Most of the video games I’ve played were pretty good. The only one I can think of that I didn’t like was MySims Kingdom for the Nintendo DS. Dropped that pretty quickly. It was a long while ago, but I’ll guess it was because there were too many fetch quests and annoying controls.
Ubisoft style open world games. I honestly know I’m not built to enjoy them but I convinced myself to try and finish Horizon Zero Dawn and it was a huge mistake.
For a single player game, it vigorously wastes your time. The entire game is based around crafting but each time you need to gather something you need to come to a full stop, and spend a second watching the interact meter fill before you can gather each thing you see in the overworld.
The talent trees either contain things that are not meaningfully impactful on the core experience, ie tons of talents are slightly dressed up raw damage increases. Or they are things that are meaningful, but not surprising such as silent takedowns or bullet time. Overall it feels like Aloy was designed to be kind of fun and then they hamstrung her in a bunch of different ways to give a reason for the talent system to exist, and it takes the runtime of the whole game to undo this.
Many quests do not have anything to say about the lore or characterization of the world, whether it be for individual characters or the world overall.
“Competitive” multiplayer games in general. I miss it when multiplayer games were just fun and not streamlined misery simulators where the attitude is everyone is an idiot except yourself.
I know it’s popular to fart on Overwatch 2, but even when the original came out I thought it was so fucking dull. The No Man Sky quote “Wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle” can very well explain the hero roster of that game.
I’d rather do a barefoot pilgrimage to Jerusalem than play CS:GO, League of Legends, Overwatch, Fartnite, Valorant, etc.
Team Fortress 2 is unbalanced and janky, and it’s 1000x more fun than any of those games. It even proved that the competitive crowd could do their own thing that suit their needs, instead of ruining a game to the ground with “balance” and unfun gameplay.
I can relate to this very much. I love Team Fortress 2 - it has just enough of that random hilarious stuff in almost every match that makes you laugh. I think it’s a huge part of why the game is still alive and broke its player record recently.
streamlined misery simulators where the attitude is everyone is an idiot except yourself.
Too real (talking mostly about CS:GO as I that’s the one I have most experience with on your list). It’s… occasionally fun, especially if your team gets into a slighly less casual mindset and plays it a bit more tactically.
But it often ranges down to the collective team just getting mad all the time and throwing various accusations around for seemingly the fun(?) of it. Fun match? Maybe, sometimes. All the time? Absolutely not, thank you.
Over the years I’ve started reaching more and more for co-op instead (Deep Rock Galactic, PlateUp!, Alien Swarm, Minecraft, Unrailed, …) and it has been a lot of fun, both solo and with friends.
Co-op games are definitely the only fun I’ve had in multiplayer for the longest time. Toxicity can still be found (Looking at you Payday 2), but overall they are a more wholesome, chill and more importantly FUN experiences.
Myst. I know, I know. One of the hallmarks of video games. I hated it. I like games that give you a path and let you figure it out. I’ve hundreds of hours into Factorio and it’s kin. Portal! A puzzle game, Portal gives you A and Z and lets you figure out how to get there. Myst doesn’t do ANYTHING. Nothing was obvious to me. I didn’t understand where the A to Z was. I couldn’t find A, Z, or any of the other steps. None of it clicked. Years ago, I watched some parts of walk throughs and I did not understand how I was supposed to know the things they were doing. None of it made any sense to me.
I don’t remember if it was like this with the game Myst specifically, but generally speaking: Some hardly solvable riddles were put into many point and click adventure in the pre-internet era, because they usually came with an expensive help hotline that they wanted you to call.
Superman 64 is the only game I tried to return to Blockbuster before the rental window was done. They wouldn’t let me so I had to keep it for the rest of the week.
I’ll list a few.
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MLB: The Show. I used to really enjoy these games because they felt like a sports game that actually cared about making a very realistic simulation while still keeping it fun. Now everything is about Diamond Dynasty, the fantasy baseball mode. All the other modes only reward you by giving you packs and giving you a gentle shove into Diamond Dynasty. One of my favorite modes was “March to October” where you play select innings in select games over the course of a whole season. Each game’s outcome determines your team’s general ability over the season. The better you do, the better you win rate and the higher chance of making it into the post season. Your rewards? Card packs. SMH.
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Ghostrunner. The levels were fun and had big Hotline Miami vibes but the boss fights were far too difficult and just utterly boring. Yeah, I really liked wall running in circles for minutes on end because the floor was lava. That was great.
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Atomic Heart. Bought it on a whim while high. I liked the bioshock influence and the level design is really cool. It just suffers from being a “survival horror” without the survival or the horror, so most of the gameplay involves you scrounging around for bullets and then dealing ultra light blows to enemies because you ran out of your 3 bullets. Pretty much none of the combat was fun and the stealth was a relentless ultra punishing slog. As a lover of stealth games, please if you’re considering making a stealth game do not take any notes from this game. It did it all wrong.
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Dying Light 2. I loved the first game but this game just sorta felt overwhelming in a way? I really don’t know how else to put it. I like open world games but developers just need to calm the fuck down. I don’t need 10 map markers.
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The Quarry. I get that it’s supposed to be a rip on teen slasher movies but that still didn’t make it very fun to me. I loved Until Dawn and played it probably 5 times so I was super hyped for this but just really let down. I hated the way the game ended and I hated pretty much every second that I played it.
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The Hunter: Call of the Wild. It was just boring. I guess that’s what hunting is like in real life, but so is truck driving and I like truck simulator games…
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papers please. i thought i was doing pretty well in the beginning, but i guess it’s built in to the narrative of the game that no matter how hard you work, your family will still get sick and die, and the story progresses by you unknowingly screwing up and letting in a terrorist. not only are you responsible for paying for your own mistakes, it only gets harder and more unforgiving with each level. i realized pretty quickly that it’s not fun at all to spend my precious free time playing an extremely punishing game about working.
Destiny 2. I played THE HELL out of Destiny 1, then 2 rolls around and it was like they forgot everything that people liked about 1.
You couldn’t access the story missions from the map, and you couldn’t replay them on demand, you could only play them off a playlist. There was a weekly heroic story mission that gave a powerful engram reward, then they removed the reward and people stopped playing even that. Eventually they removed the story missions entirely “because nobody was playing them”. Big brain move there!
In Destiny 1, each series of missions on a planet ended with a higher level “strike”. So you’d pick the missions off the map based on your light level, then level up to hit the strike, then move on to the missions on the next planet.
In D2, not only could you not see the missions, or what level you were supposed to be, the strikes weren’t present on the map at all, you could only play them on a play list and the play list was randomized. It was also bugged, often delivering the same strike over and over and others not at all, leaving gaps in the storyline and player experience.
They did patch things, like being able to play strikes on demand, then about 1/2 way through the life cycle Bungie decided to just delete 1/2 of the content in the game. New players would come in, have no access to the original story missions, no idea what was going on, and no idea how to proceed without watching a bunch of youtube videos showing the content removed from the game.
For existing players, they decided that people had spent too much time, in some cases hundreds of hours, curating their perfect weapon and armor sets. Rather than create better gear to replace what people loved, they artificially capped old gear to sunset it and force people to “upgrade” to crappier gear that replaced it. They intentionally didn’t make better gear because they were afraid of “power creep” and legitimately “explained” that they no longer knew how to design the game around the old gear. Funny, they didn’t have that problem when it was the ONLY gear.
Maybe it’s better now? I dunno, the way Bungie totally disrespected the time I spent playing and money I spent on expansions, they’ll never get another dime from me.
My biggest issue is I just can’t keep up with the monetary demands of that game. Every time I finally had the excess money for an expansion they come out with two more.
Pretty much all the new AAA games. Kind of lost interested the moment games stopped being innovative. It’s nice to have super dooper realistic looking game and millions of small details but I still haven’t seen a game that would really improve on the game play in the last 20 years. They are still full of simple rules and mechanics. For example, 20 years ago it was common to have the “enemy spotted you but just hide and don’t move for 3 seconds and they will move on” rule in games and it pisses me off when new AAA games do it. Modern games are full of this shit. “If you do A in situation B, C will happen”. Just learn the rules and beat the game. There are more rules, more details, animations are nicer but I still find it boring. It’s still just a bunch of fixed rules, NPCs still move like robots, you can still see the algorithms behind everything. I prefer to play an small indie game that actually tries something new than AAA game that tries to build ‘realistic’ world and fails at it.
I rented Sim Earth for SNES and it didn’t come with instructions. I had no idea what to do, and it was confusing and frustrating.
12 Minutes. It sucks because I was really looking forward to it - it’s published by Annapurna which has an amazing track record, and the trailer and concept looked really interesting. But it just kind of devolves into a really basic point and click game with one location where you just have to try every combination of things until something works. And the story itself is just a trainwreck. I wasn’t left satisfied or with any interesting thoughts, I was mostly just confused as to what the hell I was supposed to get out of it.
If you want a good time loop game published by Annapurna, just play Outer Wilds.
The ending is especially bad… I was rooting for some big reveal but the “twist” is just so bad it completely ruined the game for me.
Stardew valley - it sells itself as a harvest moon inspired farming Sim but as someone who grew up playing a lot of harvest moon, I really can’t help but be super disappointed in it. Harvest moon games have a complex and more importantly moving relationship system - you start to go after one marriage candidate, the others will pair themselves up and have kids alongside you. People move in and out and you need to really get to know people in order to progress the game and unlock things. Stardew valley? Super flat in comparison. All the candidates you don’t marry feel super flat once you lock yourself out of them. There’s not much locked behind friendship so there’s less reason to get out there and really work on befriending everyone.
Also fucking combat - it’s a supposedly nice and peaceful farming Sim, yet combat is an unavoidable part of the game. I didn’t sign up for combat! It’s not fun it’s just annoying.
Terraria, it’s a hot take I think but I just dislike it so much.
I dislike the controls, the appearance, the sorta jank, I just find it to be a more boring Minecraft and Minecraft can already be boring. I don’t understand the love for it and I think it ruined a friendship with a group that really only wanted to play that and league of legends
I don’t dislike Terraria per se, and I highly respect the dedication of both the devs and the community to it.
However, each time I try getting into it, I would make a basic house, spelunk a cave… and then forget about the game for a while. I don’t know why, but I just have trouble with games where you have to set your own goals
Yeah I had no concept of what to do in Terraria.
I am fine with games not telling me what to do cause I love Tunic and Outer Wilds but also there is still a somewhat obvious somewhat linear story available if you want it. The “do it yourself sandbox” games struggle to draw me in fast enough for me to not get bored and confused of learning an entire games worth of mechanics and optimization for no payoff before I put it down. And never pick it back up.
For me it was Cyberpunk 2077. Yes there were all those bugs at launch but I did not have too many issues. My main complaint was the story and the characters. The protagonist V was without any compassion, just a loud asshole. I couldn’t empathize at all. I felt like I wasn’t able to make any decisions were I was happy with the outcome. Additionally the gameplay was mediocre at best. A lot of places in the world felt completely rushed and unfinished. Combined with the lies from marketing, I wasn’t hooked at all and felt betrayed.
Did you play male or female V? A general consensus I hear is that male V makes a better merc while female V acts more like a real person with some compassion
I played a male V and I looked into the differences now. I might have to give the game a second chance and play a female V.
And I’m not gonna have expectations this time arround. So I might be able to enjoy the positive sides.Thank you!
I’m gonna come out swinging: not even a game, but two entire fucking genres:
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Battle royales. I am like 90% convinced that gamers have been tricked by some dark psychology that has somehow convinced them that these games are worth playing. I don’t know whether it’s because the quality of FPS games has been so low for so long that today’s gamers have never really played a properly fun shooter or what. Battle royales are 75% downtime. You spend so long fucking around parachuting in to the map, walking around, collecting stuff, bla bla bla, interspersed by just a few moments of action, and when you get killed it usually doesn’t feel fair, it’s because a whole other team showed up right as you were already fighting someone else and put you in a nearly impossible situation.
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MOBA games are just RTS games with the best bits taken out.
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I didn’t say that you’re wrong or lying at all! Like, MOBAs aren’t for me but otherwise I have no problems with them. But for Battle Royales, yeah, I said that I thought that they trick people, like they’re intentionally really manipulative. For example, loot boxes - they’re fun, but manipulative. Know what I mean?
I think people just like the competitive-ness of a battle royale. People like to win and nothing says “winner” more like being the last survivor out of 100, you know?
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most multiplayer shooters to me, they’re typically filled with the most vile shit you’ll ever hear coming from an 8 year old, and the adults are just as bad and should know better.
competitive shooters like Rainbow Six Siege or Counter Strike are also really bad in casual modes, especially if you’re a new or lackluster player. You’ll be flamed, team killed, and your teammates will try their absolute best to ruin your entire day over a hobby
