I’ll start. pokemon. doesn’t matter if the game’s old or new I just can’t get into how it plays. idk the gameplay just gets old to me pretty quickly, palworld is an upgrade in every way tbh
Souls games.
I really want to like them too, but they seemingly aren’t compatible with how I play games. I need to be able to put a game down for a couple of weeks and not feel like I’m back at square one because the specific muscle memory for that game has gone.
Just kinda kills the fun when the game is effectively telling me to get good, when I don’t actually have the amount of free time IRL necessary to do that.
Yeah. Heard so much about Elden Ring, and watched the kids play it, so I thought I’d give it a shot.
After about 45 minutes of wandering aimlessly and nearly as many deaths, I decided I wasn’t having a good time.
I finally had the Get Good moment where everything clicks recently, its very real. Now im on Nightreign like its crack.
Level your Vigor, people. Farm that little village with the soldiers and get a few levels into your health bar. And boom! Now you don’t die bc you missed a dodge. There’s good starting gear there too.
Once you “get it”, suddenly Elden Ring becomes like the coolest DnD game ever from an old-school perspective. Honestly, its not much different from Zelda - if you can play that, you can play Elden Ring i think.
That has been my experience with it too. It’s probably more fun with good gear, but i just see hours on the couch in my future that I don’t want to spend.
The gear would not have saved you. The game gets substantially more difficult as you progress, even accounting for your character getting stronger, and if you don’t do a decent job of levelling up appropriate skills that will compound the issue. The starter gear for most of the classes is actually perfectly viable all the way to the end of the game for most players too, it’s not notably weak at all
I love Elden Ring, but I can absolutely respect why it wouldn’t be for everyone. No sense in playing it if you’re not enjoying it, the point is still to have a good and/or interesting time
The beauty of Elden ring is that you can explore without actually killing much. Eventually you’ll find some cool weapons or smithing stones to upgrade your current weapon and some runes to get a couple of levels (putting points on vigor helps a lot early on)
And then the game starts feeling less rough.
But I can definitely understand why it’s not for everyone.
I feel similar. After having tons of people tell me for years I need to get into them, I finally played Bloodborne, which multiple people have told me is their favorite.
I pushed through it on my own first. I actually didn’t die quite as much as I expected, though I definitely had to spend time watching YouTube videos and reading 3 different fan-made wiki’s to figure everything out. I managed to finish it, but I didn’t think it was worth it and would not have finished it if not for wanting to be able to talk about it with my friends.
Then I did another playthrough with a friend doing co-op. When it worked (ugh) it was a way better experience. Partly because of my previous experience - I had a better feel for how to build my character, I remembered most of the environments and enemy placement, and still had that muscle memory from my first run. Partly because it’s better as a cooperative experience. Having an ally makes the world feel less desolate. Having another player to take aggro so you can heal is huge- some bosses almost feel like they were designed for multiplayer. And it’s fun just cracking jokes and hanging out, making fun of how ridiculous some of the stuff is.
I still don’t have the love for it that other people do though. I agree 100% on the aesthetic: everything in Bloodborne is just dark and wet and looks the same. FromSoft makes a LOT of game design decisions that are different from most other developers in terms of what they prioritize. Which is fine, but there are aspects of design where they clearly cut corners and the fanbae seems to laud it as a desirable artistic choice. I shouldn’t need to spend hours watching YouTube and researching fan sites to learn how to play the game, and I would argue I shouldn’t have to do that to appreciate the story. They simply do not respect my time.
The multiplayer barely works. It’s restricted to bosses and the areas leading up to them, and costs Insight (a valuable and kind-of finite resource) to use. Simply connecting is a tedious pain. You can only play either completely online or offline, so if you want to play with a friend you have to accept your whole world cluttered with annoying and distracting messages from random players and the specters where other players died. And that also opens you up to having hostile players gank you. Like… Why can’t my friend and I just pair up and play through the whole game together without inviting the rest of the internet too? Why does it cost Insight? Why are the caps for stats never communicated to the player? Why does the Hunter’s Axe do primarily Blunt damage while the KirkHAMMER does almost no Blunt damage, and for that matter why aren’t the damage types explained anywhere? I’m still not sure why some gems increase Attack, others increase Physical Attack, and others increase Blunt or Thrust, plus there are hidden damage types.
The game feels like it was designed to really get good on your second playthrough and beyond. Especially NG+, although even starting a fresh file again is much better than the first playthrough. Kinda reminds me of how some MMO fans like to say “it gets good after the first 100 hours”. For most developers, the player onboarding experience is one of the most important parts to be developed, but FromSoft basically skills over that and outsources it to their community of hardcore fans.
The only real way to play full co op is using the Seemless Co-op Mod. Also disables other players jumping in to kill you. You would have to play on PC though.
Soulslikes are fucking boring. I did that beat my head against the too-hard boss fight 289348923x when I was a kid because that was the only option and I had all the time in the world. Neither of those is still true.
Try Jedi Fallen Order. It’s got a lot of the ingredients, but a lot shallower learning curve.
Same for me!
Name any sports title ( NHL, NFL, NBA, MBA, etcetera )that isn’t a zany, over the top SuperTuxKart or Cartoon Network Racing style kart racer and I’m out.
Same goes for any PVP shooter games such as Call of Duty, TF2 Counter Strike, etcetera. Anymore I really find no interest in them because I don’t feel like breaking things over some 6 month old who can squad wipe me, all while getting their diaper changed and slinging slurs my way.
Pokemon - having to watch animations and not being able to speed anything up killed my interest
Skyrim - tried a melee run recently and the combat feels like you’re whacking air
The legend of Zelda - played Tears and the story and puzzles were a bit too kid friendly
Doom - I really tried to like it but I felt like I didn’t get anything out of it. It doesn’t scratch that itch I get out of FromSoft’s Souls games where I want to learn a boss’s patterns and die to it a million times.
In general I don’t think I can do story games anymore
The legend of Zelda - played Tears and the story and puzzles were a bit too kid friendly
It’s actually a kid friendly franchise, all of it. The only surprisingly mature themed zelda game is Majora’s Mask, it deal with death and loses and hopelessness way more than BOTW is comfortably touch, and it’s made in a year.
Twilight Princess is worth mentioning too. It was rated Teen, and had this scene (no gore or sex or anything, just weird surreal horror).
Zelda is such a diverse franchise it really depends on the game. I love Twilight Princess and Majora’s Mask, but didn’t like BotW or Windwaker at all. It’s almost like 2 or 3 different franchises crammed into one.
Up until Breath of the Wild, maybe Skyward Sword, the Zelda series didn’t shy away from being a bit fucked up. There’s an entire torture-themed dungeon in Ocarina of Time. Majora’s Mask is an exploration of impending doom, Twilight Princess features a botched execution. These games used to have characters in actual danger, scary enemies, confronting themes…Breath of the Wild is post apocalyptic and everyone is just happy clappy.
Couldn’t agree more with Skyrim, Oblivion was the same when I tried that too I just can’t stand it. Easily some of the most over rated games IMO.
Also agree with Zelda but I think the same about all of the Nintendo IPs, they are just boring and the fan base makes me dislike them even more!
Same for me, but starting with Morrowind. The leveling system was too weird, compared to other RPGs of that time. I remember I missclicked, fallen out of the window of some tower, got an Acrobatics skill improved and a level up.
well falling out of a tower window is quite the experience, and if you survived you learnt a lot about how to cope with deep falls, so the level ups are well earned
Modern DooMs are… strange. The legendary status of Doom is granted by Doom 1 and 2. And those games are very different from Doom 3-5.
Original gameplay is quite saved by GZDoom and similar projects. Add there something like BrutalDoom add-on and you’ll get the best from both worlds: old Doom gameplay and more modern graphics.
I still need to finish Dark Age but the level design was quite good. Felt way more like the original Jaquays type maps, lots of loops and alternate paths you naturally explore.
Project Warlock is still better tho
Pokemon - having to watch animations and not being able to speed anything up killed my interest
That’s why I play on emulator most of the time, especially for games I’ve already beaten
Yeah that’s the way to go, sadly. Funny enough I was eventually able to enjoy Pokémon through the fan game Pokerogue then a RuneScape rom hack called pokescape
the combat in Skyrim always felt so stiff so i get you, just didn’t feel enjoyable to me
i think you can disable the animations in the console games for pokemon, unless they changed it for the new games.
They removed the options to skip battle animations for the newer games. There’s an option that removes cutscenes, but that doesn’t affect anything in battles like the ten minute long terastallizations.
i see, they did that for the online card game too. in the older ones i removed the animations so i can progess through the battle tower faster. good thing i never gotten into the post- burnt out masuda games.
Just about any multiplayer game. I generally don’t like playing with randos (why would I want to listen to a 12 yo squeal in my ear that they fucked my mother in a pitch only dogs can hear?), and most of my friends don’t play games I’m interested in.
Fortnite.
Just. No.
Can’t stand the building. I’ll build in Minecraft and shoot in cs. No need to mashup!
Assassin’s Creed.
Love the historical gameplay. But I cannot stand being interrupted by the modern day parts. Even if they are small. They feel so disrespectful with my time that I’ve always been unable to play those games. I forced my way through AC2 but I have never replayed it, despite loving the actual gameplay, just for the modern day boredom.
There’s gotta be a mod for that, right?
Up until whatever came after Black Flag I was a die hard AC fan. Midnight releases and everything. And I’ll admit, the modern day sections are bad and jarring and completely unnecessary. At some point you’re a game developer wandering around an office and it’s obvious they had no idea what to do with those sections, because at that point the modern day story had been told. There was a brief cameo from some of the people you would remember from earlier games but it never got to the level of intrigue from 1-3.
Though an assassin’s creed game set in like modern day Manhattan could be fun. Watchdogs got kinda close to that before going completely off the rails.
Honestly, Black Flag is the only AC game I ever come back to. I enjoyed 1 and 2, and 3 was ok, but BF was the pinnacle of the series (only partially because of the ship combat).
I’d love a game that’s just the pirate ship parts, that was easily the best part. Setting up supply lines, capturing ships and sinking hunters. Good times.
I think Ubi tried to capitalize on that with Skull and Bones, because you’re definitely not alone. They failed miserably, but they tied.
I can think of lots of series that I don’t like, just because I’m not into the genre. I think that everyone has genres that they don’t like.
I think a more-interesting question is about popular series that I don’t like within a genre that I do like.
I didn’t like Frostpunk, despite liking city-builders. Felt like the decisions were largely mechanical, didn’t involve a lot of analysis and tweaking levers.
I didn’t like Sudden Strike 4, despite liking lots of real time tactics games, like Close Combat. It felt really simplified.
I didn’t like Pacific Drive, despite liking survival games. It has time limits, and I often dislike time limits in games.
I didn’t like Outer Wilds, despite liking a lot of space games. Didn’t like the cartoony style, the low-tech vibe, felt like it wasn’t respectful of player time.
I didn’t like Elden Ring, though I like a number of swords and sorcery games. Just felt simple, repetitive and uninteresting.
EDIT: A couple of honorable mentions that I don’t hate, but which were disappointing:
Borderlands. The gunplay can be all right, and the flow of new guns and having to adapt to them is interesting. But every Borderlands game I play, the always-respawning enemies are a turnoff. Feels like the world is immutable. Also don’t like the mindless farming of every container with glowing green dots. And for a combat-oriented game, it doesn’t make me mix up my tactics much based on whatever I’m facing. While I finish the game, I always wind up feeling like I’m not having nearly as much fun as I should be having.
Choice of Games. I like text-based games, but a lot of games published by this company, even otherwise well-written ones, have adopted a convention of making one win by playing consistently to certain characteristics of a character, so one tries to just figure out at every choice what option will maximize that characteristic. That’s extremely uninteresting gameplay, even if the story is nice and the text well-written. I feel like the same authors would have done better just writing choose-your-own-adventure type games if they weren’t focused on the stats. I also really dislike the lack of an undo, to the point that I’ve put some work into a Choicescript-to-Sugarcube converter.
I’m not sure I’d count Outer Wilds as a space game (assuming you mean something in the vein of Elite Dangerous), despite it objectively including a lot of space travel. It’s a detective game, the point is to unravel a mystery
maybe they’re confusing it with Outer Worlds?
I’d be very surprised if “cartoony style” and “low-tech vibe” is not describing Wilds. I assume the bit about respecting of time is something to do with the various timed events in each loop like Ash Twin. I don’t agree with them in the slightest, but I assume that’s what it is
Frostpunk
I get it. I like city builders too and the idea of a game that’s constantly threatening your city with crisis seemed interesting, but every run seems to be the same.
Outer Wilds
Alright, you and I are gonna fight now.
deleted by creator
Some of those can be explained by bad expectations.
Frostpunk is not a city builder, more like a puzzle game.
Outer wilds is not a space game, it’s a time loop mystery.
Fantasy sword and sorcery is hardly the most important side of souls games. They’re technical performance games.
They all technically include those elements you like, but were more about something else.
Capitalism: I refuse to develop my sociopathy to the level required to participate.
Come on,the second game was decent!
Victoria 2 scratches the itch pretty well for me.
The Bethesda (and related) RPGs. The core gameplay loop just feels so shallow in both, meaning most of your time is spent wandering with nothing meaningful to do, or in spammy, often janky combat. The parts that are interesting, the character builds and the lore, aren’t super involved in most of the game. You spend so little time building characters, and most of the lore is in written logs and books.
While I like Bethesda games quite a bit, I do agree on the in-game lorebook stuff. I can’t see the appeal of the stuff. It’s a collection of extremely short, in my opinion not-very-impressive stories. I just can’t see someone sitting there and reading them and enjoying the things — if I’m going to read fantasy, I’d far rather spend the time on an actual novel. Yet I’ve seen people obsess online about how much they like the in-game lorebooks.
I’ve wondered before whether maybe people who are talking about how much they like them haven’t gone out and read full-length fantasy books, and so they’re getting a tiny taste of reading fantasy fiction and they like that, but it’s the only fantasy that they’ve read.
I wouldn’t say the problem is with their length or simplicity. I’m sure I could enjoy a short anthology in one of these universes. The bigger problem is the fact that its embedded into a game, effectively breaking the pacing and flow of both the written text and the game. Ideally, this would at least allow you to use environmental and visual storytelling alongside the text, but this is rarely done well enough to justify all the downsides, so you end up with the worst of both worlds.
Assassin’s creed. The movement and combat didn’t feel satisfying to me at all
Dark Souls and any of its copycats. Grinding a boss for hours on end just to learn it’s patterns is not how I like to spend my free time. Aside from that: why is that whole genre so bleak? Apart from maybe “Another Crab’s Treasure” they’re all dark and gray/brown and unrelentingly depressing. Does the gameplay lend itself to that particular aesthetic? Or is everyone just copying Dark Souls that hard?
That decayed aestethic is immemsely popular and it works fine in making you feel like a survivor.
That said, i like jolly things and grimdark stories, and I tend to like the bizarre. Maybe grimdark games lack the bizarre and the occasional bit of fun. I personally say this is the byprpduct of the success of a specific subgenre of games in the 2020’s.
I can understand, but heartily disagree! For me, the firey hope in the face of a dark bleak world inspires me, and the way the games tend to have you earn your victories makes victory so, so much sweeter.
Plenty of Soulslikes that don’t have that bleak look to them. I think many of them do because the genre takes place in apocalyptic settings.
GTA. It just seems really boring to me, I dunno. A lot of shoot em up and not so much substance. To be honest I feel like that for a lot of open world games. It may be wide as an ocean but it’s deep as a puddle. That’s not ALWAYS bad but I generally would prefer a more linearly running game that’s a lot deeper.
Final fantasy or any jrpg really
Soooooooo long and boring
I cannot do balders gate 3, or any rpg of that style. I suspect it’s to do with trying to roleplay a character while simultaneously viewing them in that top-down third person perspective. I can do X-COM, strategy, I can do roleplay in third person, but that particular combination just kills it for me. It’s bizarre.
Anything Bethesda sadly. I want to like them, something about the control and movement is just so janky it’s not fun.
I thought Fallout 4 was okay but I agree Bethesda clunk is hard to get used to
I find the games very appealing. I would love to love New Vegas but every time I try it just feels… off.
I always thought it was because they tried for an “anatomical” perspective and it never worked. Like I think the goal was supposed to be you could look down at your own character model but it was never really inplimented, leaving a janky forward and back motion to the vertical tilt. It’s just enough to make some people a little motion sick.
It’s like the controller is reacting to your inputs after they are pressed, rather than your inputs reacting as you press them. It’s a very very small difference, but it just feels clunky.
Fallout 4 is a surprisingly good colony builder though. Shame that’s literally the only thing it has going for it haha
Weirdly, I love them. They’re absolutely shallow main story wise but they do exploring and looting right which is the point of open world (for me!). The Witcher 3 or Red Dead Redemption 2 for example are great games, but I didn’t enjoy them nearly as much as the arguably bad Fallout 3.
The games are appealing, I just despise something about the controls.
Interestingly I love the controls. They feel very direct to me.
deleted by creator
