Final Fantasy 7. I’ve tried to play it multiple times, but the game’s story never pulled me in. And with how long of a trek it is between story moments and the slog of combat encounters I usually put the game down.
Were you older than 12 when you first tried to play it? Because that’d do it.
I was 12 when I played it and I loved it so much that I wrote a convincing essay on why it was the greatest game ever. I then freehand drew the logo as a cover to the essay. I attach a copy on my resume.
I’ll pile on and say there’s no way I’d enjoy it now but my younger self totally agrees.
I think the thing to remember about games from that era is that we had so fewer options and so much more time on our hands. Feels like I ditch games much quicker now if they’re a slog or repetitive.
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.
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 tend to agree but then I also have moments where I get lost in the world for a few hours and it’s great. Death Stranding is probably my favourite where I walk everywhere and I spend an hour doing one delivery!
I also miss story driven games such as Uncharted games, playing several open world games in a row can be exhausting, I kinda feel it for game reviewers and such.
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.
I agree there. At the very least with the first of them. The 2nd and 3rd started to add a lot of crafting mechanics, but I really enjoyed the first one (and have played all 3 to completion)
ditto rdr2 - its less a video game than it is a graphic novel read by a semi-literate slow talker
the entire dark souls series is also ruined by clunky controls. give me a Doom, Quake, Counter-Strike, Unreal Tournament, Skyrim, etc . . . fps controls pls.
X4 fails because of its controls too. Imagine making a flight sim where you can’t invert the Y axis, or an FPS where the shift key can’t be bound to sprint.
Also, everybody started the round the same, and it was your skill, knowledge of the map etc. Which made the difference, not if you had unlocked some better scopes or weapons
Any of the Paper Mario or Super Mario RPG games. Maybe I’m not the target audience, but I’ve often felt that without the Mario name they would be considered mediocre.
Alongside this, basically every 3D Sonic game. I feel that Sonic has become a thing for furries, and that the 3D games just don’t really seem to get what a Sonic game should be. Frontiers was somewhat decent in the open world aspect, but its constant reliance on the homing dash just highlights how buggy those games are.
any 3d Zelda games. I didn't play OOT until I was in my late 20s and it was awful (specifically controls and camera). I tried watching people Speedrun it or do the randomizer, but the sound link makes when rolling (which most did most of the time) drove me crazy. BotW seemed like something I would like on paper, but Nintendo just had to work their new controls into some shrines and I found it frustrating. Also didn't like the breaking weapons. Link Between Worlds (神様のトライフォース ２) sits in a weird place. I mostly liked it, but hated the gimmicky 3d bits on the 3DS.
goldeneye for the same reasons - felt like a step backward and I had no nostalgia for it, playing it for the first time in my 30s.
anything with the N64 controller for the same reasons. It felt so unnatural and weird.
most roguelikes (but not all). Losing to random chance is annoying. Some randomness is of course fine
dark souls and the like. Watch boss. Die. Try again. Die. To me, that's boring. I'd rather have in-world ways of learning about the boss.
pokemon. I was already in high school, working part time, and doing a lot of school stuff (band/theatre/sports) and just never got into it. I tried Pokemon go and didn't care for it (but did like Dragon Quest Walk that came out later)
Final Fantasy 7 -- hated the camera and other similar things. Story and all was fine
Most 3rd person shooters (with the exception of Just Cause). I would line up the perfect shot in Sniper Elite only to shoot the few pixels of the corner of something I couldn't see because my character's dumb body was in the way
starfox. I was already playing better games like that on Amiga and other platforms, so it felt like a step back to me
I know it’s kind of an unpopular thread, but geez, those are widely considered some of the greatest games. It seems like you’re a bit older than I was when I played most of those, and I wonder if my youth made me enjoy those games more than they deserved.
Yep. I think my age (I'm in my mid-40s) and being an adult when I played them or they came out has a lot to do with it. I think having less free time and a number of issues I deal with makes it harder to enjoy certain types of games (this is not to say young people don't face their own stresses and issues!)
I’m so glad someone else feels the same way I do about OoT. I could go on for hours about how Nintendo ruined their franchise with cheap gimmicky 3D at the time, and that damned controller.
I’m not so on board with the rest, being a massive dark souls fan myself, but diversity makes us stronger and all that, you do you.
I think any game you grew up with gets a nostalgia level assigned to it and it's easy to overlook certain flaws. For me, OoT felt like a step back, but I had been playing PC and Amiga games lot (I hated Starfox for this same reason). I'm sure I have the nostalgia glasses for some games, but I'm old enough that I think many wouldn't even know them, hah.
Exactly, lttp was perfection and we already had decent 3d with mouse and keyboard controls on PC, it was a major step back. I guess that was just Nintendo nintendoing what Nintendo nintendoes.
I remember showing Ocarina to my dad and excitedly telling him it’s the peak of gaming and nothing would ever beat it’s graphics! Think I completed the game in 26hrs non-stop without sleep.
I’ve seen it since and it’s so blocky I struggle to see how I ever liked it. So I will appreciate the memories instead. :)
The N64 controller is my favourite ever controller. Bizarre shape but I had so many hours racked up on it in my teens that it holds a special place in my heart.
Which Roguelikes do you like? I’m the same - hate them all for being overly difficult. Except original ADOM which I played constantly.
I think "rogue-lite" or something like that is a better term for what I like. I'm currently playing "Against the Storm" is one a coworker recommended recently and I'm enjoying so far. Spelunky 2 was OK. There are probably a couple other's I'm not remembering at the moment.
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 ☹️.
I’ve found games like that too filled with super serious gamers. DoTA is the same but the community is a bit friendlier.
I have ZERO patience so I’ll just storm ahead into battle and try to fuck things up but that’s not a great way to play cos you keep dying and lose time on the board. I tried to get into Heroes of the Storm when it started and the more casual players were a lot more fun but over time it developed the usual crowd of hardcore addicts that ruined it.
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.
Maybe you are missing, or ignoring the context that this was like the big jump from conventional Zelda to… Well BOTW.
I don’t consider myself a Zelda guy, but I have played several games, and I find BOTW a very good open world, yeah, it might feel empty, but at the same time it feels like you can do lots of things, kinda like making your own adventure, so I guess it needs commitment from the user side.
That aspect made me understand the context of the game and I have been having a lot of fun with it, if you see something you must likely can interact with it, or has a meaning.
This is very impressive for a Wii U/Switch game if you ask me, and also I feel like if I don’t play BOTW before Tears of The Kingdom I would never go back to try it 🤣 (that is why I’m paying it).
My only real issue with it is that its soundtrack on the field is so dull, some people like it and say that it is to be ambient or subtle, but screw that, give me my epic tracks! I need something that moves my feet lol, there must be a reason why many RPGs (which are with us before open world games and provide a lengthy experience) have catchy tracks.
Breathe of the Wild is a great tech demo, but a terrible game… I feel like a total boomer playing Ship of Harkinian… but… sadly 3D Zelda has a worse fucking track record than 3D Sonic…
I want to go back to RDR2 but I’m not a fan of how slow moving the intro is and I don’t want to do loads of bullshit before having fun.
For my answer.
Super Mario Bros Wonder… I’m playing through it now. It’s a bit shit. They’ve definitely tried some stuff here which isn’t bad but very little is landing for me. I don’t like the new kingdom, I don’t like the map experience or aesthetic and I dislike some of the level building.
When I played Mario Maker 2 I saw the reason behind the success for the franchise in that there was a secret sauce to how a level is made and it is apparently missing from a lot of these. On top of that the castle battles are fairly lackluster with no sign of Bowser.
I’ll finish it but it’s miles behind the previous entries, all of them I think
I had fun playing Wonder, but it was just really easy with the exception of the bonus world. Another case of dumbing down in the name of “accessibility”.
Skyrim never “clicked” for me. I remember hearing awesome things about it: a vast open world full of things to discover, the ability to create my own character and build it however I wanted, the option to influence the world around me with my choices…
In practice, I found myself in a very big but mostly empty world, full of copy-pasted uninspired dungeons with randomized loot, and no matter what character I chose to build, the combat system sucks and the AI never tries to do anything more than mindlessly walk towards you (and get stuck on the scenery). I was never able to immerse myself in the world because everything was so drab and insipid: generic characters living in generic cities talking about generic things with a very bad dub.
Choices never matter because the game insists on spoon-feeding you everything it has to offer. You can roleplay as a barbarian and still become the headmaster of Hogwarts; you can side with the romans or the vikings but the world doesn’t change aside from the uniform of the guards patrolling the cities you visit; you can ignore the dragons roaming the land and they never do anything, because they are just random encounters in the world without any kind of personality or goal aside from turning up and being a minor annoyance to the player.
The modding community is great, but even after spending a few hours installing a dozen or so mods, I was never able to escape the jankiness of the original game: it was still Skyrim, just with a different coat of paint (and a few less bugs and horrible UI decisions).
Reading about the overall reception of Starfield, I felt like I was going crazy, because everything the people say about that game, I already felt about Skyrim fifteen years ago. On the one hand, I felt like my feelings were being legitimized; on the other hand, I still don’t understand why people forgive Skyrim (and still play it to this day) but hate the new Bethesda game so much.
I feel like, at this point, any enjoyment I still derive from Bethesda games is really just leftover nostalgia for Morrowind that will likely never come close again to how 14yo me was able to enjoy them, when they were still something new.
There’s travel and discovery in Skyrim, which imho makes up a bit for its many flaws. Starfield on the other hand was stripped of that, in the sense that you always land directly on points of interest, so there’s never a process of “getting there”, or even “getting around”, which to me was the whole point of Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim. Also the landscape is almost never handmade, but procedurally generated, so it has very little appeal. That sense of discovery I had in Morrowind was still there in Skyrim,… but completely gone in Starfield
GTA games are the epitome of shallowness, for me. The story is always so vague and not interesting, you never get attached to characters. Gameplay is a boring loop, but its strength has always been being some sort of theme park. But it’s 2024 and “hop onto a game just to go fast on car and shoot a couple of civilians”
Animal Crossing: New Horizons. Like Pokémon, nintendo developers know fans will buy new games regardless of how much new content there is to it. There is no legitimate reason for the game to be so close mechanically to its Gamecube entry, and I find it an insult to long time fans.
The last of us was a boring shooter with unlikable characters who continually did things i wouldn’t do so i couldn’t invest myself in their story. The gameplay didn’t save it.
What I find most interesting about the game is experiencing the characters stories and their reasoning for their actions. The gameplay is fine enough to keep it interesting for me.
bin.pol.social
Aktywne