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 😂
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I hate all online competitive games. Yup, all of em. I can’t relax! I can’t learn at my own pace! I can’t explore! The challenge is unknown! I don’t want to get better than strangers, i don’t care about them!
i like beating systems not people. Watching my BIL play CoD and that car soccer game, I’ve seen and heard some nasty shit. I guess it’s not unusual that people get competitive (ive seen people lose their composure over drunken kickball, i get its not just online) but considering how toxic people can be i just don’t get why people would invite that into their house.
Maybe im just not competitive. Yo, any ranked or generally competitive players, what makes you come back?
I miss server browsers and community servers. Just people playing casually and the teams could shuffle every round. It was competitive, but not sweaty plam bs and being too toxic would get you banned.
thats what turns me off them. you simply can’t play online games without being a tryhard sweat anymore. i just want to smoke a joint and chill in my off hours, not get demolished every match if i dont bring in my friends and tryhard at it.
and no commumity servers because that dont make them money
and no commumity servers because that dont make them money
Correction. They don’t make enough money.
Ok first of all, online gaming communities especially around the most popular “serious” competitive gaming scenes are usually awful, terribly toxic places dominated by toxic masculinity.
It is a major problem in my opinion, both from the toxic people it breeds but also from the gatekeeping that keeps out a more diverse player base than just insecure men who hurl around insults and call shit “gay” when they don’t like it.
That being said, I do really like competitive multiplayer games like apex, battlebit, rocket league (car soccer game), halo infinite etc. I am not an especially competitive person though, I don’t HAVE to win and I don’t get super angry when I lose.
I enjoy competitive games because of the rich experience of playing a game against another human who is focused and motivated to win. I especially like playing with a team of humans against another team of humans. Humans are just so much more interesting and dynamic to compete against and generally a blast to cooperate with, singleplayer games often feel stale and like they are trying to forcefully induce a fabricated experience in me in comparison. Why do I want to play a singleplayer call of duty campaign that tries to make me “feel” like I am in a big battle when I can just play battlebit and actually be in a virtual battle with 200 other humans?
Another human competing against you for fun brings a great gift to the table from the perspective of game design and it takes an immense amount of effort to create a singleplayer experience anywhere near as engaging and dynamic. Likewise goes for a human teammate vs an AI one. Drive around in a gun truck in a singleplayer game and get an AI to gun for you and you have a slightly interesting experience where the AI just dumbly shoots at targets when you drive up to them… get a HUMAN to gun for you and all of a sudden you and that person are in an action movie together where your collective survival depends on how efficiently you work together and help each other out. Maybe you never talk to your gunner over a mic, it doesn’t matter really, the connection is still there. It never gets old to me because everything I do impacts other humans who then react and adapt which causes me to have to do the same.
Singleplayer games have to do a massive amount of work to make me fee like I am in a living breathing world that responds to me. Multiplayer games “just” have to setup an arena and let players loose. The experience of trying to outsmart another human who wants to win as bad as I do is perennially rewarding. Every moment I play a competitive multiplayer game I am working on integrating knowledge, skill, and emotional regulation and always learning and adapting. It makes my brain feel alive and stimulated in a way most single player games don’t (don’t get me wrong, I love good singleplayer games too).
I hate the toxicity and I always report it when I see it though.
So, like you I don’t enjoy most competitive games. I like to dabble occasionally and enjoy an FPS here or there(I enjoyed the Finals for a bit, and occasionally a CoD, last one was Modern Warfare), but mostly play single player or co-op games because I find them far more enjoyable.
There is one genre that is an exception, fighting games. I fucking love them. I used to enjoy them as a kid, then had a long hiatus, dabbled when Street Fighter 4 launched, but didn’t “git gud”. Then Dragonball Fighter Z and the Arcade Edition for Street Fighter 5 launched and I think they were the gateway drug for me. Street Fighter 5 was tough, I couldn’t find a character I liked, so kinda bounced off it, but DBFZ kept me in. It wasn’t until Blanka in SF5 came out that it all clicked for me.
The genre starts of like a little puddle, you don’t really need to know a lot going in, but you definitely need to want to improve. And the more you improve the more you realise how deep the puddle is, cause it is actually an ocean. When you play against another human, at the lower ranks it is quite random and spammy. But as you get past them, you get to where you can condition people, you can learn their habits and combo choices. Then you take that knowledge and adjust your gameplay and see if they can counter it, and it can be come a big back and forth of trying to get the other person to make a mistake and exploiting their habits.
It is also a genre where nothing else really transfers across. All that time in FPS or RTS games isn’t going to help, so learning to do the technical inputs can be rewarding, or labbing out a combo and how to implement it in your gameplay.
I also really enjoy the ranking climb in most fighting games. SF6 has kinda perfected it, you play 10 games and it gives you a placement from Rookie upto Diamond 1, then you match against someone typically within ±1 rank(Gold 1 would be matched with Silver 5, Gold 1 or Gold 2)and rack up points. At the top of the ranking you hit Master, then it turns into Elo points and a proper distribution of skill, cause the difference between a professional and good player that just hit Master is massive. And for SF6 it is done on a per character basis, which allows you to sink time into every character and be playing with people your skill level.
I am 417 hours into SF6, 3 characters at master rank and a few in diamond/platinum. I still feel like I am bad, and I am definitely not using all the systems effectively in the game. But I sure as hell am excited to sink another several thousand hours into this game over the life of it.
Tekken 8 also just came out, which also seems incredible, but 3D fighters are basically an entire new genre to learn.
Fighting Games are fucking cool.
Grand Theft Auto.
All of them, but especially V. I have tried a few times to play them but never get more than a few missions in before losing interest in the story. I think I have to like or identify with a protagonist to enjoy a game, and most GTA characters are pretty unlikable.
Shit, I forgot about GTA games in my reply…
I’m with you on this one. I can see the appeal, but for me it ends up being a cycle of: do a mission or two, get bored of the larger than life characters, do some open world stuff, get my wanted level up too high, die, repeat until I quickly get bored and shut it off.
Which is odd because I do that exact same thing in other games I love (BotW, WoW (long since quit) or Destiny) and its all golden… but in a game like GTA? Yawn.
Pokemon. It’s just a franchise of watered-down jrpgs imo.
Pokemon is about the universe it was created in. It was the perfect on the go game when we were children and it even had a great anime to go with it. When you were home, you watched Ash and Pikachu take on the world of pokemon. Everything looked so vibrant and cool. Then when it was time for you to go with your parents to a house party, you could play Pokemon on your Gameboy.
It’s just a nostalgia franchise now, but that’s okay. Most people are unhappy with how Game Freak is handling the role of building these games, but maybe one day they’ll make a turn.
Almost Anything Open World tbh
Every open world game has turned into the same “do this x times to get y reward that has no relevance whatsoever to the game”
I miss the days of games on rails. I could sit down, enjoy a game and play it through to the end in 10-20 hours. Now it seems like every game is trying to milk 100+ hours of gameplay time out of even the most basic of stories and mechanics.
I fully agree with you. I feel like 99% of open world games sacrificed the story and gameplay in the process.
Open world is really only good if it’s something like an MMO where the content is built up over the course of years and there are multiple story lines.
Aside from that, it works well for racing games not much else.
I found the three newish Tomb Raider games to be a great mix of a sort of open world feel at times where you have things to explore, while being very much on rails. Each arc in the story gives you an area to explore and your actions in that area progress the story. You get some weapon and ability upgrades throughout. I came in not expecting much and couldn’t put the first one down. I think I finished Tomb Raider 2013 to 100% in about 20-25 hours and it was excellent. Will probably do another playthrough at some point, still haven’t played the third.
Sports games.
I know people who like them exist given the sales. But not only do I not play or like sports games - no one that plays games in my social circle does either.
It’s like the Venn diagram for people who play RPGs and those who play sports games is just two circles.
I get it. I’m the only one of my D&D/RPG friends who likes sports, and the only one of my sports friends who likes D&D :-/
Monster Hunter, it’s just so clunky and boring.
Edit: Also the multiplayer is god awful, why can’t my friend and me just team up and play, instead you have to jump through all types of hoops to play together.
Surprised this hasn’t been said more in this thread, to be honest. All it seems to be is Breath of the Wild and Soulslikes.
I’ve tried 3 different Monster Hunter games, I’ve really tried to see what people enjoy about them. But the controls are so awful, the loop is tedious, and I could never find anything good to say about them. This series truly confuses me.
Installed it. Spent two hours in unskippable tutorials and dialogues learning about a million different mechanics. Sent out into wild; collecting mucous for 45 minutes. Find monster, hit it a bunch. Monster runs away. I chase it for 10 more minutes, then Quit and uninstall.
League of Legends. I don’t understand the appeal at all. It’s just ugly and not fun. I really tried to get into it too. An old group of friends I played games with all play it. For over a decade it’s been practically the only game they play. They never seemed like they were having actual fun either but they keep coming back. I miss those guys ☹️.
- Abzu - hated the underwater movement controls
- Deponia & MechaNika - the protagonist is an asshole
- Papers Please - too stressful (works well as a piece of art, but wasn’t an enjoyable experience)
I have tried on multiple occasions to get into 4x games and my brain is just too simple.
The 4x elements have to be secondary and not the primary focus. Age of wonders planetfall and Warhammer 2? Great. Imperator Rome and europa universalis? Might as well look at a fucking spreadsheet lol.
Wish I could get into the micro and efficiency of numbers but it doesn’t do anything for me. Even with an interest in Rome.
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.
3D Grand Theft Auto games (GTA 3, 4, 5) Some video essay (I can’t recall which one) compared GTA’s attitude to that of the protagonist of “Catcher in the Rye”. Its comedy is very cynical, just pointing fingers at everything and saying “they are phony”, “they suck, don’t they” and “we are too cool to even admit we’re cool”. The tone always rubbed me the wrong way and felt like these white gangsta rappers - Vanilla Ice and the kind. Rampant fanboyism does not help, either. I dared critisize GTA6 trailer somewhere (by saying “this is not for me, I will pass”) to be downvoted to oblivion and I shit you not, receive threats in DMs.
No Man’s Sky When it came out, NMS was a broken, buggy mess of a game with inventory management as a central mechanic. Punch trees got replaced with laser plants, but it’s basically the same loop of gather, combine, refine, build better tools. After a decade, NMS is a game chock-full of various content, with inventory management as a central mechanic. Not for me.
Souls-likes and Metroidvanias I have plenty of rewarding challenges in my real live and consider myself lucky enough to have work that’s fulfilling and gratifying. I don’t seek validation in games - I seek relaxation and escapism. I play most games on easy and don’t feel like proving my skills in the game is the right use of my time. I can appreciate skilled players - often watching speedruns, 100% attempts or professional tournaments, but when it comes to playing - I rather pick fun, easy, light entertainment. (Death Stranding is one of my all-time favorites)
on a flip note, a game that everyone seems to hate and I quite enjoy is Forspoken Sure, the dialog is cringe and there’s way too much of the same barks repeating (I need to look through menus, I think they added some slider to adjust the rate if I recall), but the traversal is fun, I love the UI design (gold and purple), I think costumes are freaking fantastic and combat is easy enough (on easy) to happily zone out to and play an hour here or there.
Soul like everything, but that’s just me being too clumsy for any challenge. I do hope some people could stop complaining other games being too easy tho. Not every game needs to be Soul likes.
Minecraft. It desperately needs some QoL improvements for it to be anything but tedious.
That’s what mods are for, most of the game’s popularity is built around the community and not the vanilla game itself
Doom Eternal. I don’t usually enjoy FPS games and I’m not very good at them but I absolutely loved Doom (2016) as it took out most of the things I hate about FPS games. But in Eternal I just felt like I was constantly out of ammo, and there was too much focus on using specific weapons against specific weak points on enemies which I couldn’t get the hang of
GTA5 and RDR2 are boring as shit.
All souls like games are just too much work, as are most metroidvanias. I just don’t have the energy or the time to spend on them.
