Tutorial sections that just suck. Some don’t explain enough, others treat you like you’ve never played a game in your life. Or, when they interrupt you to explain a mechanic in great detail, but it’s too much of an info dump, and you’re just left wondering wtf they just said. One game that I really liked how they did it was BG3. There’s a tutorial, but you can also turn it off on future runs. Worst tutorial I think I’ve ever seen was Xenoblade 2.
Games (and really any consumable media) that just don’t know when to end. There are very few games I’ve completed, mostly because I get bored. The game overstayed it’s welcome and I’m done. The grind isn’t worth the final boss fight or whatever is at the end. Generally, it’s because games (especially RPGs) think grinding is a “fun” mechanic when it’s more of an imbalanced game. Take, for example, Expedition 33, not once in that game do you need to run around grinding levels. You can successfully go through the entire game, only going to each stage once. Fucking fantastic. But then you have games that just went too far with things. Some games, like Skyrim, CP2077, (especially) Hogwarts Legacy, I only know the ending to those games because other people beat them. Ex33 I got 52/55 achievements (just need to win the gestral games and find whatever record I missed). I beat that game entirely in 74 hours. My first run of BG3 (53/54 achievements, only missing the bard one, because I think it’s boring), first playthrough was maybe 120 hours (currently over 700 due to multiple playthroughs). Skyrim… 146 hours… 27/75 achievements. CP2077, 133 hours, 18/57 achievements. Hogwarts sits at 50 hours with 19/45 achievements (that game should be a 20-hour game at most).
Games that don’t really respect your time. This one, Nintendo does a lot. Actually perfect example is Breath of the Wild. It’s a giant fuck off world that’s mostly empty, peppered largely with the same enemies throughout the whole thing. You have a weapon mechanic that encourages you NOT to fight (just get some good weapons and head off to exactly where you need to go). The cooking is bullshit, no recipe book, no making a bunch of something, a stupid cutscene every time. And the entire poop joke… like getting 20 for a poop joke would already be too much, but collecting 900 with (IIRC) no fucking way to track them… Or the fact that the way Nintendo expects you to get arrows is to grind out rupees to buy them. And the exploits used to get arrows or rupees quickly, in a single player game, they actively tried to patch out. That’s just one game, Nintendo does this on SO MANY GAMES, which actually pushed me to “fuck Nintendo” and I didn’t buy and won’t buy a Switch 2.
Some games are combos of these. One game I really like, but I always hit a wall is Satisfactory. Once I get to trains/aluminum, it’s just not fun anymore for me. I work 40-80 hours a week (sometimes I work 5x12s and 8ish hours Sat/Sun)(only sometimes, usually closer to 50 hours a week)… so all the extra planning and time to making a factory… like I just don’t have the fucking time. Same thing with Dune Awakening. The first zone was the best. Getting your first Orni wasn’t too bad, but it was already starting to push it. Having to fucking pay taxes in a game… Oddly, it was about the time I was farming up aluminum, I quit that game too. Maybe I have a pet peeve with aluminum in video games…
Games (and really any consumable media) that just don’t know when to end.
Watched a gameranx video the other day about this. It’s the lack of closure. Players need that catharsis and pay off for all their efforts or else it inevitably starts to feel pointless rather than fun.
Even MMO’s had a closure for their main story arcs and you played the end game content. The new Live Service model though doesn’t like that cause it means they can’t milk it for eternity. They’d have to keep making new stories and actual game content but that is time consuming and meticulous for creative industries. You can’t pump it out like you can cosmetics and battle passes.
It’s honestly a huge issue in the industry. The gameranx video goes much deeper into the topic.
Edit: I should have finished reading before I posted this. Now I look dumb for jumping the gun
Actually, what you said unlocked a memory. Though I don’t know if it falls in line with the Gameranx video (I’ll have to go watch that) or your sentiment. But the ‘Players need that catharsis and pay off for all their efforts or else it inevitably starts to feel pointless rather than fun.’ immediately made me think of the first Shadow of Mordor game. It was a great game, undone by a QTE final boss.
But yeah, so many of these games just don’t go anywhere. To your point, the live service games. It’s not 100% with what I intended, but I feel it ends up in the same area… I’m spending all these hours… what am I accomplishing? What’s the point of all of this? It’s just endless padding with endless travel time, side quests, and anything that requires you to wait real time for the quest to progress. Dailies in WoW, were my WoW killer. Some people saw it as “easy gold”; I saw it as non-content meant to drive daily engagement but not actually accomplish anything in the game. It’s all just padding for extra “engagement” or to make a game seem bigger than it is (or should be).
I’ll break down some of the issues I had with the games I listed for better context. And I’ll front this with, I know you don’t have to do side missions. It’s more like, you realise instead of giving you a tight, compact story that’s well crafted, they spent too much time padding it out so it appears to be a bigger game. CP2077, the main story is absolutely dwarfed by all the side content. The main quest line is like… ~35 missions? There are like 70+ “gigs” and the same for “side missions”. The main story is the thing you do the least. With missing mechanics, I can’t help but think it would have been more interesting if it were done in a more linear fashion like Deus Ex Human Revolution. Instead of a giant city that’s mostly empty boxes (the buildings aren’t buildings) and padded out with side quests. Skyrim, the thing that killed it for me, was just how pathetically easy it was to become the leader of the various groups/factions. It felt so unearned. I can only take being handed “wins” left and right because I’m the fucking chosen one… before it’s just dull. It was Medieval Idiocracy. I could have just started learning spells and they’re ready to give me the college because I’m the smartest person they’ve ever seen. Brawndo, it’s what Dragonborns crave. And Hogwarts, walking around the castle, was the best part. It felt magical and alive. Some of the puzzles were fun. But the classes were boring tutorial sections, and the main thing you do in the game is LEAVE Hogwarts to go do unspeakable things in non-descript burrows and dungeons scattered all over the place. That game has 15 main quests, 21 side quests. 95 Merlin Trials…
The tl;dr: An easy way to look at it, CP2077, Hogwarts, and Expedition 33 have similar playtime for just the main quest (per howlongtobeat.com, ~26-28 hours). But how it feels to play the game is drastically different. One had a story to tell and a point to get to, and it does that. The others made a world with a whole bunch of other stuff to do.
Tutorial sections that just suck. Some don’t explain enough, others treat you like you’ve never played a game in your life. Or, when they interrupt you to explain a mechanic in great detail, but it’s too much of an info dump, and you’re just left wondering wtf they just said.
The ones I hate the most are the ones that meticulously teach you “press A to jump!” (Cool thanks, yeah, I’ve been playing video games since Super Mario Bros, I’m pretty good on the basics) but then you get out of the tutorial and play for an hour or two and realize that you’ve never once had to jump, but that complicated combo that they didn’t even allude to in the tutorial is for some reason the core game mechanic.
I want to GIT GUD but I’m not the kind of person who can dodge and parry while managing a stamina bar. ER and DS games look awesome but I really can’t do much sightseeing in them. I tried Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls 3, and Elden Ring and in all of them I hit a wall against the first miniboss who I should be learning to parry on. I’ve always leaned toward dodging taking priority before parrying and a stamina bar limits that.
I recently played through Ghost of Tsushima and parried a thousand cuts. The game doesn’t have stamina though. I understand stamina as a game mechanic but find all it adds is tedium. There’s what I believe to be some good games hiding behind a stamina bar. I can enjoy the games until the stamina bar runs out and then I’ll be thinking about enjoying a different game.
Odd take. Resource management is key in a lot of games to the entire design of how they play.
I play heavy tank builds in those games and block/dodge instead of parrying. It’s just a different mindset I guess to enjoy that level of resource managing to know when to commit and when to back off and get defensive, especially when my attacks take a chunk of stamina and are slow to wind up. It forces the player to be strategic so you don’t leave yourself winded mid string.
I guess what I call strategic playing you call tedium. To each their own.
The thing I hate about parrying games is that there’s rarely ever any consistency about what you can and cannot parry and also never any way for you to learn if you’re parrying too early or too soon or what.
Lies of P did a great job of color coding things (and generally being more leinent/realistic with timing). It can still be a hard game, but the most approachable parrying based game of that ilk.
To be fair, non-fixed savepoints introduce a bunch of additional work, especially on the gameplay design and testing sides, and for some games that work is better invested into other aspects of the game.
But if savepoints are fixed, they have to be frequent enough to not become an issue.
Just got a Blood Mage (Witch) to maps in PoE2. I just need one damned unique gem to tie the build together and I’m golden. Sadly, the gem isn’t easy to get and very expensive to buy. :(
The only game I preorder is GW2’s yearly expansions. Everything else is c/patientgamers material, waiting a few years and paying just a small fraction of the release price to get all DLC, fixed bugs, and tons of fan resources that were created meanwhile 👌
Because there’s a boom of Roguelite games and assumedly they don’t like it. For my part I love how many options and different spins on the genre/idea there are.
it’s from the makers of “Heavy Rain” and “Beyond: Two souls”. The player has to play the role of three different humanoid androids throughout the game, and make choices that heavily affect the gameplay. Depending on the choices you make with every character, their story and outcome changes their future paths. It’s a good game, and can be bought quite cheap at sales. The acting is really good IMO.
It’s a choose your own adventure take on the civil rights movement set in the future. Because of course society will have to deal with this shit all over again.
Had a friend telling me the same, lol. FWIW, I got into Metro after watching the series of The Linux Gaming Experiment, where Nick played Metro Exodus - so I kinda enjoy Exodus more, lol.
Any time I realize the optimal path is really boring or tedious.
Like, imagine you could sell junk to vendors for money, but for some reason you get more money if you sell them one at a time. Spending five minutes splitting inventory stacks sucks, but it’s 30% more gold and that’s the difference between the cool sword or the basic sword.
A made up example, but hopefully gets the point across.
Related: long travel times with nothing interesting or challenging happening. I remember playing some shitty MMO and you had to like run through a building, go up an elevator, and down a long hallway every time you wanted to learn skills. Just five minutes of nothing. Gotta juice those playtime stats, I guess.
It’s different if there’s stuff to do en route. Monsters to fight or whatever. But when it’s just jogging? Very disappointing.
Aah, i think it was tie-fighter, where you could lock on and press a key to match speeds with an enemy - (albeit instantaneous only).
Maybe it was there in x-wing, but i feel like it was one of the minor qol improvements in tie-fighter that made it better.
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