Can’t stand media that thrusts you into a zany, fantastical world where completely insane shit happens constantly, nothing makes sense, there’s no consistency and you’re supposed to somehow keep going through the fever dream of a setting for however many hours before you can piece together what’s actually going on and become invested
Needless to say I bounced off Nier: Automata really hard
Yeah, I never once felt that any scenes in Near A Tomato actually connected to one another. In a good mystery game, you make a discovery rife with questions, and then slowly answer more questions that lead to other questions. Nier is just about constant random shit involving attacks from the machine life forms - which are all promptly forgotten.
I don’t know how we’re supposed to care and worry so much about 2B and 9S dying when it literally happens once in the prologue, and the very first lines of the game are about how annoying it is to keep dying and being reborn.
I know a lot of nier automata fans irl and sometimes it’s hard to argue with them about the game
I think that the worst part about nier automata is that it tries to be all philosophical and deep while saying absolutely nothing. By being so mysterious about its world, the whole game builds up to some kind of reveal that creates a gigantic twist… But then you realize that the twist doesn’t really exist and that yeah all the shit is just random stuff.
Such a huge disappointment. And the combat is terrible imo
Suprisingly, while Omori had much MUCH more of a “random shit happening” feeling because of its setting, it had an extremely good story and I had never been that attached to characters before. So I don’t even think Nier’s problem is the fever dream feeling
I’m going to have to tar and feather and entire genre I’m afraid.
It’s the weird intersection of visual novel and dating simulators.
They are truly horrible derivative fantasy, written by severely emotionally stunted incels with less sexual/world experience and writing skill than the average grade 7 student.
Same here as well. It’s the first game that came to mind.
It doesn’t help that there was so much hype about the storytelling.
Maybe the story’s great compared to sports games and Calls of Duty? I finished it, more out of confusion than anything else.
I honestly don’t get what people love so much about that game, the combat is simple and kinda sloppy, boss and enemy variety is non-existent and traversal is a joke.
I get that the story is good but it’s not so good that I can look past everything else, it even has a few big issues like the amount of times the game throws a dumb obstacle in your way to justify some fetch quest like the black mist.
Maybe the change of style helped? IDK I remember I enjoyed it a lot, but yeah, the enemy variation was its greatest fault, I hope they fixed this with the sequel, that I haven’t played.
Spring engine based RTS games have been the best for a long time. I remember being similarly excited when I started playing Balanced Annihilation, which is the OG Spring based RTS, over ten years ago. BAR seems closely related to BA but has much more impressive looking graphics. Enjoy!
Yeah another big Spring Engine fan checking in here, the development of the Spring RTS engine and games on it has been a long road with lots of fun games played along it, mostly in Total Annihilation derivative games like BA, AA, XTA I forgot the other acronyms… and playing a TA-like game was what brought me like many others to playing games on the Spring Engine….
We wanted to play more RTS games like Total Annihilation but other than Supreme Commander FAF no game companies really seemed interested in doing anything but copying StarCraft (ughhh) or doing something totally different like Company Of Heroes. As a TA fan it felt like the RTS genre cut off its own head by treating StarCraft like it was this perfect RTS that demanded everyone copy it and I NEVER liked it. I liked TA with huge battles, the enormous amount of units with different roles not different gimmicks, the actual modeling of unit’s projectiles not some calculated MMO-like damage exchange, the fact that aircraft actually flew not just hovered, artillery had super long ranges like artillery should and battlefields could be as large and sprawling as my computer could handle.
I hadn’t checked in for awhile, but when I tried out BAR for the first time it got me really hyped again. BAR is so polished and well made and at this point just by virtue of being a TA-like Spring Engine mod there are years and years of tweaks, additions and subtractions to the TA formula that have been hammered out through thousands and thousands of games and many different mods with different ideas of what made TA good. The end result is a REALLY solid TA-like game that has the benefit of years of knowledge gleaned from tinkering with the formula of TA. This isn’t just a clone of TA, it is TA with 10+ years more of development work focused around gameplay balance and fun.
BAR is awesome! The AI got really good too at some point?
That aside, I've been giving it a look again lately but haven't dove in just yet. I'm in an odd mindset atm where I don't know if I'm down to wrap my head around RTS mechanics, but I'm really impressed by the looks of the game!
Also wanna highlight that this is a great rabbit hole to go down for other open source RTS games via Zero-K, Spring Engine, OpenRA, etc.
If you’re going to dive into any RTS I would definitely recommend this one. With any of them you have to familiarize yourself with the units and the interface which can seem like a lot at first till they become like your best friends and you know them by heart. A lot of other RTS’s that have been around are somewhat losing steam for entry-level players and might not be worth the investment. If you want more “hero” types of RTS I would probably recommend something like Stormgate but if you’re interested in military/army battles then BAR is a winner.
I don’t know why I didn’t link the website lol, guess in my head I didn’t want it to come across as sponsored or something and anyone who was super interested would just look at the links in the videos or search it. I’m just very entertained atm so figured I would share the videos that got me to this point. Thank you for the Zer0-K and other references, looked it up and now realizing there’s a whole slew of projects and remakes I’ve missed out on.
You made me pause for a while and contemplate my RTS gaming history. I was never really enthralled with medieval or time period rts’s (even though I’ve definitely sunk a lot of time into some of them like lord of the realms) but C&C I absolutely loved when it first came out. The cool live-action cut scenes, expanding what I was familiar with playing Dune, even had family members that also really got into the series. I slowly drifted away from it, I realize it was because of the excessive never-ending expansions being released and an absolutely bonkers story of a political drama it was. I just couldn’t keep up with all the releases as a broke kid and the characters/story lines did nothing for me.
Old school Blizzard did a great job with Warcraft cinematics for the time, the mystery behind the world you inhabited was left to your imagination at the beginning. They did a banger of a job with the Starcraft lore when it came out as well. I still remember pouring over the game booklet with the origins story before and after getting to finally play it. Human prisoners lost in space like some kind of 30th century Australia stuck in cryo-sleep and only awake to find they can never return home? Fascinating. Zerg Hive mind with specialized broods with their own lore? Baelrog Brood is legendary to me still. Protoss was just so fascinating and everything connecting the universes stories together just seemed mystical. Though I feel like they just completely botched it, Brood wars story was too rushed with a million things going on, SC2 was just abysmal and generic story telling but I do appreciate that something did happen after sc1 as I would be complaining for different reasons if they had just dropped it and moved onto a different game lol. Sorry for the wall of text, was nice to get this fleshed out from my mind though.
No worries on the wall of text! Also fwiw I'm familiar with RTS games, which is why I mentioned not being in the mindset for them currently. They're a lot to take in, even on a good day! 😅
Nevertheless, when I'm of the right mind for'em, I really enjoy'em. Building up outposts, assembling a bunch of units, and fending off enemies, it can be a bunch of fun!
Lately I've been more interested in peaceful builders/strategy games though. Still, BAR and the like remain really impressive!
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
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Aktywne