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.
No Man’s Sky. Close to 300 hours across pc and ps4. I sunk a lot of hours into it when it was relatively new and still very sparse (well before the nexus). I end up playing every 4-5 updates, just to see what they added. Everything is a slog. I have been trying to hatch my living ship for what feels like literal years now. I always seem to be one resource shy of whatever tasks I chose for myself, yet I have billions and billions of spacedollars. I have half-finished bases across the galaxy. I never feel like I accomplish anything in this game, and feel like my time is always wasted playing it. According to steam I haven’t played in over a year.
Eh, I didn’t hate it, I just found it rather disappointing. A huge amount of buildup, and even in-game— a lot of effort… Just for very little delivery.
This is a game and a game engine with nearly infinite potential, but once he got into it, once he started playing it, it just falls completely flat. Beyond a few initial and rather novel game mechanics, it just goes nowhere. Immedately
Like, the game devs produced this incredible game engine, and then just expected it to produce the game for them, and it didn’t. You have this incredible, infinitely generated open world, but there’s no game to play. No story.
It’s just… there. that’s not really much of anything to do. that is the major shortcoming. If, in the last 15 years, they bothered to fill this incredible space with anything worthwhile to actually do, it would be amazing
That’s why Star Trek online is still so active. It’s a nonstop universe, full of missions. Also, it runs very well on multiple platforms.
I don’t like Star Trek online because it’s got too much combat. Star Trek is about philosophy and science, not phasers and proton torpedoes.
It’s easier to create a game around combat than science and philosophy though
Then I guess I’ll have to keep playing Fallen London instead
Oh wow a fallen London reference in the wild. I played that like ten years ago, and picked it up fresh this year as something to do during the workday.
The current festival is interesting. I missed the “hell is missing” story when it was new. Turns out climbing into the furnace is a bad idea, even in a dream!
Currently annoyed that I didn’t bring the right thing into the waswood to get a particular item, and I can’t draw the dream card to get one of those pearls. But it’s a very interesting game.
It could also descend into total “pay for power” nonsense, but I have resisted.
Here, I have a present for you!
The following items can be spent in Estival Waswood Runs to acquire equipment: **GCO** -one of a variety of T8s - A Reverie of Heroism + Singed and Stained Work Gloves -free - Sturdy Pick, Prelapsarian Speaking-Tube, that book with all the Underscores, Polythreme Drinking-Vessel, Poisoned Pen, Wax-Hardened Boots **Starved War** -3 Parabolan Orange-Apples - London Horticultural Society -free - Strange Aeronaut, Hard-Earned Knack for Repair -an Oneiric Pearl - Rank of Flight-Captain **Coilheart Games** -a Parabolan Parable - Distinction of Waking Fire -Vital Intelligence and 2 Blackmail Material - Huffam's Good Graces -an Oneiromantic Revelation - Coilbreaker's Prints -free - A Fierce and Terrible Warmth **Museum** -a Vitreous Almanac, 75 Sightings of Parabolan Landmarks and 10 Memories of Light - Miniature Museum -a Viric-Filled Mirrorcatch Box, 3 Emetic Revelations and 250 Venom-Rubies - Perfumer's Arts -another Oneiric Pearl - Gebrandt's Address Book **Hell is Missing** **Presumably this is all, possibly not though:** -1 Searing Enigma + 1 Oneiromantic Revelation - Gang of Outlaws -Climbing into the Law-Furnace when offered - Dream of Law-Glass -Oneiric Pearl + Baited Riddle - Urchin formerly known as Mister Dinners -Free - Elephant to be Refuted
I’m relatively late to no man sky, the original scandal burnt the bridge and I didn’t bother trying to fix it until about 5 years ago when it came up as an option for a space game to play with my brother. He ended up a bigger fanboy space engineer and NMS stayed the only unplayed game in my library until last year.
I genuinely feel like it’s a great sandbox. That is to say, the fun comes more from the people you play with and your imagination than the sand itself. I genuinely feel that it would be my favorite game if I still had 2 or 3 friends to play it with. RPing as the haywired droid pilot of the Vagabond Moon as it smuggles goods to and from free space just doesn’t hit without a captain and crew.
See, I like my own private world. I can just build it and run around and discover stuff. That’s why I loved fallout 4 so much. No man’s sky is great for that because it’s infinitely generative. But that’s kind of all there is in that game. It’s just a big open world. There’s no real “game” to that game beyond the first 30 or 40 hours of gameplay.
Unlike you, however, the one thing I hate the most in any game is other people. I wanna be alone and do my own thing. I never ever encountered another game player who has done anything than just fuck up my gameplay experience. maybe I’ve just had bad luck, I don’t know. But co-op playing has never been anything other than an extremely negative experience for me. other people are assholes.
So, when left on my own in no man’s sky, it’s fine in small doses, but it’s easy to get bored. Because there are no Ongoing gameplay objectives. It really wouldn’t be difficult to build into the game, constant ongoing objectives and achievements that a single person could achieve on their own. Repetitive missions, etc. Star Trek online managers to do it. And it doesn’t have to be combat (although, combat in no man’s sky is actually very well done and quite fun). No man sky has ongoing rewards for discovery and exploration stuff, but it isn’t really structured very well and the rewards are really rather small.
No man’s sky feels like a really fancy version of Second Life, but in space, where you can have a bunch of your own planets and build bases and whatever. And have entire fleets of ships. But to what ultimate end? It doesn’t seem like there’s any purpose to any of it. That’s what’s missing from the game.
I think the key distinction is that you have to know and like the people outside the game. I used to have about 8 other people that regularly played Minecraft together and we did some impressively large scale things for a hand full of people with jobs and lives. It was honestly fun to just chat while we’re collectively digging a massive tunnel to build a functional rail network. Crack open a cold one with the gang but the cold one is actually a 4 month civil engineering project requiring us to terraform a continent.
I haven’t spent as much time as you did in NMS but I have the same feeling. It feels like I should be loving this game but everytime I try to play it for more than a few hours I end up hating it for the same reasons you listed
I heard all about how bad NMS was. Also overwatch. Then I went to university and one of the first friends I made was like “Those are my favourite games!” And I practically bit my lips to avoid blurting out “…um aren’t they crap??”
Obviously it’s not a big deal. I squeeze enjoyment out of shitty games myself. I found it jarring at the time because there was so much Internet discourse about both those games being not worthwhile.
WoW. I sank hundreds of hours in vanilla. Spent forever getting tier 3 armor completed and most end game content completed and then Burning Crusade was launched. I was so excited that myself and about 15 guildmates road tripped from across the country to meet up and play in person for launch.
I remember crossing the portal and within 15 minutes a common mob dropped an item that was better than one of my tier 3 armor pieces. Pieces I had spent weeks farming for. I was so frustrated that I couldn’t enjoy the next 2 days playing, even with everyone there. I got home, played a few more days, and had already replaced half my armor. I quit WoW cold turkey and since then have only logged in once in all these years.
I wasn’t even that mad that my armor was replaced, I was mad that it was replaced so quickly, and not even at boss fights. It was normal mobs dropping rares.
As someone who joined late in Vanilla, I think the fact that tier 3 armour became meaningless a few days into Burning Crusade was a great move, and necessary for the game.
In Vanilla, if you were late joining, you could never catch up unless someone was really nice and basically carried you for a few weeks. I spent months hearing tales about all the fun that my friends were having, but I couldn’t join them because farming the gear to catch up to them was essentially impossible on my own, and would have taken them a lot of time to level me up.
The game needed a reset so that people who hadn’t been playing for over a year could catch up. When BC came out, the Tier 3 stuff helped people for the first 2-3 levels, but by the time everyone hit 70, all the gear was reset and everyone was on the same footing again.
That was really healthy for guilds and for the game. If you already had a bunch of people who you liked playing with, you could start on the harder dungeons and then the raids immediately. Everybody started out in crap gear that kept those initial things challenging, and then everyone slowly got better gear. If you had just joined the game, you could catch up to those groups, and either join them, or form your own new group and you weren’t behind.
What killed WoW for me was all the borrowed power stuff, where you got new abilities and learned a new way to play, which they’d then just reset with the next expansion. There was also ridiculous button creep, where in the early days (ignoring downranked spells) you’d have maybe two dozen abilities, half of which could be used in combat, and a third of those were rare and situational. By the time I quit, you might need two full bars worth of abilities in combat, your typical “rotation” would use 8 or more, and so-on. On some characters, I had so many buttons that even with maxed out button bars, there were some that had to remain in the spellbook.
The story also got stupider. In the beginning, your character wasn’t the centre of the story. You could earn personal achievements, or group achievements, but it was clear that it was a game being played by millions of people, half of whom had also done those same achievements. In later expansions, they tried to pretend that you were the unique person. You weren’t an archdruid, you were the archdruid… and so were the other 100 people on your screen. Or you were the maw-walker, but so were the other 1000 people in the maw. And, of course, the lore got more and more incoherent as they kept trying to find corners of the lore that they hadn’t yet exploited.
The other major issue with WoW is that both time and the advance of technology, but also Blizzard’s choices, killed the social aspect of the game. In the beginning, there weren’t good resources to learn how to play, what kinds of equipment were out there, that sort of thing. That meant that one of the best ways to find that out was chatting with other players. That was great. Even if other players were sometimes obnoxious, the fact that you had to chat with them meant that the game felt alive. The only way to join a group for something was to send messages to other people in the game. And, since servers were isolated, people got reputations. If someone was nice to other people, they’d be known for that. If someone was a jerk, or tried to cheat other people, they’d get known for that too.
These days, people use communications not tied to the game at all. There are amazing resources to learn about the game and optimize how you play outside the game, which means there’s no need to chat with people in-game. They added a group finder and raid finder so you could join a group for something without ever talking to anyone, which also killed socialization. They merged servers and made cross-realm events so that there was always someone to play with you… but now everyone was effectively anonymous to everyone they played with, so being nice wasn’t something that gave you a good reputation, and being a jerk carried no long-term penalties.
Combine all the technological changes with all the lore / storytelling changes and you get a very good, very polished single-player online game, where other people happen to be there sometimes. These days you can be doing a 25-man raid and feel lonely because you’re not actually interacting with any of the other players in any meaningful way.
I really wish another MMO would come out that would add back all the social things that Blizzard broke. But, even if someone did everything right, I don’t think you could ever capture the magic of that early Vanilla / BC experience because the world has changed.
Similar experience here. You missed the biggest turd though, flying!
So cool eh, no more need to walk eh!
What happened was that instead of roaming about with everyone else, you flew everywhere all alone (just point the “fly” in the right direction and wait … Soo funny).
And to alleviate this they tried to make it so you “had” to walk everywhere first, before getting your “fly”, but that just made it worse because now you’d be as slow as before but also alone, everyone else were flying.
Then it became a sort of dungeon-run slot machine, argh.
Vanilla was truly amazing though, what a game…
It’s one of those great ironies, because flight was a requested feature since the beginning and being locked into fixed flight paths left people wanting free flight even more. Back in 2006-7, I don’t think most people, or even Blizzard, could predict how much it’d hurt the social aspect of the game.
I’d never be able to find it, but back in the Vanilla days, there was an interview where one of the designers literally explained that flying was a bad idea and would ruin the game for the exact reasons it did. They knew, but someone must have overruled that.
That was an integral part of the game design.
Those things, like underpowered weapons for example, is something “gamers” pester about and want changed, but any good gamedesigner knows better than to listen to them, it breaks the gameplay.
Today it’s worse in many games because the “annoying” things still exist but you have to pay to get around them, and it just makes the gameplay suck. IMO.
TBC was the worst for that. Modern expansions let you keep your high end gear for most of the leveling process.
It was also the first time it happened, so people were more put off by it.
Anybody who plays now knows that their gear is only going to be useful for the current expansion and that they’ll have to start from scratch again if they play the next one.
Its not even current expansion, ita just current season/content patch at this point.
I am completely turned off by mmo rpgs. I like my videogames to convince me that I’m not wasting time playing them; things with short levels or engaging gameplay loops…
Rpgs just take so long, and so little progress is made.
Now I haven’t play WoW specifically, but these mmo rpgs usually have this problem where people get insane loot and xp bonuses for playing in a party. But nowhere in the game does it say “please for the love of God join a guild and play with them all the time!!” No sir-ee, so when people play in a guild or a party for the first time, they notice this. And many completely lose interest in the game, seeing how much time they wasted. I’ve been the same way.
The only mmo I’ve really engaged with for more than a few months on one go is FFXIV which for me is more of a social game with stupid amounts of random side content and a fairly relaxed long story to chip away at. Wow was just a series of ever moving goalposts. I’ve played loads of MMOs and the best ones are good because you’re playing them with people tbh.
WoW is a tough one for me because I played it for years and some of my all-time favorite moments in my life as a gamer are associated with WoW. But also those moments are extremely socially-dependent. Hard to extract from the experience what was the game and what was the joy of hanging out with like-minded friends.
And it’s extremely difficult for me to judge now because frankly I think that WoW today is still an incredibly good game, especially as a solo player today, but it is impossible for me when playing it not to get sad longing for the absolute peak moments I’ve had with the game.
For me it’s kind of like if you love cheesecake but can’t buy the grocery store frozen kind because every bite makes you think of the perfect $200 gourmet restaurant version you ate once 8 years ago but will never get to have again because the restaurant closed.
I hear this. I kept trying to get back in to it over the years but without my old guild and friends at my back its a hollow shell of the game I loved.
This is one of the reasons I liked guild wars (1 and 2). They didn’t do the gear grind. They added one tiny equipment tier early on in the game’s life, and never again in ten years. They add different stat spreads, but that’s it. (Ok, and infusions, which are like a single percentage point of stats.)
Yeah I love that GW2 doesn’t do vertical progression. I’m a casual player and kitted out my characters many years ago, and since then - unless I want to try out a new build - I don’t have to touch them again.
GW was my jam back in the day. I couldn’t get GW2 to click for me because by the time I got into it, it was information overload and I found it hard to keep up. However, GW3 is going to be a no brainer buy when it releases.
I had a similar experience with BC, though I was only in tier 2 armor (our guilds just couldn’t must the runs to get much of the tier 3 stuff). I played further than you did, but I realized that I had been really ready to be done with WoW for a while and had held on just for the expansion. It didn’t revive my desire to play at all, and honestly I haven’t wanted to play an MMO since.
Destiny 2. Best platform shooter I’ve ever seen. Worst everything else: monetization+FOMO, some really shitty loot tables, locking away paid content/sunsetting.
Kept going back because the core gameplay loop is solid. Kept leaving bc it inevitably got boring quickly.This game was so good for a few years. On PS4, I got to play all the OG cut content, it was awesome. I think I played up to Forsaken. I really enjoyed the lore, and I usually skip that stuff. I even have a ghost statue on my bookshelf, one of my only gaming nicknacks (8 bucks at target). I went back to play on PC a few years ago and I didn’t have a good time. I was also pissed that I couldn’t transfer my PS4 character (or I lost my dlc loot or something).
Good one. This is probably it for me as well. I tried so hard to like it, but the whole thing felt like it was punishing me for not being there day one. A convoluted mess of whatever was leftover from what I assume was all the fun.
I was there Day 1 and it punished those players too. See my long rant touching on but two or three of the 50 issues I had with it hahaha
Yeah, Destiny 2 pretty much lived in the core gameplay loop. To this day I don’t think there’s another game that felt as good to play as Destiny. But without refreshing the core gameplay or giving some actually meaningful progression. I remember at one point I was doing a strike and those who have played the game will know what I’m about to talk about. After clearing the second wave of enemies and waiting for the third I realized that I was just going through the motion of threes. I was going to fight the third wave of the encounter so I could get to the second stage of the three stage strike and those strikes I have to do 3 times because that’s the weekly goal and that’s the entire 3 months of the season. It just started feeling like a treadmill where I’m running just for the sake of running. Just a carrot in front of the treadmill and if you get it then the next season the treadmill resets and the and carrot is put in front.
Once I saw that I could no longer get into Destiny. It just feel like I was there only to go through the motions. No emotion, no engagement, just doing the same thing over and over.
The moment I noticed they were docking xp back in the early days, I quit instantly. I enjoyed the game up to that point, but the way they had done that was just so dishonest that I have just never bothered with anything Bungie since.
Ooo I forgot about that one. And their horrible excuses like “oh we’re so sorry you think our algorithms are unfair, we’ll be more transparent about our great game mechanics so you don’t complain more”
Oh my god Destiny 2 is such a good example for me. I never played the first one, because I quit consoles with the PS4/XBox One generation. Got Destiny 2 for free with my video card, and was so excited to play, hearing so much about the first game. I bought the expansion pass and played immediately when it came out. I maxed out all three characters, did the raid, and played for a couple more hours, before realizing there was nothing to strive for.
The fuck is up with “We have a chat in the game, but nonono, you can’t actually use it to TYPE to people like, y’know, EVERY OTHER ONLINE GAME EVER—it doesn’t actually DO anything unless you’re in a party.” Also every weapon drop was exactly the same, no variance, no random rolls. Then they added in text chat, Woo!
…but made it OPT-IN, and nested the toggle in settings. Meaning NOBODY DID IT. Fuckin idiots on Reddit were defending the decision too, like “oh what if you don’t want to have that toxicity” THEN DISABLE IT IN OPT-OUT, don’t make it opt-in in the first place!
Then a few months after it came out, I told my partner “look I bet they put random rolls back in and fix a ton of QoL stuff WIIIITH the first full-priced DLC that isn’t included in the expansion pass so everyone has to buy it.”
Then Forsaken dropped, for full price. I don’t even care about the money, it’s the principle of it all.
I never bought Forsaken, never logged in again. Fuck you Destiny 2, I’m glad you’re dead. I wish you died harder, sooner, and less lucrative.
(Also more Reddit defenders were screaming “YOU DON’T HAVE TO BUY FORSAKEN, YOU CAN STILL PLAY” like fuckin EVERYTHING wasn’t locked behind the paywall now, and like I wanna support that shit by giving them more engagement to log for their investors…)
Helldivers 2 is a blast but somehow still so bug-ridden that I’ve quit like 3 separate times.
Then stop fighting Terminids /s
It’s a little glitchy at times, but I haven’t noticed any major issues since the “terminal stuck in the ground” bug.
My characters arm still occasionally goes stiff on the ship. Some enemies might spaghettify to 100 feet tall. But that’s just the beauty of Super Earth engineering.
I mean the whole mechanic of throwing a stratagem and having no idea what’s going to happen when it his the ground is infuriating. Throwing an SOS and having NO ONE drop in is infuriating. Conversely joining a open lobby and immediately being kicked for no reason is infuriating. Getting stuck underground or in a random corner and having to kill yourself to get out of it is infuriating. The seemingly random difficulty of any particular mission is infuriating.
Stratagem bounce and “mashing stim key and the stim key does nothing, even hearing the sound, but no heals” are two bugs that have been in the game since launch; and the latter has become such a sore point for me that the moment it happens in a game and I die because of it, I just close the game for the rest of the day. Game wants to be a fuck today, it can go be a fuck to someone else, maybe see how it’s behaving tomorrow. They say they recently “fixed” that one, but I’m positive this still happens.
When I saw their recent “you asked for a fairer fight” post about clamping down on super credit hacking, I just about did a spit take. Really, Arrowhead? We asked for this? I’d really like them to cite their sources, because I – and almost every other player – have been asking for these two specific bugs, in the game since launch, to be fixed since launch (to say nothing of other common player requests that have gone largely ignored or paid mere lip service to). And since launch, and in over 900 hours of playing, I have heard not one single fucking complaint from another player about getting free super credits. So again – “we asked for this”? When? Where? How? I gotta know, so that I can use the same method to ask them to fix the fucking bugs we’ve all been begging them to fix for years, and maybe then they’ll actually get fixed.
/rant
The utter absurdity of this game makes it fun regardless of the bugs and balance gymnastics. I’ve never felt as satisfied to reign down absolute madness on friends and foes alike as I have playing this game.
this is the really tragic part to me, you can tell there’s all the bones, all the structure for a genuinely amazing game; and I believe this is why so many people picked it up and made it a hit and stayed for so long through all the bullshit, hoping it was just growing pains. The only thing truly holding it back is the developers constantly stepping on rakes. (Frequntly, rakes they themselves set down in their path!)
Like, it’s still fun, but it could be so much better than it is.
Arrowhead has lost a lot of respect due to the way they run Helldivers 2 and I say it’s quite deserved. Every time you get a new piece of kit it comes pre-nerfed. New enemies are often so intensely frustrating to play against that people will simply stop fighting them. Old bugs keep returning CONSTANTLY, telling me that their internal version control and review process is not working. If something is fun, they will stealth nerf it and hope we don’t notice.
I have largely stopped playing.
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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.
Lego: The Hobbit
I give this answer in every one of these threads to raise awareness. My wife and I used to get a little drunk and play Lego games. It’s a lot of fun, and a decent couch co-op.
We get into the Mountain, start screwing around with Smaug, and he flies off to burn Laketown. Roll credits. Game over. The 3rd movie flopped so hard they never finished the game. They don’t say it’s 2/3 of the story, and at that point it’s way too late to return it.
Fun game, terrible experience.
Elden Ring can’t stand it
I don’t like that kind of game, and have barely played any of the Elden or Souls games.
But, in addition to the gameplay, for some reason the graphics really are off-putting to me. Even though they look really good, there’s just something off about them. Maybe it’s a kind of uncanny valley thing. I even find the fonts they use to be just slightly wrong. Like, the weight and spacing of the characters is subtly off.
Same. It was so boring. There was so much empty space, and when you got somewhere it was just a copy paste you’d already been through. Then there’s the basic ass story that’s capped off with the dumbest final boss I can think of.
It’s not empty space, it’s called the lands between.
Well it can kiss the lands between my buttcheeks because I want by $40 back!
Elden Ring was utter shit.
It certainly doesn’t fit the criteria the OP is asking for. I noped out of that shit game pretty quickly.
Git gud.
My complaints with the game weren’t based on the difficulty. Elden Ring was just a lifeless world that used “open world exploration” to pad the playtime. In contrast, I loved Sekiro because it was a tight concise game with solid progression and a sense of exploration without needing to cross vast swaths of nothing in between each area.
Plus I tend to dislike games that use animation locks as an artificial form of difficulty. In Sekiro, you’re consistently the fastest character in the game. The game feels responsive. If you fail to parry an attack, it’s because you as the player failed. But with most FromSoft games, they use slow animations as a way of artificially introducing difficulty.
There’s plenty of fast weapons in the game. The huge range of different playstyles with different builds is a big part of the appeal.
Elden Ring was just a lifeless world that used “open world exploration” to pad the playtime.
This is an ignorant take. It’s fine if you didn’t like the game but this is just objectively wrong. There’s an enormous amount of information to be found exploring the world, it just isn’t thrown in your face like most games.
It sounds like it would take a HUGE amount of time regardless of how good someone is, which is why I avoid playing it myself.
Checks “artificial difficulty” off my FromSoft bitching bingo card.
All difficulty in video games is artificial - the only real distinction is “difficulty I like” and “difficulty I don’t like”.
It’s fine if you don’t like Souls combat, but own your own shit and don’t hide behind empty bullshit insults like “artificial difficulty”.
Slow animations is a way to make multiplayer manageable. Add latency, and slow animations are barely reactable.
For the first 30 hours, bosses kept dying to summon jellyfish roll roll heavy attack roll roll heavy attack before I got to learn any interesting mechanics. I heard a streamer say that the underground stag enemy was a beautiful fight, but when I got there I kicked its ass and hardly got to see it do anything. If anything, the game is too easy.
The first time I played through I did it without summons and weapon arts to get a more typical Souls experience and thoroughly enjoyed it.
The second time I played through I cheesed everything with summons and Lion’s Claw and had a blast too.
Did you end up enjoying Elden Ring later in the playthrough?
I love hearing so many people voice their opinions on Elden Ring’s difficulty. It’s way too hard! Artificial difficulty! Delayed attacks are too hard to dodge! It’s way too easy!
And I agree Elden Ring is both the hardest Fromsoft game and the easiest: the bosses have intricate, difficult movesets with great variety and get even more complex later in the game; on the other hand, you have so many different tools to deal with the challenges of the game; if you explore a little and try out some of the many options the game gives, you can make the game incredibly easy for you.Did you know that there are two Ancestor Spirit (stag bosses)? The fight can be quite interesting, but they just have too little health. The second one with a more complex moveset should especially have more health since you have to beat Radahn to access it.
I quit before it got fun.
As much as I hate to say it, No Mans Sky probably. Has that same problem I get with playing Minecraft. Everything feels too empty and aimless for me.
MC has at least the building part for me thats cool for some time. And the Modding and Server with friends part.
NMS has this boring flat tile building system and also just forgets terrain modification after some time or plants respawn into your buildings so you can even build on the ground…
Multiplayer is wonky and annoing and as far as i know it does not have much modding…
All planets feel the same after a few hours. The existance of medium Asteroids and Gas Giants is completely missing. And you cant build spacestations withoud weird stack up from plannet hacking.
I want to love the game cause like the idea and the ongoing support from the devs but when ever i try it again its just sad.
I get that problem with MC too.
MC I never get that with, though I haven’t really played vanilla Minecraft in years so the sheer amount of stuff to do usually offsets that.
Iv been wanting to back to no mans, iv read good things about the updates, but yeah. Last couple times i found myself wondering what the fuck i am doing.
Like he said, it’s like vanilla minecraft, so you have to make your own goals and your own fun. I spent hours just walking around collecting resources to build the things I decided I want that time. Hours more building my Corvette, Freighter and bases. If that’s not fun to you, that’s ok.
It’s way worse about that than Minecraft, imo. I find Minecraft to be exceptionally boring, but building is at least passably fun (or was before hytale completely blew it out of the water), but it feels like NMS doesn’t even give you a real creative outlet. From what I’ve seen even starfield is better than NMS for creativity, although i haven’t played starfield myself.
Starfield? I would argue it’s much worse than NMS, though I don’t know how the current game is. Back when I played, a couple of months before the first dlc dropped (before the buggy update, even), you were extremely limited in choices for base building. You had like 4 or 5 prefabs of a living quarter which came pre decorated.
Starfield offers good ship customization (and stupidly talent-locks a lot of it), unlike NMS, which only added a tiny bit of that in an update last year I think
Terraria is the Minecraft that’s meant to be played. Actually has dungeon crawling and a world to experience. Minecraft is just 3D Microsoft Paint that decides to chase your cursor with a zombie every so often.
Rainbow Six Siege.
It was a combination of things. There was definitely hackers, some funky seasons, the grind, and toxic players, but at some point I went to launch and I was dreading playing it and thought maybe I’d feel better if I just uninstalled this? And sure enough, I did feel better.
The first few years it slapped so hard, and then somewhere down the line it felt like a chore playing. Weird
Destiny was exactly like this for me. I really enjoyed the first 20-30hrs. Then it was “just something to do” when one day I realized “this game actually kinda sucks” and I haven’t played since.
Ever since they introduced Jackal then Nøkk the game lost its charm for me, I paid $50 for a semi-realistic FPS, while I turned a blind eye to IQ and Finka (and a few others) I never liked the idea of going invisible and seeing people’s footprints.
I bought the chibis of the original characters, purchased every elite skin offered, that’s how much I enjoyed the game.
Ubisoft lost a customer, and will likely not see me again until I see Linux support for their games.
I also stopped playing shortly after Jackal was released, and prior to quitting I have probably 600 hours in-game. I played from beta day 1 until then. Used to play with Macie Jay in Teamspeak. I actually started playing it again last year during Siege X and although the game is in a pretty good state, modern players just run-and-gun like TDM instead of reinforcing and using tactics and it just isn’t the same
I enjoyed it for a while but realised that it was effectively a subscription as the new operator was always very powerful. Then I switched to solely Linux anyway and haven’t missed it much
As a former r6 player with >1000 hours and a negative review on steam, I can confirm.
Didn’t hate it, but I just sort of slid off Baldur’s Gate 3.
I love Larian’s other games and even pre-ordered bg3 to play on vacation, but the combat just isn’t as fun as Divinity 2. I kept trying to avoid combat but then I walked into a new area and combat started automatically and I just groaned and turned off the game.
I got to act 2, which isn’t a lot of time, but it felt like it
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?You can absolutely play without dodge, parry, and even attack triggers. You have to build you character for it obviously. I’m terrible at reaction your stuff and just tanked the whole game. I even learned that the telegraph was easier based on sound but still I’m so slow I just continued to build tanky.
I generally enjoyed the game, But found myself disappointed by the story.
Tap for spoiler
It’s bookends. At the beginning you see what terrible tragedy Lumiere is suffering, and wonder what sacrifice you must achieve to save them.
Ending: Oh, Lumiere is fucked either way, either today or very soon. Now it’s just a question of who you want to torment.
Yeah the story absolutely didn’t grab me. Spent most of the time confused and asking myself lots of questions, then the big twist happens n I’m like yeahnah this ain’t it chief. And the ending ugh.
spoiler
I wanted one outcome in the binary choice and accidentally chose the option which gives me the ending I didn’t want xD
Easily the most controversial comment in here. I don’t think e33 is considered very difficult unless you do the optional content which has ridiculous stuff. I loved the story and characters and think it’s one of the most enjoyable and memorable RPGs of all time.
I found parry difficult to learn (but once it’s down for an attack it’s muscle memory) and I play fighting games where people count frames, where you have to make 300ms reactions out of multiple incoming prompts, and where you have 2 frames parry windows as opposed to E33’s 16 frames (I believe).
The most frustrating thing is that the telegraphing is just not that clear. I actually wish they increased the FOV change so that it’s more apparent when it’s at its maximum.
I’m also a fighting game player and I think that’s why I found it not too difficult compared to what’s required to Parry six frame normals and what not. Fighting game execution is so complicated that I find almost all genres are comparatively easier to handle.
the screen zooms a bit when you’re about to get hit. It helps a lot with learning timing
The telegraphing was a sound more than visual. Learning that made things much more manageable. But I’m terrible at even that so I just made no dodge/parry builds and just tanked it all.
Yeah, the two main cues are a sound (“swoosh” sfx) one and a visual (FOV rubber band) one.
… That’s smart, why didn’t I think of making a tank build, lol.
Because it’s not particularly encouraged by the game. Like you can, they give you the tools, but theres a bunch of stuff you can get earlier with perfect parrying, or is gated behind it entirely, so you feel like you should be doing it.
Personally I found a mod to make the parry and dodge windows a little longer so I could reliably hit them, after which it became much less frustrating.
No Mans Sky. At a certain point it all becomes meaningless.
Among Us.
My friends kept suggesting it for game nights, but the social demands are just not compatible with actually hanging out with your friends.
When everyone’s out and about, doing their tasks and getting murdered, we’re all discouraged from actually talking with one another, for fear of revealing a dead body or whatever. Whenever there’s a meeting going on, sure, we’re “free” to talk again, but there’s not enough time to talk about anything but the game. When you’re dead, and thus finally relieved from the pressures of completing tasks or getting kills… there’s still no chit-chat allowed, because ghosts “can’t” talk.
It’s worse whenever random players are involved; having to coordinate between voice chat with friends, and text chat with randoms, or worse, when the randoms are in a voice chat of their own, coordinating to be assholes.
The moment that finally made me say “I don’t enjoy this game”, was a round with two random players in it: one of them spent the whole round watching security cameras, and the other was blocking the one doorway into the room, both players working with each other and refusing to do their tasks. No way for the lone impostor that round to kill them both. When we started calling them out on this, they flat-out said “we’re going to keep doing this just to spite you”. Timer ran out with unfinished tasks. Crewmates lost.
I can’t think of a single one. I stop playing games I don’t like.
Hollow Knight is an tremendous game, but it is also a terrible game, and while I true ending’ed it, looking back I spent more than half my playtime annoyed and ultimately don’t think the game is good when considered in full.
Wow, that’s incredible. I feel pretty much the exact opposite (and don’t get me started on Silksong, I’ll rave for days) but that must mean there’s a game I missed that’s your Hollow Knight? Please tell me about it!
I dunno, I play a lot of indie games and stuff but I won’t pretend to be some kind of refined critic or anything; many of my favorite games are pretty standard fare. But I do have my opinions and I’m happy to share them.
Are we talking just metroidvanias, or games in general? I’ll start with metroidvanias:
First off, some people consider Shovel Knight a metroidvania, I don’t really, but if you do then Shovel Knight is absolutely top of my list. That’s basically a perfect game for me.
But after that, my favorite metroidvanias are, roughly in order:
Ori & the Blind Forest - what a game! People often say the best part of Hollow Knight is the atmosphere and environment and I think Ori’s is at least as strong, and with an art style I enjoy more.
Guacamelee 2 - Look, I’ll concede that some of the jokes (especially background gags) were questionable from the start and have aged like milk, but in literally every other way I think Guacamelee 2 is an actual masterpiece. Just does an incredible job of taking the metroidvania formula and adding great touches of beat 'em ups and precision platforming. Incredibly tight, fluid, and intuitive combat and controls, and I loved how the vast majority of moves/upgrades were equally utilized as combat options and traversal tools. I think a lot of people bounce off the aesthetic and some of the questionable humor before getting into the game, but goddamn I personally can’t recommend it enough on sheer gameplay alone.
Guacamelee (1) Super Turbo Championship Edition - Everything I said about Guacamelee 2 just 2% less enthusiastically and about 8% less tight in controls.
The Messenger - Kind of Hollow Knight meets classic Ninja Gaiden? I feel like if you liked Hollow Knight then The Messenger is a really safe bet.
And now expanding outside the genre, here are some of my favorite non-Metroidvania games, but this time the only order they’re in is indies/small games first:
Enter the Gungeon - I think this the hardest game I’ve ever played, period. It’s also an actual masterpiece. I’m not good it, but I still absolutely love it. I’m late to the party and just purchased it in the beginning of 2026 and I already have over 100 hours in the game and I’ve only killed the past (“beaten” the game) once but I’m still obsessed.
Fell Seal: Arbiter’s Mark - If you, like me, rank Final Fantasy Tactics as one of your GOATs, you should play Fell Seal. It’s not a perfect game, but it is the closest experience I’ve ever had to FFT (including FFTA and FFTA2!) while not feeling at all like just a clone game. More people should play this one.
Cassette Beasts - Everything I said about Fell Seal & FFT, except about Cassette Beasts and the classic Pokemon games.
Celeste - Everyone should play Celeste, and it has one of the best sets of difficulty options in gaming so everyone can play Celeste. On standard, it’s delightfully hard as balls (at least the extra/side content), but if you’re not interested in that kind of challenge it never makes you feel lesser for choosing to make the path easier for yourself. The gameplay is fantastic, the art is adorable, and the storyline is better than both. Play Celeste.
Recettear: An Item Shop’s Tale - This one is super niche but if you like cozy shopkeeper games or spent way too long in chapter 3 of Dragon Quest 4, then you should play Recettear. Peak of the genre, imo, though if this is your niche then Moonlighter is a very close secondary recommendation.
Valfaris - Realistically this probably isn’t quite “favorite” tier but it’s damn close, and considering that I constantly see this game on sale for under $4 I think it merits mention. A really fun retro shooter a la Contra with some interesting mechanics (like having to choose whether to sacrifice max health to establish checkpoints) and one of the best, clearest parry mechanics I’ve experienced. Add in a metal-centric soundtrack composed by an actual touring metal musician and I just think Valfaris is an excellent little hidden gem that almost nobody knows about. I do not like the sequel very much though, sadly.
Hades 1 & 2 - I feel like these games are already huge but imo they deserve every drop of praise they receive. Great games and some of the best dollar values ever in gaming.
Disgaea 5 - I love the whole Disgaea series for so many reasons but 5 is unquestionably the peak of the series, imo.
And then finally just for context, my other favorites that are big enough I don’t feel like they need to be recommended:
FFT (as mentioned), Dragon Quest 4 (best game on the NES and still underrated, imo), FF7, the Playstation Spider-Man games, Portal 1 & 2, Persona 5, Sid Meier’s Civilization 6, Borderlands: The Pre-Sequel (yes I think TPS is better than BL2).
Cheers ✌
Have you played the Trine series? It’s a platformer with similar atmosphere to ori and hollow knight.
I haven’t. I’ll add it to my list 👍
If you liked the messenger and shovel knight, you might wanna look into Bloodstained: Curse of The Moon. It was an NES style spinoff of the main Bloodstained game, and is a spiritual successor to the older pre-metroidvania castlevania. It’s quite a fun little game, short and sweet.
Well damn, that’s a super thorough answer! Thank you so much! ❤️
Those of that list I’ve played, I definitely enjoyed. Celeste in particular is special.
I haven’t played Shovel Knight but I’m really intrigued by Mina the Hollower from the same studio, and will likely grab it sometime!
I haven’t played many games from your list, but I can attest to
The Messenger, Ori & the Blind Forest, Celeste, Hades 1&2
being very awesome games; (I’m also happy you mentioned The Messenger specifically, great game and awesome soundtrack!)
Wow one of the only people ever that has also played Recettear, I really liked my time with it but didn’t finish.
I also didn’t like hollow Knight that much and wound up leaving it at like seventy percent complete but I did beat Ori which I liked more.
Wow one of the only people ever that has also played Recettear, I really liked my time with it but didn’t finish.
Have you checked out Moonlighter? I think anyone who enjoyed Recettear should check out Moonlighter; it’s a bit more focus and more Zelda-like, a bit less cozy.
Never even heard of it
Cool list. I can agree with everything said except for Valferis which I never heard of but want to check out now.
FFT is a pure masterpiece!
Well all I did was play them, but hey I’ll take the compliment on my good taste anyway, thank you 😋
Hollow Knight is definitely there for me. I’ve had trouble getting controller support on steam games (maybe this is intentional since they released a new controller?) so I’ve only been able to play keyboard… the controllers are clunky and the world at the beginning is empty and unengaging. I get that this is intentional design but I feel like it lacks clear direction for new players. The npcs speak with wall of text. No good for my brain.
I can’t even imagine playing HK with M&K!
I also think HK’s slow burn beginning is too slow. I did eventually get engaged but frankly the fact that I felt kind of ambivalent for much of my gameplay is a big part of my conclusion, though not as big as the design choices made for no motivating reason beyond to annoy players. The crossroads becoming blocked by infection is forever my #1 complaint about HK’s design. It serves no purpose aside from annoying the player. There’s no new skill challenge, it doesn’t make the game any harder or more engaging, it’s just tedious and time-wasting.
I find HK to be close to an amazing game, but I think from a game design standpoint the devs seem to conflate punishing with difficult, and that’s just a philosophical divide that I find myself too far the other side on to connect with fully.
There’s no new skill challenge, it doesn’t make the game any harder or more engaging, it’s just tedious and time-wasting.
Yes i hate this as well. Developers throw in things to make sure you have to spend more time playing the game. In most cases, they already have their money from you. They’d actually make more money by not wasting players’ time, and instead convincing them to buy the next game that the studio releases.
I tried it years ago and got stuck on the mantis boss, managed to get back into it around September cause I bought silksong on release to support the devs. Anyway I actually got through it that time and into skong which is a much better experience and one day I’ll start act 3.
Imo bosses are the best part of HK, I loved every boss fight.
If Silksong was promised to be 80% less tedious, I’d buy it in a heartbeat. But from what I’ve heard, that’s not the case, though of course I could be wrong.
