Okay let me start with two heavy hitters right from the get go and don’t forget these are only personal oppinions and I absolute understand if you like those games. Good for you!
Zelda: Breath of the Wild - Not a bad game per se, but I don’t get the hype behind it. Sure the dungeons are fun but the world is so lifeless, the story non existent, the combat pretty shallow, the tower climbing is very much like FarCry but for some reasons it’s okay here while Ubisoft gets the blame…like I said I dont get why the game is so beloved. Never finished it after the 20 hour mark and probably never will.
Red Dead Redemption 2 - Just like Zelda not a bad game, but imho highly overrated. Graphics and and atmosphere are amazing but the controls are clunky and overloaded, nearly everybody is an unlikable douchebag who I would love to shoot myself at the first opportunity (maybe except Jack and Abigail) but I have to root and care for them. The game is just so long and feels very stretched, you already know that you won’t get Dutch because it’s a prequel and for an open world game you often get handholded in your weapon selection or things you can do because you have to wait for them to be unlocked by the game. I’m now nearly done with the game, playing the epilogue at the moment and I would say the last chapters are more entertaining than the rest of the game, but I still can’t understand why this game was on so many game of the year lists and I really wanted to put the controller down a dozen times.
So there they are, two highly controversial oppinions by me and now I’m really curios what your takes are and how highly I get downvoted into oblivion 😂
I fucking HATE Souls-like games. I love fantasy and RPG games but FromSoft games are just hard for the sake of being hard.
I’m an adult with a life (kinda) - I don’t have 600hrs to dedicate to defeating the fucking Taurus Demon. I even looked up HOW to kill it but apparently my controller usage wasn’t good enough to move at speed even though I completed God of War 3 on the highest difficulty.
The fact I had to re-tread the same stupid fucking area before that to reach the fucking Taurus Cunt was to much.
I quit the game and vowed to never play another FromSoft game or anything that claimed to be a “Souls-like”.
I stupidly listened to someone say Sekiro was a better game than Ghost of Tsushima (which I love). So I played it…
WTF?! The first group of enemies were all identical - no variations. There was also only TWO fucking moves I could perform. A wooden-looking block and a janky looking attack. An absolute fucking abortion of a game and I’m convinced the idiot who told me it was better than GoT had never played it.
Souls games.
tHe PoInT oF tHe GaMe Is ThE sTrUgGlE
So turn the difficulty up.
A lot of games increase difficulty by just turning up HP and attack numbers, and part of the fun of souls games is that that’s really not how they handled difficulty.
Its not for everyone. Just like any other game.
One appeal of the souls-like games is having one difficulty only. It makes balancing much easier.
At the same time people can talk about the game, and actually be talking about the same game. With different difficulties games can change a lot.
I realize this is an overgeneralization I’m making.
every game made since the ps2 was officially retired. I don’t hate them because they’re hard and I’m just not getting the handle of gameplay. I hate them for specific reasons:
- the reliance on online modes. games used to be a singular affair between the player and the game. since 2008 online modes have become increasingly necessary to a requirement. with online modes comes a need for a server dedicated to that game. so what happens when the company shuts that server down? you’re sol. and piggybacking on that
- games are released buggy out of the box. before a game wasn’t published until it was done. now it’s released on a target date and patches get released along the way. so if you happen to be in a position where you have the physical media but no internet you could have a broken game and not be able to do anything about it. I just think about that situation with the tony hawk game where the manus didn’t ship the game on the disc and players had to download the entire game as an “update”. and what’s going to happen when that server shuts down?
- games are moving to downloads instead of on physical media. I’m a full believer in you buy a game you own it. some game publisher just said recently that players shouldn’t own their games anymore. gaming is going to move to a streaming model where you own a service (console/platform) and games will move on and off it when a licensing deal expires. sorry I don’t want any part of that.
- games made that don’t require you to be online to have any kind of gameplay are becoming rare. I’m the game player that plays the game just to play the game and doesn’t want to play against another human player online. my competitive juices don’t flow that way. I’m perfectly fine playing against the game’s ai.
tldr the internet killed gaming for me.
At least back in the day, multiplayer games released with the server you could self host.
Or you’d find a chill one that you liked and it became its own little community of sorts with regulars and whatnot.
Now, some games make it genuinely hard to even play multiple rounds back to back with the same people.
The ranking system and match making superceded the lobby.
There’s still a lot of enjoyable games, gems even, but there’s a lot of hot garbage too.
I don’t think it’s (just) Internet’s fault.
Hell, we’d play Diablo over dial-up and it was amazing at the time.
I think it’s more the corpo greed making its way everywhere.
No mTx, no subscription, no battle pass, no unlocking bs, no cosmetics, no unending daily grinds, just you, the game, maybe a buddy if your family didn’t need the phone.
DRM didn’t exist, they’d ask you questions about the game manual instead.
I remember bringing the Fallout manual on a trip and reading through it thinking about what character I’d make. Now everything is digital only, you’re almost lucky if it comes with a wallpaper.
Outer Wilds. I think it’s a fine game with a pretty cool gimmick (time loop) and a neat story. The gameplay itself isn’t that fun. I think what ultimately ruined it for me was the online discourse about the game; every time it gets mentioned, hundreds of people flock to the comments to extol the philosophical storyline, and throw around hyperbolic descriptions like “life-changing”. Again, the story is pretty neat, but I was left underwhelmed after having been built up by fans of the game.
I audibly gasped at seeing this, I think it’s the best game I’ve ever played, I really do
I haven’t quite finished it yet, my feeling is that it slightly overstays it’s welcome.
I’ve also noticed that most of the time I do a thing or two in the game then realise there’s not quite enough time in the loop to do another thing, but just enough time to make me want to not waste the loop, since I find starting a new loop a bit tedious.
Several hours in, I couldn’t even make it to a point where the story started rewarding me. Which was part of the problem. I “cleared” one of the planets (Brittle Hollow), with its platforming elements (something I don’t like in 3D), and my “reward” was a small piece of a puzzle. I needed a lot more than that.
Even before that point, the game hadn’t made a good first impression. There was nothing about the intro section on the starting planet that particularly interested me. And then the ship controls drove me a bit nuts. The loop was the only interesting part about the game for me then.
Felt like the writing was on the wall for me after exploring that first planet, so I dropped it.
There was nothing about the intro section on the starting planet that particularly interested me.
Yes! I forgot about this. There were like a hundred characters to speak to and very little of it was interesting or even helpful. I couldn’t help but feel guilty when I just gave up and decided to get on the ship and leave without exploring all of the dialogue or points of interest.
I’m going to have to tar and feather and entire genre I’m afraid.
It’s the weird intersection of visual novel and dating simulators.
They are truly horrible derivative fantasy, written by severely emotionally stunted incels with less sexual/world experience and writing skill than the average grade 7 student.
Tbhey are, quite literally, the campy romance novels of the videogame world.
