What universally beloved videogame you just can't enjoy?
2 picks for me: Stardew
Valley, most boring shit ever, I don't see the appeal, seriously how the hell did that thing sold 20 million copies?
And Witcher 3, I own that game since 2019 and I regret buying it, funny thing is that I've finished Dragon Age 1 and 2, which are kinda same genre but I actually enjoyed those games. I guess the old BioWare sauce carried those games unlike Witcher where there's nothing to enjoy in its massive pointless world.
Just like any sport game, I only enjoy FIFA in small doses.
Sports games are literally the definition of "playing the same game over and over again". I can only ever do maybe a handful of games in a "season" before I start just simming and focusing solely on the management side of things. And even that doesn't last more than a season. I don't think there's any sports game where I've run more than one or two seasons.
PES back in the day had an amazing manager mode. And become a legend mode was so much better than fifa career. Being just one player and starting in small forgotten clubs and going all the way up to the champions league plus trying to win the "fifa" World Cup was addicting back in the day.
It's beautiful, and it seems like an interesting world, but learning exactly how to dodgerollattack for every enemy with deliberately delayed reflexes is not my kinda fun.
Any first person shooter. I'm just not into something that requires that kind of reflexes and precision, especially with a first person perspective where you can be killed instantly from behind.
I played for probably a dozen hours or so, beat a few bosses and then just hit a boss I couldn't beat. (Don't recall which.) I would get to the boss and die almost immediately. Then I'd be sent back to a far away checkpoint. I'd slog back to the boss, and die. Repeat again.
I've played plenty of games like this. I get at some level that's the point. The problem is that I wasn't enjoying the game. I wasn't making progress. Just repeating the same over and over again.
I've played and loved similar games. Super Meat Boy & Celeste? Excellent. Ori and the Blind Forest/Will of the Wisps? Top games.
By all accounts I feel like I should like Hollow Knight... but I just don't feel they got it right.
I accidentally beat the Mantis Triplets far earlier than I needed to because I couldn't find the path into the ruined capital city I was meant to take.
Long route back to fighting the optional boss to enter a far too difficult zone for me.
Only after beating them and discovering that that was not where I was meant to go did I backtrack and find the turning I'd missed to actually progress. (I rather liked Hollow Knight despite this, but you don't and that's fine. I just think it would be funny (, and a sign of poor map design if you made the same map reading error I did).)
I broke through the exact same situation you had and finished the game beyond what most Hollow Knight players will achieve just so I can legitimately criticise this game that so many people apparently love.
You’ve picked out the exact same mechanic that I also criticise. It wastes the players time and is anti-fun.
I’d also add that the map mechanic is also terrible.
My fun factor increased 10x when I found a hollow knight map online to use that had key locations marked. Ironically it was a very soft touch map that just gave general guidance without too many spoilers and this improved my experience of the game.
It's a game I wanted to enjoy, and I had some amount of fun, but ultimately it just fell flat.
The Ori games were so much better while following the same basic gameplay, but Hollow Knight gets all the extra attention. I do think Hollow Knight is bad, it's just a game that is ok, and by the next game will be enjoyable after they iron everything out.
The other possibility I assume is that there is something Souls-like about the game that I don't get. I've only played DS3 and I found it boring quickly. I understood what the game wanted me to do, but I wasn't having fun doing it. Maybe some folks do, but not for me.
Pretty much every first party Nintendo game, especially Mario and the Zelda series. I've had some enjoyment from the 2D era Zelda games at least, but have yet to finish any of them as they just don't seem to hold my attention.
I'll reserve my judgement on the most recent Zelda game as I understand it's quite different from the classic 3D and 2D games, but I don't have any particular desire to give Nintendo money given their increasingly lawyer heavy behaviour.
I really enjoyed Breath of the Wild although I haven't tried Tears for the Kingdom. It really suited me but it's lack of direction is how I play every open world game anyway. I actually can't go back to other AAA open world games without getting irritated by how hand holding and limiting they are of their own medium, but it wasn't just breath of the wild that made me realise that.
I've just never gotten into Pokemon. The games just feel like 99% grinding. I'm sure that's an incredibly unpopular opinion, but I still find them unspeakably dull.
They came from a different era. If you didn't grow up taking long road trips with a Gameboy pocket/color for your only distraction then you probably don't get the nostalgia rush that most pmon fans do.
It's weird, because Pokémon didn't invent turn-based RPG's, nor did they even invent the pocket monster genre because Dragon Warrior Monster arguably had a better game than Pokémon out around the same time - with more monsters, breeding, and a better storyline.
But Red/Blue and Gold/Silver were great games of their time. Very basic, but great, mostly because of the world built around them. If you didn't appreciate Pokémon, it's probably easy to see why you'd find it dull.
Worth mentioning, regarding Dragon Quest, the monster teaming up with the player was added in DQ5, back in 1992, something that was arguably first introduced in Megami Tensei 2 (1990). Dragon Quest Monster was released only in 1998, after the first pokemon games.
What set pokemon apart from them was the amount of pokemon you could get. That Game Freak managed to cram another 100 in Gold/Silver, a night/day cycle, berries, friendship, breeding and the entire original Kanto region in a gameboy color cart is a small miracle
I don't even mind some turn-based RPGs. I mentioned Wasteland in another comment, which I loved. Wasteland was basically remade as Fallout 1. Fallout 1, 2 and the Wasteland games which now have their own sequels are all turn-based RPGs, but they give you so many more options than Pokemon and they are also about team building since you don't play as a single character.
I guess Pokemon was just not the game for me. 🤷♂️
If you look at the first game from a historic perspective
The first game basically was an open world RPG with 151 unique characters with each their strengths and weaknesses, and their own attacks, and all could be customised. Running on a handheld that previously could only play Tetris.
It was a freaking coding masterpiece.
But I agree the gameplay loop hasn't upgraded the way it should. It didn't evolve with the medium and stuck too much to its roots.
Although the grinding in the newer games has been minimised. You can play through the games without grinding once.
I admit I haven't played a recent Pokemon game because of my previous experiences, but I'm open to checking a new one out at some point if the grinding has been reduced. Thanks.
Animal Crossing. I have friends who became obsessed with that game. They wouldn't stop pestering me about how much I would love it, and how I should start playing so we could trade turnips or some shit. Anyways, I bought it. What a weird thing to be obsessed with. It was boring, childish, and pointless. But it was hugely popular for a period of time.
Fucking chore simulator. My roommates couldn't be assed to do their actual chores, but every morning during covid they'd get up and make sure their fucking farms had whatever the shit they needed.
I bought it for the same reasons and also hated it. It just felt empty and boring. I then had to bite my tongue so hard when those friends would start gushing about their latest Animal Crossing thing.
Deep Rock Galactic has nailed the formula with seasons as ways of adding things with using them as FOMO. Missed skins and loot from previous seasons used to just get recycled into the RNG loot. Now they added a system to toggle and play missions as if you were a in a previous season and earn the old loot.
I never really got into the Pokémon games. Don't find turn-based combat very fun. I mean, I guess turn-based is easy and relaxing for when you just want to put your game down and take breaks.
Oh man I hate turn based combat. It's the worst possible combat system. If you try to fight enemies more powerful or numerous than you, you just lose and that's all there is to it. Anything besides turn based actually allows you to benefit from skill and strategy. Factors besides enemy numbers and level play a much larger role in how the fighting plays out.
Low level runs are popular in many games with turn-based battle systems. There can definitely be a lot of strategy involved. Those kinds of games tend to have a lot of mechanics to play around with.
That's funny, it's the opposite for me. Got into Satisfactory, loved it. Buddy bought me factorio, and now Satisfactory seems like an extremely feature-neutered version of Factorio.
Overwatch and Fortnite. I feel like I'm catching ADHD just playing them. Strangely Apex Legends is quite enjoyable. Though I stick to HLL and Squad for shooty mcpewpews.
Anything with that boring lazy Batman Arkham fighting system that they put in every game anymore.
It's such a shitty mechanic. I don't understand why people like it. It's just an extended QuickTime event. The same identical QuickTime event, over and over again, for fucking hours. It wasn't so bad in Arkham because the stealth was so fun that I never fought unless I had to.
But for 15 years it's infected every other goddamn game. Shadows of Mordor, Mad Max, Ghosts of Tsushima off the top of my head.
Céleste wasn't a cake walk but the unlimited lives and quick load makes it doable. Just don't try to 100 percent it, forget about the wack story and it's good
I have a specific opinion about the older mario games; they expected a much more narrow game literacy than new games do, so the people who played them already had a little bit of transferable ability from other games. Nowadays, not just are precise skills less required because the games are designed to be easier, but the player base is starting the games with less skill due to their previous game being totally different.
Well you picked two of my favorite games there... :p
For me it's Monster Hunter. There's no appeal to me fighting endless boss fights grinding for better gear. People often compare it to Soulslikes, which I do like. But IMO Monster Hunter doesn't have the best part of Soulslikes, which is the exploration of an intricate world full of mysteries.
That's... an interesting one. Uniquely frustrating from what sort of perspective? Like, do other fighting games work for you but platform fighters don't? Or are fighting games in general just not your thing?
The control scheme, the health bar system, and the general chaos just never hit right for me. I can appreciate the game in a party setting, but maybe a little begrudgingly. In maybe similar veins, I'd prefer Towerfall or Power Stone 2, for example.
Gacha games, but surprisingly not for the gacha elements. FOMO events, where you either play during a limited period or miss the event and its rewards forever, killed my interest in every one I played.
The worst are the ones that put critical parts of character stories in them, then never rerun the events. Genshin and other MiHoYo games were especially bad about this (Albedo's evil twin says hello).
I’ve gotten into one of those games over the past few months for the first time and I’m still not even sure why. It’s so transparent what they’re doing, trying to milk users for money with artificially ridiculous drop rates for characters and gear, and just constant grinding to get anything. I’ve stayed F2P the whole time, but it’s kinda aggravating seeing stuff essentially locked behind a paywall. And the prices are absolutely ridiculous, I can’t imagine what kind of idiots would actually buy anything at their arbitrarily inflated rates for fake, digital crap. Yet I keep playing.
The battle pass from Genshin/Star Rail boggles the mind. You have to grind like crazy or play almost every day to complete it, and the majority of the rewards are character and weapon advancement materials. You know, something you'd usually have to grind for.
Escape the grind through more grinding.
Oh, and you only get 1/6 of the battle pass rewards as a F2P player. It's ten bucks to unlock the majority of the rewards. And the headline feature, the weapon/star cone you unlock at tier 30 (only it you pay, naturally), is easily outclassed by stuff you'll get as a F2P player.
Me too, until I found a random thing on the way, when a bandit attacked me only to give me a better sword then I was watching fish in a river spotting a weird shadow realising it wad a flying dragon which I managed to kill somehow near a town. Beaten up went up to the tavern where they told me about weird things happening in the castle nearby so I went to see WhatsUp and they were crying on about a weird claw part of my main quest, I was about to quit tired from all that when my character took it out and completed the quest as soon as it began.
Then I stole everything in the castle and couldn't run back to the store fast enough aaaaand... It was 500+ hours already
Me too . Also don't really enjoy most Bethesda games . I tried fallout 3 and found most of the combat was walking backwards and shooting the enemy a hundred times.
I think he’s thinking of Build a Gate 3, which is indeed the most confusing game ever. It helps to think in terms wood grain, and it really helps if you get the carpentry instruction from BaG 1 and 2.
I felt this way too, but my husband guilted me into sticking with it and I'm super glad he did, we had SO much fun playing split screen. I'm the type of person who has to look at the controller to see which one triangle is to give you some idea of my adeptness.
I get the complaint, it feels like it could be so tactical and strategic but often you get fucked by bad luck. But that's kinda rogue likes for you I guess. Wonder if there was a way to design it differently.
I'm having that problem with slay the spire currently. I've spent 50 hours trying to beat it with the witch character, and keep getting fucked by the RNG.
FTL I've beat with every ship/variation on normal, but it takes a lot of Memorization or looking up events to make sure you're not screwing yourself.
Into the Breach is way less RNG.
Minecraft and other open-ended games without much guidance toward specific goals.
While I do enjoy freely exploring a large open world I also lose track of the point of playing at all... add some quest objectives or something and it's perfect.
There are mod packs that add a lot of content and progression. As much as I like Minecraft, vanilla gets boring fast. Check out curseforge if you want to check it out.
Fucking loved that game until I got to the moon. I was doing 10-hour sessions I loved it so much.
I played a scenario where I start in a planet, and there’s a space station orbiting the planet, and whenever I’m ready I can go to the space station and hit a button and then it’s basically zombie defense except it’s robotic drones.
Well, I started on the surface and my first thing was I had no water to make hydrogen and there were mountains on the horizon with ice caps on them so the first like 50 hours of gameplay was me building a rover and finding a path around a canyon to those mountains.
Finally I had a source of ice, hence hydrogen, hence fuel to get off the surface and into space.
After a few attempts I got a flying craft into space. Bare bones basics on it: survival kit, basic refinery so I could make repairs to my ship, and I started exploring outer space.
I tried the station with the defense thing and died instantly. So I decided I’d build up my ship, get more weapons, and try again.
So I cruised around, my ship grew, got more and more features including tons of turrets. I went and did another run at the drones and got through like 10 waves instead of 2. Then I decided to go check out the moon. This was a long journey (30 minutes at max speed as the crow flies) and I stopped many times along the way to expand my ship, so it was actually days of journeying to the moon.
Then I got to the moon, and landed, and it was cool and then … flop. All my motivation and fascination died all at once.
Apparently it’s quite common with Space Engineers. I really wish there was some major sequence of goals.
The drones goal isn’t beatable, I don’t think. And it’s the only goal like that. The reason it isn’t bearable is there’s infinite waves. I think.
What would even make it cooler is a series of challenges that you have to pass. At locations, each with their own difficulty level.
I mean there’s contracts where you can get money to trade like 50 steel plates for some space bucks.
I tried multiplayer servers but none of the worlds persist. Either the servers themselves are persistent - but the world is wiped every 6 hours - or the servers themselves are just rented servers that are up for a few days then gone.
I wasn’t able to find any public servers with long-term persistent worlds using the in-game browser.
Some friends tried to get me into Destiny 2. It seems really pointless. I recognize the mechanics and aspects common to other games but somehow it just never clicked with me.
I had a co worker a few months ago say they needed to head home to their second job after work, curious I Inquired further and it turns out he has just been busting out ~40 hours a week of destiny 2 for a few months now while also working 40 hours a week at our job.
To be fair we work from home 2 days a week so I'm sure he had some cross over work/destiny time.
seriously, I tried playing with my friends for like 2-3 months and had to spend at least $100 just to get the DLCs to play with them. Great investment at this point...
Most of the Soulsborne games. The only one I’ve been able to enjoy is Sekiro.
In most Soulsborne games, it seems like difficulty is artificial simply because your character is so damned clunky. I enjoyed Sekiro specifically because the character was snappy and didn’t feel like they were running through waist-deep water. If I lost a fight in Sekiro, it was never because I was animation locked or because my character was too slow; It’s because I was too slow.
The more armour you wear in the main Souls game, the slower and clunkier you are. It's kind of a gotcha, in that you instinctively think more armour will help, and it does the exact opposite because you get hit more often. There's a lot of shit that isn't really explained at all. Some people like that, but the Wiki is there if you don't.
Parrying was all but impossible for me, I just went with sword and shield for most of it, switching to the massive zweihander for the DLC.
Dark Souls 2 is the worst of them, I'd skip that if you ever try again. Way too many enemies in every area.
I also just dint have the time to get good at them. I get maybe 2-3 hours a week to game on average these days. I'm not going to dump a year into getting my ass kicked for a single game.
I tried Dark Souls and quit pretty early because I couldn't pause. I don't care about doing inventory or anything like that, but I'd like to be able to just stop things if I need to go check on the door or something. The outside world doesn't stop just because I'm gaming.
IIRC, lots of people originally used the Home button as a sort of super-pause. But that’s not as easy on the PC version, where the game just keeps running in the background.
"Soulsborne" isn't a series per se, it's an umbrella covering all the Dark Souls games, and FromSoft's other games using the same formula like Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Elden Ring.
The entire Final Fantasy franchise, with the exception of Dissidia. I just don't like that style of game play where you have to stop in the middle of fighting, pick what you wanna do, then watch them do it. I'm also not a fan of Pokémon for the same similar reason.
Final Fantasy hasn't been like that for a long long time. They make ARPGs now. Check out gameplay from ffxvi or the vii remake, it's high paced action.
Witcher 3 used to be like that for me. Everyone kept telling me to do the Bloody Baron quest; did it, didn't care for it, and stopped playing the game. Four years later, I decided to give it another shot and I liked it a lot and finally understood why people like it.
When I tried playing it there were a couple quests near the beginning where you get to choose someones fate. Nether answer is a good one and I felt bad whichever I picked. I stopped playing at that point.
I didn't really like the witcher 3. Found the combat wasn't that great and I spent most of my time walking around talking to people or trying to repair my weapons . I didn't get very far into the game though so I'm not sure how much that changes later in the game . I did like the card game Gwent though .
I had a terrible time with DAO until I read one thing that helped improve the whole game:
‘Get Wynne’
Once you unlock her character you will actually be able to progress at a reasonable rate without incredible headache allowing you to enjoy more of the story.
I feel it suffers from a lot of the problems with RPGs of the time both culturally and mechanically. No one had a really good idea of where the genre could be taken. The story was fine though. I would suggest anyone getting into it to just read or watch summary and use the online tool for generating decisions/save.
Warhammer series as well as the Gears of War franchise. I like other strategy and 3rd-person shooters with cover mechanics. I just couldn't get into this world or the characters/groups.
I’ve never really found turn-based games to be all that fun. A few have had a good enough story or some other mechanic to make them interesting but it’s just not really my thing, for some reason. (It’s not just a video game thing. A bunch of my friends play poker or complex board games and I’d usually rather watch than play.)
So, something like the Final Fantasy series or Pokémon games would be my answer. Everyone loves Final Fantasy and Pokémon. I’m clearly the weird one. And I probably would love them if they were more action-oriented.
I'm right with you on Stardew Valley. Might be because I'm a city kid but I just can't connect with the game. I know that it's supposed to be "cosy" but my idea of cosy is a downtown apartment, not a farm. It just doesn't work for me.
Its not an accurate representation of a farm, just to make that clear. It's a very much romanticised little village - and there's plenty of indoors, if that's what you like. Eg, your house, which you can upgrade and decorate, the villagers houses and shops, the mines. That said, I wouldn't have described it as 'cozy', I would say more 'chill'.
Grew up on retro console and then fully grew with PC gaming as it grew and matured in the 90s. Tried Halo once in 2003 and the graphics and gameplay for death match were so consummately uncreative I pitied console gamers ever since.
I never was a console player so I only got around to playing the original Halo a couple of years back. It was a decent shooter, but nowhere near as great as I imagined. IMO the original Half Life does everything much better and it came out three years earlier.
I'm curious about Goldeneye and Perfect Dark, but I kinda expect the same kind of disappointment.
It's not like I totally didn't enjoy it, but Red Dead Redemption 2. The game was good in many ways, and I totally get why it's so we'll loved, but I just have nothing with the setting. I don't like cowboys, I don't like playing as an asshole who makes bad decision after bad decision, and I also don't like a setting where women are basically property. Just not really my vibe. I just came from Cyberpunk 2077 and the contrast was quite big, even though Cyberpunk is supposed to be more dystopian
As someone who both dislikes westerns and liked the first Red Dead Redemption, everything I've heard about RDR2 makes me think I would not like it at all.
It sounds like they took a great game and injected it with mindless busy-body gameplay mechanics. I've barely ever heard people talk about the story, which doesn't really help sell a game that's a sequel to a story focused game.
Lol I'm the opposite. I won't allow KOTOR slander. Don't give a fuck about Mass Effect, you can trash it.
KOTOR had a great story and I was finally in the Star Wars universe, just flying around and exploring the universe.
I do admit the early part of the game is a bit slow, but once I was jumping from planet to planet it was awesome.
(Come to think of it I found Mass Effect equally boring when I started it. If it had been Star Wars I probably would have stuck with it, but since it wasn't I just found it boring.)
I played one Resident Evil game for 5 minutes, and gave up because of the fucking stupid controls.
Outside of that, probably Halo. I've tried several of them because I loved first-person shooters, but they just felt a little soulless to me, and unbelievably slow compared to the likes of Unreal Tournament, Quake, and Doom.
Resident evil is my favourite franchise so I can't agree. The og controls are there due technical limitations but work well and are much more responsive than other survival horror games of the era
I thought the controls also helped with the horror factor. Unable to move completely freely and stuck in a mansion with fixed camera angles. But I also see why some would be put off by it.
Warframe. Shooty and jumpy. OK. No strategy. Just shooty big guns. Boring. Compare to helldivers 2. No jumpy allllllll strategy. This or that syrategem? Throw or hide? Which objective first?
I get it, I played Warframe a fair bit and the beginning is pretty one note. The game really opens up at some point but it's very far from the beginning. Not very friendly to newbs and it is a very very grindy game.
I can understand your feeling. I first bought Witcher 3 in 2016 or so and didn't touch it for years. Picked it up 2 years ago again and loved it. It's not he best combat, not the best complex game but the story really hooked me. Mind you, it does take a couple of hours for it to get going. And the secondary quests (side quests) are some of the most memorable I've ever played.
My opinion might be more controversial than disliking the game. I only read the book the Netflix series is based on, but it was kind of a terrible book. I enjoyed the story for the most part. The issue for me is the writing style is terrible. I kept losing track of who was talking or doing something because the author never reconfirms which character said or did the thing. It ruined the book for me.
If your game is advertised as being "extremely difficult", it just means it is lacking tons of quality of life features and goes out of its way to punish the player by making them repeat the same slog over and over. It is quite easy to make a difficult game, much harder to make a fun game.
Just imagine how much better and shorter Dark Souls would have been with a marker telling you where to go, instead of you fumbling around going through the same areas because you have no idea where to go next. It artificially lengthens the game.
But the worst part about those types of games is the community. They go insane when you even propose an easy or story mode. As if the the difficulty is the only redeeming quality those games have.
I don't have to "git gud", I can just close the game and never play it again while I enjoy actual good games.
Look I think there are valid complaints to be made about the Dark Souls franchise, but criticizing them for not giving you waypoints says more about you than it does the games themselves. The lack of any sort of hand holding was by far the most interesting thing for me when I first played Dark Souls and is the thing that got me hooked. The tension in exploring a new area, having no idea what to expect and being so scared you're going to die is a wonderful feeling, especially when you overcome it and survive to the next bonfire.
You're making me want to write a boomeresque comment about how kids want video games to hold their hands. Don't you have a sense of adventure? Is exploration and mystery not interesting to you?
I'd like to make a counterpoint here, but first I want to acknowledge that you are 100% entitled to your opinion and maybe souls-like games are just not for you. It's a shame that people are kicking downvotes your way because this is in no way a new or controversial opinion, but like you said, the community can sometimes take their love of the game/series too far and blame the consumer for not liking the same stuff they like, which isn't fair and just makes the souls community looks like clowns.
Anyway, my counterpoint is that I don't feel like these games are as difficult as people make them out to be. IMO, older games were just as hard, if not harder to complete even when playing optimally. In the framework of just about every Souls-like game, you have tools that you can use to almost completely trivialize the toughest encounters if you want. DS1 can be beaten by a complete amateur if you do the gravelord speedrun (which doesn't require any real speedrunning tricks and there are many youtube tutorials that you can follow along with, takes about 10-15 minutes from character creation) and get the gravelord greatsword which can inflict Toxic on all the bosses, so you can just hit them a few times and run away for the rest of the fight, waiting for the poison to finish them off. That's just one example. Just about every installment of FromSoftware's Souls' series has some overpowered cheese that you can research to essentially trivialize the game. Some people might argue that you're not beating the game in the "intended way" if you take such shortcuts, but I disagree. Any way you make it to the end is the right way.
For a lot of people, part of the fun of a game like Dark Souls is the adventure, the discovery, and yes, pounding your head against a tough boss trying to beat it over and over. If you're the type of gamer who gets easily frustrated to the point where you feel like quitting when encountering a challenge that feels unfun or unfair, I can see it not being an enjoyable experience. The thing that keeps most people coming back is the dopamine hit that they get when they do finally overcome that challenge and they are rewarded with more stuff to explore, new items to pick up, and so on. I think if there were any argument to be made against making the game easier for yourself by exploiting broken game mechanics (or with an easy/story mode added or modded in), it's that you probably won't be super invested in the outcome and get bored easily. Without the challenge aspect, the Souls games are very much a bare bones experience. It's essentially a generic fantasy RPG with a story hidden behind item descriptions and cryptic NPC interactions. That doesn't exactly make for the most compelling gameplay, so there's no trail of breadcrumbs to keep the gamer uninterested in the challenge going. There's a sort of intrinsic value in these games that can't be quantified, because everybody gets something different out of it.
The games usually have an easier mode that is still not easy. In DS 3 playing the Knight and using the shield heavily works pretty well and make a lot of bosses trivial.
But yeah, it's not for everyone, grinding timings and level information can be really frustrating so if the satisfaction of beating a level is not enough there'd be no point.
The real easy mode in Souls is to have you and three friends get burner accounts, then get anticheat-banned on purpose so you can co-op the entire game with low risk of getting griefed by some jerkoff PvP player, as the 'banned people' ghetto server is a ghost town. Played through the entire Souls trilogy like that during the 2020 lockdown, and had the time of my life. Never really felt "hard" because we could gang up on enemies. It did help that one of my mates was a veritable Dark Souls encyclopedia, and would give us pointers and strategies while also telling us about the lore. Great time.
My first Mario Game was Super Mario World, as such I don't understand why Mario 1 and 3 are so beloved. Groundbreaking they might be, fun they are not.
Any time I got the Mario All Stars Cartridge out and said to myself "I am completing Mario 3 today", after a while my mind went "or I could actually enjoy a round of Mario World" and did that instead.
I share your sentiment; but you need to remember that SM1&3 were both originally NES games, and even the All Stars remakes are largely hampered by the original consoles limitations.
That’s why both SMW and Yoshi’s Island are such better experiences overall, they didn’t have to emulate those same limitations in order to preserve an original playstyle.
It's just not fun to me, yet online people describe Mario 3 as "the best 2d Mario" and "one I could always come back to". This has nothing to do with the NES' limitations, it's a difference in taste.
All Mario games except for any Mario Kart. I didn’t even like the games as a kid, and I still don’t get their appeal because to me the platforming aspects are simplistic and not engaging enough. I can enjoy other platformers though.
Witcher 2 with its semi-open-semi-linear gameplay has definitely been a better experience in terms of pacing and story. Witcher 3 had quite the environment to wander around in a slow pace and is a much, much larger game with a good enough polish in my opinion, but can be very overwhelming with how many hours it requires for a balanced gameplay.
I don't know if they're considered "universally beloved". But the Total War series of games theoretically should be directly up my alley based on every other game I play, but for some reason they've never clicked for me.
X4 is one that I couldn't figure out. There aren't a lot of ways to make passive income and the entry barriers to get to participate in anything cool seem extremely high. I'm not grinding quests, in the starter ship, making beans until I can buy a space station for example. $30k quests that only pop up sometimes and 1800 credit profit from trading isn't even close to good enough for that. I ragequit when I bought an affordable cargo ship, found that I could do NOTHING with it to gain passive income, grinded manual money making methods for another few hours and then got bored of it.
I expected this to be a spaceship game where I could tell npcs what to do instead of do all the stuff myself. Perhaps it becomes a management game instead of a grind game eventually, but I don't have the patience to play to that point. Starfield at least has fun gunplay.
What? X is all about the passive income and telling NPCs what to do. You play long enough to afford a cheap cargo runner as a second ship, put an AI pilot in it, and tell them to run trade routes in the background while you do whatever you find fun. Your income snowballs from there as you buy more and bigger ships and unlock better trading automation, then becomes ridiculous once you start building stations and producing entire supply chains yourself.
I say this as someone who also bounced off X4, because even with all that and time compression it still takes ages to get to the fun endgame stuff I actually enjoy.
BioShock Infinite. The gunplay is very basic and it's world doesn't make sense.
Like:
How can Elizabeth be a up beat Disney princess like character? If she lived in her tower and being experimented on for all her life.
Why Columbia need slaves? When it haves robots and have control of quantum mechanics.
spoiler
Killing Booker will not stop Comstock being made. Because an Booker who didn't go though with the river baptism still can become Comstock. You need to kill one of Lutece twin's parents. So they never be born. Due to them helping Comstock make Columbia in the first place.
I really liked the visuals, especially at the start, and there's some really nice beats, but the story fall completely apart as soon as the tears to alternate realities are introduced and given that the story ends up completely relying on that... yeah. I agree 100%.
Yes, but there are lots of universally beloved video games. I was saying that two they chose happened to be the specific two that I'd played the most recently.
I just can't get into one-player games anymore. My little brother, who's awesome in every way, got me these two great games for birthday and Christmas. Hades, and Witcher III: Wild Hunt. And I can't for the life of me get into them. I want to play with other people! Also, I'm one of those people that wants to explore every little bit of the world before going to fight the boss, because I hate being under leveled for a fight. Leads me to explore for an hour, find a bunch of sweet stuff that definitely will help me later in the game, then I die to a pack of flipping wolves, lose all my stuff and have to start over. Did that a couple times then stopped.
Started Hades, and the game started with blaring music that I couldn't turn down. Nothing in the game controls was doing it, so I turned it off.
Meanwhile I'm basically addicted to DOTA 2, and put over 1000 hours into SMITE just because that was a game my lil bro played. Soon as I got good enough to play SMITE with him, he stopped playing 😥
Oof, I'm mostly the opposite these days. Multiplayer games either have too much toxicity from randos, or they're stuffed with progression systems that actively make me hate the game even if the gameplay itself is good.
Still like coop games like Darktide every once in a while.
I can't get into single player games either. Interacting with NPCs just doesn't do it for me and to me they're a tedious way to get a narrative. I hate having to grind to get to the next plot-point only to get stuck behind a boss and by the time it's beaten, I've forgotten the plot. If I'm going to entertain myself alone, I'd rather watch a movie or show, read a book, or work on a project than play through a single player campaign.
Same and same. There was a moment in PUBG's first moments that I found it fun because it felt like ridiculous gameplay in a good way. But lost it's appeal like everything else.
Breath of the Wild. The combat is fun but after that got old I realized there was absolutely nothing about the game I found engaging. The world was sparse and filled with the same enemies everywhere, temples were repetitive, the writing/acting was absolutely atrocious, and many of the mechanics were tedious as fuck. Climbing is tedious, cooking is tedious, gathering is tedious.
I genuinely do not understand why the game is so beloved.
Bloodborne for me. Everyone talked about how hard it is, but the game just encourages grinding until you hit your natural talent level. Plus, the story was gross.
I enjoyed gwent in Witcher 3 more than the story tbh. Did not enjoy the standalone gwent spinoff they eventually made.
I kind of have the same gripe about Minecraft as you do about Stardew. Not only is it stupid, but it looks like utter shit. The only redeeming quality is being able to do stupid shit in a virtual space with friends. Gmod does all that and more, except better in every way that matters.
The standalone Gwent version started sucking the moment all the competitive gamers got their hands on it. Then it was all about optimising the game to death, all the decks got streamlined. I came back to the game after a longer break and it was almost completely different, and my favourite faction had been so drastically altered that I couldn't get back into it.
Bloodborne. I just can't click with the gameplay. I've tried and tried and tried. I've bounced off of it. Been filtered.
Not the game's fault. It seems fantastic for what it's going for, clearly very finely tuned. I just have never been good at doing these frame perfect 3rd person melee games. I just listen to loads of lore videos on it now.
It's okay, that's how I feel about the monster hunter games. Just couldn't get into them. I also found the weird dimorphism that the monster hunter armor had off putting. I wanted my woman character to have real armor, not a bikini. I get some people like that, but it wasn't for me.
The gameplay wasn't as fun as I anticipated, and I can't place my finger on why. It's weird.. I WANT to like those games but just don't find them enjoyable.
Sometimes we just just don't vibe with a game. It happens!
Sekiro. Too hard for me, massive skill issue ik. (And I have beaten Elden Ring and shadow of the erdtree so it's not like I dislike all souls-likes... idk)
Anything made by Riot games. They are just worse versions of already existing games.
Destiny 2. I can't play the whole story so I do not care to start it + yk, microtransactions...
Hollow knight. Same deal as sekiro, skill issue on my part.
Factorio solo. Great fun with friends but I just can't get into playing it solo...
My friends have tried to get me into destiny 2, but it's just really expensive and you cannot play the whole story... And it doesn't run on linux so that's also a thing.
I thought this game blew chunks. I'm an old gamer and it was jist God of War on ps2 on God Mode, but way less fun and cool. Low health + constant parry, but boring story and relentless tedium. If this was any other studio it would have been long forgotten already. I don't think being unwilling to deal with a developers core concept of using frustration as an action gameplay element as "a skill issue". Making the enemies respawn both when you die AND when you reload or save isn't a reflection of fighting skill, it comes down to being unwilling to tolerate irritating, tedious game design.
It very much is a skill issue. Elden Ring pretty much has the same philosophy and it's my favorite game of all time... The difference being that Elden Ring is way easier. My main issue with sekiro is that I can't parry for sh!t in any game, I'm just bad at it. So obviously, a game balanced entirely about parrying is gonna be hard for me. But yk, the lack of interesting weapons, skills and exploration also play a big part in my lack of enjoyment of sekiro in particular.
I’d question whether hollow knight is really a skill issue on your part.
I’ve done the ‘path of pain’ and I still don’t understand why people love the game so much.
It has solid combat, true, but some of the fundamental game mechanics (like save points and the map system) are designed to pad the game time and frustrate the player. Its poor design and the fact they weren’t called out on it is disappointing.
Making a save point 40 seconds from a difficult boss fight doesn’t make me or any player git gud. It’s needlessly frustrating.
Yeah I like difficult games but Hollow Knight is just boring and wastes a lot of your time, so I never ended up finishing it. It’s a shame because I probably would like it a lot more if it didn’t waste so much of your time
DaS/ElR give you so many options and so many moving parts that you can make the game a lot easier if you know what you are doing. You gotta find a build and playstyle that work for you. People say there is no easy mode, but there is. It's not easy-easy but it is definitely easi-ER than trying to brute-force it without thought.
I consider the easy mode of DaS to be playing with magic. Your health pool basically doesn't exist and if anything touches you, you just melt. But you also deal a ton of damage, so you just get naked and tumble around pretending you're playing a bullet hell game and you just can't get touched. This is the build that works for me.
With Sekiro, on the other hand, there is a lot less you can mess around with. It's just you, your pattern memorisation, and your reflexes versus the world.
Zelda: Ocarina of Time -- I didn't play it until more than a decade after it came out and had zero nostalgia for it. The camera and controls were super clunky and I just couldn't enjoy it. That's actually true of a lot of N64 stuff for me.
I fried tried Kingdom Come: Deliverance and honestly hated everything about it. I didn't enjoy the combat, voice acting, or graphics. I felt like I spent most of the game running (and running and running) to the next quest and it was very boring. On top of all of that, it felt so much like Christian propaganda it made me feel uncomfortable. "Hello random npc" -> "JESUS CHRIST IS YOUR GOD REPENT NOW hello PC would you like to buy some flowers?" -> "um, no thanks, I guess" -> "OK, have a nice day PRAISE JESUS THE CREATOR OF ALL THINGS AND THE ONE TRUE GOD". It would have been bearable if the game was good, but it just wasn't.
Stardew is... fine I guess, but there's always something else I'd rather play.
It feels like I need to rebuild the whole factory (or at least some of it) each time I unlock something new.This becomes quite annoying considering that I really liked my previous layout. Maybe I'm doing it wrong. Idk.
I just do not like Fallout 3 and 4. I played the hell out of 1 and 2 back in the day, but Bethesda really changed things up. The writing in particular suffered.
Wasteland 2 and 3 will activate the same brain ridges as the original Fallouts. I actually would recommend starting with 3 if you don't think you can commit to playing both games, as it has the most polished presentation, and you get all the relevant backstory quickly enough not to need to play the other games. WL3's structure is all about supporting different, mutually incompatible factions, which can feel like Fallout New Vegas.
I'm currently playing Colony Ship, which is an independent game that makes no secret of being inspired by Fallout. It is very mechanically dense. Clearly it is intended to be played by a variety of character builds. I haven't finished it, but it seems promising so far.
Underrail is another game that takes a lot of inspiration from the old Fallout titles, with a lot of social stratification and mystery about the world in the game and mechanically a lot of different build types.
Right there with ya. Oh, I tried so hard. Walking and junk collection simulators in a depressing, ugly setting. The humorous bits are way too infrequent to make up for the litany of misery.
Which ones? All of them? I found BotW boring and massively overated but Ocarina of time & Majoras mask are fun and engaging games. OG Zelda and link to the past are also fun games.
Didn't see them mentioned yet, but the Civilization games. Which is funny, because I love the 4x strategy game Galactic Civilizations, and many other strategy games like Europa Universalis, Victoria, XCom Total War, and Expeditions. But something about the abstraction and tile system turns me off. I recently tried Old World, and similarly couldn't make it through a single game.
What kills Civilization for me is the phase in which I just wait for production or other stat to fill up and there's nothing interesting to do for couple turns.
Civilization Revolution is kind of black sheep of the Civ family, because it's "dumbed down" and "not a true civilization game", but IMO it has much better pacing.
I played Terraria for a bit and I kept getting into the headspace of wtf am I even doing playing the game?
Anytime I touched Minecraft it felt the same.
I've played other, similar builder/mining games, most notably satisfactory and DRG, both of which feel like they have more direction than Minecraft or Terraria.
I don't need much of a push to care enough to progress through a game; an interesting mechanic, a fun playstyle, interesting things to do and achieve... For the most part I'm really laid back when gaming. I don't really get involved in PvP at all, so anything cod/modern warfare/fortnite/whatever, I'm not interested in. I'd rather work cooperatively with people to achieve a goal. Even something like left4dead or counterstrike is pretty decent in my mind. Some competition is fine, but free for all and/or small teams in large battles (like with many Battle Royale games), when it's almost entirely PvP, no thanks. There's always trolls and people who take the game far too seriously, and those are the kinds of people I don't want anything to do with.
I struggled with Terraria because a lot of the mechanics were not obvious. There was a logical progression to get more powerful stuff, and even some fairly good quests and bosses to fight, but you either happen across them and you're wholly unprepared for the encounter, or you have to follow a guide to get the event started. It was a bit convoluted, and the game didn't really explain anything about what you needed to do to move forward. Minecraft feels like the same stuff. It's all exploration and discovery based, basically at random. I know there's some "end game" type stuff in the game, which implies there's progression, but idk, it's all kinds of obfuscated.
Compare with satisfactory, which is largely open, but has a pretty clear set of skill trees and progression. There's no "end" to the game, just endlessly creating items.
There's direction there. It's not a lot, and nobody is going to tell you how to get to the next thing, just that it exists and this is what you need to get to it. There's a hundred different ways to get to that objective, and you have to find your own way.
DRG is basically an endless grind of matches. Procedurally generated, which keeps things lively, but an endless set of essentially the same thing every time. You can get upgrades and cosmetics the more you play, but it's the same gameplay every time you get into a round.
DRG still has a better plotline than twilight.... I mean, Minecraft.
Just getting dumped into an open world with no idea what you can do, or what you should do, isn't really my jam. I tried with Terraria. No thanks.
Terraria is a much better game in a group, even just another player that knows what's going on. Otherwise it's completely confusing and I didn't enjoy it until you played with someone else.
Minecraft suffers from the same problem, plus development hell. Mods greatly improve the game in my opinion, but without people to play with it is rather boring. I like building but I don't build on a grand scale. I love creative mode and gathering resources to fuel the creativity of others.
Vanilla is a lot better now, but it still lacks a lot of depth. They have done a lot of work on the nether.
I can only play Minecraft with other people, and really even then I'm really not all that into it, for me it's just a good excuse to hang out over voice chat.
Honestly it's not much different then fishing come to think of it...
I think you summed up the toys vs games disagreement well (it's a matter of taste). I love Minecraft and games like it because I like playing around with systems and coming up with my own goals and games within those systems.
Likewise I adored Black & White back in the day, and it had much the same criticisms leveled against it. To me, what others hated, was what made me love it.
Halo:CE. The controls were too floaty and the level design got WAY too confusing somewhere in the middle of my playthrough. Never finished it afterwards.
Small pedantic note - Halo CE was originally the official abbreviation for Halo Custom Edition, which was launched on PC shortly before Halo 2, leading to quite a bit of Halo Combat Evolved being referenced as Halo CE.
I get that one is obscure, and the other popular, but drives me mad none the less.
Anything within the MMORPG genre, the Diablo-like genre, and the Looter Shooter genre.
Played them on my own -- Felt like I was grinding just so I could grind some more, the entire thing felt like an exercise in pointless skinner-boxing with no reward other than "number go up"
Played them in the company of friends -- Second verse same as the first, but now less tedious because of voice-chat with people whose company I enjoyed, the micro-instant they had something else to do I'd log off immediately because the whole thing bored me.
Then I'll see people get excited for like, Diablo 4, and it's like -- This is the same skinner box as the last three games, but now slightly prettier. And now you know you are giving your money to abusers and I'm like "?!?!?!?!?????!?!?"
How do people get a kick out of clicking the same monsters until they explode like piñatas for a random chance at a helmet that gives them +.5% gullibility status?
Every video game is this on some level, but these games are so very transparent with this, I just can't. Not only do I not enjoy them, I flat-out don't understand how people enjoy them.
Headon blood rites, you would think the big titty orc girl protagonist FPS would be enough to overcome any gameplay issues but no as it turns out I just really HATE hexen inspired games that make you run around in circles constantly searching for hard to find keys and shit to progress the map. I could just barely tolerate that stuff in the OG DOOM games but the hexen likes take the sisyphisus's maze bullshit and make a whole genre out of it. No thanks, I prefer games that respect my time with proper signposting and much fewer bullshit key hunts.
Overload, some of the old FPS fans talk about a game called 'Decent' and how it was actually this underrated gem of a series that offered a novel 6 degrees of movement. So the devs who made that game came back a decade later and put the 6 degrees of freedom in a modern fps game. I gave it about 5 minutes before I was motion sick and ready to go back to my safe and familiar 4 degrees of movement.
Sometimes you gotta pay to figure out what you dont like.
Working to love the games… but all of N64!! Who has three arms?!
All kidding aside this year I’ve made an effort with N64 and am finding the gems and that a lot of games are just nicer compared to PlayStation where file size limitations don’t burn the system
More or less anything “Open World” and to an extent single player in general. I just get bored and ragequit every time mechanics stop being fun (which tends to be 15ish minutes into any session of them). TW3 is a big culprit here. I get about 2 hours in, the combat gets super clunky and I quit, coming back 3-4 years later thinking it might have changed.
I’ve been an FPS player since 2015 and that’s pretty much all I’ve played. Enjoyment in games for me comes from min/maxing a small to medium number of skills/abilities and applying them thousands of times in a similar gameplay loop. I’ve played well over 4,000 hours of apex legends alone, somewhere in the realm of 10,000 games and still could play more if the devs didn’t suck.
I'm gonna drown in downvotes once I say that I don't like the Grand Theft Auto series. I'm actually serious, I never understood the appeal for those games.
Baldur's Gate and Elden Ring I tried to like but just couldn't get into either of them despite giving them both a fairly long warmup time. I get the allure of both, but the play style or the pacing just aren't for me.
Same on Witcher III. I'm the target audience of that game - I love RPGs of all kinds, have played all the classic series like TES, Baldurs Gate, Planescape, Icewind Dale, Dragon Age, you name it. I even play ttrpgs multiple times a week.
I wanted to like Witcher III so bad that I forced myself all the way through the game to an optimal ending. But I just never started enjoying it. The world just feels... Flat. Fake. You do exactly what CD Projekt Red envisions or you hit a stone wall of empty game world.
Despite the skill trees and inventory and all of it, it just doesn't feel like an RPG at all. It feels like a Disney ride on rails.
Also Gerardo just a boring ass protagonist, the only cool thing about him is that he's sleazy. But that's it. At that point I better watch porn. Same goes for BG, but that game the main problem is the gameplay
Ocarina of Time. I tested it out some time ago. I'm sure any game with time travel is going to have this as a weakness, but it's just so clunky. The story feels like a weird living childhood daydream sprinkled with what many accuse of being politicalundertones, and while I technically don't mind the graphics, those particular ones are weird as a glasses-wearer who is using them to fight.
All of this was especially the case during the level where you're inside Jabu-Jabu, which is the whole reason I ever played the game in the first place, as I had to help my friend through the level because of both the headache-inducing squiggly lines (which go with the graphics like a 60-watt bulb goes with a 180-watt lamp and prevented my other friend from helping, he gets vertigo despite his age) and because the parts right before and right after Jabu-Jabu set off her submersion phobia since you're in the country of Ruto. Sometimes the game seemed to know how to crossover into the style of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, which is a neutral statement.
The Fallout series. The worldbuilding is so sloppy and lazy that it grates pretty much from the get-go... and that's without even mentioning the white supremacist subtext it's all drenched in.
Fallout's worldbuilding is fundamentally based on the 1980s game Wasteland, which had some of the best worldbuilding of its era, right up there with Ultima. Fallout 1 was essentially a remake of Wasteland. And they've only added to the worldbuilding since.
I'm much more a fan of team-building turn-based strategy games like Fallout 1 and 2, but I can't claim that the worldbuilding is sloppy with the later sequels because the world was already well-built and they're just adding details at this point.
Just the fact that the worldbuilding of the game was able to sustain a really good TV series season without the series adding much to the lore is pretty damn amazing.