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.
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’ve never been a fan of the direction the Fallout series took after Fallout 2. FO Tactics and BoS aside, Bethesda’s handling of Fallout 3 and onwards really didn’t resonate with me.
As someone who enjoyed the story and RPG aspects of the earlier games, the shift to fast-paced shooter mechanics was off-putting.
Back in the day, getting my ass handed to me in Quake III, Half-Life, and Unreal Tournament wasn’t exactly a barrel of laughs, just something to endure. Discovering turn-based combat where I could strategize and plan my moves, rather than relying on quick reflexes, made me actually enjoy gaming. The shift away from that gameplay style made the series lose its appeal for me.
I think there are two age groups of Fallout players. Those who started with the original games, and those who started with Fallut 3.
I’m young enough to have started with 3. I did go back and play the original two, and I absolutely see what you mean. New Vegas was somewhat better, despite still being a shooter, probably owing to the fact that it was written and designed by the remnants of the people who worked at Interplay when they made Fallout.
Haven’t played it. I tried 3, and played through 4. But from what I’ve seen anything released from 2004 onwards is purely action role playing.
Researching my original comment (yes, I’m a professional overthinker) I stumbled upon the wasteland series. It seems that the original fallout was based on this series, and that it still has proper turn based combat.
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.
Hell yeah, love BAR. The discord group slowly started falling apart as we all fell out of love with SC2 but we’re back to regular matches every night now that they’ve been getting converted to it.
I am more of an AoE or SC2 style RTS player, as opposed to the Supreme Commander/Planetary Annihilation/BAR style but BAR really just makes RTS feel so good it doesn’t matter.
At their best, the originals were about a hyper-competent adventurer who always had a plan and was unapologetically confident. She was like Xena and Indiana Jones combined.
It was already a pretty tired cliche at the time to make a gritty origin story when the first game came out. We got an uncertain, untrained, and unprepared Lara with a whimpering attitude.
By the third game they tried to act on the feedback about this, but instead of something closer to the original, she became Rambo, covering herself in mud, hiding in the shadows, stealth killing hordes of enemy soldiers.
I think the Uncharted series did what Tomb Raider remake series should have done.
The enemy ai in those games was so bad that i couldn’t get into them. Especially after coming off of playing the last of us. That game ruined a lot of other games for me. Lol
Well, with that memory unlocked, it’s time to go pull out my Dune II CD and fire that one up again. House Ordos! In the meantime, I guess I’ll check out BAR.
Oh you’re in luck, with the original CD you can play the remake people have been working on! (requires some files from the original game but has been upgraded)
Dune Legacy - Dune Legacy is an effort by a handful of developers to revitalize the first-ever real-time strategy game. It tries to be as similar as possible to the original gameplay but to integrate user interface features most modern realtime-strategy games have like selecting multiple units.
Open source and cross platform
Modern display resolutions
Modern RTS controls like selecting multiple units and right-click commands
Original campaign with Harkonnen, Atreides and Ordos
Super Dune campaign with Fremen, Sardaukar and Mercenary
Multiplayer support
Map editor
edit: @gmr_leon listed below the OpenRA which also has a Dune 2000 rebuild on it if you’re interested.
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.
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.
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!
I have tried on multiple occasions to get into 4x games and my brain is just too simple.
The 4x elements have to be secondary and not the primary focus. Age of wonders planetfall and Warhammer 2? Great. Imperator Rome and europa universalis? Might as well look at a fucking spreadsheet lol.
Wish I could get into the micro and efficiency of numbers but it doesn’t do anything for me. Even with an interest in Rome.
bin.pol.social
Najnowsze