Almost anything first person. It makes me incredibly nauseous, which is really unfortunate because there are some really neat games that use the mechanic. I recently sold my copy of Echo Night since I couldn't play for more than around ten minutes at a time. I also couldn't complete the tutorial in Half-Life because it made me so nauseous that I had to spend almost the entire day in bed. Weirdly I'm perfectly fine with Metroid Prime.
I suspect Metroid Prime works for you because movement is quite slow. Samus feels like a tank compared to Gordon Freeman.
I love the Prime trilogy, but when I returned to it while doing a Metroid binge of sort, and I was kind of trying to do decent times, I was surprised how much slower-paced they feel compared to the 2D games. Even jumps feel floaty (probably for the better, it’s hard to judge jumps correctly in first person).
I played the inspiration for years (Tenchu) and loved that so much, but Sekiro just feels hollow in comparison. I know it's not a stealth game, nor is it trying to be, but I can't help but feel like the cliffs and stuff are just "cheap" ways of making the game more difficult. Idk, maybe I'm just not ninja enough lol...
Speaking of stealth, Dishonored. I REALLY wanted to love this game. It's just not open enough for my taste. There's only usually one main walkway to the objective (I say walkway, but there are of course roofs and stuff you can teleport to - I'm just saying, I wish you could get on the actual roofs of buildings Assassin's Creed style or explore the city open-world style). Cool story, cool theme, but the gameplay falls through for me. I felt the same way about MGS4.
Also Red Dead Redemption was meh for me. Could have been better, could have been worse. Undead Nightmare was great though.
Legend of Dragoon. The game where a main character dies and is immediately replaced with an off brand of himself, and that includes a boss rush mid game that is unavoidable and punishes you for trying to use the game's signature mechanic.
I haven’t actually noticed this happening before now. My immediate reaction is if it is changes driven by the original creators I’d feel quite positive about it. Love to see personal growth. When driven by the studio though, I’m a bit more skeptical.
Either way, this is why modding should be protected. Let folks play historical/modern/hyper-weird versions of the game they love.
When driven by the studio though, I’m a bit more skeptical.
This is a really good point. When it’s in the hands of the creators, you’re still dealing with people who know what they were creating.
A lot of the stuff that people complain about are hamfisted attempts by corporate flunkies to make the game “appeal to a wider audience” as opposed to actually caring about removing unnecessary or offensive material in a constructive way that doesn’t lessen the original impact of the piece of media.
Corporations never decided that women, black people, latinos, and LGBT were humans with inherent value to them simply from existing, but rather, they decided that “Oh shit, we’re leaving money on the table by not marketing to these groups or hiring them.” It’s all about dollar-signs. It’s why corporations will fly the Pride Flag in June on Twitter… Just not on their Saudi Arabia Twitter corporate account. The corporates don’t care about the issues, they just care about getting your labor and your money, in other words, extracting value from you.
And attempts to extract value from you are where hamfisted attempts at making pieces of media “more appealing to everyone” by trying to shove as much strained “diversity” (the corporate kind, not the real kind) in there as possible in hopes to increase sales.
…on the other hand though, some of the original creators simply never grew up and are just obstinately wanting to continue to offend people for no good reason other than getting off on triggering other people. Like I’d have more hope from a remake from Neil Druckmann over John Romero, for example.
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.
The universe is great but why would I feel bad about bandits not being able to be bandits anymore!? Still there is a lot of potential in that wild west universe.
GTA5. I loved the 4th one but not really liked the 5th one. I guess I can’t understand why you have to be a bad guy in these games and I’m getting too old for that.
Assassin’s Creed after the second one. The plot lost me and I don’t think there is a plot anymore.
MGSV. I loved the first 4 MGS and hated that one as it had no good story…
You can’t understand why you need to be a bad guy in a game called Grand Theft Auto, where the main focus of the series is stealing cars and building a criminal empire?
To be fair, in many of the GTA games, you’re not a bad guy. Sure, you break the law; but in almost every instance, the law is super corrupt anyway and you almost always end up working for said corrupt cops at some point because they have you by the balls.
Vice City is the only one I can’t really find any justification for the protagonists actions other than greed; and that one’s story is basically Scarface where you’re playing as Tony Montana.
To be fair, in many of the GTA games, you’re not a bad guy.
I've played Vice City, 4 and 5 and every one of them started out with the main character(s) being a bad guy who is just a little less evil than the people around them, but still willing to kill to get what they want.
4: Niko grew up as a child soldier and has basically been under the thumb of mob bosses his whole life. It’s also the ONLY game where you actually have choices in many cases to not kill someone as part of his revenge story (he wants to find and kill the man who sold out his unit in some war and got all his friends killed).
5: Franklin used to be a car thief, and has since gone straight as a repo man. His dumbass friends, along with Micheal and Trevor, get him caught up in all sorts of bullshit he doesn’t necessarily want to do, but doesn’t really have much choice. Micheal is also an ex-criminal trying to go straight, but having a much harder time at it than Franklin. His hot headedness is what got them into major trouble prior to Trevor’s arrival. Trevor is not only a bad guy and a psychopath, he could be considered the main villain of the game. Most of the plot revolves around Micheal trying to hide the truth from Trevor, because he knows Trevor is a fucking maniac and will possibly kill him and his entire family because he sold him out to the cops when they were bank robbers and Micheal wanted out of that life.
San Andreas: CJ is an ex-gang member who comes home to attend the funeral of his mother who was recently murdered. Things start out with him simply wanting to bring the killer to justice, and gets swept up in more gang violence, police corruption and even government conspiracies.
They’re as much bad guys as John Wick or John McClane or Arnold Schwartznegger in pretty much any of his 80’s and 90’s action films.
Being an ex criminal who is trying to reform after armed robberies, but still committing new crimes, is still being a bad guy. Choosing not to kill people doesn't make someone not a bad guy when they still continue to commit crimes as part of the game.
Painting the targets of their crimes as worse doesn't make them not bad people.
I totally agree with MGS5. I just could not get in to the game, I barely felt like I was playing an MGS game. It felt like Ghost Recon or some Ubisoft collectathon game, with just such a lackluster story.
Ohhh i just got one that will be really controversial.
I’m not a big fan of Morrowind.
Yeah the world has a very alien style, and the lore is cool. But the actual world feels empty and boring to me. Like IMO the map is way too big for it’s own good.
When wandering around, there’s always a cave or tomb around to explore. But yeah, there aren’t a lot of people out in the wilderness. Just the occasional naked nord or plantation.
Don’t get me wrong, the game has fantastic mechanics and great art direction.
HOWEVER. The game relied too much on its lack of hand-holding in order to be enticing but it came out just raw fuckin frustrating. You know what’s cool? Finding new areas by exploration and not by being told it’s where you’re supposed to go. You know what’s not cool? Being handed a list of names of places with no idea of what is in each of them and being expected to know where to go. I got really frustrated with a boss and quit for a few weeks. I come back, kill the boss, and learn that there’s no new door out of the boss arena. I open the fast travel list to find a long list of names of places I had been to but had no fucking idea which one I was supposed to explore next. That is the absolute worst design choice I have seen in a universally loved game. Fuck Bloodborne.
Yes, I will absolutely buy it when they decide to remaster it for PC.
I hate all online competitive games. Yup, all of em. I can’t relax! I can’t learn at my own pace! I can’t explore! The challenge is unknown! I don’t want to get better than strangers, i don’t care about them!
i like beating systems not people. Watching my BIL play CoD and that car soccer game, I’ve seen and heard some nasty shit. I guess it’s not unusual that people get competitive (ive seen people lose their composure over drunken kickball, i get its not just online) but considering how toxic people can be i just don’t get why people would invite that into their house.
Maybe im just not competitive. Yo, any ranked or generally competitive players, what makes you come back?
I miss server browsers and community servers. Just people playing casually and the teams could shuffle every round. It was competitive, but not sweaty plam bs and being too toxic would get you banned.
thats what turns me off them. you simply can’t play online games without being a tryhard sweat anymore. i just want to smoke a joint and chill in my off hours, not get demolished every match if i dont bring in my friends and tryhard at it.
and no commumity servers because that dont make them money
Ok first of all, online gaming communities especially around the most popular “serious” competitive gaming scenes are usually awful, terribly toxic places dominated by toxic masculinity.
It is a major problem in my opinion, both from the toxic people it breeds but also from the gatekeeping that keeps out a more diverse player base than just insecure men who hurl around insults and call shit “gay” when they don’t like it.
That being said, I do really like competitive multiplayer games like apex, battlebit, rocket league (car soccer game), halo infinite etc. I am not an especially competitive person though, I don’t HAVE to win and I don’t get super angry when I lose.
I enjoy competitive games because of the rich experience of playing a game against another human who is focused and motivated to win. I especially like playing with a team of humans against another team of humans. Humans are just so much more interesting and dynamic to compete against and generally a blast to cooperate with, singleplayer games often feel stale and like they are trying to forcefully induce a fabricated experience in me in comparison. Why do I want to play a singleplayer call of duty campaign that tries to make me “feel” like I am in a big battle when I can just play battlebit and actually be in a virtual battle with 200 other humans?
Another human competing against you for fun brings a great gift to the table from the perspective of game design and it takes an immense amount of effort to create a singleplayer experience anywhere near as engaging and dynamic. Likewise goes for a human teammate vs an AI one. Drive around in a gun truck in a singleplayer game and get an AI to gun for you and you have a slightly interesting experience where the AI just dumbly shoots at targets when you drive up to them… get a HUMAN to gun for you and all of a sudden you and that person are in an action movie together where your collective survival depends on how efficiently you work together and help each other out. Maybe you never talk to your gunner over a mic, it doesn’t matter really, the connection is still there. It never gets old to me because everything I do impacts other humans who then react and adapt which causes me to have to do the same.
Singleplayer games have to do a massive amount of work to make me fee like I am in a living breathing world that responds to me. Multiplayer games “just” have to setup an arena and let players loose. The experience of trying to outsmart another human who wants to win as bad as I do is perennially rewarding. Every moment I play a competitive multiplayer game I am working on integrating knowledge, skill, and emotional regulation and always learning and adapting. It makes my brain feel alive and stimulated in a way most single player games don’t (don’t get me wrong, I love good singleplayer games too).
I hate the toxicity and I always report it when I see it though.
I feel similarly. Playing with/against npc’s just doesn’t do it for me, and I don’t even use the mic in multiplayer games unless I’m playing with friends. Additionally though, I find video games a really tedious way to get a narrative. They’re long, there’s often a lot of grinding, and if I get stuck behind a boss I won’t figure out what happens next. So I don’t even bother with single player games unless they’re famously good and short, like I really enjoyed the portal games and when I find the time I’m going to play outer wilds. But most of the video games I play are closer to sports than narratives, it’s all about figuring out the little tricks and strategies to improve myself, and the occasional wild situations that can only happen with real people
I agree with you to an extent, in my opinion the gunplay and general movement/action parts of Red Dead Redemption 2 just isn’t fun or deep. Rockstar sucks at gunplay for the most part. I respect that the game is hugely admired and people love the story and open world but I just can’t engage with it for very long because the basic gameplay loop is too unsatisfying.
On the other hand I think really well made point and clicks like Strange Horticulture, the Blackwell Series, Machinarium and others and “interactive fiction” esque games like Roadwarden are awesome ways to tell stories. Other ways are cool too like Firewatch, Oxenfree or Papers Please. If the gameplay is fun I like games with good stories, but I don’t enjoy story focused games with mediocre but prominent mechanics.
I like competitive games where I feel like I outplayed my opponent, the feeling I get from winning against an actual human is so much superior to winning against a system that was designed to not be too hard. Here I know I had to surpass myself to win
Plus having ratings and that kind of stuff is always a nice reward for winning. I play a lot of competitive tetris, Trackmania, CS2, The Finals and recently started learning Tekken 8 for this specific reason
Om the other hand, I don’t like souls like because they’re just a single goal I need to spend hours to beat with no progression afterwards. I want my solo games to be challenging sure but not requiring me to learn like my multiplayer games can get
I’m just competitive. Nothing beats absolutely decimating an opponent to the point they quit.
I also get 0 satisfaction from beating a computer. I do that every day as a software developer, so I’d much rather play against other people.
Also competitive games are great because you can play hundreds or thousands of hours and almost always get new experiences. Some team is going to throw something at you that you haven’t seen before, and it keeps the gameplay interesting and dynamic.
I only like competitive games that are just as much cooperative as they are competitive. Team-based shooters like Overwatch or R6 Siege, for example, are always fun with a group of friends.
Shit like CoD or Fortnite though? Nah, I could never get into them. I don’t really hate them or anything, but I always get bored of them very quickly so I don’t bother buying them.
So, like you I don’t enjoy most competitive games. I like to dabble occasionally and enjoy an FPS here or there(I enjoyed the Finals for a bit, and occasionally a CoD, last one was Modern Warfare), but mostly play single player or co-op games because I find them far more enjoyable.
There is one genre that is an exception, fighting games. I fucking love them. I used to enjoy them as a kid, then had a long hiatus, dabbled when Street Fighter 4 launched, but didn’t “git gud”. Then Dragonball Fighter Z and the Arcade Edition for Street Fighter 5 launched and I think they were the gateway drug for me. Street Fighter 5 was tough, I couldn’t find a character I liked, so kinda bounced off it, but DBFZ kept me in. It wasn’t until Blanka in SF5 came out that it all clicked for me.
The genre starts of like a little puddle, you don’t really need to know a lot going in, but you definitely need to want to improve. And the more you improve the more you realise how deep the puddle is, cause it is actually an ocean. When you play against another human, at the lower ranks it is quite random and spammy. But as you get past them, you get to where you can condition people, you can learn their habits and combo choices. Then you take that knowledge and adjust your gameplay and see if they can counter it, and it can be come a big back and forth of trying to get the other person to make a mistake and exploiting their habits.
It is also a genre where nothing else really transfers across. All that time in FPS or RTS games isn’t going to help, so learning to do the technical inputs can be rewarding, or labbing out a combo and how to implement it in your gameplay.
I also really enjoy the ranking climb in most fighting games. SF6 has kinda perfected it, you play 10 games and it gives you a placement from Rookie upto Diamond 1, then you match against someone typically within ±1 rank(Gold 1 would be matched with Silver 5, Gold 1 or Gold 2)and rack up points. At the top of the ranking you hit Master, then it turns into Elo points and a proper distribution of skill, cause the difference between a professional and good player that just hit Master is massive. And for SF6 it is done on a per character basis, which allows you to sink time into every character and be playing with people your skill level.
I am 417 hours into SF6, 3 characters at master rank and a few in diamond/platinum. I still feel like I am bad, and I am definitely not using all the systems effectively in the game. But I sure as hell am excited to sink another several thousand hours into this game over the life of it.
Tekken 8 also just came out, which also seems incredible, but 3D fighters are basically an entire new genre to learn.
i grew up playing street fighter ii turbo and mortal kombat with my friends from the neighborhood. Whenever we get together these days one of us will have a copy ready in case we want to throw down like when we were kids. Getting a big group talking shit and passing the controller around will never not be fun for me, but i know i dont have what it takes to handle people online.
I have read about all that goes into competitive ranked fighting games and it looks (as you say) as deep as the ocean. there is sooooo much to learn and practice that i don’t think i would ever have fun online, but i can still hold out with my favorite characters with my old pals. I agree with you, fighting games are quite fun.
I am going to respectfully disagree, I think if you have a desire to learn and participate everyone can have fun online in fighting games. Don’t get baited by thinking that you need to learn all these combos and moves and be 100% perfect at doing it all the time. Cause you dont.
The difference between someone just starting and a pro is vast, and will seem daunting and like you need to know a bunch of stuff. But honestly competitve starts out similar to you and a bunch of pals just having fun together.
You are playing the other person, getting reliable damage from a combo is more important to begin with than doing optimal damage. For street fighter(it is what I have the most experience with), you need to know how to anti air to stop people from jumping(this is usually a crouching Heavy Punch, but can be different for some characters). Then throw in a simple combo, can be an easy target combo(or using the modern inputs in SF6) or something as simple as HP > Fireball/Tatsu. And then making sure you know basics like blocking and throws, drive impact and drive parry for street fighter 6.
That seems like a lot, but it is less than the mechanics of most single player games that get thrown out in tutorials, and the rest of the knowledge will come with time and practice. Say you come across someone who just cleanly wipes the floor with you, you can look at the replay and see if there is a gap, or learn the timings, or if it is unsafe if you just kept blocking. But that won’t be something you have to worry about for a while. You will spend a lot of time figuring out how to handle people randomly throwing out DP or Drive Impact or who just won’t stop jumping.
I don’t play competitive games unless the community is generally decent or I have the option to just turn off voice and text chat for people I don’t know.
Hunt Showdown is the one arguably competitive game (in that its PvP) that I still play … the community there is generally great. There is the occasional trash talk but mostly it’s just people having fun.
Sometimes people on enemy teams will be willing to negotiate and you both walk away from the fight.
Sometimes they’ll just have fun with it and make sound effects. One guy just the other night I was in a shoot out with was making sound effects “agghhh my leg!!! You got me you got me, it’s over!!” Only to come back a few seconds later with a bomb thrown at me and my buddies.
Occasionally there are toxic people but it’s really fun when you shoot them, take their stuff, and burn their characters bodies … then report them. Taking the extra time to be inflammatory or make noise to trash talk on an extraction shooter can easily get you killed and make you lose a fair amount of stuff.
If being a toxic egomaniac is your jam, extraction shooters are a bad fit.
For games that are in genres that I'd actually play:
Final Fantasy 6 (3): I grew up with the NES, and when we got a SNES I got whatever games I could from the $20 bin at Toys R Us. I had some friends who were a bit better off that loaned me some games, and I eventually managed to get my hands on a copy of Chrono Trigger (as well as other RPGs like Breath of Fire), but when I borrowed FFIII from one of them I was just... underwhelmed. I didn't really care for the characters, it felt pretty slow initially, and I remember getting to a bit with a bunch of moogles in the party and I just put it down and never went back.
I've since tried to play it a few times here and there, but it never really manages to hook me... but people sing the praises of it high and low and I just don't really get it because I can't get over the hump.
The Witcher 1/2/3: I just really don't like the combat, honestly. I've tried playing all three, and managed to get enough time into them to appreciate the good bits (voice acting, story, quest lines) but the main meat and potatoes for me in a game are exploration and combat, and only one of those really works for me in those games. I had a better time in the first game, all things considered, because I guess I was willing to allow a bit of jankiness from an older game, but I bounced off Witcher 2 pretty quickly combat-wise, and didn't manage to get more than many 1/3 to 1/2 way through Witcher 3 before I just admitted that I wasn't having fun.
Persona 3: I got into the games with P4G on my Vita, so part of this is 'going backwards is hard' in terms of QoL improvements and what not. But I also played the PSP port of Persona 2 (whichever one was actually ported in English) and had a good time (not so much with the PS1 version of the one that didn't get the English PSP port... that one was rough) so I guess its just the game didn't resonate with me as much as the other ones did... Maybe it was the characters or maybe it was the cuts that were made for the P3P version of the game, but it just didn't hit the same.
Otherwise, a lot of military-style FPS games (stuff like Halo or Destiny or Timesplitters or even Goldeneye 64 are/were fun), the more recent sports titles (up to the Dreamcast/PS2 I was fine with them, but more realism doesn't do anything for me), and stuff like MOBA or visual novels or 'walking sims' or battle royale or whatever those asynchronous horror games just don't tick the boxes for me in terms of what I want from a video game.
Ugh I feel the same way about The Witcher. I tried 2 and 3 and just couldn’t get into it. The combat was not enjoyable and it felt really clunky to me. I actually tried 2 a couple of times because everyone raved and I thought maybe I was just missing something, but it wasn’t for me.
I’m with you on FF6. The leveling system for abilities was interesting (but slow), but there were too many characters. The previous one on SNES (called 2 in the west but I think it’s 4?) had a better balance with number of characters to story.
In general anything with crafting and/or excessive loot. I find it very boring and especially when a game is advertised as “survival” when in reality it is just a crafting game with no real threat.
Subnautica is almost an outlier to the rule but the ocean triggers a phobia so I can’t play it. The Long Dark is probably the best example of a survival game with crafting that I do really like.
That trend of shoving crafting into literally everything for a while was really irritating. Even with the great big empty MMO world, Dragon Age Inquisition would have been much more fun if I didn’t spend a good half hour after every expedition looking through the giant mountain of crafting-based loot I inevitably acquired.
Skyrim. I dislike most everything about this game. It’s not a “bad” game as in it doesn’t work and it’s not exploitative, I just think it’s quite average.
Combat is pathetically simple. There are some interesting support spells but by and large magic is either bolt spamming, beam spell, or you summon golems. Melee is even worse just having basic and strong attacks. This is exemplified by the meme that you can make your character however you want…as long as it’s a stealth archer. But even then the Stealth Archer gameplay is pitiful. Archery has the same boring attacks as melee and stealth is just watching a little icon.
The story is garbage. Besides a few side quests, the main campaign is just awful.
The open world is pretty decent, but is waaaaay too small and jam-packed. Skyrim is supposed to be a remote nordic province. But Skyrim does a terrible job at having places feel remote and like wilderness. Every time you turn a corner in a mountain pass there’s another cottage or bandit tower, etc. It feels like a theme park whose theme is nordic wilderness.
The progression is mostly boring. The skill tree is almost entirely passive bonuses. Do X% more damage, Attacks have a chance to do bleeding, increased range, etc. Very few skill trees have an effect on what you can do; just how well you do it.
Again, Skyrim isn’t a terrible game. It’s competent at what it does, but not good at it. The only caveat is that there weren’t many open world RPGs before Skyrim that were as large or became as popular. Plenty of games who did every aspect of Skyrim better; but I struggle to find one that did them all at the same time. /rant
The open world is pretty decent, but is waaaaay too small and jam-packed. Skyrim is supposed to be a remote nordic province. But Skyrim does a terrible job at having places feel remote and like wilderness. Every time you turn a corner in a mountain pass there’s another cottage or bandit tower, etc. It feels like a theme park whose theme is nordic wilderness.
That’s exactly the reason why I like the game. That and how moddable it is lol
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.
The Trails series (Trails in the Sky and Cold Steel).
Some of the worst villains ever, and you’re constantly getting blue balled. The series keeps introducing new characters, that don’t matter, and just drag things out for hundreds and hundreds of hours.
Zero and Azure are great though, until they connect back to the main story at the end.
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