I’ve been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don’t mind so much the fact that it’s different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I’m bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
Dark Souls.
Got Dark Souls II to see what the hype was about, and 100%-ed it cuz I was post-surgery with nothing better to do.
Fast forward, and a friend gifted me Elden Ring, so, here we go again.
It’s famous difficulty was just a combo of clunky controls and obnoxious health pools, which made mastering that type of difficulty really unsatisfying.
I gitted gud, but Dark Souls never gitted fun.
Same applies to Souls-likes.
I really wanted to believe. Fucking love the aesthetic, but that’s about the only positive I can recall.
No Mans Sky. At a certain point it all becomes meaningless.
And that point was after 3 hours, honestly.
Every now and then I try NMS again after like a couple of big updates have dropped and I’m like “bro this is the same game as before water you all on about” (exaggerating a little but that’s basically how I feel). Still I can’t hate the devs since they’ve poured 10 years of additional work into the game at no cost to us.
The most recent things that come to mind are games that are way slower and/or grindier than expected. One was Octopath Traveler, where after finishing all the characters’ stories for chapter 1 (or maybe it was 2?) leveling starting taking a million years for no good reason. I wanted to just progress in the story but I was getting killed by everything. And it’s not like the fights are interesting once you learn the basics of the (somewhat interesting at first) battle system. Unless I was missing something it’s just a massive slog, worse than anything I can remember from the S/NES days, like the Dragon Warriors or Final Fantasys.
More recently it hasn’t been quite to that extent, but Dave the Diver feels way slower than necessary. You make decent progress at first, but somewhere around the time when you make it to the sea folk village you earn money really slowly and the crap around the village has zero challenge at all, but takes awhile to get through.
Breath of the Wild and moreso Tears of the Kingdom.
Not bad games. But not Zelda games.
BoTW did not play into the metroidvania that I felt defined a Zelda game. Plus it lent on the “sim rpg” style of eating, cooking, durability, etc.
Then ToTK just felt like a gimmicky cash grab. Copy paste terrain, “gadget building” straight out of some steam early access game.
Ultimately, both games felt like a hodgepodge of stolen concepts, slapped together. And the adoration that they received just makes me hate them more.
Fallout 4
Nms
The entire elder scrolls series now that I think about it, except maybe Morrowind but also Morrowind
Fallout 3 and NV were worth it, as were 1 and 2
Honorable mention to GTA5 tho I played the story to completion in the first few weeks after release and haven’t touched it since, so not really the same but similar vibe
There’s a difference between playing the game is great, but it’s get boring eventually or the ending is tedious. Like playing elder scrolls and just doing running around and thieves guild and dark brotherhood is enough to be a great game by itself.
I already answered another title but I also want to say Tales from the Borderlands.
I hated this “game” so much that when I was finished I was genuinely offended by what I’d just experienced. First off, it’s meandering and uninteresting, with characters that scream personality at you, not in a good way. And it’s filled with the illusion of the choice, the episodic nature of the project immediately making actual choice a non-possibility. But worst of all, it had the audacity to present and market itself as a game. A small handful of “push button when lit” QTEs do not make your visual novel a game. Visual novels are great, just be what you are, a visual novel.
Fuck Tales from the Borderlands.
Expedition 33. I’m not a huge turn based fan anymore but gave it a shot because of the rave reviews. And initially I liked it a lot actually. It had the UE5 default realistic look I loathe but the combat was fun.
And then it became unfun. Severely so. I started to dread every major combat encounter.
But the reviews were so positive so I pushed thru, I hated playing the game but told myself I’ll see it through to the end, and I did.
I regret that. Having to keep playing despite disliking it probably soured my experience way more than if I had just stopped playing. On the other hand I now have the full picture of the game and know it doesn’t get better and it’s not worth finishing.
The worst combat encounters were the fights where the attack itself is a minute long cutscene, then without warning you get 150ms to time your party perfectly, or you die and restart. Unforgivable.Bah
Yes quick time based combat for that group fighting dynamic isn’t a good match. If a game asks you to command a whole group of people, like one after the other, it’s a good idea to make it more of a puzzle or “carefully select the right moves” experience. See: Occidental Heroes
Again, always seems to me that shiny new games which focus on aving great graphics are letting people down 🤔
Initially the parry and dodge mechanics are great. They’re presented like an option for higher skilled players who are used to tight timings to get an advantage in combat while people more accustomed to the traditional “trading blows” style can still enjoy combat that way.
But the game never tells you that perfect parrying and dodging are actually not an option but the required style of combat since taking any damage later on is basically instant death. You’re just not gonna be able to tank a full combo while ignoring the dodge and parry mechanics.
Oh and then the enemies do that Elden Ring delayed attack thing. I like ER but seriously fuck that game for introducing this style of attack pattern. Yeah let me just swing my giant sword but mid-swing take a coffee break… ER wanted to present a challenge to the absolute wizards who play Dark Souls SL1 no-hit, so why did E33 copy that?
Whenever I’m considering a game, I always look at all the recent negative reviews. Depending upon what it is, I may or may not purchase, even if it was something I was quite looking forward to. I can’t think of the most recent game that happened with, but something in the last year had some negative comments that felt spooky enough to keep me away.
How does one hate a game and play it anyway?
You
- go into it thinking it will be fun or otherwise “good,”
- it isn’t fun but you keep on playing, holding out hope that you’ll get past the “slog” section,
- only after sinking several hours (as many as 1000 - or more!) into it, you decide you’ve wasted your time.
It happens all the time. Usually when a friend recommends a game to me, i hate it.
- the game is actually good and you enjoy it but some time down the line the devs completely fuck the game up
- the game is actually good and you enjoy it but underlying problems don’t get addressed and new issues keep piling up, eventually you realize that your vision for the game and the devs’ vision don’t align
- Mass Effect series
- World of Tanks / War Thunder
Best examples I have for each
Dead by Daylight.
I stopped playing when The Walking Dead stream “Incident” happened. The worst thing about the game is the players.
I don’t mean that they are not skilled at the game. I mean, they aren’t, and quit matches at every minor inconvenience. But the way players treat each other out of the game is horrendous. Players will go out of their way to verbally assault you for no reason in particular other than you are playing the same game as them. If youre a streamer they will go to your stream, if you’re a Steam player they will leave negative comments on your profile, or complain in the end match chat if you have a private account. They report you for just playing the game.
I have been called more names, slurs (none of which applied), received more death threats, rape threats, and whatever else in Dead by Daylight than any other game I have ever played online. Including League of Legends, Call of Duty, Halo, CounterStrike, and many more.
I don’t play it anymore. Not because I care about what other people say in an online game (words don’t change my mood because I don’t let them), but because the developers just straight up ignore when Killer Main players complain or ask for stuff. The Survivors get stuff all the time, but if youre a Killer Main the game feels like the developers hate you personally. And I was done with that. Its easy to get into High MMR as Killer, and then literally every game becomes a sweatfest. Also, multiple Killer characters have been gutted and left like that for years while Survivors just keep getting buffed. I dont need any of that.
The gameplay is genuinely fun, when you don’t get a 4 man SWF or Bully Squad, but the times the game is like that when you get to High MMR as Killer is basically zero. So the tradeoff isn’t worth it.
Oh yeah I’ve had toxic survivor parties on so many occasions. Haven’t touched that game in at least 4 years now though
Pokemon on the DS.
I spent like 3 hours and it was just the grindiest crap.
Unpopular opinion, I dislike all Pokémon games, I have never understood why ppl like pokemon unless they only like to collect. It isn’t challenging, there is no story (I would call the story just random quests because of the lack of depth) and it is just a grind. And ultimately it doesn’t really matter what Pokémon you pick most of the time, for example Aaron and all the evolve of it, I could play with only it until a water Pokémon came along. It is aimed for kids so I get why it is as it is but even as a kid did I have a hard time liking any of them, I never finished because I got bored, but I still got multiple versions of it because so many liked it. I am fine with it being easy if the story is great, but there isn’t really any story either… And maybe I would had been fine with it without the grind and the forced fights as a relaxing game but I do not know.
Rant over, sorry
Werent all the gameboy pokemons like that? Its been awhile since I played one, but I used to go back every couple of generations and play a pokemon game. The map was a little different each time, but it always felt like the same game.
I don’t know, it’s the only one I tried and it was just grind grind grind… I just don’t get it :-D
ToME4 for me.
I was looking for a roguelike experience. It is hardly it, cause the single game run is about a week long, the default mode of play is with limited amounts of respawns (afaik about 7).
That, and that after spending some 250h+ in, i barely unlocked 30% of playable classes and races. The triggers are easy to miss, random (not in every game loop) or awkwardly specific.
It felt like I’m playing MMO RPG but singleplayer.
What is ToME4?
A bit of searching makes me think it’s a game called “Tales of Maj’Eyal”… Never heard of it though.
I just finished Batman: Arkham Origins. I kept hoping it’d become fun and then the game was over.
Everyone seems to say this, it’s crap compared to the rest of the arkham series. I didn’t really mind the collectathon aspect, and i kept on restarting with more difficulty added because I realised i could bag the achievements - then I realised i was incredibly bored of the game p, which might be why I wanted to test it on higher difficulties all the time.
City was the best one, I enjoyed origins and liked the setting but yeah it wasn’t as good
I found the challenges to unlock gear utterly obnoxious, particularly as several key ones were very situational (notably the exotic takedowns one). Said gear wasn’t required, obviously, but it meant I spent my time trying to find setups that would work for challenges rather than just playing the game.
The backtracking for collectibles was also extremely tedious.
I played through Asylum twice and loved Arkham City but Origins was just sort of plodding.
Hate is an overstatement, but the game I have most hours on steam in (and likely will never surpass) is Europa Universalis IV.
Back in the day I used to enjoy the semi-plausible alt-history scenarios that would arise. Similar to real life but different in distinct and interesting ways that often could be traced to noticeable deviations.
Nowadays, it is much more arcade-ey and soulless. By the end of the game (1800’s), the entire world is basically at the same technological level of advancement, constituted of soulless blob-empires that ends up looking basically the same each time albeit with slightly different flags for the blobs.
Yeah, Paradox tends to do that. Strip all the fun weird shit from their games for the sake of “balance”, and then introduce so many new mechanics in their DLCs that old things break all the time. By making every nation equally good, they absolutely ruin the fun.
HOI4 has it, Stellaris has it, EU4 has it.
Though, the games all make for EXCELLENT modding bases. All of them have really fun mods.
Stellaris traded away so much of the games soul when they removed the alternate FTL drives.
Yeah I never imagined the end game of those historical map-painters would be good; either it ends right away or, like you said, stagnation.
I’ve only played one map painter game and I never went back to the genre because it was too complicated for me. This was like… 7 or 8 years ago TBF. I’m more interested in ones with base building elements or economic planning - Victoria and EV ask you to look at some spreadsheets and use that to guide your nation towards greatness. I would have given Victoria at least one other go since then but I bought it on amazon and lost the install I think 😒
I can heartily recommend gicing vicky 2 a try despite its’ age (kinda clunky and less polished but plays fast, a campaign can be done in maybe 10hrs). It’s actually the game that got me back into grand strategy during the pandemic. Pick it up on sale like I did or via yarr, heart of darkness is a necessary dlc and not included in the base 25$ price tag, kinda insane for a 20 y.o game.
EV - europa universalis 5?
Part of the problem with Eu4 is that they in the “later” (somewhere post 2018) updates aimed to make every nation “viable”.
OMORI - oh, how I’ve despised every time story sidetracked and I had to go do random unrelated things (mostly fight) in the mindspace. I’ve heard that the other ending explains why things are this way, but I’m not going to play this overstretched shit again. IMO it’s a 10-hour game artificially stretched to 20 (or 40). Also, since they’ve already created pretty much all facial expressions for combat, they could put them into the dialogues.
Both Nier games - I’ve heard that the devs’ previous games didn’t have good combat either, which begs the question of why they decided to turn yet another game into a slog, twice. As for the story, I could predict the events way before things have happened. Maybe I’ve seen too many games that came after and got inspired, since I only played them last year.
Chaos;Head Noah - for the 4chan incel protagonist and all the unnecessary graphic gore. The fact that world ends in pretty much every ending didn’t help, either.
