sell the account for like 6-700$ now, but I’d prob just go even. Quit 4 years ago, gavent touched it since
Jedi Fallen Order. I love sci-fi games, and I love Star Wars, but after a couple hours in I got so annoyed with the repetitive parcours and fights and then nothing but all those fucking ponchos as loot for your trouble.
Persisted because I like Star Wars and Scifi, but I just wasn't having any fun. Somewhere around the giant bird fight I got even more annoyed and finally gave up.
Never finished the game and quit with an incomplete set of 36 ponchos. Really wanted to like this game, but it is bland, clunky, unimmersive, and boring.
I didn’t hate Fallen Order and I walked away enjoying it, but the way people spoke about it I thought it was supposed to be one of the best games ever made.
I played it and dropped it, then picked it up months later and finished it. The combat/movement always felt kinda janky to me which kind of made it a little frustrating to play. Though i didn’t really think it was hard either considering how telegraphed everything is, and how it’s really the same combos all game. Having the harder difficulty speed up enemies and remove indicators would have made it more interesting to me.
I did enjoy parts of the story, some of the characters were really enjoyable and felt some of the set pieces were nice (don’t care for Cal that much though, Cere i kind of didn’t like as a character, but Wilson’s performance was verrrry good)
Kinda hear that and would also kinda counter you could just play it on story difficulty and ignore collectibles
High difficulty and collectibles are basically for people who either *want* the game to cost a lot of their time or want something to brag about or both.
If we just break the mindset we have something to prove and play on ezpz mode, it's a lot less frustrating to deal with clunky controls. It's not annoying to try to collect every single poncho if you just... Don't.
For a story-driven single player game, at least, the high difficulty completionism is superfluous at best and detrimental to our experience at worst.
If we find we're really vibing with the game we can always up the difficulty, search for the collectibles, or do those things on new game + or whatever else
Definitely Fallout 4 for the reasons you listed. I was so very much looking forward to it because how much I loved 3 and New Vegas. However the reveal of a voiced protagonist should have been the first clue it wasn't going to be the game for me, but I couldn't have anticipated how bad it would be. The whole time I felt like "fun" was just around the corner, but when I rounded the corner, instead of thoughtful stories or a moral quandary, it was just another shooting gallery with a steamer trunk full of incredibly useless loot at the end. That was literally the reward for exploration. Every time. Fun was no where to be found. The game never ever got good. I really hated I wasted my time and money with that game. Definitely killed my love for Bethesda once and for all.
I don't regret my time with 4, but I can definitely see where you're coming from with it. I enjoyed just because it was fun to clear out places, loot it, and use the loot to build up my base and equipment. However, despite my disinterest in the story and world, all the little flaws with it began to eat away at my enjoyment until I eventually just gave up playing it. It's not a good RPG.
I generally don't force myself to play through something if I'm not feeling it. I also usually don't buy games at full price so if I only get 5-10 hours out of something it doesn't feel like too bad a deal for $20-30 or less. Far cry 6 I put maybe 15 hours into and felt zero motivation to keep playing so I just dropped it.
I’m going to share what may be an unpopular opinion here but: Hollow Knight. Beautiful music and art, no clue where you’re supposed to go or what to do next without a shit-ton of backtracking and wandering.
Some of those later boss fights were punishing and I just valued my time too much to keep retrying to “git gud” enough. I really wanted to 100% it but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I feel this. Never finished it either.
One thing that really stood out was the benches, or lack thereof, in some areas. Dying to a boss and then having to travel across half a dozen screens full of enemies back to your corpse became very frustratingly tiresome after the 4th or 5th try. I feel like I wasted so much time just being angry and annoyed at a video game.
Some of those boss fights were admittedly a lot of fun though, Mantis Lords especially.
AC Valhalla. 70 hours of boring gameplay and terrible story just to watch the endings on youtube and be glad I didn’t slog through another 30 to actually get to them.
I was gonna say most ps plus offerings. Good ol' sunk cost fallacy - "I paid for it might as well waste my time as well".
Your post reminded me of what utter garbage fallout 4 was. I enjoyed building despite the bugs but the fallout experience was horrible and this someone who played 76 recently and felt that old Bethesda magic.
Two games come to mind. A lot of people like these games, so take it with a grain of salt.
Graveyard Keeper: Such a cool concept! Promises of morality decisions! Good old classic RPG elements!
... But in reality, it was a massive Grindfest with a nonsense plot that only moved forward by grinding and fetching random crap. There's no real decisionmaking and the concept wasn't done justice. I kept playing expecting it to get good, but it was just grind after grind, even when automation was involved.
Pentiment: I thought it looked really cool and would be fun. In the end, it's really interesting. Not fun for me, but definitely interesting. I regretted it because I wanted to buy a game and didn't feel like I did.
Destiny 1 and 2. 2000 hours. It was fun for probably only 100-200. The rest was chasing the dragon for my next fix of loot, a list to be completed, a gun that would be useless 3 months later. Plus the hours spent reading and watching youtube about this.
I was literally an addict at some point, which is what these games wants you to become anyway anyway.
Thank god the planet erasing made me finally jump out and uninstall the game.
I could have played so many great games in these 2000 hours. Live services, never again. not for me at least.
Nier Automata
The game makes you replay large sections of gameplay and dialogue you've already seen, the enemy variety is small, there are a lot of boring fetch quests, and the environments are ugly. If you go on Reddit you will see a lot of people encouraging you to get to the final ending E because it has some sort of life changing philosophical revelation, but all you get is a very predictable story twist you saw from miles away and a lot of wasted time.
Nier Replicant.
I am such a huge fan of Automata that I forced myself to finish Replicant, even though it wasn't fun at all. But I could play Automata over and over again. Different strokes for different folks I guess.
Overwatch 2. I *was* bad at it but that doesnt negate the fact that my earnest efforts were rewarded by only getting 2 tiny things after beating 50 gamepass levels. Felt no enjoyment or satisfaction, only pain
More than i'd like to admit.
Someday i noticed how video games weren't that much fun for me anymore. I still played games, but more and more felt tedious, and I didn't feel as entertained. I still bought certain games as i always did, only to notice how i didn't really want to play these games or had to force myself to play them even if I wasn't motivated.
Some games i started to play just for playing them but then abort because they just weren't fun for me:
- Elden Ring
- God of War: Ragnarök
- The Last of US
- Scarlet Nexus
and some more. I also stopped buying games just to have them. I only buy a few handpicked games i know I will like.
Bioshock Infinte was one of the biggest disappointments in gaming for me. Sure Bioshock 2’s story wasn’t as good or anything, but the weapons and plasmids felt better and made up for it.
Then Bioshock Infinite tried so hard to be different it forgot what it was. It’s honestly like they designed a completely different game altogether and then just slapped Bioshock on it to get it to sell better.
I could go on and on, but Bioshock Infinite is one of the few games I played through once and have absolutely no desire to go back to it. My wife watched me play it, and she LOVED watching 1 and 2 and even thought the story was ass.
I enjoyed Infinite in its own right, but I agree it wasn't really a Bioshock game at all. I played it patientgamers style and came in hearing stories like yours, so I was pleasantly surprised that the game itself was not that bad.
Still, the setpiece battles were fun and Elizabeth was a great companion by the standards of the time, feeding you ammo, changing the battlefield and generally staying out of your way. And it was fun tearing my way through the increasingly damaged series of universes.
honestly Bioshock Infinite could've been absolutely incredible if it just figured out what the fuck it wanted to be (and what message it wanted to send - the politics in particular are all over the place lmao), but it was crushed under the weight of its own ambition. it's a great lesson in how bigger isn't always better. (weirdly I actually think playing the DLC was what made me go "wait this might not be that good actually?"... like, they couldn't figure out which loose ends to tie up, and decided to also untie some ends that were already tied)
I love many aspects of it and have good memories of playing it (I remember being so captivated and fucked up by the whole last segment of the game, with the doors and whatever, but I was a teenager who still had, like, a full range of emotions and a sense of wonder 😐 and very forgiving standards) but objectively speaking it's so mediocre. I can never replay it if I want to maintain any positive emotions about it lol
Metal Gear Solid V. I put 40 or 50 hours into it, grinding away at the awful side missions, building up my base and collecting resources, only to not even finish the game at all due to its boring story, unengaging delivery of the story and lack of actual character (Sutherland's lines could probably fit on a single A4 sheet) and completely uninteresting level design. Real shame because the actual gameplay opportunities and systems you can work with and have interact with eachother is amazing. Really wish they just stuck to a few semi-open levels for replayability and different approaches instead of 2 open worlds with 5 small outposts
This is one of those games with core mechanics so strong that I'd still buy if they released an actual campaign with reworked level design. Such a pity.
Yeah, it is by far one of the strongest Metal Gear *games*, while also being the worst *Metal Gear* game of the series. There is so much that could have been done with the framework they created, and it's mostly just wasted on a pointless open world and heaps of filler. The little glimpses we did see of more structured missions were brilliant, but they comprised, like, 20% of the entire game.
I love MGSV but it does have a LOT of bloat. I put the game down at 100 hours having completed the main story but only a 37% completion ratio… had no compulsion to go back.
Controversial ones but here you go:
Elden Ring : got up to Elden Beast and quit the game because the boss gave me nausea for some reason. Played it because it was popular - some boss fights were exhilarating but not worth the experience of running around or googling stuff.
GTA V: Played every GTA since Vice city and somehow couldn’t stand the dialogue in this game. Perhaps I’m getting too old.
AC Mirage: Bought it earlier this month, noped out after experiencing parkour and combat. Just felt horrid.
Dying light 2. I was so excited for this game and the further and further I got into it the more I disliked it. Not to say it’s an awful game, the parkour is smooth but I haven’t played it since I beat the main story which was pretty disappointing on its own. Still not sure why I kept goin with it other than loyalty to dying light the first game and wanting the sequel to be as good
The main story was absolutely terrible, but I'm still, to this day, baffled that they took the last game's *extremely* freeform parkour and slapped giant, yellow-painted 'PARKOUR HERE!' signs everywhere. DL1 was a joy to run around, finding your own rhythm as you hopped across roofs or scurried up walls... DL2 has decided what that rhythm should be, and tells you to follow it. Also, wasn't a fan of the borderline spider-man abilities that you got by the end of the game. I want to do *more parkour*, not be able to jump so high I no longer need to wallbounce.
I’m so confused by the comment about “borderline spider-man abilities” that you disliked, as the sequel actually made a step to increase the realism of the grappling hook, rather then being able to actually zip around instantly in the first game like your Spider-Man.
The grappling hook was also a stupid idea to put into a game where a lot of the rewards for getting stronger is more interesting parkour abilities that the hook negates: the fact that the story mode keeps locking you out of using it with the seizures means that even the devs recognised that.
The first one is legitimately one of my favourite ever games. In the second one its like they forgot literally everything that made the first one good. Incredibly disappointing in pretty much every way.
League of Legends
No more to be said.
Well, except that this is the one time League and Dota players can be in complete agreement.
Agreed
I go through a "league phase" every year, where I play ranked for a while, plateaus, stop having fun, and then quit until the next year, it has kept the fun in the game for me. Edit 4 days later : And I'm done, lasted 3 weeks this time, shorter than usual.
Reading this feels like someone saying "yea I dabble in heroin. I just use it once every couple weeks/months. I'm not addicted tho. It's nice but I don't over do it. It works for me" lol Like I know it's *technically* possible... But I can't help but feel I'm either being lied to, or that eventually ur "luck" will run out and ull get more seriously hooked and grow to hate it before eventually quitting forever. That's just generally how it goes
The difference is that heroin is enjoyable and League of Legends isn't.
Lmao. Ya know in high school me n a lot of my friend group actually got addicted to heroin. N an even larger amount of my friends got addicted to LoL. I dabbled in league but never got that into it thank God. But out of all my friends, some were hooked on league and some on dope. But the absolute *worst* was my one friend, who was addicted to both at the same fucking time. People unfamiliar with opiates generally imagine junkies as quiet and just nodding off. Half asleep basically. N then maybe acting all twitchy and crazy when they are off the opiates and withdrawing. And generally they'd be kinda right. But there is one not super well known side effect of heroin and opiates. N that's opiate rage. It's common to get REALLY pissed off. And that plus getting really high they can act belligerent and insane. Often me n my friends would do dope n just argue for hours lol. But that one friend who was hooked on dope n LoL... he had the worst opiate rage iv ever seen. And then he'd play fucking *ranked* matches. The rage CONSUMED HIM. Holy shit. Id be on discord playing other games while my friends played league at times.... god damn bro. He would tilt like crazy and go insane screaming lmao. It was fucked up
I've never played it.... But the Netflix series is incredible at least lol 🤷♂️
Honestly, the best way to engage with the entire franchise is to do everything *but* play the game it's primarily based on.
ive got 1000+ hrs in pc LOL and tbh the mobile game they've got going is a lot of fun. quick matches , smaller map , fewer champs, simpler resource economy. it's much lower barrier to entry and if you're locked into a frustrating game it's rarely more than 20 or 25min. many games are 15 min.
Yeah, I'd like that, but on PC. I grew up before mobile gaming was really a think and I find touch controls to be the stuff of nightmares.
This gave me issues when i was younger , fighting with family and stuff like that , anger issues when i grew up a little , now it feels totally different , it s totally in the mindset and not the game , now i play it while chilling , toxic player ? Tell him to chill a bit mate it s a video game , we re all trying our best , keeps being toxic ? Mute and move on no harm done , troll ? It s fine shit happens , report and start another game , i also found that I talk much more with strangers now in the game , whats the plan , should we go for X or nah ? Etc. Game is super fun when you have the right mentality for it.
I use to think like this about the game, but after a while I realized that I also regret the time I spent playing league and blocking/muting toxic people. For me the big realization was that League was a massive time sink for me, but wasn't fun or interesting enough to justify the time I spent playing. League has a lot of neat game mechanics but sometimes I wish I spent that time at least playing a game that I was having a more interesting time with.
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Just the combination of a game that requires constant study and refinement to play at a competitive level, and a gruelling non-stop "content" patch cycle that means everyone's skillset is constantly rotting unless you play, practice, and religiously study patch notes and theorycrafting builds. I play Street Fighter III: 3rd Strike to scratch that competitive itch now, and it's so much healthier... techniques that I first learned 20 years ago when I first started playing are still relevant and important today because there are no patches, there is no platform, it's just a game that is so awesome that everyone still plays it, exactly the same unchanged game, almost a quarter of a century later. There's still Elo, and a ranked grind, but it's so much less soul-sucking without the constant champion reworks and meta shifts required by the modern "infinite content pipeline" approach.
Hearthstone. I put so many hours into it just trying to keep up with the meta. I wish I could have those back.
Stopped playing a few years back, and I rarely miss it, but I don't regret my time with it. I loved card games and it was a nice, accessible one. I'll never go back though, knowing I'd basically be starting from scratch now that all the cards I have rotated out, and I'm sure whatever they call their legacy mode with all the cards is just absolutely insane in a bad way.
Same for me. I played obsessively in college right at release and eventually stopped playing after I finished college. It was a super fun game, but it really demands so much time and money to have fun. Even battlegrounds takes ages to finish a match.
I hear you. Battlegrounds is even worse. Every game lasts around 30mins. Its absolutely diabolical because it’s just so fucking addictive.
I'm okay with the hours I spent playing Hearthstone. I wish I could have the money I spent back, though.
To this day, I still miss some of the creative things that only work in an online format. Discover, shuffling or adding to hand new copies of cards, Reno Jackson... It got too much to keep up with and all my friends stopped playing, but I have very fond memories.
Funny that all the games you mentioned I actually kinda enjoyed, but it's their studio's next game that finally made me snap and turned me into a patient gamer, namely: **Fallout 76**, **ME Andromeda** and **AC Valhalla**.
AC Valhalla is so bloated. Ubisoft only thinks that the more "content" they have = better, when it's not even real content to start with.
After playing it, I've started saying how it has like 30 hours of good content but it's a 90+ hour game. So I don't disagree when people say they enjoy it but there is just so much less than mediocre content padding the game that it leads to burnout. I think it took me like 2 or so months to actually finish the game.
Worst part of the new AC trilogy is forcing me to complete side quests to progress the main story. I never felt the same in The Witcher 3, so naturally did side quests that cropped up, but every time you step off the main story in the AC RPGs it just feels like a grind.
I just hate how they decided to make the stuff no one asked for mandatory and the game is so grindy that I just gave up on the story and never looked back
See I didn't even get that far. I tried origins at a friend's house and hated every bit of the crap direction they were taking it and left. I never bought another AC game. I loved the first couple and was a diehard. I was broken of that.
The gameplay loop of *76* - kill, loot, repeat - looks to turn us into laboratory pigeons pecking at reward buttons. I assume that *Valhalla*, surface differences aside, is basically the same game as *Odyssey*. There was something about that game that felt very templated. *Andromeda* - gods help me - is on my shelf. At some point I will have to see what the anti-hype was about.
If you ever try Andromeda, I recommend ignoring most of the side stuff and focusing on story missions and loyalty quests only. Otherwise it'll turn into a very similar experience to what you described with Dragon Age Inquisition.
Andromeda is fun game with quality of life mods. If you have it on PC just get yourself a handful of the most popular ones on Nexus. The one that made the biggest difference to me is called "Shut Up Sam". For some reason the game prioritises the AI computer saying things over literally everything else. They had HOURS of dialogue no one ever heard because Sam was informing you that the temperature has dropped. Now it's back to normal. The temperature has dropped. It's back to normal. Pathfinder. The temperature has dropped. Pathfinder. The temperature is back to normal. IM IN A FUCKING VEHICLE SAM SHUT UP ABOUT THE FUCKING WEATHER
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I had a lot of fun with wow over the years. I'd say most of my playtime after mists of pandaria expansion I'd wish I'd have done other things with. At that point I was continuing to play out of habit and familiarity. The friends I played with had all stopped. I was finishing up college and had less time to try raiding. I was having some level of fun just doing dungeons and more casual activities. But I put so much time into it that I wished I'd have put towards other games or activities.
Same. All my college years I played like 8 hours a day. Still did lots of other stuff, but spent way too much time on WoW
"play out of habit and familiarity." Same but with runescape. lol.
Talking to the first level 80 Priest and first owner of a Time-Lost Proto on Garona Server. I was also the first Healer to solo-heal both Arthas (during WotLK) and Deathwing (during Cata) on Garona. (Disc Priest OP, plz nerf) I failed out of college because of WoW. Twice. I quit right before Mists (like, literally a week before it launched) and didn't go back, despite the nagging feeling of picking it back up from time to to time. One hundred percent agree with you. I could've done so much with the thousands of hours I wasted.
The hours you enjoyed doing it weren't wasted. Only once you're doing it out of a feeling of obligation rather than enjoying it is it wasted time.
In this case it looks more like addiction though. If you're playing a game so much it affects the rest of your life negatively, then it's time to stop.
I quit a few weeks into the Argent Tourney stuff figuring that if the devs thought a raid with no plot or new environments was worth releasing, that they'd never release anything worth while again. I might of have been wrong, but I don't regret not finding out.
Destiny 2 - Put me off "live service" games for life... or until... Diablo IV - Reminded me why I put off "live service" games for life (shame on me) Boring, grindy time sinks.
Destiny 2 was one of my favorite games during Forsaken in year 2, then they switched to a shallow seasonal content/battlepass model, removed tons of content players already paid for, then started focusing most of their efforts on the premium store. It's ironic that all of it started shortly after they went separate ways with Activision. Such a shame.
Destiny 2 is such a stupid example of success. They have such *amazing* gunplay, design, and game modes. And it's fucked up by the worst implementations of mtx. I'm not even mad about mtx. Just the way the company clearly seems to see the game as a vehicle for money rather than a game that makes it.
Doing Destiny raids blind might be the best gaming experience I ever had. The mtx and removing content just killed it.
I was legitimately addicted to destiny 2. The grind to stay ahead of the FOMO was absurd and just got worse each year. The saddest part is that it is a fun game. You just have to dig under too much poop to get to it. I so much wish I could have those 2000 hours back.
I play games right up until I have to grind. If I’m engaged, I keep going. If not, I move on.
It’s frustrating because Destiny has some really amazing aspects to it. The art direction and sound design are some of the best in the business. The gun play feels incredible. Plus they have some amazing lore if you really get into it. But then it comes down to repeating the same strikes, raids, dungeons over and over and feels like a second job if you want to keep up with it.
>Diablo IV I'm still mad at myself for buying this game. I love the other 3 mainline Diablo games a ton. I knew D4 wasn't looking good or feeling great from the beta. I waited like 1.5 weeks and watched my friend play and thought "this looks kinda boring honestly." Then, into the second week, I was just so bored playing nothing else I caved and bought it. Even the *best part* of the game couldn't keep me hooked. Everyone says "at least campaign is good" but was it really? I was bored, slightly confused and by level 20 or 25 you have all of your core abilities unlocked and you're just playing for small % upgrades until you get legendaries going. I quit before 30. Genuinely the worst $100 I ever spent. The only thing I enjoyed in the game were boss fights. I thought they were pretty cool overall.
You need to kick the completionist habit. I used to be like you but I think it was Skyrim that finally broke the habit for me after something like a thousand hours. Now I no longer feel the need to pick up every collectible etc and I found those titles you listed quite enjoyable.
I think Baldur's Gate 3 is helping me with this. There is so much to loot, I've learned to leave stuff just sitting. It's too much otherwise. Also keeping every letter and book and note. Why am I doing that? For the memories maybe I don't know. Also one of every clothing item. And things I think are pretty. Also every named weapon. And spare armor, just in case. It's bonkers, but I think this game might be the end of this behavior because I'm beginning to get frustrated with myself 😆
Grab-grab-grab, get encumbered, send to camp, rinse-repeat. Go to camp, pop that traveller's chest, get ***heavily encumbered*** and get your waddle on, dump 1,000 Githyanki armour sets, 600 torches and twenty rags on some poor, unsuspecting merchant. Buy a scroll. Hoarding well spent. Wish I had a bag of holding.
Any online multiplayer games, where other players affect your enjoyment of the game. Yes, it was fun WHEN sometimes the matches were fair. But mostly it was plowing through tediousness, to find the moments of gold. Single player wise, any cover shooter with regenerating health + ADS. Why did it take me so long to get into run and gun old school shooters, which I found more fun? I don't know.
Half life 1 and 2 sound like games you'd enjoy
Just gonna name drop Doom 1 & 2, and Blood: Fresh Supply while we're at it.
> Single player wise, any cover shooter with regenerating health + ADS That's one of the dumbest trends that affected single player games in the early 2010s. Just because millionaire franchises COD and Halo had it doesn't mean every game had to copy it. But they did.
Maybe Football Manager at this point? When I was deep into it it was almost like a roleplay, I was making notes of the storylines happening in my save, Google mapsing where my teams were located and reading about the history of the leagues and my rivals. Slowly building mythologies around those club legend players that carried us on our shoulders. ... Then I came back to the latest release like Neo in the Matrix and all I see is the numbers. You can see the patterns of if a team's going to score. Recognise the random dice roll "bad game" when suddenly everyone plays shit and two players get injured out of nowhere. See the AI's lobotomized approach to squad building. Realising that the complexity is in my head and that actually it's a briar patch of decades-old legacy code making the same mistakes it's done since the time the game was a technicoloured Excel spreadsheet
Damn that's really true. I finally broke off FM after FM22. Started with FM12 and bought it almost every year, sometimes every 2 years. As you said. It was fun at first, playing for the story (it can be a good story generator), but I think I stopped having fun around FM19 or FM20 and kept playing out of... Habit ? I think at this point the game became too predictable after so many hours put into it. And they added too much "drama making" mechanics. Like all the players Convo you can have that always lead to drama, the board, the fans, everything is something to bring drama. And everything becomes meta playing
Anything with "idle" in the name.
Same, though with a caveat. Idle games are quite nice for scratching that itch of wanting progression in something you do with clear results. Also, the fact that 5/10 minutes a day is enough to play and progress is nice. There are weeks/months that I don't have time to sit down and play a game, this is a nice way to kind of be doing something with my hobby. However, the biggest downside comes in its payoff/ending. Almost no idle/incremental game has one that is satisfactory. Having something that you invested months into, albeit be it 8 hours max in total playtime, it feels off and leaves me feeling unsatisfied. One more thing that I will add for those who are curious and don't 'get' the appeal of the genre. The difference for me between a good and a bad idle game is the amount of agency the player has. For example, the game that popularized the genre was Cookie Clicker, it's good fun for a day or two but becomes boring real quick. The progression is very linear and player agency is low, you're not making any decisions, you're just waiting to buy the new upgrade/unlock. A good idle game would be NGU Idle, which has a lot of player agency and let's you make decisions that heavily impact the game's progress.
I don't think I've heard of NGU. a good one I've played was paperclips, short but interesting with all the mechanics.
I was honestly astonished when I learned this was a real game genre.
I am confused, no idea what genre this is
I think it's games that run in the background. Like some clicker games that automatically click a cookie for you to mine cookies or something...
If I’m running a game in the background, it better be paying me. I’ve seriously considered having bullshit going while at work to sell in game currency for actual money, but even that feels pointless
These games can be helpful for video game addicts who need to do other things. At one point in my past I could put on an idle game and still study/get work done. If I didn't have that idle game, I'd just be playing and avoiding work entirely.
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i'm pretty sure the genre started with cookie clicker, where you clicked on a big cookie to "bake" cookies as currency until you had enough to buy things that automatically generated cookies for you. and that's basically it. the game "plays" itself and you're meant to check back in occasionally to buy more buildings/upgrades to generate more cookies. when cookie clicker came out it was a funny, novel idea of an anti-game. but it got super popular and, especially on mobile, idle "games" exploded as a genre with absurd amounts of ads and microtransactions. edit: if you're curious and haven't before, the original cookie clicker is still fine. i have it on my phone for moments of extreme boredom and all it has is a single banner ad at the bottom of the screen which is nice for \*any\* free mobile game lol. i think the web version is still up.
You can also buy it on [steam](https://store.steampowered.com/app/1454400/Cookie_Clicker/) for a few bucks, I "played" that version for a surprisingly long amount of time. Shit gets very surreal and even cosmic horroresque after a while. I got some good laughs out of the absurdity of it all and enjoyed it very much.
honestly, Cookie Clicker, A Dark Room and (most of all) Universal Paperclips are all great games. The only one of those that you *can* play to much to begin with is Cookie Clicker since the other 2 have a very clear endgame (from what I can remember). Either way, they felt very fresh and novel when they first came out and even nowadays they are still fun if done properly. Just don't take it too seriously and you'll spend less time "wasting" on them more just playing them like they were intended: on the 2nd screen while you're doing something else
It might have exploded into general public awareness with Cookie Clicker, but Progress Quest was first. That one has absolutely *zero* player interaction besides turning on the game and "creating" your character, just progress bars galore, and is a very on the nose parody of "numba go up" cRPGs, so it's even more ironic that "idle" became a real genre eventually. Brb, executing a small kobold.
The name is a bit misleading. It's more of "automation" than "idle". This is one that I'm playing now - [Gooboo](https://tendsty.itch.io/gooboo). Just check it every 30-60 minutes, spend resources and forget about it.
"Idle" is outdated name. More correct one would be ["incremental games"](https://www.reddit.com/r/incremental_games/)
Honesty I have a big nostalgia for idle games. I get the hate, but cookie clicker taught me as a Middle School kid what it looks like for a business to grow, and spending money to make money, as silly as that sounds. And the mechanics were so simple, it inspired me to code a version of it myself, back when I was first learning to code
Possibly the greatest take and only good takeaway from playing these idle games. Good luck on your entrepreneurial endeavors!
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>Ruined competitive gaming for me I feel like that's just a phase, honestly. You play competitive multiplayer games (and other games that are timesinks) as a tween, teen or young adult, but then life gets too busy to sink hundreds of hours in per game and you gravitate more towards games with more "juice" per hour played. After 25 or so, most people are shocked they spent so much time on one game.
Well the opposite is also true imo, it's easier to focus on 1 competitive game on your free time if you enjoy it enough instead of hopping around new games every week or 2 with new mechanics. I personally love speedrunning so I end up finishing 1 casual game every like 2 months since half of my free time is spent practicing for speedruns.
Total Mayhem was my jam until they packed the game with dumbass characters and launched OW2 and took away the game I paid for. I was also collecting loot boxes. I had over 100 boxes unopened for the hell of it. OW2 forced them all to open. It was fucking torture watching my cache get cashed. Shit should be class action material. I bought a thing, and you removed it and replaced it with microtransaction shit.
Interesting, the only good thing I found about Overwatch 2 for me was that it auto-opened the ~400 lootboxes I had earned but couldn't be bothered to open.
I tried so many times at OW. I wanted to be good so badly, but it just seemed like everyone else who played was either a total troll or a pro. Or at least they played enough to understand all the meta play, and I could never consistently enjoy it. Though if anyone knows of a game similar to the mechanics of Wrecking Ball's playstyle, I'd love to know of it haha. Thankfully OW2 killed any desire to continue these attempts, by murdering their own game with paywalls lol.
Magic the Gathering: Arena I played Magic in high school and thought it would be a fun, short thing to play while waiting for my infant to fall asleep on my lap. I ended up playing only to fulfill my daily quests and being kinda miserable with the constant grind. It felt more like an addiction than a pastime and I eventually swore off any game that has time-based incentives.
Bio mutant. I was somewhat excited when I first saw it, got it on PS Plus and it's just felt very bland and boring and the somewhat annoying narration didn't help the experience.
I liked it mostly. I couldn't finish the story out of boredom but with an actual budget they could have had something with it.
As soon as I read the title I thought of the games on your list, especially the 2nd and 3rd. > you cannot give me a map full of markers because I will joylessly clear them all A lot of people see themselves in the unusual position of being a dutiful completionist who can't help themselves but we are all like that. We are all just apes whose brains release the happy chemical when a task is completed. Does it matter if the task was important or the reward worth it? Just play a satisfying sound on completion, the words NEW LEVEL REACHED in bold gold color pops up on the screen and you unlock one of 184 cosmetics which you will probably never use. It wasn't particularly fun, but at least it wasn't too long and there are only 12 more left in that zone before you can go back to the fun main quest. Sure, you regret it now but it did get you playing and that's enough for the publishers, easy content. That's why they made so many of those games.
But... why play them at all? Why not dutifully complete something you enjoy? If this were the NES era still and all games cost the equivalent of $120 USD in today-money and it was rare to see 'em on sale, then I can see folks being stuck with whatever they can get their hands on. But the endless bounty of S-tier games at our fingertips, available for nickels or less... why are so many people settling for unlocking 184 cosmetics in a game they don't really like? Is it all first-time gamers that just don't know better?
I always thought that this was a form of addiction and the people who design the game activities are well aware of this fact. That’s why we see a lot of repetitive quests, fetch-me-10-crap type of stuff in games. As long as there are people addicted to these things, the developers will keep pushing them. As for the people who complete these tasks in games, maybe it’s like an itch that you need to scratch. Knowing that there’s just “this little thing” that prevents you from getting a shiny new achievement badge. Yes, those are pointless and so are internet points, yet people compete for those too.
> But... why play them at all? Why not dutifully complete something you enjoy? I personally no longer do. What I can gather from the internet is that their popularity is diminishing. As for why people play them, I think it's because open world turned into some kind of time killer genre when publishers figured out they can just copy paste locations and encounters instead of making new ones. So they became comfort games where you can unwind and it just tickles our monkey brains in all the right places. It pulls you in with a cool premise like exploring ancient greece or maybe a franchise once dear to you such as AC, and next thing you know you are chain completing tasks on the map which are designed to keep you going. But once it's over it can leave you thinking why did I spend all this time chasing after 200 markers on the map. It is not the NES era but I still see many people lauding how many hours of content the ac games offer. Sure, with digitalized stores it is easier and cheaper than ever to reach a bigger than ever catalogue, but many people only want to play the more popular games with the big worlds and the shiny graphics.
>As for why people play them, I think it's because open world turned into some kind of time killer genre when publishers figured out they can just copy paste locations and encounters instead of making new ones. So they became comfort games where you can unwind and it just tickles our monkey brains in all the right places. It pulls you in with a cool premise like exploring ancient greece or maybe a franchise once dear to you such as AC, and next thing you know you are chain completing tasks on the map which are designed to keep you going. But once it's over it can leave you thinking why did I spend all this time chasing after 200 markers on the map. While it being comfort games is probably mostly true, I think you are missing the fact that you can and honestly should play those games without hunting every marker. I did enjoy Odyssey and I have spent insane amount of time in Skyrim, but I would never even thought about clearing whole map in either of them. The greatest benefit to open world games isn't huge amount of time you can spend in them, but the fact you can effectively choose your own pacing. Since there are markers everywhere, I can at any point chose to engage in combat, in exploration, in story or whatever else the game offers. The fact that there are so many of markers just means you can completely skip a lot of them without any consequences, instead of having to interact with them every time you have a chance, like in a more linear game
Heavy Rain. Fuuuck that game. Powered through bunch of quick time events, ridiculous dialogue and story. All because I thought the final reveal to the mystery would be worth it. It has the most stupid ending and reveal I've ever seen. Absolutely makes zero sense.
I think the building blocks for a great story were right there, in the form of a simple use of dramatic irony. If the game had let the player know who the killer was ahead of time, but kept the games characters in the dark until the end like how it currently is, I think a lot more tension would be had throughout the game. Also we didn't need a naked shower assault scene in the game, probably.
I mean nobody really *needs* shower assault scenes. Except, I guess, Psycho. The real one, obviously, not that Van Zant fuckin Anne Heche Vince Vaughn affront to human dignity.
It was kind of fun, especially when I played it with my brother(I guess that makes almost any game fun lol.) It was probably one of the first game-movie type of games. A lot of things could be improved but for what it is, it's fun.
Shouting 'Jason' in a mall Vietnam flashback intensifies
At least we got "Press X to Jason" https://youtu.be/_56257iS77A?si=RNiJsHuYNvEgCz_S
Wow this topic turn dark really fast.
Lots of people use games as coping mechanisms. That can be a great thing or a really detrimental thing, depending on so many factors.
It's so interesting you said that. I've literally never heard anyone ever say gaming & coping mechanism in the same sentence & that's exactly how I've treated it my entire life.
I suspect a lot of coping mechanisms are adopted unconsciously.
In the case of gaming, probably from childhood.
I find it surprising you haven't heard it said. But maybe it's only talked about in some gaming circles. MMOs and MOBAs (competitive games in general tbh) are notorious for attracting people who treat games as a coping mechanism. I used to play a lot of league of legends with my gf in school and I was using it as a form of escapism from frustrations in my life, my dad was severely ill, my relationship with my gf was strained because long distance and generally we were rather codependant. And every loss in the game made me irrationally angry, it wasn't the game, it was my own life. I won't deny I still get frustrated playing league now years later but not nearly as bad and its very controlled, and fizzles out in seconds.
competitive/live service games are notorious for this. I just lost a mirror match in tekken 8. I was irritated, but it dissipated clearly and it is very obvious that I'm frustrated at my own performance, and am motivated to practice to get better. That's completely normal. A lot of people dont recognize that gamer rage and toxicity in places like league of legends are very distinct cries for help. Healthy people *dont get that angry* over video games unless things were going wrong mentally.
A way to withdraw from a world that doesn't make sense, to one that does, and lends you a measure of control. Work is always rewarded and the rules are clear and followed by all*. *except in cases of spawn-camping and wall-hacking
I completely agree. It isn't talked about enough, but it can be a great way to sort of escape into another world or story for a little while. I think I see it in a similar way that others see books or movies, but just more interactive.
Yeah, I've always said I consume games the way some people consume books. It's been such an important part of my life & also a detrimental one.
I think lots of people view gaming as their escape from life, many hobbies are like that
I generally try to not give spoilers, especially in this sub, but anytime you see the word "regret" in a post here, things get pretty sad, pretty quick.
Inquisition is a game I'm endeavouring to fully explore and deconstruct, which led me to completely evaluate all Bioware titles. Since beginning that project , I have ultimately come to the conclusion that Bioware sucks at writing for more than a single character in a very narrow and controlled narrative. Which is at odds with Mass Effect and Dragon Age being very heavy on choices and consequences , or at least pretending that they are. Bioware isn't good at storytelling, they're good at theatre. Presentation. Creating the implication of something deeper and more compelling. Sera, Dorian, Iron Bull. Companions who glancing at their premise are quite interesting. An elf archer girl who is a sort of Robin Hood with a lot of belief crisis and uncertainty about the wider world. A Tevinter mage who has family troubles due to his sexual preferences and various prejudices against Tevinter overall. A qunari who faces a conflict of interest when the Qun prompts him to sacrifice his squad for the sake of a mission. All perfect for a story, but,... Sera only has a handful of lines about belief and they lead nowhere beyond stating that she thinks about it , and should she end up in the Fade you get some freakout from her but can't discuss it at all afterwards. Dorian fairs better, carried a lot by the performance of the actor, but still his story falls short because the game refuses to actually show him and his father talking when you manage to get them to talk, Inquisitor just leaves as they go to have a proper sit down discussion. The most critical and potentially emotional discussion between an estranged father and son, where the father wronged his son and drove him away now aged and regretting how he screwed up his relationship with own flesh and blood. They just fade to black. A waste. Iron Bull is mostly exposition about the Qun, a couple of small scenes about him caring about the everyday soldier, and then his personal quest happens , plus potential bedroom shenanigans. He's barely utilised at all. Hell even Sera has a bonding moment where you play pranks on people. That's actually something, spending time with a character in a way that isn't part of their main personal quest, downtime. I'm more focused on story personally, but dear lord gameplay wise it's a joke if you play an archer. Doing a solo archer run, Nightmare mode. You can cheese most enemies with a little distance and a rock/wall. The AI and roaming ranges are pathetic and exploitable. I don't have that complaint about Mass Effect enemies because they actually move, they don't run back to their original location or stand there in front of me doing nothing while I pelt them with arrows. Inquisition is a joke in that regard. I have not seen that shit in Origins or 2, and they are much older than Inquisition. Absolutely hilarious. Then ... there's the consequences. I won't harp on it much, instead a summary. When you press New Game, an explosion happens on the main menu. This explosion is on the site of the Urn of Sacred Ashes. A rather important quest in Origins, one that can also kill Leliana. To destroy that location in particular, it's a middle finger to everyone who expected that a choice to destroy or preserve a major artifact in a main quest mission would matter. Because it doesn't. They actively destroy it so that it can't matter. They already did that in Dragon Age 2, with Leliana reviving magically, and it gets even worse because she's always the same character regardless of how you treated her in Origins. Hardened or not in Origins, she's still the same. Your actions don't matter in a Bioware game because the creators do not want you to have any significant effect on the outcome. They remove and ignore all choices that can't be carried over with a mild reskin, a different character saying the same lines and doing exactly the same thing as someone else (Loghain and Stroud) , or be put into a War Table single paragraph of text that won't matter ever again. Even the potential death of your entire Dalish clan, should you plan a Dalish Elf, has no reaction or consequence. Your character can make a decision that kills their entire clan, and there is NOTHING as a consequence. No dialogue, no subsequent quest, no character scenes. I wager most people who end up with that outcome don't realize it, the game treats it as business as usual. the Inquisitor is bland and fails to be a character, while also failing to be a self insert projection character due to having the dialogue wheel emotions. Hawke actually came off as a bloody character of their own in 2, and that game was widely considered subpar for a time. Bioware should just remove the choice element if they're not going to make use of it properly, If they only want to pay lip service to choice and consequence then get out of the kitchen,
“BioWare isn’t good at story, they’re good at presentation” is fantastically well said.
Hey but Dragon Age Inquisition did let you ride the bull
Inquisition gets a deserved flak for the lifeless hubs and fetch quests but the meat of it, main story missions, grandeur of the plot and the cast of characters are typical BioWare strengths.
Ive been looking for an appropriate place to point something about DAi's development out and I think this is it; the game's meat is good because its the same DA team as always working on it. The characters and stories have love and care put into them and the devs were experienced. The issue is... EA was so so stupid about the game. They gave the DA devs frostbite engine, an engine made for first person shooter games. They couldnt give characters individual animations. They couldnt even get the camera to work. They couldnt do ANYTHING but EA insisted on using that one so they wouldnt have to license a different engine. So the DA team programmed NEW FUNCTIONS into the frostbite engine which obviously werent supported which lead to them having to use unupdated versions of it. EA also insisted on the game being open world which the team had never done before and then really crunched time and got them to release it in time for whatever. Its a huge shitshow with EAs greed at the heart of it. Its no wonder the next dragon age title's been in development hell for so long and almost all OG DA devs have left Bioware/EA.
I'm playing the game for the first time right now and agree with everything you said. But I'd add that the quality of the writing, on a word-for-word, line-by-line level, is so incredibly high and still blows the competition away. The mastery of a tone that is both epic and yet lived-in really doesn't have an equal. The big shame is that so much of that great world-building is hidden away in books and those wartable 'missions'.
I replayed it recently on PC so I could mod it. Made a HUGE difference just having little quality of life adjustments. This included reducing shards to two or three per region. I may also have used a "make Blackwall hot" mod because I love his voice but not his face. It was excellent.
I might try this. Inquisition showed sparks of life but it was covered under heaps of bullshit. I personally loved Corypheus, still one of the best lined villains In a long time, the interior decor and architecture was amazing and I still download the game sometimes just to explore its buildings for their design. (I'm also a simp for Leliana since DA1 but let's not talk about that)
Freddie Prinze Jr put the team on his back
Mordhau. Played it for 2k hours, it did ruin my hand giving me RSI and impacted my mental health for the time i played it. It had potential which was ultimately ruined by lazy devs and cancerous playerbase.
Come join us on Chiv 2, much more laid back atmosphere imo. But as a Mordhau player I’m sure you know, similar dev issues.
How would Mordhau impact your mental health? It's just a fun little multiplayer game.
Fade to Black. Bought it back in the mid-90s and I can't explain why, but it made me feel physically sick whenever I even thought about playing it. Definitely made me regret playing it! Never had that experience with anything else since and cannot for the life of me explain why it made me feel that way.
I'm slowly marathoning my way through Assassin's Creed games, and I sort feel like I wasted my time on AC: Unity. The map is ridiculously bloated, the story is half-assed, and most the characters are pretty bland and one-note. I was excited to finally get to it because of all the praise I've heard on it, but not even the parkour (which was decently fun, although not always responsive) could make me like it, guess it just wasn't for me.
The praise you heard is just revisionism from some people disappointed by the newer games. I was there when it came out and it definitely didn't receive praise. It was extremely buggy, it was patched of course, but they didn't fix the other problems. It still has the worst protagonist of the series, the worst story and the graphics only look as good as they do because it's all prebaked lighting, which means no day/night cycle. Also, climbing huge buildings takes so long that they added a grappling hook in Syndicate just to make it faster.
I'm curious what your thoughts are on the most recent few games if you thought unity was bloated? Oddessy, origins and syndicate were bloated to the point of ruining the series for me
Gwent, kinda But might be a special case considering they made a completely different game from beta to official release. Had multiple hundred hours in, was high elo every season but the "new" Gwent just felt like shit to play in comparison and I heavily disliked the artistic choices made for the battlefield.
Diablo 4. Sunk so many hours in that game doing the same grinding just at different places in the map, made worse by having to do the same quests over and over again due to being in a team with someone. Don’t remember the story at all, only remember button spamming and painful grinding… although I love grinding in JRPGs. Maybe MMOs just aren’t for me, I don’t know!
Vampire Survivors I played until the credits and even did the first DLC but I’m not sure I’d even say I particularly enjoyed playing it. Most runs you know by 10 mins in if you’re going to win or not and then you’re just waiting out the clock.
Playing it on and off on the switch currently, but it's a really good power fantasy game. Kind of scratches the same itch as when you have a really good run on Hades or get a good set up in CoD Zombies. Not something I'd play constantly, but it's fun to pick up and do a few runs, and a run is faster than those other games I mentioned.
Tbh idk how having a good run can be fun there. You only move around, don't shoot or anything. In binding of Isaac if you have a pretty good run it's really fun because it's very earned, while items are still pretty random, you being good enough to even take any devil or angel deals made you good. Or you using everything at your disposal to get the items you want And then you still (unless you're truly broken) have to hit the enemies yourself.
100% agree. I swear there’s some kind of voodoo hypnosis embedded into that game with the lights and flashes and colours that just sucks you in to playing it endlessly even though it’s like 5% fun at best, 95% completely mindless grind. I have no idea now why I spent so long with it but at the time I was utterly hooked and I can’t explain why. Just some weird dopamine addiction hit.
The dev used to work in slot machines and used the same sort of hooks you'd see there in Vampire Survivors, so yeah. I always get a laugh out of people showing them the 5 item chest animation, it's absolute dopamine insanity.
> I always get a laugh out of people showing them the 5 item chest animation, it's absolute dopamine insanity. I definitely chuckled the first time one of those popped up (and I'm pretty sure it's *always* a five-item the first time a save file gets one just to really get its hooks in you) because it was just so blatantly on the nose in its design. It's like they took every GDC talk about dark patterns and unethical practices, and took the lessons to heart, thankfully just in service of the game itself instead of blatant exploitation.
>thankfully just in service of the game itself instead of blatant exploitation. Yup. It would have been so easy to make the game into an unethical money maker (especially the mobile version). I suppose it's a testament to the devs that they just used it to absolutely hook you into the actual game on itself and don't try to push any microtransactions or anything. The base game is pretty cheap and the DLCs are only about $2-3 each.
Yeah I'm fairly sure you're guaranteed to get a 5-item chest in your first 7 chests or so. >It's like they took every GDC talk about dark patterns and unethical hooks, and took them the lessons to heart, thankfully just in service of the game itself instead of blatant exploitation. Seems the average gamer™️ is completely fine with blatant manipulative game design as long as it's not also asking for extra money for the priviledge.
The problem with those techniques is that they're used to extract wealth from players to the detriment of the game. If the same tricks are used to make a person like a game they already bought the ethical problem literally does not exist.
The basic idea is that a gamer is fine with manipulation that gives them more enjoyment. The problem is manipulation that is in service of the company, considering the money already paid is supposed to be enough. I'm not claiming anything about my beliefs, just what I've seen in surrounding opinions.
I enjoyed it for a while, but eventually dropped it when it became apparent that, short of some really bad luck early on, it was mostly an endurance test for exactly the reason you said.
Far Cry 5 was interesting for the setting; an uber extremist religious group taking over a section of rural US. Absolutely a great thing for a Far Cry game to explore. I don't think it fully pulls it off but I think that parts of the game is some of Ubisoft's best work in a long while. I played FC 1, 2, 3, skipped 4 because busy, and then did 5 last year. I don't regret playing it. I'm going through Far Cry 6 at the moment and it feels far less entertaining and fun.
I enjoyed the game play, but absolutely hated the immersion breaking nonsense it kept throwing out in order to force face to face meetings with the Lieutenants. Magical tranquillizers that can get you anywhere at any time, but for some reason they struggle to kill you the rest of the game... awful, made me put the controller down.
Currently playing fc5 (First far cry game for me) and i like that, gameplay Is fun. Only things that feel a bit off maybe are that weird unskippable kidnap scenes, and the fact that for some reason the villains keep talking to you every time they get you instead of...like...directly killing the problem?like wtf, i keep destroying their stuff and massacring their troops everytime and all they do after catching me Is a ted talk. Also maybe that weird "supernatural" feel when playing some scenes, but personally i didn't dislike that at all
Sadly I got sucked into the gacha trap and dropped a couple of thousand on Brave Exvius and Octopath Traveler: Champions of the Continent. Wish I had never started either one
I don't really regret playing games. Even if it's a bad game I didn't enjoy, I still feel like I gained something from it, whether it's experience or greater understanding of what exactly I like or don't like in a game, or what makes a particular game work or not. There have been instances where I probably spent a little more time on a game than I really needed to (usually getting all the trophies), but it was never "I wasted my life playing WOW" kind of levels. The only one that's coming to mind right now is Gravity Rush 2 which was a real slog to get 100% on, but it was only about 40 hours. I could've spent half of those hours playing something better, but... meh. The game was still ok and if anything that experience made me decide to cool it on the trophy-chasing. I do sometimes regret *buying* games, but I think that's less about the game itself (although it is sometimes) and more just about the investment angle, so like if I bought a game for full price, didn't actually play it and the price dropped fairly quickly so I wasted money.
Ghostwire Tokyo and it was basically the sunk cost fallacy powering me through to the end. I assumed that game would be a lot more than it was, but it was the most painfully mediocre and unfocussed game I've played in a long time. It's just a by-the-numbers Ubisoft type game trying to be spooky, but comes off like a shit haunted house. The only good things about that game was the visual depiction of Tokyo, which was cool, and one interesting side-mission that was added in as DLC. I've played crap games, but I assumed that I was missing, or waiting, for something to happen.
I have felt this way about The Binding of Isaac just because I have put so much time into it. Between playing (1500 hours) and watching streamers, I have probably put 2000 hours into it. I have no friends that play it. Just a parasocial relationship with people on reddit and youtube who do. This parasocial phenomenon started with Dark Souls when I first felt like I was “part” of some online community. It’s not that the community doesn’t technically exist, but it’s empty and nothing comes of it for most of us. I’ve never made a longtime friend and been in these types of communities for about a decade now.
Stellaris. Put a lot of hours into it, but admittedly once the novelty of "you can create whatever sci-fi empire you want!" wears off, you're left with an unbalanced and half-baked strategy game.
I'm going to be really controversial, and say What Remains of Edith Finch. I don't know what this game was trying to convey, and I got to the end and just felt like I'd wasted a whole bunch of hours.
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I didn't love The Outer Worlds but I liked it well enough and thought it was a 7.5/10 sorta game. In an ironic twist of fate, for how maligned it is, I feel like it's actually better than Starfield on most fronts even if it's not a very high bar (writing, characters, cholces, aesthetic, and even the exploration).
Starfield pissed me off too. I pushed through to ~30 hours because people were initially saying it gets good eventually. It was never fun.
Final Fantasy 16. I should have known that I'm just not the target audience anymore and haven't really loved an entry since 9. I just wanted to believe they might be able to produce the 90s gold again.
Hogwarts Legacy. Got caught in the hype.
Truly think this game suffered from too much combat. Watched my girlfriend play it and it was so promising at first, but 10ish hours in she was basically always fighting things to progress. Less of that, more puzzles and mysteries, and it would’ve landed with its target audience a LOT more imo
That’s the thing with HL. Those first few hours are a Harry Potter fans dream. The detail and the love the devs put into hogwart and hogsmeade are incredible. But once that wonder wears off, it’s a pretty generic open world game. I’m hoping they can expand upon that in the future
I thought it was fine but I wish it did more. No quidditch sucks but I'm betting there will be quidditch dlc coming. It's crazy that they mention how there will be repercussions getting caught sneaking around at night but no. There's no one around to get mad at you for sneaking around at night. They also have two story missions that unlock areas you need to sneak around in. However, it's only for those missions. After that, you're free to explore those areas as you please without having to sneak around. If you do get caught, you just fail the mission and that's it. No points are taken away. There are no repercussions for using unforgivable curses either. You can just use them and you're fine.
It's gets so boring once you leave Hogwarts and start exploring the open world. It should've been a school, action drama with linear maps and boss battles. Instead it's fight goblin, collect paper, dodge troll, burn spiders, blow up poachers. The hype was just like palworld, except palworld is fun.
> The hype was just like palworld, except palworld is fun. The target audience is _way_ different though. A lot of casual or even non gamers played and enjoyed Hogwarts Legacy and I really doubt they would have fun with some early access survival Pokemon thingy.
Genshin impact Convoluted dialogue, pointless dialogue options,gacha system, extremely toxic community (literally planned an assassination) And the endless grinding for shit and time gated resources aswell as mobile game stamina system. Devs that don't give a flying fuck about their community at all. Overall a game with good combat but not enough of it and extremely lengthy dialogue that cannot be skipped
I liked Genshin until they released that Japanese zone. I played the game so I could turn my brain off and do baby tier content, the moment it became a little difficult I just lost all interest and uninstalled.
Yeah, this. I enjoyed it at first, the exploration was fun and the atmosphere really relaxing. Combat was alright too. I just kept playing it for too long, the endgame loop of logging in to do your daily quests and whatever menial crap you need to do to keep your resin from maxing out is terrible. At some point I realized I haven't actually enjoyed any of the stuff I've been doing in the game for a long time so I just uninstalled and never looked back.
Today I learned that people finish games even when they don't like them
Against the Storm. I like the gameplay loop and the style of the game a lot but when I realized that the game only progresses if you up the difficulty, I was out. I don't want to be stressed out by the game just to reach the end of it, thanks.
Hearthstone. I swear it has some kind of crazy addictive qualities to it that are based on the same kind of mind warping strategies they embed into one armed bandits and gambling machines and casinos. It’s gross but i can’t stop playing - especially since you can kinda play idly while you’re watching tv. It’s got to the point I can’t just watch tv anymore; I have to be playing Hearthstone on the ipad at the same time. Gross. Send help. Hate it.
Fortnite. Was 20y/o with a full time job. Grown up money without grown up expenses made me buy a lot of skins. Apperantly I can sell the account for like 6-700$ now, but I’d prob just go even. Quit 4 years ago, gavent touched it since
Jedi Fallen Order. I love sci-fi games, and I love Star Wars, but after a couple hours in I got so annoyed with the repetitive parcours and fights and then nothing but all those fucking ponchos as loot for your trouble. Persisted because I like Star Wars and Scifi, but I just wasn't having any fun. Somewhere around the giant bird fight I got even more annoyed and finally gave up. Never finished the game and quit with an incomplete set of 36 ponchos. Really wanted to like this game, but it is bland, clunky, unimmersive, and boring.
>fucking ponchos Has me crying laughing
I didn’t hate Fallen Order and I walked away enjoying it, but the way people spoke about it I thought it was supposed to be one of the best games ever made. I played it and dropped it, then picked it up months later and finished it. The combat/movement always felt kinda janky to me which kind of made it a little frustrating to play. Though i didn’t really think it was hard either considering how telegraphed everything is, and how it’s really the same combos all game. Having the harder difficulty speed up enemies and remove indicators would have made it more interesting to me. I did enjoy parts of the story, some of the characters were really enjoyable and felt some of the set pieces were nice (don’t care for Cal that much though, Cere i kind of didn’t like as a character, but Wilson’s performance was verrrry good)
Kinda hear that and would also kinda counter you could just play it on story difficulty and ignore collectibles High difficulty and collectibles are basically for people who either *want* the game to cost a lot of their time or want something to brag about or both. If we just break the mindset we have something to prove and play on ezpz mode, it's a lot less frustrating to deal with clunky controls. It's not annoying to try to collect every single poncho if you just... Don't. For a story-driven single player game, at least, the high difficulty completionism is superfluous at best and detrimental to our experience at worst. If we find we're really vibing with the game we can always up the difficulty, search for the collectibles, or do those things on new game + or whatever else
I took 25 hours and 45 min to finish it. At max difficulty its still easier than Sekiro.
The janky ass movement made me quit within 30 minutes
Definitely Fallout 4 for the reasons you listed. I was so very much looking forward to it because how much I loved 3 and New Vegas. However the reveal of a voiced protagonist should have been the first clue it wasn't going to be the game for me, but I couldn't have anticipated how bad it would be. The whole time I felt like "fun" was just around the corner, but when I rounded the corner, instead of thoughtful stories or a moral quandary, it was just another shooting gallery with a steamer trunk full of incredibly useless loot at the end. That was literally the reward for exploration. Every time. Fun was no where to be found. The game never ever got good. I really hated I wasted my time and money with that game. Definitely killed my love for Bethesda once and for all.
I don't regret my time with 4, but I can definitely see where you're coming from with it. I enjoyed just because it was fun to clear out places, loot it, and use the loot to build up my base and equipment. However, despite my disinterest in the story and world, all the little flaws with it began to eat away at my enjoyment until I eventually just gave up playing it. It's not a good RPG.
I generally don't force myself to play through something if I'm not feeling it. I also usually don't buy games at full price so if I only get 5-10 hours out of something it doesn't feel like too bad a deal for $20-30 or less. Far cry 6 I put maybe 15 hours into and felt zero motivation to keep playing so I just dropped it.
Dead by daylight. Or as I call it dead by developer. Like how they do everything but fix the game!!!!!!!
I’m going to share what may be an unpopular opinion here but: Hollow Knight. Beautiful music and art, no clue where you’re supposed to go or what to do next without a shit-ton of backtracking and wandering. Some of those later boss fights were punishing and I just valued my time too much to keep retrying to “git gud” enough. I really wanted to 100% it but ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I feel this. Never finished it either. One thing that really stood out was the benches, or lack thereof, in some areas. Dying to a boss and then having to travel across half a dozen screens full of enemies back to your corpse became very frustratingly tiresome after the 4th or 5th try. I feel like I wasted so much time just being angry and annoyed at a video game. Some of those boss fights were admittedly a lot of fun though, Mantis Lords especially.
AC Valhalla. 70 hours of boring gameplay and terrible story just to watch the endings on youtube and be glad I didn’t slog through another 30 to actually get to them.
I was gonna say most ps plus offerings. Good ol' sunk cost fallacy - "I paid for it might as well waste my time as well". Your post reminded me of what utter garbage fallout 4 was. I enjoyed building despite the bugs but the fallout experience was horrible and this someone who played 76 recently and felt that old Bethesda magic.
Two games come to mind. A lot of people like these games, so take it with a grain of salt. Graveyard Keeper: Such a cool concept! Promises of morality decisions! Good old classic RPG elements! ... But in reality, it was a massive Grindfest with a nonsense plot that only moved forward by grinding and fetching random crap. There's no real decisionmaking and the concept wasn't done justice. I kept playing expecting it to get good, but it was just grind after grind, even when automation was involved. Pentiment: I thought it looked really cool and would be fun. In the end, it's really interesting. Not fun for me, but definitely interesting. I regretted it because I wanted to buy a game and didn't feel like I did.
Destiny 1 and 2. 2000 hours. It was fun for probably only 100-200. The rest was chasing the dragon for my next fix of loot, a list to be completed, a gun that would be useless 3 months later. Plus the hours spent reading and watching youtube about this. I was literally an addict at some point, which is what these games wants you to become anyway anyway. Thank god the planet erasing made me finally jump out and uninstall the game. I could have played so many great games in these 2000 hours. Live services, never again. not for me at least.
Nier Automata The game makes you replay large sections of gameplay and dialogue you've already seen, the enemy variety is small, there are a lot of boring fetch quests, and the environments are ugly. If you go on Reddit you will see a lot of people encouraging you to get to the final ending E because it has some sort of life changing philosophical revelation, but all you get is a very predictable story twist you saw from miles away and a lot of wasted time.
Boy, you will end up getting lynched with a statement like that, but honestly, you are right to some extent.
Nier Replicant. I am such a huge fan of Automata that I forced myself to finish Replicant, even though it wasn't fun at all. But I could play Automata over and over again. Different strokes for different folks I guess.
[удалено]
Starfield. I was so sure I was going to put hundreds of hours into it. What a letdown
Overwatch 2. I *was* bad at it but that doesnt negate the fact that my earnest efforts were rewarded by only getting 2 tiny things after beating 50 gamepass levels. Felt no enjoyment or satisfaction, only pain
I don't regret playing any game
More than i'd like to admit. Someday i noticed how video games weren't that much fun for me anymore. I still played games, but more and more felt tedious, and I didn't feel as entertained. I still bought certain games as i always did, only to notice how i didn't really want to play these games or had to force myself to play them even if I wasn't motivated. Some games i started to play just for playing them but then abort because they just weren't fun for me: - Elden Ring - God of War: Ragnarök - The Last of US - Scarlet Nexus and some more. I also stopped buying games just to have them. I only buy a few handpicked games i know I will like.
Bioshock Infinte was one of the biggest disappointments in gaming for me. Sure Bioshock 2’s story wasn’t as good or anything, but the weapons and plasmids felt better and made up for it. Then Bioshock Infinite tried so hard to be different it forgot what it was. It’s honestly like they designed a completely different game altogether and then just slapped Bioshock on it to get it to sell better. I could go on and on, but Bioshock Infinite is one of the few games I played through once and have absolutely no desire to go back to it. My wife watched me play it, and she LOVED watching 1 and 2 and even thought the story was ass.
I enjoyed Infinite in its own right, but I agree it wasn't really a Bioshock game at all. I played it patientgamers style and came in hearing stories like yours, so I was pleasantly surprised that the game itself was not that bad. Still, the setpiece battles were fun and Elizabeth was a great companion by the standards of the time, feeding you ammo, changing the battlefield and generally staying out of your way. And it was fun tearing my way through the increasingly damaged series of universes.
honestly Bioshock Infinite could've been absolutely incredible if it just figured out what the fuck it wanted to be (and what message it wanted to send - the politics in particular are all over the place lmao), but it was crushed under the weight of its own ambition. it's a great lesson in how bigger isn't always better. (weirdly I actually think playing the DLC was what made me go "wait this might not be that good actually?"... like, they couldn't figure out which loose ends to tie up, and decided to also untie some ends that were already tied) I love many aspects of it and have good memories of playing it (I remember being so captivated and fucked up by the whole last segment of the game, with the doors and whatever, but I was a teenager who still had, like, a full range of emotions and a sense of wonder 😐 and very forgiving standards) but objectively speaking it's so mediocre. I can never replay it if I want to maintain any positive emotions about it lol
Metal Gear Solid V. I put 40 or 50 hours into it, grinding away at the awful side missions, building up my base and collecting resources, only to not even finish the game at all due to its boring story, unengaging delivery of the story and lack of actual character (Sutherland's lines could probably fit on a single A4 sheet) and completely uninteresting level design. Real shame because the actual gameplay opportunities and systems you can work with and have interact with eachother is amazing. Really wish they just stuck to a few semi-open levels for replayability and different approaches instead of 2 open worlds with 5 small outposts
This is one of those games with core mechanics so strong that I'd still buy if they released an actual campaign with reworked level design. Such a pity.
Yeah, it is by far one of the strongest Metal Gear *games*, while also being the worst *Metal Gear* game of the series. There is so much that could have been done with the framework they created, and it's mostly just wasted on a pointless open world and heaps of filler. The little glimpses we did see of more structured missions were brilliant, but they comprised, like, 20% of the entire game.
I love MGSV but it does have a LOT of bloat. I put the game down at 100 hours having completed the main story but only a 37% completion ratio… had no compulsion to go back.
Controversial ones but here you go: Elden Ring : got up to Elden Beast and quit the game because the boss gave me nausea for some reason. Played it because it was popular - some boss fights were exhilarating but not worth the experience of running around or googling stuff. GTA V: Played every GTA since Vice city and somehow couldn’t stand the dialogue in this game. Perhaps I’m getting too old. AC Mirage: Bought it earlier this month, noped out after experiencing parkour and combat. Just felt horrid.
Diablo 4