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.
In counter-strike you can win and still be angry with your teammates
FFXVI
I saw the trailer years ago and seemed good, so I wanted to give it a try. I of course looked for online reviews and game journalists were praising it so I bought it.
It’s horrible. The only reason I played a lot of hours is because there’s an endless stream of cinematics.
The strong point is supposed to be the story. But the story is so fucking stupid. The lore and world building is good, but the story is shit.
I don’t know how game journalists are even allowed to exist.
EDIT: mistakenly wrote XIV instead of XVI
Counter-Strike Global Offensive. Too many cheaters and the skins just ruin the game. I still play 1.6 and Source sometimes. CS2 I don’t even bother, because my pc is potato.
Subnautica: Below Zero.
Subnautica is one of my favorite games I’ve ever played. My understanding is there was enough of a shakeup of crew behind the scenes during BZ’s development that it effected the final product, and it’s evident that they didn’t know what about the first game was so good.
Every single area in the game is a twisty turny confusingly self-similar maze of corridors. The twisty bridges, the sea monkey dens, the icebergs, the glacier, the lilypad caves, the crystal caverns, the wreck, the game is a bunch of mazes. The story doesn’t make sense, the characters kinda suck…I’ve played it through 3 or 4 times, and that’s probably it. I’ve played through Subnautica dozens.
I only played like 30 hours, but I hated every minute of Mina The Hollower.
Red Dead 2 for me.
I constantly get everything wrong. Never understand the quests or what I’m supposed to do, always making the wrong decisions. Constantly having to retry.
It felt like it was designed by aliens that just read a few books on life on earth and cowboys and made an open world game.
“Hurry you have to do this one thing RIGHT NOW” means you can do that thing whenever you want. Hell. You can even take and 8 year old on a fishing trip but I get tricked into losing sleep on a workday because of appearant lies… I never knew when I was in a quest or not.
BG3 I straight up refunded because it reminded me why I hated D&D. I just end up save scumming and hating melee combat against ranged targets. I walk 2 steps towards the enemy the enemy also walks two steps and throws a dagger in my face. Repeat. To be fair I hated XCOM for the same reason. I loved Fallout 1 and 2 though.
I played this Gameboy advance game as a kid where you adopted a puppy and cared for it and all that and then after a certain amount of time your parents in-game made you get rid of it.
I’ve never felt so fucking betrayed in all my days. I was so mad that I threw the game cartridge out of the car window and my parents weren’t even mad because the ending to the game was so fucked lmao
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.
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
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 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.
Town of Salem would be another one for me. It’s a game like “murderer,” the party game, with a harmless innocent fsction and a dangerous mafia faction. The game devolved into foregone conclusions every match because everyone devised a formula for town to win 100% of the time.
Jailor here TPLO
It did suck that there was a meta around Jailor. NK usually only won with NE working with them, or all/any
What i hate about TOS now is that its dead and making a lobby takes forever.
You might like blood on the clocktower. It’s a similar premise but with some key twists and some very interesting role options, depending on the script you run
I begrudgingly put up with Puyo Puyo Tetris back when it was the only way to officially play Puyo Puyo in the west, but it is the worst thing that ever happened to the franchise. Only thing I hate more than the game itself is the impact it had on the series, because Sega has done nothing but lazily rehash it four times. It’s been a full decade since the last proper main series game and there’s still no word on when or if we’ll ever get another.
Helldivers 2 is a blast but somehow still so bug-ridden that I’ve quit like 3 separate times.
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.
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.
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
Flashback and Ultima VIII
Both games were inspired works of art with unbelievably frustrating mechanics, often involving jumping onto moving platforms. I think I actually broke a keyboard playing Flashback. And yet I kept playing.
Back then, if you had a game, you finished it, even if it made you cry. Because you didn’t have anything else.
I wouldn’t say hated, but I’ve sunk almost 500 hours into Diablo IV and just feel like it’s meh. Nothing particularly special about it.
Quit after 9 hours.
I probably sunk at least that much into D2 (and more) but just fell out of love with D4 so quickly. It felt so repetitive and dull.
I put 130 hours into it at launch and enjoyed the grind to endgame with my first build but the endgame grind was just way too much for me and I haven’t picked it up since.
I just started playing this and question what the hype was.
∆V: Rings of Saturn is a top down realistic physics based space mining game. I love the game but the high frequency of random encounters made the game feel less like a mining sim and more like a space combat game where you have to survive against constant pirate attacks.
While all that sounds bog-standard for a space sim, it’s the realistic science that kills it. High speed mass driver rounds from far off map, mining lasers outside the visible spectrum (only revealed with steam or dust) that will cut right through your ship, microwave beams that cook the crew alive and are impossible to evade - the game is not made for such weapons with the very limited combat format.
It became unfun to have a load of minerals that took IRL hours to harvest become scattered across Enceladus orbit as the added mass of minerals made my ship unmanageable during evasive maneuvers causing me to slam into an asteroid.
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
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.
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.
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.
