I’ve been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don’t mind so much the fact that it’s different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I’m bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
Lego: The Hobbit
I give this answer in every one of these threads to raise awareness. My wife and I used to get a little drunk and play Lego games. It’s a lot of fun, and a decent couch co-op.
We get into the Mountain, start screwing around with Smaug, and he flies off to burn Laketown. Roll credits. Game over. The 3rd movie flopped so hard they never finished the game. They don’t say it’s 2/3 of the story, and at that point it’s way too late to return it.
Fun game, terrible experience.
That was actually one of my favourite lego games, but I do “hate” the devs for not waiting like just 1 or 2 years for the third movie to come out
I loved the crafting and resource gathering aspect. I felt like abilities were well balanced (not always the case in lego games) and the graphics were lovely - no need for anything more graphically advanced than that, thank you very much.
I kind of preferred it to the Lord of the rings. I’m not sure. Lotr managed to have a more advanced and expansive world map.
They didn’t have to wait for the last movie, they know how the hobbit ends!
Elden Ring - Beautiful game, but without the context of other FromSoft Titles, I’m not sure how you are supposed to enjoy it. Most people would say “well you’re not supposed to enjoy it!” but it feels a bit like one of those restaurants where the gimmick is they are rude to you. The story is impenetrable, the “tutorial” pop ups lie, and quests are hidden behind specific actions that 90% of players would not organically try. That said, I completed it.
Pretty much any moba. cs, r6, overwatch, lol, dota
This is so true
Oh god, Destiny 2. Do I hate it? I’m not sure. I def don’t like it and don’t play it anymore. Something like, 1400 hours over covid, probably more. Sometimes I pick it back up and play for like 15 minutes and the feeling of meh is so overwhelming I wanna throw the controller. I got all the guns I’ll ever need, my armor is completely maxxed out on multiple sets. My drip is impeccable. All of it is kinda worthless now because I couldn’t tolerate the seasonal grind any longer. Having to go back to zero every 3 months when I’ve already mastered everything is gut wrenching for a completionist. “Oh you have to try this new gun, new build.” Yeah and once I get it, a month later it will get balanced into oblivion.
Didn’t hate it, but I just sort of slid off Baldur’s Gate 3.
I love Larian’s other games and even pre-ordered bg3 to play on vacation, but the combat just isn’t as fun as Divinity 2. I kept trying to avoid combat but then I walked into a new area and combat started automatically and I just groaned and turned off the game.
I got to act 2, which isn’t a lot of time, but it felt like it
I played a lot of bg3. Every so often I think about playing it again, and then I think about how DND 5e kind of stinks, so I don’t.
There are mods to convert it to Pathfinder 2e… But then I’d rather just go play one of Owlcat’s Pathfinder games
I tried one of them and either I don’t understand pathfinder, or it didn’t work right, or I didn’t enjoy it. My to-hit on my first attack of the round was like 65%. Missing is not fun.
I think I appreciate pathfinder2e more than 5e, but it’s still got a lot of DND-ness in it.
What do you think makes the combat system of Divinity 2 better? I usually hear the opposite.
Octopath Traveler. I struggle to finish jepgs but I was genuinely enjoying it, until I stopped unlocking new skills and finding good stuff became an exercise in running around aimlessly.
I am currently paying through Assassin’s Creed Odyssey, and I have a love/hate relationship with it. On the one hand the story, the acting, the visuals, … are all top notch. However, they also made it impossible to play as assassin - even more so than in Origins. The protagonist constantly reminds the player to stay hidden, but then none of the bigger targets are killable in one hit. Having to use an assassination hit once, and then hide until they forget you, is no fun. Especially if you need to do that 5+ times for one enemy. Some of the later game skills help, but it’s still more fighting than assassinating. In an AC game. It sucks.
Even worse, there are a ton of scripted fights, where you simply cannot do assassinations. Open a door in a cut scene and immediately get jumped by five guys. Kill a whole camp and sneak up to the boss, only to start a cut scene where you brazenly and openly challenge him. It sucks.
But then there’s an emotional reunion or a cool side quest, and it’s all good again. Until the next fight.
I can’t think of a single one. I stop playing games I don’t like.
yeah, I checked my list of games on Steam, and of the ones with 20+ hours playtime, the only I didn’t actively enjoy were some idle games, so they don’t really count. Everything else I liked. I stick with meh books more than with games :)
If Genshin Impact was a Steam game, it would be the game from the screenshot for me (and if anything, 1.4k hours is a lowball - I’ve racked up over 500 hours this year alone on PC, not to mention the years before on mobile).
It would have been goated if it wasn’t a gacha game and battlepass timesink, but now I can’t recommend it to anyone, at least not if you’re strong-willed and can resist the gacha and fomo or willing to try setting up a private server … which I imagine people here on fedi might be more likely to be, now that I think. (The private server thing, that is.)
I have a love-hate relationship with Genshin, and the only reason I’m still playing is that I love the exploration and I consciously ignore everything else in the game 😅 (aside from fun event minigames)
I used to be a lot more susceptible to fomo (“oh no this event is only available for 3 weeks, I should grind through it even if I don’t enjoy the story or the minigames”), but Genshin trained my fortitude against its psychological manipulation, and now I don’t even touch the story or any content I don’t enjoy. Thanks Hoyo for making me care a lot less about your game lol…
It looks like Dragonsword, a single player gacha game, just released the other day if you wanted to scratch that itch.
In counter-strike you can win and still be angry with your teammates
This is the essential premise of all Soviet Womble videos
Pokemon Legends Arceus. I rage quit after playing more than 200 hours.
On paper, it is the best Pokemon game for me. I can complete the in-game collection without having to trade with other versions of the same game. The end-game is moderately grindy and gives a fun sense of progress (catch 15 of this pokemon, defeat 20 of that one with ice attacks).
Unfortunately, the spawn rates are very very broken. When you first enter an area of a map, it is swarming with creatures, but as you catch or defeat them, they do not respawn. It takes some combination of distance and in-game time to get a map to repopulate so I have to travel away for several minutes, travel back, and then find that the map only partially refilled. Plus, there seems to be some sort of back-off that reduces the spawn rate of rare Pokemon the more often I clear a zone in quick succession which only resets when I teleport back to the hub area and teleport back. It is all very painful when certain Pokemon seem to have a 5 or 10% chance of spawning and the game asks me to catch 15 of them and then defeat 20 more.
And don’t get me started on Space-Time Distortions, random events where a small part of the map gets unique creatures for a short while. The game does not explain how often they are supposed to occur, that certain player actions (like battling) pause the timer, and that in-game weather events can reset it. A player can wait hours for a distortion to appear before looking up the formula online and being told that the best strategy is too load into a map, put down the game for exactly 5 minutes, and if a distortion is not starting, teleport out of the map and back in, wasting a minute looking at loading screens.
Overall, it is so frustrating that I cannot imagine it is all intentional, but that it is caused by bugs that the developers never patched. I have heard that it is fixed in the new Pokemon Legends.
I never really stayed in one map for too long but now that you’ve mentioned it I do recall thinking things were taking too long to respawn during some specific mon grinding.
Z-A has definitely fixed this with more intuitive respawn mechanics, but it’s got much more of a focus on battling and less on collecting this time around, so it isn’t for everyone. Much more fun than the main series has been in a while though!
Baldur’s Gate 3. Game falls apart after the first act imo. Voice acting was great, first act is very fun and I can still play it, but I just can’t manage to make myself even finish act 2. I do get why people like it, but maintain that as a game it was very much overrated. It’s made my wife swear they should only do GOTY selection for the previous year after the full game has been released and played through entirely. I get the sense their early testing allowed for lots of tweaking an adjustment in the first act but they ran out of time to give the rest the same treatment.
I disagree on the falling off point. Act 2 has that funnel, pulling you into the final showdown at the end of the act. It is cinematic, epic, and such a great ending to the act that it feels like an ending to the game (which it technically is, since there’s an optional ending at the end of the act). The problem really begins with act 3, since the tight narrative choices at the end of act 2 primes you for a tight, claustrophobic narrative for the third act as you race against the clock to the finish and instead… it’s the biggest act in the entire game, with the most amount of side quests, most of which aren’t optional if you want all of the origin characters to have good endings. You’ll even stop leveling up about halfway through act 3, so the reward feedback loop really dies off in this act. Makes the ending so incredibly hard to complete.
I agree with this so much - the end of act 2 was such a narrative high I was excited to see how they topped it!
And then they didn’t. And then I stopped levelling. It wasn’t the climax to the story I was expecting.
I always struggled to describe what was so disappointing but you hit the nail on the head. Starting act 3 felt like I was sent in time back to act 1 - aimlessly wandering around the map until finally stumbling across the next main story point.
Five Nights at Freddy’s was just…disappointing, and got worse after the 1st. 3 at least had interesting atmosphere.
It’s just jumpscares and frustration.
Dark Souls.
Got Dark Souls II to see what the hype was about, and 100%-ed it cuz I was post-surgery with nothing better to do.
Fast forward, and a friend gifted me Elden Ring, so, here we go again.
It’s famous difficulty was just a combo of clunky controls and obnoxious health pools, which made mastering that type of difficulty really unsatisfying.
I gitted gud, but Dark Souls never gitted fun.
Same applies to Souls-likes.
I really wanted to believe. Fucking love the aesthetic, but that’s about the only positive I can recall.
I’ve always somewhat agreed. I’ve played elden ring and some DS 3. I think the world design is very fun, and most fights individually can be fun. But at the end of the day every boss fight is a janky rhythm game that gets longer and longer.
I see the appeal, but the most I do like once a month is jump in Elden Ring for an hour or two where I bumble around exploring or upgrading my stuff, find a boss fight, and just learn the funny Osu!-like pattern to beat it. It never leaves me mesmerized or champing at the bit for more like I’ve seen some of my friends get obsessed with it.
I tried both Dark Souls 2, Dark Souls 1, and even Bloodborne. All felt shit and I literally couldn’t even find achievable goals from any of their starting areas.
I’ve played (imo) much better Soulslike games all the way through, like Tunic, Stellar Blade, and Another Crab’s Treasure. But FromSoft, ironically, seems to make the worst of them.
My Friendly Neighborhood.
Basically a Resident Evil game; BUT, you get far, far less ammo. The enemies attack via insta-grabs with no discernible lunge. They get back up from falling anytime you leave the room, unless you consume a duct tape item to keep them down.
I eventually realized I just wasn’t having fun by avoiding enemies every room. On top of that, the game has no music and makes you listen to psychotic muppets in the background in every room.
I loved that game for about half an hour. Never went back to it though and I’m feeling like I dodged a bullet
