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.
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?
Still grinding that World of Warcraft: Legion Remix. New phase started this week, along with the next raid. I’ve been playing so much the last couple of weeks, that it’s definitely getting stale, but I’ve been saying the same thing for a few weeks already, and I’m still playing, albeit a bit less.
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 vindicated. I have the exact same feeling of factorio feeling too much like work, having to refactor everything because the requirements change is one of the more frustrating parts of software engineering imo, and the game feels tailored specifically to invoke that frustration.
I imagine that part gets better after the first hundred hours where you basically know what’s coming. I don’t have the patience to learn the tech tree though, given that I don’t even enjoy the game.
Yeah I’ve seen people try to balance things perfectly in factorio, but my strat is always to overproduce and let belts getting backed up balance out the throughput.
Yeah same. I’ve seen other people stockpile intermediate resources to try and smooth out bottlenecks, but I think that’s wasteful. Build extra throughout, and have as little product sitting there as possible.
I’m fuzzy on the details, but it went something like this:
I set up long resource lines of coal, copper and iron.
I needed a thing#1 and built a neat little package to build it, exactly to order and on minimal space.
I copy pasted that design 10 times left to right along my resource belt line.
Then thing#2 came along. Needed the same stuff and combined with thing#1 into thing#3. So I wrapped my resource belts, designed a second package on minimal space and also copy pasted it 10 times. So I had pairs of thing#1 and thing#2 with a line in the middle to combine them and a belt to collect them. Worked nicely.
Then:
Coal was replaced by electricity. I had no space for powerlines.
I got other types of the grab thingies, potentially simplifying my setup.
Suddenly I got sorting, making my belt setup a waste of space (I had one line per thing/resource).
All belts needed to be replaced by better belts.
Oh and:
Thing#4 came along, needing 2 of thing#1 and one thing#2 with some additional resources. Since I built to order, I basically had to start from scratch or severly hamper the production of thing#3. Also, my packages didn’t work anymore without wasting space and/or entirely fucking up resource belt management.
Therefore, I designed stuff from scratch to fit the new requirements.
That’s from the very beginning, but after repeating this pattern a few times, I gave up. Building it non-optimized felt even worse.
Interesting. Optimizing the factory for your immediate current needs sounds very tedious, because those needs change all the time. I instead optimize for expandability and adaptability. The factory game genre isn’t for everyone, but if you are interested in some tips:
My solution is usually something like:
really long line of basic resources (usually a belt of smelted copper and a belt of smelted iron, eventually adding more stuff and adding more belts of iron and copper as supplies are needed)
when I need thing 1, I make a little package that builds it, drawing resources from the line with splitters so the excess can continue down the line
thing 2 is an independent little package farther down the line
When it’s time for thing 3, I build copies of the packages for building thing 1 and thing 2 as necessary to feed the construction of thing 3, again as separate feeds splitting off the main resource line
when it’s time for thing 4, its again independent of the production of things 1-3, except they are splitting off the same main resource belt
If the resources on the main belt are insufficient to feed all of those machines, one of three things needs to happen: 1. Add more raw resource processing until your belt is full and backed up at the beginning 2. If that’s not enough, upgrade the belt 3. If you don’t have a belt upgrade available, build another main resource line and use splitters to rebalance it onto the main line
This construction allows for easy expansion without having to destroy anything. I typically don’t disassemble anything unless it’s actually a problem for some reason or I need the space. This is especially important because you often need some basic components like the level 1 belts even into the late game.
Also, once you unlock robots, you can literally copy-paste, just select an area to upgrade all belts/arms/etc. in, and a lot of other neat tricks that drastically speed things up.
And one last peace of advice: Overproduce everything and let belts backing up balance out the resource distribution. Then if you discover that belts that previously were backed up are now sparse, figure out why and optimize it, usually by adding more production of whatever the missing resource is.
Ultimately throughput is all that matters. Loss of throughput because you don’t need something isn’t wasteful. Loss of throughput because you aren’t producing enough of something is a problem to solve. Things that don’t affect throughput don’t matter and aren’t wasteful.
I played pretty much the same way De_Narm did. I tried caring less, though because I had no idea what would come next, it inevitably descended into spaghetti. I am stressed out about technical debt enough at work to be playing a technical debt simulator lol.
Dedicating the space needed to expand, ensuring everything you build is scalable, inevitably requires you to know a lot about what’s coming.
Yeah, if you know what you’re doing you can avoid these issues. I did not enjoy myself in the slightest, so after some hours of giving it a chance I decided that learning how to avoid these issues was not worth the pain. I’ll just stick to work instead.
Elden ring. Repetitive, ugly, boring. I don’t think I made it past the wasteland you start in but I never saw anything worth seeing and the dying over and over gameplay is frustrating for me, not fun. I played for a couple of hours and just gave up on it, i saw no progress or any story, just repetitive killing
Yeah I’m a huge factorio player and I so badly wanted to like satisfactory but i can only describe the gameplay as cock and ball torture. For the first 6 hours you are getting kicked in the balls repeatedly by pointless tasks that drag you out of the automation loop. The game is not playable until you unlock the hydro power.
I was not throwing shade in the game as it is pure eye candy, when you unlock the space elevator that was a “holy shit” moment. It does really look good, but factorio the base game, I could get lost in for days, nevermind doing mods like pyanodon.
LOL I could have told you that before you spent the money.
Thankfully there’s a lot of good games that really shine on high-end hardware. Like that Indiana Jones game and the Spider-Man games. Also you never have to worry about games being an unoptimized mess, when you can just brute force them with pure processing power.
Absolutely. The original Deus Ex is pretty excellent too. And the turn based Shadowrun games. It’d be cool if 2077 was better though, the tabletop game is sick.
I really liked and the story. But after taking a year break and then playing the dlc phantom liberty. I kinda was over it. Just felt like work. Not really fun.
So idk. Maybe you just have to be in the right mood for it.
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.
I still enjoyed Elden Ring, but I agree completely. I prefer the metroidvania world design of earlier From Software games. The sense of progression is one of the best parts of those games, and Elden Ring’s open world robs the it of a lot of the magic of earlier titles, where discoveries were around every corner and in every nook and cranny. I never felt the same joy of exploration and hard won progress as I did in Dark Souls, Bloodborne, and Sekiro.
Double-agreed, but from a different point. What frustrated me about Elden Ring was that some of the dungeons were literally the best designed soulsbourne levels I’ve ever played. Everything between those dungeons, though, just felt like open world slop. The game would have been pure crack if it had just been tighter.
If it were more linear akin to their older games and dramatically reduced the visual clutter of most bosses, it would’ve been perfect, but those two things brought it way down imo. These sorts of games excel in smaller, more linear but interconnected environments.
Bg3. I think the flaws are glaringly obvious and everyone has heard them already (inventory, everything after act 1, the main characters being generally gross) it’s just whether they’re a deal breaker for you personally. For me they are, especially inventory.
Same. I tried to just ‘go with it’ and ignore the flaws so that I could play multi-player with my SO. Act 2 was a slog. Act 3 is where we gave up completely. The only good part is that the whiny companions started dying on their own.
My favourite part of returning to camp was lying to gale that I’d found no magical items while having 4 characters invs basically overflowing with items I didnt want.
Wyll is the least immediately unlikeable but he’s boring and I hated talking to him
Laezel, shadow - clearly intended to parallel each other but listening to hard-headed morons clash between “we should murder everything” and “those people need medicine and my only medicine is pain” is not entertaining to me. Their “growth” doesn’t ever seem to fix this
Karlach I don’t have real complaints about
Gale never managed to grow out of being pompous and annoying
Dark urge probably the biggest character
There’s plenty of listicles and reddit posts with other complaints if you google “don’t like bg3 characters”.
I had the same feeling, didnt really like the characters they were weird but after modding some custom ones in I enjoyed it a lot more. I did keep astrlas ans shadow heart then put my own two characters to fill the party.
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