Outer Wilds. I think it’s a fine game with a pretty cool gimmick (time loop) and a neat story. The gameplay itself isn’t that fun. I think what ultimately ruined it for me was the online discourse about the game; every time it gets mentioned, hundreds of people flock to the comments to extol the philosophical storyline, and throw around hyperbolic descriptions like “life-changing”. Again, the story is pretty neat, but I was left underwhelmed after having been built up by fans of the game.
I’m glad you liked it! I really wanted to like the game. I wish one of my friends in real life played through it so I could walk through some others’ perspectives on the game in person.
Several hours in, I couldn’t even make it to a point where the story started rewarding me. Which was part of the problem. I “cleared” one of the planets (Brittle Hollow), with its platforming elements (something I don’t like in 3D), and my “reward” was a small piece of a puzzle. I needed a lot more than that.
Even before that point, the game hadn’t made a good first impression. There was nothing about the intro section on the starting planet that particularly interested me. And then the ship controls drove me a bit nuts. The loop was the only interesting part about the game for me then.
Felt like the writing was on the wall for me after exploring that first planet, so I dropped it.
There was nothing about the intro section on the starting planet that particularly interested me.
Yes! I forgot about this. There were like a hundred characters to speak to and very little of it was interesting or even helpful. I couldn’t help but feel guilty when I just gave up and decided to get on the ship and leave without exploring all of the dialogue or points of interest.
I also gave Outer Wilds a try and don’t think it stood up to the hype. Got through probably 95% of the story and then gave up on it, there were two “puzzles” that I just couldn’t figure out. Ended up reading a walkthrough and was not sad at all that I put it down.
I haven’t quite finished it yet, my feeling is that it slightly overstays it’s welcome.
I’ve also noticed that most of the time I do a thing or two in the game then realise there’s not quite enough time in the loop to do another thing, but just enough time to make me want to not waste the loop, since I find starting a new loop a bit tedious.
For me it’s not a bad game by itself. But I think it’s the worst recent CRPG by far, so it irks me that it’s heralded as the best game ever everywhere. Some details:
The character building is so incredibly shallow, this is mostly the fault of DnD5E, but Larian could have at least given us more Subclass options. Multiclassing doesn’t really help because some combinations are just so incredibly overpowered that it doesn’t make sense to play anything else (For example: adding 2 Warlock levels to your Sorcerer is always better than playing a plain sorcerer), this is exacerbated by the next point
Why is 12 the level cap? The game is long enough to go the full 20 levels. Level 12 is particularly odd because almost no classes get anything special at around that level (exception: fighter with the 3rd attack at 11). Going to 20 would have the advantage that all classes get a capstone ability which would make single-classing worthwhile.
The amount of companions available is laughably low, and all of them seem to be the creation of a 13 year-old with how uber-cool they are. We got: Vampire boy, Mystras loverboy, Tiefling badass, stuck-up Githyanki, Shar’s pet and Warlock superhero. Each and every one of them makes me yawn.
This also extends to the main character even when you are not of the defaut origins, you are an instant super-hero starting at level 1. Nice power fantasy, would have maybe been compelling to me when I was a teenager.
All conversations are voiced, whoop-de-doo. The flip side is that all conversations are extremely short. Compared with “real” CRPGs the writing is shallow, once again this feels like it was made for pre-teens. I’d rather have writing that rivals a good book.
Why in the nine hells is this game even called Baldurs Gate 3? It continues neither the story nor uses similar mechanics beyond pretending to be a CRPG. The familiar faces you can meet feel extremely forced. At the very least they should have allowed 6 party members.
It’s Baldur’s Gate in name only. They took Divinity and slapped a Forgotten Realms skin on it.
It’s still the same terrible Larian game: player-punishing gameplay (low hit chance, overwhelming enemies), traps/hazards fucking everywhere, shallow class mechanics, and rage-inducing camera and UI controls. I will finish the game once and never touch it again (like all the other Divinity games).
That’s the thing I’m not entirely sure. I expected the graphics to be better and combat to be more exiting I guess? Especially for GOTY. Voice acting was a bit basic too
Did you play any of the Dragon Age games? I’ve heard the combat is pretty similar, which is a bummer because that was the thing that kept me from continuing DA:O. I feel like I’d enjoy the story of both but can’t get past the actual gameplay.
So I got on that game and it was kind of fun up until the first town when my friends were like “we need to talk to people to figure out what to do.”
I don’t mind games having a bit of lore and story but … I want to be doing (read: typically fighting) stuff in my games not just talking to a bunch of people… And when I don’t even know what people I need to talk to, to most quickly get back to the action, I’m out.
The one exception to that is possibly RuneScape because I’ve been playing that game for ages. However, even there I use quest guides and sometimes just spam through all the dialogue.
Undertale is a decent enough game, I guess, but whenever I think about it, I think about all the crazies that call themselves fans of it. It’s exhausting just thinking about it.
For Honor got me interested, but it made a few very bad choices. Magnet hands and slow attacks meant that you could react to attacks, and never had to worry about whiffing. It’s so dull to have basically no concept of interesting movement play in a game about fighting.
For Honor was once my favorite game. As players got better the design of the game tried to account for it and the game went from a slow paced, gritty fighter to a very fast paced beat em up, focusing less on mind games and skill and more about getting the right combos and abusing safe attacks.
I still come back and play every now and then but it’s very arcady compared to when it first came out.
Zelda: BOTW is a soulless Ubisoft game clone shamelessly inhabiting the dead shell of the Legend of Zelda franchise. It contains little to nothing that makes the Legend of Zelda games what they are. Gone are fascinating cities and towns, no colorful cast of characters, no real dungeons or temples, no progression system so the entire game is just 50 hours of the game exact same copy-pasted things over and over and over with no change in difficulty or approach. It’s like the first Zelda game in history without a memorable score, in fact there’s hardly any music in it at all. Theres no plot to speak of. It introduced some novel systems, and they deserve credit for that, but it’s just not a Legend of Zelda game at all.
RDR2 is a bland on-rails march from shooting gallery to shooting gallery, with an incredibly lifelike and immersive world that… doesn’t really give you anything to do. And what it does give you, there’s no reason to do. The game revolves around your camp and allies but the camp hardly serves any purpose. You can’t customize it in any significant way, keeping everyone happy and supplied does very little besides reduce the amount of audible complaining. And the game shoves so much money in your hands from the word go, that you never have a reason to do any money making activities, and it upends the plot of the whole game “We just need a bit more money” Dutch says as I have $10,000 stashed in my saddlebags. Everyone seems to love Arthur as a character but he’s just such a bland, indecisive milquetoast guy who doesn’t hold his own opinion on anything. He doesn’t have any personality to speak of until the last third of the game, and then they expect you to have an emotional reaction to him by the end. John was hands down a better protagonist and it’s not close.
Absolutely nothing like Majora’s lol. Majora’s Mask took everything expected about a Zelda game and put a put a twist on it. It switched up the formula while staying true to its legacy. It was a fresh new experience but everything you could want as a Zelda fan was there.
BOTW just abandoned everything good about the franchise and replaced it with insultingly generic Ubisoft inspired busywork. Whatever Zelda DNA that was left is just window dressing.
I WISH we could one day get a spiritual successor to MM, but I guess we have to wait for Nintendo to kick its Ubisoft / Fortnite phase.
I tend to agree about the souls like games, especially from soft ones. There have been some I’ve enjoyed (I devoured remnant and remnant 2), but most often they just feel clunky and slow to me. Not “hard” just annoying.
Why would I play them if I’m not interested in the whole Star Wars world? I’ve watched a couple of movies, didn’t like them too much and didn’t watch the rest, so the games are automatically also not interesting.
For example, that's like saying you don't think you'll like the Dark Knight, because you don't like comic books and without ever having watched it. I'm not saying the Dark Knight is a particularly good movie, but it being part of a certain extended universe, having a particular setting, isn't necessarily relevant to whether you'll like it.
In a lot of genre stuff(westerns, scifi, fantasy, etc.), you'll have stories which aren't actually about a fictional future, but about the present or past. Often they'll rework them into science fiction stories, just like how a similar story would have been reworked into a western when those were popular.
For example, Red Dead Redemption could have been turned into a Star Wars game quite easily.
Hell, in the past acclaimed directors like Tarkovski made science fiction movies, so they could fly under the radar with subversive stories, exactly because critics underestimated the story they were telling because it was 'just science fiction'.
TLDR: don't judge a book by its cover.
This being said, I get why you wouldn't bother trying if you disliked much of the Star Wars you have seen.
I hated Shadow of Mordor when I got it. It was Linux native so I had to try it. Played past the return time so it sat in my library for a while. Got bored and tried it again. Didn’t really care for the story but the gameplay was awesome. I have SoW to try, but no real motivation currently
Well tbh I’ve heard a lot about the gameplay in Shadow of Mordor being great, so I played it when it was temporarily free on Steam. The gameplay didn’t feel like anything special so combined with the world I disliked, I didn’t last long in it.
May I ask why you dislike the world? Is it LotR in general, or just what they did to the lore in those games?
Because I do enjoy those games, and I’m a fan of Tolkien as well, so I can definitely understand why someone wouldn’t care for the Shadow games due to what the devs/writers did with Shelob and Sauron
Honestly, for some reason, I just strongly dislike everything set in the medieval fantasy setting. I tried watching Game of Thrones and dropped it because of that, I didn’t watch too much of Harry Porter or LotR, never played Skyrim for the same reason. I know I’m missing out on a giant chunk of cool media that’s great and interesting but I just can’t bear this time period + magic. Unfortunately.
I might try something that’s incredibly good and super popular but I probably won’t like it in the end, even if I’m coming in with no prejudices against the world.
As a big Outer Wilds fan, is there any other game in the genre you like better?
I believe Outer Wilds is one of the best games ever made, because it’s the best execution of it’s genre (exploration / mystery games). I accept the genre might not be for everyone, but I’m not aware any better games in the genre.
I love the idea of bar but I don’t think I’ll ever be able to play seriously. The learning curve is just massive and there’s not enough time in the world among my other hobbies. Instead I’m getting my mechanized battles and explosions kick from mechabellum. 😁
Bar is what I call a lifestyle game. It’s the hobby to take over all your hobby time
Huh, never considered it a lifestyle game. I’ve played games previously like Eve online that I just couldn’t keep up with so I understand what you mean. I only really have played like one match a day with the rest of the time it’s videos in the background catching me up on the mechanics while I do other hobbies or chores around the house. I get your point though and I’m probably underplaying the importance of the time I’m dedicating to learning everything about it. I suppose it’s a double edge sword, more varied units means more types of strategies that can be implemented which is something I’m loving about this game but at the detriment of the learning curve being more intense for late game play.
A lot of games increase difficulty by just turning up HP and attack numbers, and part of the fun of souls games is that that's really not how they handled difficulty.
And I get that. My biggest issue is I know if I could just lower the difficulty I would love the game. Hell I feel I could probably get pretty good at it if I played it on a lower difficulty then switched to a higher one after getting everything down.
TLOU - Great story, don’t get me wrong; probably some of the best writing in games for it’s time. But the gameplay got super boring once every concept was introduced. The loop is just not satisfying, and exploration is more or less go check out the dead end before moving on, because the level design is so linear. This is more or less the same problem I have with most big AAA titles; they look great, have a good story, but are just so incredibly boring to play. You can tell the budget went entirely into graphics and voice acting, because the game itself feels more like an afterthought to those; it’s just there because otherwise it would be a movie.
Lethal Company - The game itself is pretty shit and tedious. What makes it fun is not the game, but how voice chat sounds when someone is being chased or getting eaten. 100% a game made for Twitch streamers where more people will be entertained by watching others play than playing themselves.
Palworld - I was interested by “Pokemon with Guns” and then I found out it’s more like Rust with Pokemon. I hate Rust and Ark all those kinds of survival PvP games. The genre itself has all the same weird jank, like everyone who has been copying the idea from DayZ or the like also copied every bug and bad idea, too; even the AAA made ones! They usually run like shit, are balanced like shit, and get so stale alone and are super frustrating in multiplayer unless you’re playing with a large group of friends so you’re not just being singled out for being all alone.
GTA:O - Specifically the online portion of GTA5 has made me never want to buy another GTA or rockstar game period. Not because the game play itself sucks, but rather because it’s extremely fun but the game doesn’t want you to have fun if you’re also making money. I can spend hours and hours doing all the activities that don’t earn you cash and have not one single issue other than maybe some other players trying to blow me up (especially if they are modding). But once that Mission Rep meter starts going up, hoo boy… The game starts breaking in all sorts of interesting but frustrating ways. Headshots stop killing in one hit, traffic starts behaving erratically and non-sensically (like straight sliding sideways at light speed to force a collision), triggers start breaking, the server decides to go down or get super laggy, etc. Since none of this happens in single player or while not doing activities that reward cash, and there is no other obvious function of the Mission Rep stat, I can’t help but think these are actually features put into the game on purpose specifically to slow down grinding so people will buy Shark Cards. The same kinda shit happens in RDR2:O, too.
I’m not far enough into paltopialand to really say, but at the beginning and five hours in, it runs at 142FPS and never drops *at max settings. Its performance is really remarkable for an early game.
To clarify here: It’s not really the game specifically; I just know it’s the latest example of the type of game and super popular atm. It might be the best game of that genre; I still don’t like the genre itself, which is why I’m not getting Palworld.
The learning curve does look really brutal but it made me realize I was falling into a gaming rut. I thought I was a decent gamer but it’s just that I’ve been playing the same “base” games with fancier graphics for so long. I’ve been mostly into sandbox games lately because I can vary my goals but with this game I think I’ll really be able to expand into any type of tactic or strategy to scratch that never ending itch.
The game is great and the learning curve can be tricky, but it has a whole load of scenarios which gradually ramp up the difficulty and introduce new concepts to help you learn how to play. I’d highly recommend checking out the game!
You will find one but it´s all manageable. I recommend focusing on one faction and one or two unit types at the beginning and learn just those tech trees first, to avoid getting overwhelmed by the abundance of units and go from there. Vehicles and/or Bots are good unit types to start with. Just let your team know what unit types you will go for at the start of a match, choose a fitting starting position and it should work fine.
Edit: Also the multiplayer is god awful, why can’t my friend and me just team up and play, instead you have to jump through all types of hoops to play together.
Surprised this hasn’t been said more in this thread, to be honest. All it seems to be is Breath of the Wild and Soulslikes.
I’ve tried 3 different Monster Hunter games, I’ve really tried to see what people enjoy about them. But the controls are so awful, the loop is tedious, and I could never find anything good to say about them. This series truly confuses me.
I so wish I could like Monster Hunter. I mean there are huge monsters, what’s not to like about it. But the rest just isn’t fun or enough to me so I get bored really fast. It’s a bummer.
Installed it. Spent two hours in unskippable tutorials and dialogues learning about a million different mechanics. Sent out into wild; collecting mucous for 45 minutes. Find monster, hit it a bunch. Monster runs away. I chase it for 10 more minutes, then Quit and uninstall.
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.
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Aktywne