Dungeons and Dragons 5e is less fun than 3.5e IMO.
There was more of a sense of character progression, and ability differentiation in 3.5e.
5e achieves balance by flattening the power curve.
For example, the attack bonus for a level 20 Fighter in 5e is just 4 points higher than it was at level 1 - same as a 5e Wizard. Both get +2 at lvl 1 and +6 at lvl 20
In 3.5e, a level 20 fighter’s attack bonus is 19 points higher than it was at level 1 (+1 to +20), but a wizard only gains half that much fighting prowess as they level up (+0 to +10).
All 5e characters are pretty much the same statistically & mechanically. Differentiation comes from role play, which is the least interesting part of the game for me.
I think this is one of the reasons why Pathfinder 2e has been doing so well.
It’s a middle ish ground and it feels good to progress.
My current issues with it are how underpowered the items are. So boring.
Heartbreaking that they decided static item attack rolls and DCs was a good idea. It’s my biggest gripe with the system. Some items, like the Holy Avenger, subvert this and are pretty good, but most items suuuuuck the instant you outlevel them. Like, Sparkblade is cool, who doesn’t like chain swordbeams? Anyone over level 4, aparrently, because every creature you come across has learned to dodge lightning from that sword in particular
I haven’t played any 3.5e proper, but I understand Pillars of Eternity 1 is largely based on it, and I’ve played a handful of the 2e games. I dig a lot of the changes in 5e. I wouldn’t say the power is so flat that the differentiation only comes down to role play; I’d say a lot of it comes from the apples and oranges comparisons between classes, like things beyond to-hit roles. Your fighter has no AoE attacks like the wizard has but has Second Wind and Action Surge, for instance. The advantage to flattening the differences a bit more is that your character’s role is less preordained (“you are playing class X, so you must be responsible for Y”) and that you are less hamstrung by the absence of one particular role, which scales better to small parties.
2024 is even worse. On top of that, they also stack extra abilities, and try to give everyone everything.
One of these days I should try Pathfinder
3.5e being the best is an opinion I’ve heard for my entire life. I would say preferring 5e is a more unpopular opinion.
5e character progression does feel kind of bland.
I feel the 5e rules are poorly organized, too. Lots of interdependent rules scattered far from each other in the books, and sometimes buried in the middle of seemingly unrelated sections, so unless you’ve memorized multiple chapters, understanding how to resolve common situations sometimes requires stopping the game for 15-30 minutes while someone digs through the books to find all the relevant factors. Even when you do find the relevant info, it’s often in ambiguous language describing what could have been made perfectly clear with a few keywords. The books are pretty, and the text might be nice to read for entertainment, but they’re pretty bad the the job of being game manuals.
Does 3.5e use the d20 system? Does it have the advantage/disadvantage mechanic? I like those aspects of 5e; they’re simple and they help keep games moving along.
Maybe I should give it a try. Or perhaps 4e, which I have read does a better job of clearly defining its gameplay mechanics.
3.5 does use d20, but lacks advantage/disadvantage in favor of doing a lot more math every moment of every round of combat. This is the biggest appeal of 5e, it’s approachable and keeps the games moving.
I wouldn’t recommend 4e, it strongly suffers from the aforementioned “everyone can do everything and feels samey” much more than 5e.
Pathfinder 1e is basically just dnd 3.5, and as others have mentioned, PF2e is more of a middle ground
Differentiation comes from role play, which is the least interesting part of the game for me.
Can you explain why you would play a TTRPG if you’re not interested in role play? Seems like a battle sim like warhammer, or just a video game might be the thing you’re looking for.
As a DM, the cooperative story telling IS the interesting part. D&D has never been an airtight game system, it’s a bunch if hand waving to give just enough illusion of structure and randomness so you don’t feel like you’re just arbitrarily deciding everything yourselves. But at the end of the day, you are. The characters and story you’re left with is the only thing of value.
I liked 4e the best.
4e did some really cool stuff while also going a bit off the rails for me. I think overall I like 5E more, but we played a ton of 4e and I’ll always remember it fondly. I was really into the more defined roles, and how classes were a bit more self contained so they could just keep making more and more niche ones
I started TTRPGs with Pathfinder (1e). Some people talk about it like some impossible thing to play. It does have a lot more detail than 5e, but it isn’t that bad. (I did play one character as a wrestler, who did grappling a lot, which is notoriously one of the most complex systems.)
5e sells itself as being simple, and it is in how little control it gives you. However, the rules are anything but simple. There’s so many contradictions and stipulations every player has to memorize. It’s a mess. For example, some spells can be used as bonus actions, but not if you’ve already cast a spell, except for some that can anyway. It’s stupid.
Pathfinder 2e seems to make things so much simpler for everything, while still giving players freedom. Actions are just actions. If you’ve got the points you can use them for anything. Movement, attacks, spells, etc. Pretty much everything just is what it says.
All the souls games. I don’t get it, they’re just no fun 🤷♂️
Also, never finished doom eternal, far too busy. Dark ages was great tho
There was a time when I could not have imagined liking those kinds of games. My partner got me Dark Souls Prepare to Die Edition and I hated it. Hate may be too kind a word for how I felt. I’ve always loved metroidvanias and the style seemed right up my gothy, witchy alley, but I couldn’t get past the first basic zombie.
Then we watched a bunch of videos and realized that the game was designed to be played slowly and deliberately. There were no “junk” enemies and paying careful attention at all times was the game. When it clicked, it clicked, and now From Software games are my favorite.
I had a similar experience. Went the wrong way in DS1, headed straight for the catacombs, went “oh. This isn’t hard. This is punishing.” And dropped off. Later a friend gave me some guidance and some pointers on what the game did/didn’t expect of me and I’ve been a giant fan ever since.
Sekiro took me a little time to figure out what it expected from me, too, but now I absolutely adore that game. That’s more of a mechanical “what should I be doing in combat” statement of the fact that the game expects you to act aggressively while focusing on defense. Though
All the souls games. I don’t get it
They’re memorisation timesinks
Souls games didn’t make sense to me until I saw Giant Bomb play through Demon’s Souls. Mechanics that I didn’t know were there were explained in plain English, and then I could better understand where I went wrong when I died.
My first attempt was Dark Souls 3. I went in expecting challenging but rewarding battles, and a mysterious world to explore. Unfortunately, I found myself bored within an hour every time I played, and gave up on it after maybe a dozen sessions.
I tried Elden Ring maybe a year or two later. I stuck with it for longer, but the experience was roughly the same. The combat felt tedious. The art and animation didn’t appeal to my tastes. The world seemed big, but desolate. The controls somehow made me feel awkwardly disconnected from my character. Nothing about the game made me care about it at all. The biggest challenge was in keeping my eyelids open.
I wonder if I would find soulslikes more appealing if I had grown up on console games. They’re clearly popular, but it seems they just aren’t for me.
I actually bought DS3 twice, For the PS4 the first time, and couldn’t do anything. I’m not a console person by nature. Then I found out it was on PC, my jam, got it and OMG is that port shitty
I’ve enjoyed a lot of Soulslikes, but none of the ones made by FromSoft. Their style of providing poor explanations of mechanisms just makes no sense to me, even if you want to give players those moments of self-driven discovery.
I love the fuck out of dark fantasy. The problem is that while souls-games and Elden Ring, are drenched with dark fantasy elements, the game execution itself just didn’t appeal to me at all. I just don’t like the idea of tediousness mixed with a scale of difficulty where all and any progress of mine are just dashed because a slight misstep.
I enjoyed Blue Prince, I’m exactly who it was made for, but it was definitely much worse than people would lead you to believe.
The game makers had no respect for players’ time. You solve one of the large, run-independent puzzles and it all clicks, then it could take you several hours to playtime to luck into the conditions to actually test your solution. Everything takes longer than it should. It’s obvious that I’m going to toggle security settings every time I’m in the Security Room, why do you make me go through this slow as hell PC every time? It’s not for realism because no PC back then had such fantastical functionality, so why not make the PCs load screens faster? How does the slowness enhance the experience? Why not just put buttons on the wall you can toggle for the security settings, at least? There were times where I figured something out, and rather than spend ten hours trying to actually do the thing, I just looked up that part of a walkthrough to get the next info.
Really interesting game, but I did some napkin math and I wasted 25 avoidable hours during my playthrough (long unskippable loads and such) that could have been spend completing an entire different game.
The game makers had no respect for players’ time.
I don’t know that game, but the importance of respecting the player’s time cannot be overstated.
I wish more game makers understood this and prioritized it accordingly.
It’s a huge part of why I quit Destiny 2 entirely. A game that doesn’t respect the player’s time and pads it with RNG on top of RNG to extend playtime feels awful.
I absolutely agree with you, I got to a point where I had solved the “main” puzzle, but was struggling to complete other puzzles (that I knew the solution to) simply due to room draws.
I wanted to love the game, but it held itself back on the RNG design. It can be so detrimental to the game that I wouldn’t recommend it to most people.
I bought into the review hype, bought the game, then realized about two hours after the Steam refund window expired just how tedious this game felt to play.
I really wanted to like it, but it stopped being fun and started being so tedious that I uninstalled it.
I bought it ages ago but finally decided go give it a go. From the first day I could tell it wasn’t gonna be a game for me. Note-taking is basically mandatory, and it seems so easy just to get fucked out of a run by RNG.
Narrative seemed interesting but I feel like the whole “ability to decide what room you’re going into” thing should be weaved into the story off the bat.
Neat concept but not for me, but I think since I’ve owned it for so long I’m outside of the refund window.
You know, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. I’d say Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is worth playing for a lot of reasons, but I think it’s got huge fundamental issues in both its combat and narrative design; it’s still on the short list for most outlets’ game of the year awards this year. Hades just got a sequel, and I didn’t even care for the first one. For many people, those two games are just about the only roguelikes or -lites they’ve ever played, but I don’t think they’re even good ones of those; the level generation is so limited that you’ll have seen all their permutations quite quickly, and the bonuses from boons just about all feel superfluous and interchangeable. Hollow Knight holds this legendary status among metroidvanias, and Silksong followed suit. I thought Hollow Knight was just fine, but I was surprised to find that this was the game with that sort of following. When facing the possibility of playing Silksong this year or about 5 other video games that came out this year, I don’t think Silksong is making the cut.
But your mileage will absolutely vary. These games have hype for a reason: a lot of people love them. You might, too.
I’d go for CO:E33 too. Its a decent enough game but I don’t understand the absolute hype it receives. Probably a 5/10 game for me.
I can answer this for you. So imagine a genre of game that you grew up playing, loved, and sunk possibly thousands of hours in. Now imagine for like 15 years they only made the most dogshit version of that genre of game. Then someone comes along and makes a decent, even passable, modern version of that game.
It’s like giving dirty water to a dehydrated person. Is the water good? Fuck yeah in the moment it’s fantastic. Is the water the greatest water you’ve ever had? Well technically no, but please don’t take away the dirty water please.
continues playing trails games in the corner
All of the games you listed here were pretty under hyped IMO except for perhaps Silksong.
I understand this is all subjective, but I think you’re leaning toward like indie gaming hipster material with this comment…and that’s my opinion.
I leaned toward games that came highly recommended that I actually played.
I played E33 for about 4 hours. The combat system is atrocious. It feels like I’m playing a turn based RPG but with elements of Dark Souls? The almost necessity of dodging in combat made me give the game up.
I just played it on easy difficulty then it became enjoyable for me.
Horizon: Zero Dawn. I have yet to finish it but apart from robot dinosaurs, it feels so generically open world… Admitedly, a very pretty-looking open world. Can‘t really get into the story so far either since it takes itself so seriously while I‘m having a hard time not thinking too much about how ridiculous its world is. So apart from sight-seeing, there hasn‘t been much in this game for me thus far.
Edit: This comment section is a treasure trove of hot takes, so many of my beloved games mentioned making me go „What the fuck…,“ I love it
It’s absolutely a generic open world game, bit that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The formula is fun if it’s done well, which I think it is for Horizon Zero Dawn. The combat style is also uncommon and provides a satisfying loop of stealth and bullet time mechanics.
Dude. I have tried like 3 times to get into the horizon series. Just can’t do it. It’s so generic, just pretty.
I liked both games, but combat is ruined in the second. Literally just constant spamming of massive AOE attacks. All the nuance of the first is literally nuked from orbit.
Are you playing with gyro aiming? I also loved the gameplay of the first one and was disappointed by the second. My hypothesis is that aiming without gyro was too tedious so they updated the gameplay to require less aiming. Not that the game tries to be realistic anyway but the combo/special attacks and the time spent in the inventory/wheel kinda break the immersion/flow for me.
I had a great time with that game with the difficulty turned up a few notches. It really makes you use the tools in your tool belt, plan ahead for weaknesses, and lay traps. Without that stuff, I likely would have found it to be a generic open world, too. The story will always be ridiculous, but even taking itself seriously, there’s a payoff toward the end of the game where taking itself so seriously is still satisfying and makes sense, even with a world filled with absurd robot dinosaurs.
Took me awhile to get into it. I did eventually finish it. My criticism of the game was more that the dungeons aren’t really all that challenging and are mostly just places where the story advances. Not many puzzles or fights. You just do your fighting out in the open world. Also, eventually the fights are easy as you learn how to fight each type. Eventually you just avoid confrontations because they’re just time consuming.
Deep Rock Galactic. I was really excited to play it and I tried to like it. The colors and graphics were 10/10 awesome, I just found it to be extremely boring and repetitive.
Very fair, I had a lot of fun with it as a casual game to relax with. Not so easy it’s trivial, not so hard it needs a lot of thinking.
Man I LOVE drg. A good team on a call made this the most fun I’ve had playing in recent years. Unfortunately, the population is lower and one may have trouble finding new players. Veterans are usually happy to help, but you’d need a patient one.
For me, deep rock really shines when you’re playing the higher hazard levels. Seeing a wall of the cave move because it’s covered in enemies, and then hitting them with a fat boy gave me happy chemicals.
Elden Ring. It is good for what it is, probably the best in its genre, but after so many Soulsbornes, it just feels like more of the same. Formulaic. I’ve tried it three separate times and it never grabbed me.
The entire Mass Effect series. Many of the missions were dredging through mostly empty buildings that had copy-pasted boxes and random shit in them. Just generic buildings with generic crap stuffed into them. The world felt purposeless, sterile, and generic to me.
Also, the story just didn’t really grab me that much as I cringe at the romance parts of any story. And lastly, the gameplay was just clunky and awkward to me.
Out of curiosity, who did you romance, and why?
No one. Because it’s incredibly cringy.
So am I to assume there was more to the story that didn’t click with you than the optional narrative sub-branch that you chose not to engage with?
I played through fhe whole series thinking the good part was about to happen since there was hype for the game.
I do wish they’d done more with the buildings.
The structures being carbon-copy was lore, they’re built in factories and dropped from ships.
But that doesn’t mean they all need the same boxes in a row layout internally, some personality would have been great and pretty easy to implement.
I love the series, but I played the games when they came out. It’s true that the level design of ML2 suffers from it being a cover shooter and ML1 is very dated now.
Which of the three titles did you hate most/represents your dislike best?
Mario Kart World.
Soundtrack is 11/10. But they dropped the ball hard on the entire open world aspect. Completely wasted the entire potential.
Instead we get lame ass intermission tracks that count as the first two laps of the next race, so you don’t even get to enjoy the new and remade tracks during championships, because you’ll blink and miss them.
Fallout 4. I could never bring myself to finish it. The furthest I ever got was just before the Mass Fusion mission between the Institute and the Brotherhood, with the Railroad already dead. I just couldn’t summon the will to continue. In every playthrough after that, I rush to Nuka World, finish a few parks there, and call it quits again.
Being on the patient side of things, two games I’ve played in recent years and didn’t enjoy were:
God of War (2018) - it just felt like AAA slop to me. Meaningles upgrades, tons of obvious puzzles at any corner - never throwing in even a single brain teaser, boring combat - the best option was almost always to throw the axe, that thing were you start walking at a snails pace to mask loading and/or play a cutscene and on top of that your god powers being mostly cutscene exclusive. Just your bog standard AAA game with no ‘friction’ - boring.
Factorio - it just feels like work to me. On top of that, going in blind, I just didn’t enjoy building something up just to tear it down again because I’ve unlocked something new changing the requirements. Once again, feels like a job in IT. Also, resource patches being limited just gave me the weirdest kind of anxiety despite never actually seeing one run out.
Factorio’s the awakening for a lot of people on certain ends on the spectrum. My AuDHD makes it crack for me. I will say though, while the tutorial teaches you some essentials, it just throws you into the deep end once you start a real game.
I only discovered all the tips and quality of life from videos online, and there are some troubles in the game you can solve on your own but good fucking luck (belt balancing).
Might not be your kinda game, but if you ever feel like giving it another chance, check out some vids online for beginner tips (: It’s a game about stimulating the Eureka! part of our ooga booga caveman brains and it feels amazing.
I feel both of these strongly for the same reasons, also GoW had all the sluggishness of a Souls-like which immediately made it not fun to play.
Agreed. New GOW was much better.
Hot take alert
Hollow knight silksong.Its such a huge letdown for me as a massive fan of Hk… but they did so many things that are just… mean. They disrespect the player constantly… tc actually TROLLS YOU with trick benches n shit. But mainly waste so much of your time with shitty padded content. Fucking fetch quests, timed ‘flower’ quests by the dozen. Most of the primary content ends up being “just like hollow knight, but worse, and now do 10x more of the worse version.” So its unoriginal AND inferior to the source.
I tried so hard to love it and its nothing but frustration in the end.
I stopped playing it after the credits rolled only for someone to tell me there’s a secret Act 3 if you do some really specific stuff. I don’t really care for games that require guides, especially if they gate a bunch of content behind it, so I never came back to it.
However, I did enjoy the first two acts of Silksong much more than the first game. I was never a big fan of Hollow Knight and considered it among the worst of popular metroidvanias. But Silksong was pretty good outside of the fetch quests. Unlockable alternate move sets was probably my favorite bit
I picked up Vampire Survivors, played one round, and was like yeah I think I’m done here.
I picked it up and thought “this is so stupid,” right before spending many hours playing it.
Try out Magic Survival, the (way better) game VS was copied of
I don’t know how I managed to have gone through the game as long as I have. I got it for free when it was a giveaway on Epic. I feel that’s exactly the right price because really, it’s just an almost do-nothing but move slightly and just pick options kind of game. Got boring fast.
It started being really ridiculous when I got one character, a skeleton that threw bones, up to the point where all I see were just numbers, gems and other flying things from the abilities I picked. It just got comically stupid but still boring at the same time.
This game’s entire premise, was that it’s supposed to give you feel-good moments without having spending money like you normally would on mobile games. It behaves like a mobile game without MTX. But I think its problem is that it retains the other problems that mobile gaming has than just MTX, such as time-wasting, cheating you of your dopamine and all that.
I often stay away of new games because that exactly, the hype. If you play a new game and you say it sucks, everybody yells at you, but if you let past the time, it’s the time the one who gives reason to people.
In a lot of cases, the people who enjoyed it will have already said what they wanted to say about it, and then the detractors can just yell out the loudest. There’s a perception that BioShock Infinite was only praised because of release hype, and a lot of people look back at it unkindly for one reason or another, but I’ve seen a number of people experience it for the first time in just the past couple of years, unaware of any reputation it might have, and they loved it like we all did at launch.
This happened to me with Resident Evil 3 Remake, I didn’t knew that had so many haters behind but I really enjoyed the game. One thing to hate, they say, is the short duration of the game. I mean, you could beat the original game in 2 hours, if you didn’t knew nothing about the game, could take you like 7 or 8 hours
Yeah, I liked that one more than its reputation as well. In some ways, I liked it better than the 2 remake.
Dark Souls.
I played Demons Souls and it was awesome, but Dark Souls is so confuse, I couldn’t understand shit about the story, and it’s not that hard, harder than Demons Souls but no that hard.
Dark Souls is a 14 year old game
you’re probably right
