What video game have you played the most, that you think is garbage and no one else should ever play?
What video game have you played the most, that you think is garbage and no one else should ever play?
I have played Eve Online so many hours, and it's a bad game. Don't do it. you will spend hundreds of hours dreaming about the cool thing you'll do later, but for 99% of players the cool thing will never happen. You will be part of the one percent's cool thing.
Do you have a similar game?
League of Legends
It's a bad game that makes you bad by exposure
I really wanted to get into MOBA games, the idea seem really cool. But every one I've tried the meta/community seem infuriating.
It's just annoying how everything has to follow the "meta" and if you do dare to try something else and you don't perform above expectations you'll get shit on. I just want to play the game the way I enjoy it sometimes.
The worst game I've ever sunk thousands of hours into
I hate this game but I love Bard. He's the only fun thing in the game. ARAM too.
OMG so much this!
Yep, this is mine. And I have barely any time in compared to serious players. But when it was first becoming a thing I think I probably put in 50+ hours playing with my friends. As someone who primarily plays single player games this is a lot. Then I realized I hated every minute playing, and it was making me hate my own friends. It was actually stressful to play. I would be angry after ever play session. So I quit.
Fuck League of Legends. It's shit and no one will convince me otherwise.
it was making me hate my own friends
Yep. Other games it's easy to brush off a mistake and laugh about it. Just something about this one (probably the massive time investment and amount of attention required for every game) had us seething at each other... I played for 10 years and probably played less in those 10 years than most of my friends I played with did in their first 2... Lol. I liked team fight tactics, but blizzard did it better in my opinion. And they removed Dominion. Was the only game type that was worth playing.
>.>
I've find aram to be pretty fun tbh. No raging or anything, just skill spamming and it's super casual
My dumbass ex-brother-in-law is deep in the process of losing his wife and two kids largely because of his EVE Online addiction.
I can see it, I played a lot, but I never lost my job over it.
But there were folks that were on no matter what, and as time has gone on the micro transactions have only gotten worse and more aggressive. So it's easy to imagine that those folks who were on 24/7 were burning whatever money they had on the micro transactions.
The high of the really good things happening felt SOO good. Like pulling off the perfect heist/ambush felt so good it pulled you through another 50 hours of grinding on the amount of adrenaline and endorphins you would get after that 5 minute victory.
I've only ever been a miner, and not a moon miner, but like the kind who goes to .4sec and just tries finding the most valuable ore... I know there is a huge pvp and pve scene, but like, where can I find it? I've also never been a multi boxer, so I have one character who over the course of 7+ years has trained every possible thing, and i have no idea what to do with that, besides maybe joining for a week and strip mining before gettin burnt out
I feel like that game isn’t good enough to warrant that sort of sacrifice. It’s gotta be more than just his addiction to tanking a fake economy…
Skyrim. The writing is horrible, I can't remember the name and personalities of more than 5 NPCs, the town's are microscopic, it can't handle more than 5 NPCs on screen, all the dungeons are theme park rides with gift shop exits, combat is a horrific sloppy mess, it's ugly, it has 4 voice actors, it's a buggy mess despite being released 37 times, the only way to interact with the world is violence, and all of the quests are flaccid boring murderfests.
I've played hundreds of hours.
Actually the first thing I thought of. Played the fuck out of that game, but kinda always hated it while playing it. Can’t explain why. Was a weird time.
I don't disagree with anything but man, I love Skyrim anyways. I guess because quests do get repetitive I love the stupid ones, like the ones given by the Mara priestess.
People that complain about Skyrim town size complain that Lego Police stations are missing a back wall.
There are not a lot of games where you can play a thief and up being a vampire, after recovering from a alcohol night with a deadra.
When it released I wanted to play it one without any mods. I lasted less than a week.
I love ultimate Skyrim/wildlander though, it gives it a lot of improvements and I just rp in my head.
I played tons of Morrowind and Oblivion.. could not get into Skyrim at all and I tried multiple times.
I'm kind of afraid for Starfield. It looks interesting but given their track record I'm afraid they might botch it up.
Don't even be afraid they "might", just accept that they will. Go into it with the understanding that it's going to be an overhyped bugfest when it launches, that you can then eventually fix and massively overhaul with mods, just like every other Bethesda game, and then you can just skip the part where you're disappointed.
I must have played skyrim on 5 different platforms, started by playing 250 hours on pirated copy and then buying it and playing for 750 hours at least.
Thank God Bethesda knows how mods keep them up or I wouldn't bother with anything they put out.
Starfield mods bout to be crazy, I can feel it.
This is 1000% my Skyrim experience. Also, Oblivion and Fallout 3. and yet, I can't get enough.
I mean, I clearly can, since I haven't played them in a couple years, but you know what I mean.
Play some modded Morrowind and live the good life
And you will play hundreds more.
Call of Duty. And any other game that makes you pay more money (after you've already paid for the game) for loot boxes that are basically gambling for kids.
I can't stand the state of modern games. They arrive broken, have pay-to-win models, and promote an unhealthy dopamine cycle of gambling and addiction.
I played a shitload of COD4 with friends in college. I think I played MW2 briefly and then basically dropped COD.
When I bought a PS5 I was looking for games with PS5 versions to show off the graphics and thought hey, why not get back into COD? So I bought Cold War.
The multiplayer menus and lobbies are damn near indecipherable nonsense. There is so much spam and shit I can't even see what I should do to play the game. It's a sad state of affairs how things are now.
It makes me sad to say it now because I used to love it so much, but Destiny.
It’s just a micro-transaction shadow of its former self now.
Definitely destiny, I realized I was paying an absurd amount of money for seasonal content just to play once a month with friends, the separate dungeon pass was the last straw, wish I had moved on sooner
I’ve lost interest in the game, but in terms of bang for your buck entertainment, I have no regrets for the money I’ve spent on Destiny. Even at 100 bucks a year for the most recent expansion and all the seasons, it still feels like a deal to me, but I’ve never spent a dime on the cosmetics and that may not be the case for others.
Fucking Ark. I have a major love-hate relationship with that game.
This review visualizes it well.
Is that screenshot from this year? ARK came out 2015, so if this person had 2 years of playtime in 2020, then they basically spent 40% of their time every day playing this game. That's 9.6 hours every day!
(warning: link to reddit) - the thread is ~3 years old, so it sounds like your rough calculations are correct.
I'm just a filthy casual, so I never had the skills to tame high level dinos and stuff, but this game was still such a time suck! And so frustrating yet addictive.
every time I see this I think someone must care about this person and is missing the red flags about their crippling addiction
I feel this so much. I wasn't sure if I would answer Ark or The Sims 4. I have my own personal Ark server because I don't like the timers on official, housing or dino. I have other things I need to do besides watch a downed dino for 20hrs. I don't want to rely on tribe member dinojoe to help me either. But my goodness I love playing Ark. 😕 I stopped recommending it several years ago. But I still play it myself. 🤔
I love ARK so much, it is an amazing game when you customise your own server and play with friends only.
Just ... don't join any public server where the admin is a 17 yo who makes up weird rules like every woman has to join his harem or no one is allowed to ride a bigger dino than his. ( ´ ▽ ` )
Yeah that post was what I thought of when I asked this question. I don't have THAT many hours in Eve, but oh boy did I waste so much time in eve.
I was bitten by the eve bug. I played early on, and then it got to a point where there was too much new content, that it became so much of a chore to bother with. Fwiw I stopped playing around the time when you could interact with planets, however long that was.
Just bought it lol
Just in case you're out of the loop and it's relevant to you: they're remaking Ark in Unreal 5 and going to be shutting down official servers for "old" ark within the next few months. And then it looks like you might have to pay for everything all over again. At the very least the base game already seems to have a set price.
Genshin. Sucks really, and I felt that after I quit the game, looking back, I never had fun at all.
Imo Genshin is a decent game at its core. The problem is that the gacha elements make it really hard to enjoy.
That’s true. I just can’t seem to separate the breath of the wild aspect of it. It’s like I’m playing BOTW with more characters.
Weird I didn't mind the gatcha it's the fucking non-stop talking fairy and unskippable dialogue, I have 30 minutes to an hour of time to PLAY the game and I'm sat smashing A trying to get to the content.
Cookie Clicker
like drugs... just say no
I think idle games are interesting to mindfully experience. They - at least good ones - demonstrate the influence of external motivation, of progression.
Outside of that... Yeah. There's a fine line of experiencing theme and gameplay Design, and falling into mindless simple number scaling and waiting.
This is why Universal Paperclips is my favorite idle game, maybe my favorite game ever. It has an ending and you can even interpret a story from it. Definitely worth playing once.
This is a crazy one for me. I saw this for like 5 seconds and I knew instantly this would piss me off and I never ever ever touched it or any 'idle' type games. I would rather stand still and stare at a wall. I don't understand how anyone could find any entertainment at all. And apparently they are massively popular.
It does weird stuff to your brain. Just never start any of these and you're good.
Always thought I was immune until I was forced to play Roblox, of all things, with my niece. We played some kind of incremental / idle game and I had to continue to play this game. It was horrible. ( ; ω ; )
I enjoyed playing Cookie Clicker, but probably because I only really played it for a month or so - I can imagine playing that any longer would not be worth the time 😅
Elite: Dangerous.
Hell of a good space trucker sim. If you like spending 2 hours managing your ship before making a 6 system jump only to dock and do it all over again.
The king of 'oops I forgot my keys' simulation
You mean fuel scoop. Nothing worse than making jumps with a full tank only to get to your destination and realize you forgot to equip a fuel scoop. Better hope they have a fuel scoop you can afford that also doesn't take forever to refuel!
I second this. I really love the aesthetics and design direction - especially the sound - but the gameplay just falls flat after a few dozen hours. Doing anything cool requires copious amounts of grinding, and the story has been dead in the water for years.
It's a real shame that Frontier botched it so badly.
It says a lot about a game when in the end the early access period was more fun than the game 2 years after release. Definitely one of the biggest disappointments of my gaming career after the sheer bliss of it actually happening and the initial game being so fun.
I think they painted themselves into a corner with the code and everything just ended up being a giant slog that could never deliver the initial promise.
But the ship management is very basic and less complicated than what you'd find on ETS2 for example.
I played a shit ton of WoW when I was younger. It stopped being fun a long time ago. Mostly it was only fun with friends.
D3 also sucks. Played a lot of that at launch, and also when the expansion came out (can’t remember the name). D2 was always way better, and now with D2R, I don’t think I’ll ever need to buy another game in my life.
D3 got better with age. The seasons, especially the later ones, were a blast.
Hard agree with you that D2 was better than D3 in every way. I also bought D2r and played it a bit at launch.
Have you played any D4 yet? As someone who never loved D3 I will say that D4 has been refreshing. I have some low level gripes with it, but overall I am really enjoying it.
Had to scroll way too far to find WoW. I'm still actively raiding wotlk classic with my small guild, but blizzard seems to have a policy of,
- Step 1: determine what should be done
- Step 2: do the opposite
For everything. Server population management. Bots. Moderation. Customer support. It's incredible how incompetent they are. Any patch now they'll add RDF and I'll unsub one last time and be done for ever. Cannot NOT recommend it enough.
Yeah. I feel like blizzard has always been that way. How long have you been playing WoW? I feel like it was a product of it’s time. I quit before WoW classic got started, but I started playing the original about 2 months after launch. It was incredibly fun back then, but I wasted way too much of my life on it.
It's Hearthstone for me. Spent a lot of time and even some money on a game that was just getting shittier every year.
I just couldn't click with Hearthstone. Wanted a time killer that I could jump into for a quick game or two and just couldn't figure out what was going on really.
Even at my lowly beginner level it seemed that everyone else knew what was going on and would ace me. And I was just left dumbfounded. Couldn't figure out if it was just me not getting the game or a load of smurfs.
Also doesn't help that there's years and years of content to catch up on and anyone new is just in an ocean of it.
Yeah, it was a bit overwhelming to get into. You only got the ball rolling once you had a good library of cards and could start experimenting.
Maybe get a template/concept from the Internet and then start changing things was how I learned the most.
But the barrier to entry became way too high over time
The single player mission packs were great. I loved Naxx and League of Explorers. I wish Blizzard could have just made that a separate game, since there was no incentive for unfun power creep in a single player experience. I guess Slay the Spire fills that void at least.
The main game is just impossible to catch up nowadays if you want to have competitive decks and not spend money.
However, I love Battlegrounds and buying the stupid season pass doesn't do much 4 me (4 hero picks instead of 2 and cosmetics that I don't care about).
Yeah, BG is definitely the choice these days, I never really could get into it though. Hearthstone was most fun for me when setting up elaborate decks around weird cards or combos.
I wish there was a way for games like this to not have an annoying, expensive, ever-changing meta! That's always the reason I end up dropping games. Did the same for Hearthstone and League, it was either too expensive to try and have a feasible deck and/or too difficult to have to constantly keep up with changing metas.
It would be possible I think, but corporate greed is a thing.
Like if it was $10 a year to get everything, maybe with a slow free to play option.
But there is also a certain addictiveness of cards actually being rare and getting a rush when opening something cool. I don't know how you get that without limiting content and user experimentation, which is where most the fun comes from.
Destiny 2. Played it religiously and got like 3k hours in it since 2018, and just stopped last year. The grind was killing me season after season and the clan I was with has disbanded, everyone is super pissy in LFGs. Great shooter, but can't do everything from zero every 3 months Bungie. Qlso the rotating meta, and the frind to get it.
I had a similar arc with D2. I was on it straight from work for hours for a few years, was a bit too much to be honest.
Then it became even more cyclical and the grind felt like I was Sisyphus, constantly working towards the next thing.
Haven't turned it on in years now and happy that way!
Same. I think I have roughly 2k hours over the years, but I've reduced my own playtime (and also the amount of money I give them, I don't buy it unless it's more than 50% off) over the years and ever since Forsaken I've had less and less reason to recommend it to anyone else. The big reason is pretty simple. Bungie just keep giving it less and less focus while monetizing the game as much as possible. Without writing an essay on everything wrong with Destiny I think the best summary is that the game has lost it's vision and turned into a content treadmill. The themes of the original story have been largely thrown out the window. There's no longer a clear artistic style of Destiny but rather whatever seems "fun", like having 80s themed sci-fi setting with a "surfs up bro" type of character for an expansion. That expansion in the context of the wider story was supposed to be the dreadful defeat and uncertainty about the future, but we've thrown the story out anyway so who cares? Content is largely the same thing we've been doing since Forsaken with the biggest difference being the setting. All the while price of the game is increased and content gets spread out between expansions, seasons, dungeons and in game store, so that Bungie could get all the money they want.
And that's just for the seasoned players. New players have it even worse. The new player experience is a lazily put together nonsensical mess. One of the worst I've seen. New players would have to put in a lot of effort to "get" Destiny and for that commitment they get "buy now" thrown in their face on every possible chance like some shitty F2P mobile game.
Oh man, I used to love this game. I adored the lore and gameplay, but fell off at Season of the Splicer, which is a damn shame because I LOVE the eliksini!! It was like that season was made for me. But I just got tired of the weekly chore list, and the need to "get my money's worth" for whatever season I bought. Story was locked behind these chores too. Just.. damn shame.
Yeah +1 on Destiny. My most played game after ARMA2 and I'd not recommend it. It doesn't respect your time and you're expected to just grind the same 3 or 4 events constantly and those don't have any variation to them. Each season roles around with the same event to do each week for the next 12 weeks to get a slight recoloured gun.
I know it's common among MMOs to hyper focus in a small subset but at least alts exist and there's a world to explore. There's virtually no reason to go back to the main world in D2 outside of seasonal events and every area has the same feeling to it. Alts don't really matter either, there's 3 classes that all play almost the same way with slight variation. If I start a Mage or a Warrior in an MMO I'm going to have a different experience and challenge, In D2 the biggest challenge between a Hunter and Warlock is learning how double jumping works. I'm still going to be using the same gun to kill 99.9% of enemies.
The devs also don't care that much about their game. That much is self evident if you followed the recent major DLC release where at the end of the story even the communities own lore experts were scratching their head about what exactly the MacGuffin in the story was. At no point did the writers decide they should tell the players what it is/does even though all of the NPCs talk to you as if you already know.
Kept scrolling till I found this comment.
I absolutely loved Destiny 2 but good god is it terrible in a lot of ways. Couldn't keep up with the time investment required and the game really likes using FOMO to keep players hooked.
It's less of a game and more of a second job. At least, that's how it started feeling towards the end for me.
I haven't played since they removed a bunch of content that I paid for. I played the hell out of Destiny and pre ordered Destiny 2 but Bungie is dead to me now.
The Sims 4, I have 600+ hours on it somehow, don't even bother asking me how because I also don't know how that happened. It's widely regarded as the worst one in the series as it lacks the most content, has unbelievably egregious DLCs and it's plain out fucking boring compared to older titles. If I had to guess how I've played so much I'd guess it's the CAS (character creator) and building mode which are both fantastic, the game itself is blergh at best, especially without mods.
I feel this. I loved 1 and 2 growing up. Easily the most nostalgic games for me. 3 was pretty good but I didn’t get too far into it tbh. Spent a lot of time with 4 (pirated) and enjoyed it.
Fast-forward to a time where I no longer pirate games so I decided to play it through Xbox Game Pass with limited DLC and it was just bland. Felt like I was missing the “full game” and the price tag to own such a thing is out of this world. Last I checked if you want “everything” you’d be spending around $1k USD.
EA is disgusting.
I really miss playing Sims and Sims 2 growing up. That, and the random other Sims games, like Sims Theme Park. I loved those.
I do still play Sims 4 but MAN the amount of basic game content that is locked behind a million different DLCs is insane.
I like The Sims 4. I think it's the best Sims game. The mood system makes it so much more interesting than previous games and makes the sims feel a lot more like real people.
To each their own, I find it incredibly boring, easy and lacking in attention to detail compared to Sims 2 or even 3.
Sim City for GameBoy. If you're thinking, "how the heck would you play Sim City on a GameBoy?" Exactly, don't do it. Young me wanted to like it, but just spare yourself...
GTA for the Gameboy on the other hand, kinda rad.
I'll have to check that out lol.
Path of Exile. You will watch a cool new budget friendly league starter guide on YouTube and follow it religiously. You will install or update half a dozen 3rd-party tools for essential QoL. You will ignore the new league mechanics until maps while speedrunning the same unskippable story for each character. You will hide most loot and avoid risky item crafting. You will pickup currency to buy your gear wholesale from other players. You will reroll your character or rq if your build has no defense or bossing damage or becomes too expensive due to popularity (Mathil effect). You will repeat this cycle in 3-4 months.
I tried to get into POE and I just can't. It's so obtuse and unfun for newer players, and I don't want to have to install third-party tools just to be able to enjoy the game.
Quitting poe was wonderful for my mental state. The game was great when I was learning and discovering. Once it became a treadmill, I should have stopped. Once I realized the devs were purposely nerfing the most fun builds every season, I finally gave up.
I've got around 5k hours in poe and it's been a lot more hate than love the last few times I played a league; haven't logged into standard in ages.
I have recently been trying Last Epoch. It seems to really pull-in a lot of good traits from similar ARPG's. Still has a few bugs from time to time, as it's still in beta.
But but but enemies go splat and colorful loot!!
HA! It's funny cuz it's true! Eve is much more fun to read about than to play.
For me, it's most mobile games I've spent a large amount of time in. Recently it's Marvel SNAP. Before that it was SWGoH. These games are fun fun and they hook you but eventually you play enough to see all the levers they're using to manipulate you and it sours. I should really stop playing them... lol
that was me with clash royale, Id play just to get mad haha
Ugh, YES to any mobile game. I'll find a game on my phone, get sucked in, then after like 3 weeks be like... wait have I had ANY fun at all at this? And how many ads have I been shown? How much grinding would be required to finish this game? Then realize I should just uninstall...
And yeah Eve was crazy, cause I would rarely get the cool thing... but that made it worse. If I never got the cool thing, then it would have been easy to quit. But because I sometimes got a cool thing my brain would say "If you just played more then the ratio of time to cool thing would go up!"
I was really hooked onto Marvel Snap for the first 4 seasons I played (6-7 total now). The game can be a lot of fun. I haven't made infinite the last 2 seasons and I stopped paying for premium after my 3rd season. I don't regret doing that since the game has become more transaction focused and I feel it's quick turn around makes it more enjoyable than MtG. That said I wouldn't recommend someone to pickup the game if they are serious about competitive card players.
I just got an invite to DC Dual Force beta this weekend. Gonna make sure to keep my wallet closed. :-D
Warframe, Got over 2.5K hours and in-game hours show over 3K.
Used to play as much as I can as it was a game meant to be grinded, but eventually got worn out and stopped playing all of a sudden.
Tried playing it afterwards and by then the content got even more bigger that it was overwhelming to play anymore.
Sometimes I miss it but about 95% of the time I just don't feel like playing anymore.
Edit- Added hours and a Comma.
Warframe is overwhelming when starting it, but it's also incredible to see what it offers in terms of content, all for free (for the cost of grind).
As someone who spent ~3K of hours in it but haven't played it for months, I think it's important to keep in mind how you wanna play it. Don't continue the grind when you feel burned out, not playing a game for a while is fine too.
Edit sorry for the spam, kept giving me errors when replying lol
Elite: Dangerous.
If you want to enjoy it, you need to go in with lowered expectations and a certain frame of mine, lest you go mad grinding materials.
Same here. I'd be playing much more of Odyssey ran better on Steam Deck. On foot stuff is rough, but maybe I should just look at my settings again. I can't remember if they're down all the way or not. Ship stuff runs just fine though!
GTA 5 especially GTA online, idk how I used to grind that game constantly just to buy a cool car that I'd stop driving a few days later. It got better "recently" (2-3 years ago) with bigger payouts and single person heists but then the in game inflation fucked everything. I haven't touched the game in months because all I saw about it was how glitchy it was and how R* were removing shit that had been in the game for 10 years.
Cracks me up how Rockstar basically just committed digital GTA on the players
They have become exactly what they been satirizing this whole time...
I'm worried what Grand Theft Auto 6 will be, maybe the controller will be replaced with a credit card reader?
Idleon - The Idle MMO. The dev billed himself as a non-predatory mobile dev; premium currency could be reasonably earned for free. I was happy to support the dev by buying seasonal bundles. Then he started adding stuff that had to be purchased directly with money. Then he implemented FOMO with rotating bonuses. This guy makes millions a year and rants on Twitch streams about having to pay too much taxes.
Recently, he added a gacha system with a separate premium currency that cannot be earned for free so that the very few players who are running a hacked version of the game can't pull the best equipment. F2P players get one pull a week and will statistically likely pull the best bonus in 1-3 years, but there are already plans to add more bonuses and rotate out existing ones.
This was right after another controversial incident when many players exploited an infinite currency bug which was predicted and could have been removed well in advance. Historically, the attitude was "you guys had your fun" and he removes the bug with no punishment to players. This time, he went into full meltdown mode, posting walls of text on discord with screenshots of Steam reviews that hurt his feelings, then reset a bunch of exploiters' skill - not just rolled back but reset to remove months of progress.
He's recently removed a statement from the Steam page that stated mobile game developers don't have to be predatory, so at least he's self aware I guess? Steam reviews were very positive; recent reviews are mostly negative. He's responded by offering a concession that the best bonus is guaranteed after 200 pulls, which equates to 3.8 years if you're F2P.
I haven't quit the game yet, but I'm pretty close. My wallet is closed for sure.
World of tanks and it's less terrible version but ugly mobile version blitz. The company actively despises it's playerbase, and I want to play a game like it but they all give up and copy them.
Armoured warfare was fun until they turned it into a clone with co-op. War thunder is more realistic and that's cool but mostly just annoying.
I just want more tank games that are fun to play and not microtransaction driven.
Years ago I started on WoT and went to WoWS and was immediately hooked. Loved it at first but they really do not give a shit about their player base. I haven't logged on to either in about 3 years.
Came here looking for WOT. Yup, it’s crap but i keep going back, largely because i don’t know how much gaming time I’ll have due to other stuff going on and each round is 15m max.
Hate the microtransactions, and some of the playerbase is pretty toxic.
I go back to World of Tanks every once in a while but it is impossible to enjoy it even though I want to. The concept is great, there are tactics involved, but the skill ceiling is just too damn high. So now whenever I get the urge to play, I instead watch a couple of streamers. Skill for his entertaining streams and well, skill (but he gets annoying when he starts raging about not being able to achieve his personal goals), and Dez for the generally chill vibes.
World of Tanks would have been a great game had it not been plagued with the entire pay to win aspect. And don't get me started on the whole crew training and retraining nonsense. I hate that aspect of the game, and still don't understand it. Do I keep the trained crew in a tank I enjoy playing or move them onto the next tier tank and then have terrible stats on the new crew and lose interest in the tank I started enjoying? Uff!
I just logged in every once in a while, but round Christmas I would play more to get some drops for fun. Then they changed the Christmas thing. Uninstalled and never looked back.
Temtem.
Extremely predatory design that tries damn hard to force you into micro transactions. And once you do, you have to spend so many hours to get what you already payed for. On top of that, the endgame is almost a completely different game with a different target audience than the rest of it. I regret all the money and time I wasted on it. Had to hide it in my steam library to get myself to stop as well. That kind of predatory shit should be illegal imo.
Stay away from that game, especially if you have any past issues with impulse, micro transactions, and/or addictive tendencies.
Bro go play Nexomon extinction. It's a really good single player mon game. Best I've found. Really funny story, cool monsters, and SO many good quality of life changes pokemon should have implemented a decade ago.
EDIT: Oh and NO microtransactions if you play on switch/PC. The microtransactions on mobile are pointless and make no sense, so don't play on mobile.
I just play the DBZ Pokemon romhack for GBA. It's hilarious.
Ugh, thats why it was on humble choice?
Ooh thank you. It's on Humble Choice but I'm prone to microtransaction addictions so I think I'll skip this one.
Ah, oof.... I just picked it up with the Humble Choice. Thanks for the heads up that it's filled with microtransactions :(
I have owned temtem for a few years and I haven't spent a dime beyond the initial purchase. I enjoy the more modern Pokemon type experience but I haven't played in about a year due to work and other interests. I had no idea ait had become so transaction focused.
It hasn't, it just has a cosmetic battle-pass now. They said it was going to have that back in the original Kickstarter.
Destiny 2.
Incredibly engaging loop, great gunplay/moment to moment gameplay, and an intriguing story that keeps me interested to see what will happen next.
Loaded with micro (and macro) transactions and time gating of reused content as the game approaches it's conclusion and Bungie prepares it's next project for launch (this project also highlighting the poor state the PvP section of the game is in.).
Again, so much of my time has been spent in Destiny 2 and a good majority of it I've personally enjoyed. But when asked this question it's my go-to answer to advise people to steer clear if possible.
I'm from Thailand. We have a term called เกมหมา (dog game) which means a shitty game that gets you raging. The list varies from person to person but every list so far includes Dota 2 and League of Legends (which I have personally played). Other honorable mentions include:
- Free Fire
- Fortnite
- PUBG
- Minecraft
- Roblox
- FIFA Online
Looking at my Steam, the game with the highest number of hours played, of which I would currently say unambiguously that you should avoid it, looks to be War Thunder. Among the reasons I'd tell you to stay away from it:
- It's a grindfest starting very early on.
- It's far too easy to lose as a result of what can reasonably be called bad luck.
- Unless you specialise, or throw real money at it, the fun, high-tech stuff is probably thousands of hours into the future.
- There's content gated behind "if you were not around when this was regular stuff, you will never get it"
- It calls itself an MMO, while there's nothing MMO about it. It's all instanced battles, with little to no world continuity as you progress.
What I am seeing here is that mostly people regret playing free to play games. That tells me that their business model is working as intended but we should all wise up.
My regret is spending too much time making cool mods work together and then not playing the games, oblivion was the worst because I didn't get it until skyrim was a year or two old and there were so many stupid mods out already. Most of them are janky or old and have incompatibilities with each other. I discovered pretty quickly that I need less options not more in open world rpgs because I'm an adult and don't have time to play games the way my heart wants to (look in every door, under every bush, around every corner).
Thomas the Tank Engine on SNES. Me and my mates used to find it hilarious when high. Still do.
Hotline Miami 2. I've beat it on several platforms but I really don't think it's as good as the original.
Fallout 3. Mostly due to the mountain of technical issues it has on PC but even playing on console you can run into stability issues.
felt the same way about Hotline Miami 2. it just didn't have the same feeling to it for whatever reason, despite the mechanics being arguably better/refined. That first game though, it's so good
I think the problem with hotline miami 2 is deaths feel much less fair then the original
Paladins. I've spent like 400 hours in it and tbh it's all hand crafted to keep you addicted and keep grinding their bullshit battlepass.
Honorable mention: Team Fortress 2. Game is great but Valve has pretty much done nothing with it. Last major update was in late 2017 and since then the game has received minor updates that usually only add shit for people to throw money at. The game still has a bot and cheater problem due to aforementioned fuck all Valve has been doing. Feel free to play, but you better open your wallet if you even want to speak! Let that one sink in, the game is free to play but you need to pay! To! Communicate! In the fucking game! Why? Oh the aforementioned cheating/bot problem of course! The bots were spamming racial slurs and other shit so Valve in infinite wisdom made free to play players unable to communicate at all! And that didn't even do anything! The bots just had premium accounts! There are cheaters in the game with very valuable items and are not banned. After all that trash talk the game is still fun, 4000 hours well spent. It's just sad that it's being left to rot.
League of Legends. I've sank so many hours into it a few years back. It's not a bad game, just highly addictive and toxic. It was only really worth playing it with friends, but now they've all moved on.
The fact that nobody has said Escape from Tarkov yet is shocking. The desync makes you never sure if you were killed legitimately or from a cheater (of which there are plenty). You're brutally punished for every mistake, including those caused by the ever present audio issues. The developer, Nikita, will make the most nonsense changes in the name of stopping Real Money Trading, but all it does is encourage people to pay cheaters to get ahead since it gets harder to progress every wipe (the game completely wipes your progress every 6ish months). The quests are uninspired and boring at best, or sadistic at worst and encourage the worst play styles. This is honestly just a fraction of all the issues with the game.
I haven't played in probably 6-8 months and I will for sure go back because apparently I'm a masochist.
Starcraft 2 custom games, i loved custom games back in the day but right now you need to grind to get to the good stuff in most of the maps and the community is weird since most have been playing for too long and aren’t friendly to noobs.
I miss the time where i could go into a random custom game and just learn the map on the go, bot having to grind or learn the correct upgrade path.
Clash Royale. I was in a clan that spanned multiple mobile games but I was the creator/leader for Clash Royale. The game has transitioned to P2W the last few years. I only keep it installed as a time waster and because of the clan.
transitioned? I played it in 2017 and had to spend more than 70€ so I got some decent cards
It was certainly somewhat P2W since the beginning but it wasn't until Clan Wars 2 that it felt fully P2W for me. Before that you only needed one maxed deck which didn't take that long. Then came lvl14, then champions and lvl 15. Now evolutions are the next broken P2W mechanic. I haven't financially supported the game in years but someone must be giving them money and reinforcing these awful decisions.
Genshin Impact. Had like 400 hours in it before quitting.
I'm glad I'm out of that grind hell now.
Same story here. Gacha games are the worst.
Gacha games are more of a lifestyle decision than a hobby. I've had 3 accounts and stopped playing on all of them because it's unbearable to grind materials all fucking day when I just want to enjoy cozy story quests and fun characters. Progress is artificially slow to inflate playtime and the resin system can suck a dick.
So the grinding is the bad of it?
Certainly the biggest con for me.
The exploration and combat are pretty darn good, but the most effective way to progress in that game is to do the same shit over and over again every single day.
I will say though, I had a great experience for about 60 hours in the beginning thanks to the great world design and some 50 more good hours sprinkled throughout the rest.
You don't need to grind though to play the story and exploration. You only need to farm artifacts when you want to get all 36 stars in the Abyss every two weeks, which isn't necessary or connected at all to the story.
You can literally play the whole game with the characters you get for free if you only want to experience the story.
SWTOR
I’ve put at least 2000 hours into this game and completed all the endgame PvE content including an NA first/world second raid achievement and made a lot of friends in the game.
It’s still a shit game with barely any new content and now Bioware has pawned off the game to some company called Broadsword that looks like it specializes in taking over dead MMORPGs
I remember having a ton of fun leveling up my first toon. It was a sith juggernaut I think? Had a cool thing where you could recruit a jedi woman to join you either by being so evil you corrupt her, or so good she decides she'd rather be with a good guy working in an openly evil society than a villain in one that always espoused goodness. I thought that was super cool.
End game was awful, then the next expansion they utterly broke the companion system which was my favorite thing about the game.
Sooo... yeah.
I enjoyed that game as a mostly solo casual from launch up until about KotFE/KotET. When they condensed stats and made a bunch of class changes that kind of erased what made classes unique I never had as much fun. After that I would pop in every few months, run through a class story again and then get bored.
I gave up on it fully when I realized the 10th anniversary stuff they hyped up just never really came to be.
Man KotFE was such a disaster of an expansion. They put in so much marketing and built up so much hype for the story at the expense of every other part of the game. Then it comes out and the story is bland and the PvEers and PvPers have no reason to stay subscribed.
Oh god and don’t get me started on the 10 year anniversary. Justice4R4
I mean the writing was on the wall like a month after launch. How did you not quit back then?
It was fun to dominate Hutball for like 2 weeks and... that was basically it...
I actually stopped playing a couple months after launch and only after it became F2P in 2.0 that I played it sporadically every now and then to get a few levels. It took from release to 2014 for me to actually get one max level character lol
After I got to level cap I dipped my toes into raiding and cleared what endgame content I could but stopped playing again in 4.0 when they didn’t release any new raids for the expansion. Then any time they release a new raid I’d pick the game back up again and hit up my old guildies to rejoin me
Temple run. I used to play it a lot back in high school, unlocked everything with gameplay only including seasonal things like Santa Claus. It was fun enough, but updates would regularily reset my game completely loosing everything I archieved and unlocked, and the developers never gave a shit about that issue. I eventually gave up on it because of that.
No Man's Sky.
No, I'm not one of the fellas that fell for the hype. I didn't preorder it. I started playing around 2020, after many patches and updates, my expectations were very low. Even then, I was disappointed, because everything is half baked. I think ~10h is more than enough to see everything there is to see, then it's all pure repetition.
I still got almost 500h in it, and check in once in a while, but it's not "fun", it's just cheap comfort food.
I feel like most people will name salt inducing multiplayer games. So I will too. Overwatch
OW1 was good value. OW2 is dog shit you pay to gild.
I loved being able to play Overwatch casually with friends whenever we felt like it, which was usually like a few times a month or so. I'm very sad about the OW2 situation :(
Goat Simulator.
NBA 2K games. Terrible loot system that never gives you good stuff until it enters endgame near the end of the year. Then they turn off the servers a few months later and force you to buy next year's game that has the same graphics and a slightly tweaked playing mechanics.
But I honestly personally spent quite literally hundreds of hours on that series. Mainly cause I'm a huge NBA fan and I love building out custom teams and there's not much competition in realistic basketball simulators at the moment.
Yeah I'm with you on those games. I want to like them, but I always feel like I've invested way too much time for way too little progress that eventually i give up. Then I try again a year or two later lol
Yea, I eventually just resorted to playing the offline modes. It's much more fun than the rat race that is myteam
Path of Exile, I loved that game and consider its high point (3.11-3.14 approx) to be the best ARPG ever made and I put a good 1200 hours into it over 2-3 years but after they kept nerfing builds and items over and over (I didn't like playing the leagues (seasons), preferred the eternal playground of standard) I was seeing my time and progress get invalidated by pointless nerfs over and over in a PVE game no less, so I had to quit playing. The company became hostile to its player base, lying about and hiding major changes to loot drops resulting in more invalidation of people's time and effort. I understand it's a free to play game but they already made the best ARPG of all time and to anyone who loves that genre this game is majorly addicting already and all they had to do was add interesting content and leave the systems they had in place alone. So I'm on to other games played more casually and more real life stuff. Fuck GGG.
This godawful matching mobile game called Hello Kitty Friends.
Seriously it's the worst. But also it's mindless and cute and when I had back pain that was keeping me up all night I used to pace back and forth across my living room playing it.
I have spent far too long playing Magic Arena when it’s really just awful in pretty much every way you can imagine.
The economy is unbelievably broken because randomised packs are the only direct way you can use your gold to get cards, and they’ll almost never have the cards you need or in the quantities you need to have a halfway competitive deck.
Wildcards do allow you to choose to redeem them for specific cards, but they have to be of the same rarity as the wildcard and the mythic and especially rare wildcards you need so many of are always in short supply. Getting anything decent without spending real money requires a ton of grinding. I honestly wouldn’t even mind having to spend money if I could just buy the cards directly like in Magic Online, it’s much jankier but in my opinion better predecessor, but you can’t.
Probably the best part of the game is just the digital implementation of the game mechanics, but even there are some seriously annoying issues which come up not infrequently and can lose you games (like the autotapper for some reason valuing 1 life over keeping an extra colour of mana open for responses).
Overall it just feels like 95% of the time it’s just me grinding playing games with fast aggro decks I don’t even enjoy (I’m into control but it takes way longer to get your rewards that way). It’s just so so much worse than the paper game I love and I don’t think I would ever play it if it weren’t for the fact playing in paper is stupidly expensive for pretty much any 1v1 competitive format (commander is great and all and I have a couple decks, but it’s not my preferred format).
Destiny 2.
I actually just started this. What’s wrong with it?
If it shows up in Prime Gaming, it's probably a game designed to extract money out of you via MTX, not a game designed to be fun.
Space Engineers. Hou can do lots of cool engineering things, but the venn diagram of "fun" and "bugged beyond belief" is nearly a perfect match. If it works, it is peobably boring, like the crafting system.
I had such hopes for SE but seeing the developers drift into some dimension where the game works and it's time to sell dlc... Oh well. Hope their awesome AI startup that will definitely fly SE spaceships when it's done is coming along.
Fwiw, most features they release with dlc are free. The paid dlc is mostly just extra skins and ornaments. Much better than a lot of other games imo
But as a game it's still hard to get into and stay on top. Klang killing hours of work because i forgot to save gets old
Cries in Medieval Engineers
I really wanted to like it... but after about 30 minutes I sent it in for a refund. I wouldn't call it garbage, but man, it is rough.
I was picking between SE and Dyson Sphere Program for a space-themed game, luckily ended up choosing DSP
Wurm Online/Unlimited
Like...legit? I really enjoy it. Buuuuut I couldn't tell you why. The whole thing is literally a grindfest. Want to craft a cart so you can haul some logs? Better grind carpentry for two days. Want to grind carpentry? Gotta search every patch of gravel you can find for a few hours to get iron and flint so you can make the tools to be able to chop trees.It's a slog, and yet I play it quite often.....
I've been building a house for over a month now. Trash game but you better believe I'm finishing that thing.
I had a house half finished the 2nd to last time I played. Work got really busy, and didn't have time to get on the server for a week and a bit. When I got back to it, the damn thing had mostly decayed and I couldn't be assed to start over.
Oh goodness I have no idea why I spent hundreds of hours in this game! No graphics, combat was trash, you had to make arrows one by one, took literal hours to level the ground, and it was the most P2W thing I've ever played on top of having to pay monthly premium.
Why did I spend so many nights staying up late trying to get skills up??
That is an extremely good description of the reality of Eve. For me this would be Arma 3. Such extraordinary potential but for every 15 hours you fiddle, you get 6 minutes of peak gaming. Absolutely not worth it.
And of course our brains will say "Well if you just get better at the game, you will get more of the peak gaming!" But no, no we won't. The game was not made for that.
Arma was a full time job for me one summer. Never again
I've tried to get into Arma 3 many times over the years. But it's just way too much for me. I like some MilSim, but Arma is so complicated and just not worth it to me. To make it worse, everybody that I've linked up with to learn how to play with always says that the base game sucks and you have to install 15+ mods just to start having fun.
Sorry, but if a base game isn't worth playing unless you spend 2-3 hours fighting to get 15+ mods all working together just to then get barely 40 FPS, spend another hour planning the mission, and then trying to remember the dozens of hotkeys for the 10 unique ways you can crouch next to a wall, I'm just not interested and it probably isn't a very good game.
Most people recommend playing Minecraft with like 50 mods, but at least Minecraft is a good fully playable game in vanilla mode...
Spot on.
Stellaris. Extremely long games, a lot to learn.. ..and they change it. Mechanics that worked before stop working. The bad parts are added to same become a DLC, the good parts disappear or are algal paved in DLC. Overall, it just doesn't feel worth it.
I only ever played a few hours and had it on my "come back to" list. I'll have to check into what you said and maybe move it to "won't play"
Stellar is is fun but I HATE how they put the DLC stuff in the main game as a teaser and then dont let you experience it until you pay. It's asinine and I can't think of another game that does that.
I don't know if I can call it garbage but probably no one in their right mind should play Hearts of Iron IV. Somehow I managed to persist through hours of bewilderment and confusion, until it all clicked, and I soon found myself unhealthily obsessed and unable to rest peacefully until glorious France had swept across half of the globe
Well that's just a Paradox game.
Dead by Daylight.
The community is absolutely toxic in a very weird way. I've played other games with famously toxic communities but in Dead by Daylight it has a strange spin. Some players heavily identify with the killer/survivor side and feel personally attacked by everything "the other side" or the developers do.
Imagine bringing Tumblr fandoms into an asynchronous and highly competitive Us VS Them game.
You will regret the day you cross ways with either an unhinged player of DbD who will stalk you throughout the internet. Or someone who streams this game and their unhinged fanbase.
The Genesis Young Indiana Jones game. Played it a lot when I was a kid, because I owned very few games. Got so good at it I was able to beat the whole thing without dying. I loved that game.
Then a few days ago, James Rolfe played it in the latest AVGN episode and holy cow that game is absolute garbage. For the curious, you can check it out from 18:34: https://youtu.be/xPsN_rcEpu4
Since I haven't seen it yet, Dead by Daylight is a pay-to-win disaster that is consistently making boneheaded decisions nearly every update.
I had a feeling it would show up sooner or later! Eve, DBD, ARK, and LoL are the 4 I thought of when posting this. No one has fun playing these games. We play them almost certainly because of a moral failing at this point.
The thing is, at least DbD and Ark can be incredible when you only play with friends. We have our own ARK server for years now and we all have lots of fun. DbD we only play when we do not need to take in any randoms. I think the games aren't bad per se. It's the players who make these games bad.
Oh I remember DbD in the early days. I think it all started going to shit with Bubba
I had 2000+ hours in Sea of Thieves before I stopped playing. I enjoyed the multiplayer aspect - meeting new people and having long chats without big groups (max crew of 4). It also has decent pve content. But the devs did a terrible job at bug fixing and it felt like they cared more about the lore/story telling than the sandbox aspects and combat which is the core of the game.
As a slightly different perspective, I really wish I could play without the PVP, I just want to enjoy the awesome gorgeous visuals and atmosphere while experiencing the stories and cool lore.
I don't get much opportunity to hang out with my friend and play sea of thieves, maybe a few hours every few months, so when someone ruins our entire night because they enjoy griefing other people, it really sucks.
Take the other day for example, they added a sort of short tales thing, or something like that, so we wanted to check it out, but we got chased off the moment we tried to reach the island the quest was on.
When we try to play a game only to be unable to actually experience the content and have our time wasted in the process? Really leaves a sour taste in my mouth.
Great game, needs an option to play PVP or PVE. Servers are spun up as players join and leave and are very small, no reason they can't accommodate both playstyles with ease.
Sea of Theives would end up very shallow without the threat of having your progress challenged. There are games like Deep Rock Galactic that cater for this. In SoT there are also ways to minimize getting griefed. Don't put up an emissary flag. Don't hold treasure. Doing the original tall tales gives you an instance where pvp is turned off. If you seek treasure, be ready to defend it. I don't think the game should focus on the once a month players too much.
i used to play clash royale, it is a massive credit card grab and a mental health nightmare
Ah Eve Online... yeah... feels like something cool might happen but then you're 20 hours later and nothing cool has happened yet. I ran a little corp or two for a while and the main thing bringing me back was just interacting with those people. Though running a small corp sucks because nobody ever wants to help you run it or contribute, and then some cheeky fucker steals your, worthless but convenient, shared inventory and leaves.
I don't need a 2nd job and I definitely don't need to be an adult babysitter.
Guild Wars 2, although I don't know if people think it's garbage, just more obscure now
Oh man GW2, been forever since I played. I just remember leveling up was super fun, but the end game was mind numbing.
Same experience with Star Wars Old republic. I had a ton of fun leveling up, felt like a really good single player game, then was handed like 2 dungeons and was told to get grinding.
I need to reinstall that game damn
It's great to clear some maps and listen to audiobooks. So far my favourite MMO in my very very limited experience with the genre.
They just announced a new xpac too!
They say a lot more people are back playing since it was released for other platforms. Tempted to see myself.
Elite Dangerous. I have thousands of hours in it, would not recommend. I got into it with high hopes, but the developers proved their incompetence time and time again. Doesn't stop me from playing it though, I still love the setting and the... I suppose low level gameplay? Like flying a ship and doing combat etc all feels great, but there's no higher level gameplay to make it interesting.
When I was about 13, I started playing this MMO called Nexus TK. I have spent what I'm sure is thousands of hours playing it. I kicked the habit for a whule, but recently re-registered to see what was going on. It's a slow responding 2D "action" MMO, and the decline in players turned it into a weird niche clique where newcomers are basically not welcome. But it's still up and running 25 years later.
You should go check it out. It's awful.
Fallout 4. What I seem to enjoy the most out of it is resource gathering to try and build impervious settlements. But Fallout 4 is not Subsistence, or The Forest, or Subnautica. I'm not playing it properly. I don't care about the story or the characters because they are bad.
Stick with Fallout NV or 3 for good (first person) Fallout.
When I was young, I spent a lot of time playing Extreme Paintbrawl. I only learned years later that it had achieved notoriety as one of the worst video games of all time. Looking back it's not hard to see why. But back when it was one of the very few games we had for PC, I got a lot of enjoyment out of it.
Oh man I miss those days when we were not picky at all. If it ran on my computer, I was going to play it as much as possible.
Yea, Eve was fun for a day or 2, then got more boring than an actual job. Another one is Don't starve together in my opinion. No Man's sky is getting there too, with every planet looking nearly the same while pretending to be different, while your chore is to constantly fix your deadbeat ship.
The fact that I find eve "Fun" is probably a personality flaw of some sort.
Yea, I like space exploration, in-game economies, but not so much the mindless grind.
There are very few. Factorio is amazing and no-one should play it if they value your life. Train Simulator "Classic" will also destroy your wallet, and it isn't really that good. Horribly buggy, unoptimised, never patched or fixed.
I tend to go the other way. games I know people like, but I dislike. Far Cry 3 was the worst in the series, and I never got on with Red Dead Redemption 2, despite having 120 hours in it.
Gex.
This thread is like a luau at Mel Blanc's house!
Star Wars The Old Republic, i mean, its a tough choice, since i really like the story and setting. And for a game of that age, the ongoing support and community are amazing. But umm, it's just a mediocre Mmorpg at best, when it comes to Gameplay.
I played this Pokemon PC game back in the day. It was a simple Windows UI game with radio buttons for selecting your attack in a turn based setting. The only graphical element was the images of pokemons on the boring gray Windows panels. I played way too much of it back then but it was basically a simple luck game with a leveling system.
Update: it was Pokemon Simulator
Earth 2025. I don’t think it’s even around anymore. It evolved from the BRE BBS game.
The game I've played most that I don't recommend would have to be Ark. You really need to like a certain type of survival challenge to enjoy it, and even I didn't have much fun myself.
Victoria 3. It's not even close to being in a finished state yet, but I just love watching that line go up. It's like the world's most complex Cookie Clicker game
Victoria 3 makes me fear for EU5. Like I really want them to make it, eu4 is getting really old and it shows. But I just know that it's not going to be better than eu4.
Lost ark
That game was super fun right up until I hit the artificial grind wall.
Oh you need to be gear level X to play with your friends. Here's enough crafting mats to try raising your gear level once per day at a 1% chance of success. And once you get past gear level X, you'll need to be gear level Y and your chance of success goes DOWN!
Yeah, no thanks.
I played at NA release, and got to max level then just lost interest lol but I've been getting the urge to go back to it for some reason. I actually really enjoyed the levelling experience and when I hit end game was like "what now?"
Kingdom come deliverance. It was a rollercoaster. One of the first games I played after building a new computer. I progressed far enough and finally found that the combat was jank and the story was pretty garbage. Still have fond memories of the game though. Almost like the first time playing Oblivion 🙂.
Madden or any sports game nowadays
Dota 2
Mobile Legends Bang Bang, a mobile-based LoL ripoff thats very popular in South East Asia. It is very catered to newbie and low skilled players, most items sold as gatchas, and has severe skill-imbalance in matchmaking (many suspect they will pair you with low-skilled low-winrate players if you win too much, giving birth to many grievance from good solo players).
Alas, with my rl responsibilities, I can't play more serious moba like Dota2 anymore. The only way to satisfy my crave for moba is by playing MLBB as most matches only take 12 to 20 minutes to finish. I can cram it to my commute time or break time.Lost Ark. As an MMORPG it has terrible game design and profession systems on top of extremely heavy reliance on RNG. Everything has an RNG factor, from levelling your gear up and improving skills to pointless collectibles that don't really matter to the end game. Apart from all this the devs refuse to fix the core problems of the game such as reliance on alt characters to level up your main, stupidly high grinding for materials, bugs, performance and dumb designs for raids. The new player experience is terrible so anyone coming into the game will most likely quit withing a few weeks. On top of all this the game has egregious pricing for their shop and players are encouraged to spend to power up. I have 2500 hours in this game and only continue to play it because of my friend group that I made through the game. We play together so we avoid most of the horrible pub lobby experiences and gatekeeping.
Shop Titans (played on PC). It's just predatorial and I got caught in its addictive gameplay loop for every waking hour of 2 days. I'm lucky that it was only 48 hours (compared to other people) and that I hate playing on mobile unless it's short sessions of non-mechanical stuff because it seems mobile is full of games like this.
I'm always torn about Elite Dangerous, similar to Eve's grind I beleive. It's a space game that requires hundreds of hours and 3rd party databases to have any sense of efficiency. There's no true interplayer economy so you're still free to operate solo (except that one time people with fleet carriers kidnapped noobs to slave mine). I have 900+ hours in 3 years and still don't feel like I can do anything I want. I enjoy the sights, but they're really repetitive. I relax while mining, but the payout just isn't on the same level as some gaming methods. There's no campaign and the lore is just small journal entries, so progress is only measured by purchases. You're free to write your own story, but eventually you grow tired of the sandbox. The alien invasion events spiced things up about 9 years into the game's life, but even that has become a little stale. Build the meta ship, work the events methodically, go home. The real world time sunk into travel for necessary upgrades is tiring.
But then, every once in a while, I'll use my laptop on the big screen with great sound quality and I remember what makes this game so special.
Marvel Strike Force. I've never played a mobile game before it and I don't think I ever will. But it took up brainspace and time during the COVID isolation, and I put in enough money that I feel I can't quit now.
But don't do it. It's a time suck, money suck, and it's repetitive.
Can say the same for Marvel Contest of Champions. Never spent money but oh boy did I waste precious time playing that for several years and it was, if I'm being honest, rarely enjoyable. Most of the time it was just compulsive.
Does RSF Richard Burns Rally count? An amazing simulation with extremely accurate physics and a massive assortment of stages and cars, but it's also absolutely brutal and unforgiving. I suppose it's fairly realistic as a result, but it's more sim than game at that point. It's a ton of fun to improve at, but the chances of cracking any of the online leaderboards is fairly slim (unless you spend an absurd amount of time training).
Recently, project zomboid. I feel like my ratio of exploring vs inventory management is super low. And then I have one misclick against a horde and have to spend the better part of an hour to get back to what I was doing with a buddy. Still get sucked into it though regardless.
Heroes of the Storm - many thousands of hours, no wonder its a dead game now. Because of how the core gameplay works if one or more people on your team are idiots, you have no chance in winning, it aint no Dota or LoL where one carry can win the game. It's unplayable without a 4-5 man party.
PUBG - played thousands of hours on everything (PC, Lite, mobile), do not waste your time. I still watch competitive PUBG though, it so much fun!
Pokemon. Games used to be really good, new mons were cool, but since X/Y they made several decisions to ruin the games entire progression system and end game combat. The whole team XP share gives your whole team 50% of an encounters XP thus every encounter generates 3x the XP with a full party. This completely dismantled the entire leveling experience and now means you are over leveled for all the content or take 3 times longer to do anything for 0 additional reward.
Easily a game called Infra. It's an older source engine adventure game based on exploring crumbling ruins of public facilities and recording damage and things. I put over 50 hours into it (which is a lot for a first person walking simulator puzzle game) And it was just ....work. It felt so much like work. I have no idea why I forced myself through it. The environments were just so cool. But wow ...... Would not recommend.
Work in games is popular! For me it plays on the satisfaction of completing a project. A game that does this well I think is Satisfactory.
Viscera Cleanup detail is work but it's also extremely relaxing
I like a lot of work in games, that's actually why I wanted to give it a shot. Not fun, though. Terrible slog. What really ruined it was they took the concept and made it too big. It couldn't just be a game about looking at janky infrastructure and reporting it ...they HAD to inject this entire narrative with shady business men from the past and other unnecessary world building. But it forced them to make the game overstay it's welcome by at least 20 hours imo, just to tie up the narrative.
I better stop ranting while I can. I played it over 5 years ago...I've clearly been scarred lol
Star Trek Online. I love the Star Trek franchise. I've spent so much time and money on it. It's got some old ass engine that the current team can barely maintain, it's super buggy, and there isn't enough actual content. They keep players in a cycle of perpetual events to keep FOMO up and the events are usually the same for each time of year, with different rewards.
It's F2P but all the desirable items are paywalled and many of those are behind gamble boxes. A single cheap ship that's decent runs $20 USD from their store. But one can realistically easily pay hundreds for a single ship with gambling. They sell ship bundles for hundreds of dollars as well.
Graphics are ridiculously dated. End game is a selection of instances that get repetitive, playing the game is intentionally grindy to encourage spending real money (you can buyout virtually anything you can grind out). Or running a specific instance over and over to clock your DPS and try to make a leader board only visible on a 3rd party application.
The community isn't particularly toxic but there's very little player engagement, chat zones are usually maybe 2 different places in the game and if the conversations aren't game related they are almost always political arguments/discussions. PVP is almost nonexistent due to limited maps for it and a lack of people queuing because they would be instantly murdered by money whales who minmax DPS.
The UI can be really confusing and there's a lame tutorial at the start that teaches you very little about the game. You will be doing endless internet searches for what should be intuitive and basic. There's probably more to removed about I'm forgetting right now.
Inkbound is... disappointing.
I played the demo and it was pretty solid. It's an isometric, turn based strategy roguelike, with multiplayer support and some competitive features. I was initially planning to buy it on release.
But the price at launch was a bit higher than it would be for a no-brainer purchase, and playing requires constant online connectivity, despite supporting singleplayer play, AND came with a cosmetic battlepass out the gate.
I found it ridiculous that the game couldn't even support offline play before pushing a battlepass. Cosmetic only or no, this game is missing important functions and ultimately put me off getting a paid PC game that hasn't even gotten it's shit together before shilling their microtransactions. Smh.
Loony Tunes Racing on Dreamcast
Football manager
Population: One
Been playing for over two years but the development team (which may or may not be one unpaid intern) has ruined the game to the point that few people even play it anymore. This used to be one of the greatest VR experiences you could have but now it's so full of bugs it's nearly unplayable.
Just a broken dumpster fire. This is what happens when Meta buys a studio.
I hate to say this, but Super Dragonball Heroes World Mission
While the "what if" stuff is interesting, the gameplay is boring and repetitive. It's not worth the effort put into things.
Drakensang Online. Originally started fine until Bigpoint sold it to the chinese and started doing crazy p2w shit called The Dark Legacy.
That update ruined builds, made veteran accounts look squishy and made long time players disappointed
Mordhau. Terrible toxic community, developers that cater only to the super hard core players. Content droughts.. Yet I somehow stuck 500+ hours on it. Playing the lute was nice though.
Sim city 2000
I have thousands of hours in MORDHAU, a crazy medieval PvP "First Person Sworder". It has been my main game since release four years ago. There's nothing that compares in my opinion, Chivalry 2 is in the same genre but I vastly prefer the combat of Mord.
It's on sale on Steam right now, -75%, check it out. :)
I think you misunderstood the post
I noticed my -1 score, re-read the post and realised I misunderstood it yep lol
If you think others should check it out, then it's not a good answer to this question!
I want a game you think is absolute trash, and think people are stupid to play, but you still find yourself booting it up whenever you have free time.
Rainbow six: siege. I played it pretty religiously and had a pretty good ranked k/d. At some point the magic wore off and playing with randoms is insufferable. Very toxic too
The skill curve on that game always seemed insane, cause you could throw the game by taking cover behind the wrong wall?
You can also get killed by someone aiming through a 2-pixel-wide hole
I got to do some pretty cool things, I lived out of pos in worm hole space with a close nit group during the first year of them, I flew with Rooks and Kings and Pandemic Legion.
But I wish I stopped then. I came back a few years later and that was so depressing.