Zelda breath of the wild - it’s one of the worst Zelda games I’ve ever played and I’ve played so many. There were so many bad decisions made with this game from weapons breaking to getting rid of traditional dungeons. It’s a great open world game but a terrible Zelda game.
The Horizon series by Guerilla Games - These games are good for the most part, however they suffer from long stretches of boring open world where you have to fight robot dinosaurs with underpowered weapons. The whole point of the combat is to find weaknesses with the enemies and exploit/attack those weaknesses, but the game never at any point explicitly explains that concept or focuses on that concept. It expects you to just understand what to do. Not to mention the absolutely stupid grinding for mats to make new weapons and armor. Melee combat is terrible, the story for the most part is pretty good but man does it take forever to pick up, it overstays it’s welcome. They are technical powerhouses but just so grindy and boring.
I agree with all you said about Zelda BOTW. As a Zelda game I was really disappointed. But if you set aside the Zelda part it was actually a pretty fun game for me. I really enjoyed the exploration and it was the best open world game I played so far. But too easy forgettable dungeons and too easy bosses and darn weapons breaking really bothered me so I’m not even interested in the TOTK. I’ll wait for the next Zelda game and keep my fingers crossed.
Pretty sure they’ve stated Zelda games will lean closer to the two recent entries going forward, so those of us who think like this really can only cross our fingers that something resembling previous Zelda titles returns.
What I love about the Zelda games is that they try out something new with each title. So who knows, maybe they’ll eventually do a Zelda that’s geared more to fans of the older titles.
Weapon breaking is controversial but I see it as a mechanic with positive impact on the game. Just because your weapons were not permament it actually added choice into which weapon do you want to use in the battle
It does not add any choice. All it did was encourage me to speed run my way to the master sword and essentially go down the line of weapons I had in a boss fight until I ran out. There was no strategy, just a sense of never wanting to use any of the good weapons and hoarding them. It was so bad I marked a spot on the map where weapons would respawn every blood moon so I could at least have some good weapons. Guess what that’s called in every other game? A repair mechanic. Don’t even get me started on the master sword “breaking” for no thematic reason.
I’m on the disagree side on this. As much as I did use whatever garbage the game threw at me, there was no incentive to use your best weapons tactically, because unless you were fighting a boss, breaking a good weapon would not bring an equivalent reward… and then the major bosses were weak to the Master Sword anyway.
It also felt incredibly unrewarding to explore and open chests only to find yet another disposable weapon rather than some permanent upgrade like the heart pieces used to be.
Around the time I felt like Horizon Zero Dawn did more to encourage smart use of multiple weapons than Zelda did, by giving them different funcions and making it so enemies had different defenses and weak spots.
I felt the same way about the first Horizon game. I was playing on normal, barely making any progress because A) I couldn’t be assed to care about any of the characters, and B) the combat was really finicky.
I mean, I get it you’re fighting giant killer machines with a bow and arrow, but still. I had a way more enjoyable time when I turned the difficulty down and got a couple mods (just ammo and carry capacity upgrades so I didn’t have to stop to collect resources after every single fight).
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.
I agree, but I also think kids nowadays find it interesting too, but hell, they find Fortnite interesting too, so maybe Palworld is gonna be the next big thing for them now (if it survives the hype and the pass of time).
A bit more about nostalgia, I remember I played Pokémon Red and obviously watched the anime too, but then I saw a magazine advertising Pokémon yellow and showing Jesse, James and Meow, I was like WTF I need to have this, plot twist never did (not physically at least) but at least I continued with Fire Red, Ruby (never finished it) Diamond and Platinum, Soul Silver and I kinda stopped there, currently playing Omega Ruby because yeah, nostalgia, oh and yeah I finished Pokémon yellow recently in Anbernic RG351V, so a very good way to achieve it if you ask me.
It would have been interesting if they released more games like Pokémon yellow (making it easier to feel we are in the anime).
I don’t play Pokemon expecting a good turn-based RPG, I just like collecting cool little monsters and making them grow. Similar games like Cassette Beasts, Monster Sanctuary, and now Palworld appeal to me for the same reason.
GTA V - I disliked the characters, story was uninteresting, and gameplay felt like a downgrade from GTA IV; graphics were the main attraction there, and that’s not enough for me
Borderlands - my fastest “nope, not for me” game I’ve played; I don’t like loot in games, and that’s basically the entire point of the game
Skyrim - found it very bland coming from Morrowind; side quests weren’t as interesting, which is pretty much the entire reason I liked Morrowind
any competitive FPS (Apex Legends, COD, etc) - I play most games once the get the story, mechanics, etc
What about loot do you not like? I don’t mind random loot to a degree, but I’m not a big fan of games where you have to wait for a drop with max stats or whatever. Give me a loot pool with randomizations if you want, but no random stats (e.g., if it has fire that always means the same amount of bonus, or whatever)
TL;DR - I’m a fan of tighter, focused experiences with a strong element of puzzle solving, and I’m generally not a fan of sandbox-y experiences.
Some of my favorite games are Zelda, Ys, or Half Life. Loot in those games is typically an intentional part of the progression, and the gameplay feels like an action-y puzzle. Resources have a specific purpose, and wasting them has consequences.
Using a slightly different weapon, item, cosmetic, etc doesn’t excite me at all, I am mostly there for the story and gameplay. To me, shopping feels like poor game design and essentially covering for the player missing something important. So games with extensive store/inventory mechanics feel poorly designed, on average.
There’s one big exception here: if the economy of the game is integral to the core loop. For example, I love Recettear, which makes loot and inventory management a core mechanic in an interesting way. I’m also working on my own game with a player-driven economy (e.g. if you sell a lot of something, you get less for each additional one, it’s cheaper for AI/other players to buy, and NPCs will slowly distribute the items around the game world).
On those same lines, I generally don’t like things with crafting, enchanting, etc, unless it’s an interesting, core gameplay mechanic. I’m very goal oriented, so the journey is less important than the destination, so I like constant “mini-destinations” (boss fights, puzzles, etc). I almost never replay games, unless there’s a different set of challenges to explore (e.g. I loved each of the three characters in Ys Origin, but won’t bother playing Morrowind twice).
Yeah, I’m not a fan of loot that offers incremental benefit, but I do enjoy loot that offers a meaningfully different way to engage with the game (be that a new ability in a metroidvania or some new weapon in a soulslike)
Yup, I love the ability-based progression in Zelda, older Ys, Metroidvanias like Ori and Hollow Knight, etc.
I don’t like loot for the sake of loot. For example, Borderlands prides itself on having 16-17M weapons (they’re procedurally generated). That’s not interesting to me, that’s tedious. I much prefer the Half-Life approach (14 in original, 10 in Half Life 2), where each weapon fills a niche and you pick based on what you need.
A lot of people love loot in games, such as in MMORPGs, Bethesda-style RPGs, and Diablo-style RPGs. The latter is the most frustrating because many people mean Diablo-style when they say “ARPG,” whereas I mean Zelda/Ys-style.
I don’t care how good the story is, 13 Sentinels gameplay looking like a cheap sci-fi movie interface thing just takes me out of the experience, I also don’t like tower defense style games and this is the only thing you will do in-between story beats. I was extremely letdown to get this after the first teasers instead of a mecha vs kaiju brawler.
Then some months later it comes out that localizers were also changing things too far, now I have another reason to not finish it.
I wanted to like it, but the gun play was underwhelming and gameplay kind of boring.
Worst of all was the progression. Upgrades were tiered in ways that made 1 a clear best choice. Perks were uninteresting passives or actives with bizarre activation requirements. No way to upgrade flares or pickaxes. And I’m not a guy that cares about cosmetics, so it just didn’t work for me.
I’m happy for everyone else that got a GOAT experience though.
I think it depends on how you upgrade it though, slight time increase, colors just for the fun of it, range on how far you throw. None of that Crosses over with the flare gun too much.
This is controversial for sure. But I dislike all kinds of games that focus on driving or racing or flying a plane. I don’t know but driving a vehicle like you do in real life is kind of stupid for a game idea? I want to do things that I can’t do IRL, like murdering a bunch of bad guys, or building a village, things like that. Also casting magic spells is better than shooting a gun, so I don’t really get FPS games.
Racing games for the most part are because it is something I can’t do irl. There’s no way I’m going to get to be one of 12 drivers running the brand new Prototype race cars, but I sure can get almost as close in a racing simulator.
They are all just ways to “do things I can’t in real life” though. I have no interest in murdering people but I enjoy driving and 18 wheeler across Europe or flying all around the world.
I was really excited for “open world dark souls”, but I feel like this turned out to be a bad combination. The difficulty is all over the place, so you fight enemies that are really strong (which is fine), but then other areas become completely trivial as a result.
And with how many bosses they put into the game, the quality of each individual fight suffered immensely imo. I think the bosses in previous games were just a lot better designed (on average, there are of course stinkers in Souls games and good ones in Elden Ring).
There’s also a ton of gank bosses, which is just lazy. You could use the summons, of course, and it almost feels like a lot of the difficulty was designed around players having that extra strength, but at the same time, the enemy AI and movesets are designed around fighting a single person, so it breaks the combat.
All around, it was just a huge disappointment for me personally, and I uninstalled it right after I beat it, whereas I have hundreds of hours in DS3.
Fromsoft had to fix a security vulnerability in all their games that got advertised in the final months before release. All Fromsoft games went offline for like a year and it really short circuited how Elden Ring got finished.
Souls games are particularly crafted series of levels. That kind of gameplay has to either be condensed in between stretches of empty, or spread out thinly over a large area.
Elden Ring has some condensed areas with good classic Souls level feel, but they’re often quite short. There is also a lot of very empty areas with little to no significance. A lot of the game feels like placeholder content that had cancelled plans.
Absolutely agree on Red Dead Redemption 2. Another point considering it’s an open world game it plays extremely linearly and sometimes in missions it tells you that you can’t leave a certain area for no reason.
I really enjoyed it, and will return to it. But I put it down because it felt like doing chores. I will try again and try to focus on the scenery and story, which I do like a lot
Skyrim. I dislike most everything about this game. It’s not a “bad” game as in it doesn’t work and it’s not exploitative, I just think it’s quite average.
Combat is pathetically simple. There are some interesting support spells but by and large magic is either bolt spamming, beam spell, or you summon golems. Melee is even worse just having basic and strong attacks. This is exemplified by the meme that you can make your character however you want…as long as it’s a stealth archer. But even then the Stealth Archer gameplay is pitiful. Archery has the same boring attacks as melee and stealth is just watching a little icon.
The story is garbage. Besides a few side quests, the main campaign is just awful.
The open world is pretty decent, but is waaaaay too small and jam-packed. Skyrim is supposed to be a remote nordic province. But Skyrim does a terrible job at having places feel remote and like wilderness. Every time you turn a corner in a mountain pass there’s another cottage or bandit tower, etc. It feels like a theme park whose theme is nordic wilderness.
The progression is mostly boring. The skill tree is almost entirely passive bonuses. Do X% more damage, Attacks have a chance to do bleeding, increased range, etc. Very few skill trees have an effect on what you can do; just how well you do it.
Again, Skyrim isn’t a terrible game. It’s competent at what it does, but not good at it. The only caveat is that there weren’t many open world RPGs before Skyrim that were as large or became as popular. Plenty of games who did every aspect of Skyrim better; but I struggle to find one that did them all at the same time. /rant
The open world is pretty decent, but is waaaaay too small and jam-packed. Skyrim is supposed to be a remote nordic province. But Skyrim does a terrible job at having places feel remote and like wilderness. Every time you turn a corner in a mountain pass there’s another cottage or bandit tower, etc. It feels like a theme park whose theme is nordic wilderness.
That’s exactly the reason why I like the game. That and how moddable it is lol
I have the exact opposite opinion, heh. Sniper elite drove me crazy when I'd carefully line up a shot and be just too far inside cover and shoot a wall I couldn't see because my freaking character was in the way
In general anything with crafting and/or excessive loot. I find it very boring and especially when a game is advertised as “survival” when in reality it is just a crafting game with no real threat.
Subnautica is almost an outlier to the rule but the ocean triggers a phobia so I can’t play it. The Long Dark is probably the best example of a survival game with crafting that I do really like.
That trend of shoving crafting into literally everything for a while was really irritating. Even with the great big empty MMO world, Dragon Age Inquisition would have been much more fun if I didn’t spend a good half hour after every expedition looking through the giant mountain of crafting-based loot I inevitably acquired.
Uncharted made me feel like being the protagonist of a movie (something like Indiana Jones). The production value was much higher than other games at the time.
The universe is great but why would I feel bad about bandits not being able to be bandits anymore!? Still there is a lot of potential in that wild west universe.
GTA5. I loved the 4th one but not really liked the 5th one. I guess I can’t understand why you have to be a bad guy in these games and I’m getting too old for that.
Assassin’s Creed after the second one. The plot lost me and I don’t think there is a plot anymore.
MGSV. I loved the first 4 MGS and hated that one as it had no good story…
You can’t understand why you need to be a bad guy in a game called Grand Theft Auto, where the main focus of the series is stealing cars and building a criminal empire?
To be fair, in many of the GTA games, you’re not a bad guy. Sure, you break the law; but in almost every instance, the law is super corrupt anyway and you almost always end up working for said corrupt cops at some point because they have you by the balls.
Vice City is the only one I can’t really find any justification for the protagonists actions other than greed; and that one’s story is basically Scarface where you’re playing as Tony Montana.
To be fair, in many of the GTA games, you’re not a bad guy.
I've played Vice City, 4 and 5 and every one of them started out with the main character(s) being a bad guy who is just a little less evil than the people around them, but still willing to kill to get what they want.
4: Niko grew up as a child soldier and has basically been under the thumb of mob bosses his whole life. It’s also the ONLY game where you actually have choices in many cases to not kill someone as part of his revenge story (he wants to find and kill the man who sold out his unit in some war and got all his friends killed).
5: Franklin used to be a car thief, and has since gone straight as a repo man. His dumbass friends, along with Micheal and Trevor, get him caught up in all sorts of bullshit he doesn’t necessarily want to do, but doesn’t really have much choice. Micheal is also an ex-criminal trying to go straight, but having a much harder time at it than Franklin. His hot headedness is what got them into major trouble prior to Trevor’s arrival. Trevor is not only a bad guy and a psychopath, he could be considered the main villain of the game. Most of the plot revolves around Micheal trying to hide the truth from Trevor, because he knows Trevor is a fucking maniac and will possibly kill him and his entire family because he sold him out to the cops when they were bank robbers and Micheal wanted out of that life.
San Andreas: CJ is an ex-gang member who comes home to attend the funeral of his mother who was recently murdered. Things start out with him simply wanting to bring the killer to justice, and gets swept up in more gang violence, police corruption and even government conspiracies.
They’re as much bad guys as John Wick or John McClane or Arnold Schwartznegger in pretty much any of his 80’s and 90’s action films.
Being an ex criminal who is trying to reform after armed robberies, but still committing new crimes, is still being a bad guy. Choosing not to kill people doesn't make someone not a bad guy when they still continue to commit crimes as part of the game.
Painting the targets of their crimes as worse doesn't make them not bad people.
I totally agree with MGS5. I just could not get in to the game, I barely felt like I was playing an MGS game. It felt like Ghost Recon or some Ubisoft collectathon game, with just such a lackluster story.
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