The stakes are just too high and the limit on time and funds you can safely earn just makes it feel stressful when it should be fun.
I can get the appeal of the risk/reward but it crosses the line from exciting and tense to anxiety inducing for me.
On top of that the game was kind of unstable on release and if you crashed it counted as losing the race and your wager etc and you cannot load an earlier save or anything, if that was the case the whole game would actually be decent apart from the lack of event variety.
I bought Unbound as one more desperate attempt to chase the love I had for the burnout series, and yeah…I hate the time limit thing. The driving is good enough (I still miss the frenetic arcadey driving of the burnout series), but I just want to race, not spend all my time assessing the risk and reward of every event.
I also hate the daytime/nighttime thing and just the cops in general. I don’t feel like NFS has ever figured out how to do the cops in a way that isn’t cheap and frustrating.
Sunset. It was a walking simulator back when they were all the rage.
You might think including walking simulators is cheating for a 'most unfun' game rating, but no matter what game comes to mind when you think of 'walking simulator', Sunset is more boring than that.
If you've played this type of game, you'll know that the best ones are the ones that have their plots unfold in interesting and engaging ways. There isn't a lot else going on in these games so a good plot and interesting ways to engage are paramount for this genre.
Sunset had you walk through an apartment to guess what object to interact with to advance the plot in a completely linear manner, driven entirely by post it notes. The plot was also pretty basic for the genre too.
How this game got 9/10s, 4/5s and a game awards nomination is fucking mystifying. The reviews talk about some deep commentary about civil wars or some shit, but I was too bored out of my mind to notice anything other than a high-schooler's attempt at writing about war. It's so far up its own arse about its 'war is bad' message that it forgets that it needs to convey it in an interesting way.
The game was received so badly by audiences that the developers just noped out of the video game market.
12 Minutes. It sucks because I was really looking forward to it - it’s published by Annapurna which has an amazing track record, and the trailer and concept looked really interesting. But it just kind of devolves into a really basic point and click game with one location where you just have to try every combination of things until something works. And the story itself is just a trainwreck. I wasn’t left satisfied or with any interesting thoughts, I was mostly just confused as to what the hell I was supposed to get out of it.
If you want a good time loop game published by Annapurna, just play Outer Wilds.
I 100%d this game, out of some kind of angry obsession and curiosity rather than excitement, and instead of feeling satisfied with myself, I felt relief that the frustration was over and I could leave that danm apartment and never return.
Myst. I know, I know. One of the hallmarks of video games. I hated it. I like games that give you a path and let you figure it out. I’ve hundreds of hours into Factorio and it’s kin. Portal! A puzzle game, Portal gives you A and Z and lets you figure out how to get there. Myst doesn’t do ANYTHING. Nothing was obvious to me. I didn’t understand where the A to Z was. I couldn’t find A, Z, or any of the other steps. None of it clicked. Years ago, I watched some parts of walk throughs and I did not understand how I was supposed to know the things they were doing. None of it made any sense to me.
I don’t remember if it was like this with the game Myst specifically, but generally speaking: Some hardly solvable riddles were put into many point and click adventure in the pre-internet era, because they usually came with an expensive help hotline that they wanted you to call.
I can understand thinking Riven (Myst 2) was made to force people to buy a guide or call a hotline. It had some extremely challenging puzzles. It was bearable without a guide, but you had to really pay attention to everything. but Myst 1 didn’t have anything insane.
I have never ever heard of a game coming with a help hotline. And I played a lot of games in that time. TIL that
one classic example is the game “The Legend of Zelda” for the NES. The game contained cryptic puzzles and secrets that were not easily solvable. Nintendo provided a hotline, called the Nintendo Power Line, where players could call in for tips, tricks, and solutions. Calls to the hotline were not free, creating an additional revenue source for the company.
Oh boy, Myst… Overall I think I enjoyed Myst, but mostly I enjoyed the books in the library and the world(s). I completed Myst without a guide and I think in terms of early point and click adventure games it’s on the straightforward side… but it can be a real pain to notice some areas and some things are needlessly obtuse, and frankly I didn’t like most of the puzzles. Honestly, I can completely understand why people wouldn’t like Myst, it’s far from perfect…
Riven, on the other hand… is kind of amazing. There’s a few things that are needlessly difficult to spot in Riven, but it’s a little easier to navigate because there’s more frames. Riven is gorgeous, though, and the puzzles are a bit more interesting. I don’t think everybody will love Riven, but it holds up a lot better than Myst does.
Honestly, Armored Core VI. Endgame spoilers below (idk if there's a way to do spoiler tags?).
The final boss is absolutely godawful. Just utter garbage. It took me hours, and I hated it from my first attempt. It's categorically different from anything else in the game, and there's never a point where it's fun. Probably 20% of my total playtime was on this one boss. I was absolutely loving the game up until then, but that one boss is so unbelievably poorly designed that it ruined the entire game for me. It's genuinely impressively horrible.
I don't know for sure, but I think it's just a couple missions before the end. You have a choice to either fight Cinder Carla (siding with Ayre) or to fight the corps (siding with Carla). I sided with Carla, which made Ayre the final boss, and the fight was godawful. My understanding is that there are maybe more endings with NG+, but I'm trying to muster up the will to bother even turning the game on again after how atrocious the Ayre fight was.
Yeah Ayre is the boss my friend got and he also had a hard time with it. I won’t tell you who I got, but it definitely wasn’t as bad.
I decided to Google why we got different bosses, and turns out Ayre is actually intended to be the NG+ boss lol. I have no idea why FromSoft would make two final bosses available for the first play through if they have an intended order for them.
I did it on the first or second attempt and I'm pretty mediocre. That shoulder gun you get from the ice worm mission trivializes most of these hard boss fights - you should give rocking two of them a try.
I’m gonna come out swinging: not even a game, but two entire fucking genres:
Battle royales. I am like 90% convinced that gamers have been tricked by some dark psychology that has somehow convinced them that these games are worth playing. I don’t know whether it’s because the quality of FPS games has been so low for so long that today’s gamers have never really played a properly fun shooter or what. Battle royales are 75% downtime. You spend so long fucking around parachuting in to the map, walking around, collecting stuff, bla bla bla, interspersed by just a few moments of action, and when you get killed it usually doesn’t feel fair, it’s because a whole other team showed up right as you were already fighting someone else and put you in a nearly impossible situation.
MOBA games are just RTS games with the best bits taken out.
Battle royal’s taught me what it would feel like to be gaslighted. Surely nobody thinks they are fun. The only sane answer is all my friends have conspired to induce paranoia in me.
I didn’t say that you’re wrong or lying at all! Like, MOBAs aren’t for me but otherwise I have no problems with them. But for Battle Royales, yeah, I said that I thought that they trick people, like they’re intentionally really manipulative. For example, loot boxes - they’re fun, but manipulative. Know what I mean?
Battle royales seem to be specifically designed to exploit human psychology to maximise the amount of time that a person plays the game by having specifically timed dopamine releases and manipulating game matchmaking to keep players playing for longer than they would have otherwise. Have you ever felt yourself thinking “damn, I should stop playing, but I want a win first?” That’s exactly what I’m talking about.
I’m glad you enjoy the game and I’m not trying to take that away from you, but I just have an “ick” for that genre, it feels abusive in a way I can’t really put my finger on. And yeah for sure I am overthinking it, this entire thread is an invitation to overthink video games ;p
I think people just like the competitive-ness of a battle royale. People like to win and nothing says “winner” more like being the last survivor out of 100, you know?
Nah, that’s not really it, imo. If that was the case then they could just stick 100 people in a lobby and get them to square off 1v1 in a tournament until there’s one winner.
I swear that battle royales are specifically designed for precisely timed dopamine release to make players have longer play sessions and to encourage addiction
I swear that battle royales are specifically designed for precisely timed dopamine release to make players have longer play sessions and to encourage addiction
You’re really just describing live service games though, of which most battle royale games that come out in the modern era are a part of. Pretty much any AAA online multiplayer game is going to be about encouraging addiction and dopamine release. I think why battle royale games seem to be at the forefront of this is because they are inherently online multiplayer games. You couldn’t really make a true “battle royale” game before the prevalence of online multiplayer without some major concessions.
Battle royale games happened to be the industry darling back in 2017 which is why so many AAA studios rushed to carve live service models out of them. If you pay close attention in the coming years you may notice that this will likely again happen to whatever new burgeoning genre takes the industry by storm. They already did it back in the early 2000s with MMO’s.
Yeah, you’re not wrong - I guess the difference is that when it comes to battle royales, the medium is the message. I don’t give a shit about levels, ranks, customisation options, skins, perks, etc. in Call of Duty, so all of those manipulative tricks they pull in that area don’t really achieve much. But for Apex Legends, the manipulative shit is the game itself.
If that was the case then they could just stick 100 people in a lobby and get them to square off 1v1 in a tournament until there’s one winner.
And you think battle royales have too much down time?
I don't play them because they're all prey to the modern aggressive cash grab bullshit most online games are, but most of the downtime you're discussing is actually active and engaged. You need to be consciously making a decision during the parachute part to decide where you want to land. All the "collecting" is constantly under stress, because if you aren't aware of your surroundings at all times, you could be dead. The whole game mode has a tension to it that most others don't, because dying in death match doesn't cost you anything but 10 seconds to respawn.
Lots of games had duel modes without downtime, when your duel ends, you get paired up with another player whose duel ended recently. It’s a few seconds at most usually.
I never felt particularly stressed during the collection segment, just bored, and from the other guy who wrote that he likes that time to mess around with his friends, I don’t know that your experience is universal.
That feeling of tension that you describe was absolutely present for me playing traditional deathmatch. The drive to want to win was strong enough to make me give a shit about the game. Especially if it was like, a clan match or something.
There's also the chaos aspect. Put 100 people in an arena and pretty much anything can happen. The top player can find themselves overwhelmed by people, and any competent player can come out the winner with a bit of luck. It keeps things from getting boring in the way a standard 8v8 in a standard map might get.
For me it’s pretty much any competitive multiplayer game. I don’t dislike the games, I usually dislike the communities. That was one of the big things that turned me away from Overwatch (the first one) for example, the gameplay was fun but I just wish I could choose who I was playing with.
Needless to say, I stick with singleplayer games these days, or at least less competitive multiplayer games. Games with good local multiplayer, like SSBU, are also pretty fun when I can get a group together.
Battle Royals - for me, it’s about how the consequences heighten the tension, and how the threat of getting unceremoniously smashed back to the lobby heightens the victories.
Playing with friends makes the the whole experience fun. If you drop and have some downtime ‘just’ gearing up, you can chat and hang out and goof around. Then when shit kicks off, it’s just so much more impactful (imo) than a game where you’ve just died and respawned a bunch already and you can do the same again. The teamwork and communication has to be next level and it feels so damn good to win a round, especially when you’ve been on the back foot and had to claw your way out of tough fights.
No mind tricks, not fussed about loot boxes and skins, just awesome memories from when we where playing enough to get almost half decent at it.
…and now I’m missing Apex Legends, might reinstall and remember that my friends don’t play it any more
Hahaha ummm yeah as for your last sentence, I finally got around to getting a diagnosis for adult adhd recently and yes, having that focus naturally demanded of your brain by something you actually enjoy doing is definitely soothing. Kinda explains all of the activities I’ve always been drawn to (intense games, sim racing, rock climbing, skydiving etc)
That downtime in a battle royale creates a really fun tension. Unfortunately, it does feel like dominant strategies emerge in that genre a little too easily, and then they become repetitive, so you don't get that early feeling with the game for more than a few weeks.
MOBAs can take many forms, and a lot of them don't look anything like an RTS, but they do usually give you the good parts of leveling up and becoming more powerful in an RPG over the course of about a half hour.
Battle Royales: there are pros and cons to the format over traditional FPS. The real story here is that Fortnite in particular also frequently comes out with tons of fun and ridiculous weapons and items which is something that other companies don’t really do.
Ie: chrome that lets you turn into a fast moving blob, a katana with a charge dash range so big that it’s considered a mobility item, a handheld napalm cannon
I hate RTS because there are so much going on everywhere at the same time that I just can’t handle it. You gotta master your production while scouting while repelling raids while strategizing to see what kind of army the opponent is building while exploring the tech tree and… damn how did they just send an army of 50 fellas??
MOBAs allow me to fully focus on the moment and whatever I’m doing instead of being perpetually late on the actions that need doing
Yeah, I understand that, and I guess they’re not for everyone. I’ve got pretty severe ADHD and I love the “everything happening everywhere all at once” feeling that RTS has
Oh yeah, for sure, 100%. I know that this is incredibly opinions based. Every time I play a MOBA, I just think how much more fun I’d have playing an RTS!
RTS games are currently in a big slump (nobody’s really making them, and the player base on the ones that exist has seriously dried up) because most people only like half the game.
The people who love the micro end up going to MOBAs like League or Smite. The people who love the macro end up going to 4X/Grand Strategy like Stellaris or Crusader Kings. The market of people who equally enjoy both aspects is pretty small. Like, I’ll never buy a bag of Chex mix again, now that I know I can get a whole bag of just rye chips.
To make the scene even more anemic, the skill cap right now is so high. I know several people (including me) who tried to get into Starcraft 2, only for their first random opponent to be a person with 20,000 APM who thinks a match lasting longer than two and a half minutes is a slog. It’s not even possible to learn from your mistakes when you get stomped that hard, that fast. But the single-player part does nothing to prepare you (other than maybe letting you figure out what the buttons do), and it’s going to happen just about every time (because the only people still playing are the people who have been playing for a decade or more).
I would respect your opinion if you presented it as an opinion, but your comment just reads as a condescending statement towards gamers who enjoy those genres. I don’t play either of those genres either, but I respect that people do enjoy them.
I would respect your opinion about my opinion if you presented it as an opinion about my opinion…
Of course it’s just my opinion. I respect people who enjoy those games absolutely, 100%. No disrespect at all. I didn’t even say anything negative about MOBAs except the fact that I didn’t personally enjoy them. You’re taking this way too personally.
I have never played a MOBA but some quick sessions of Vainglory in an old iPhone… If that counts.
I can see the charm in the genre I guess… But battle royals? Hell no, you wrote it damn perfectly… It is a huge waste of time, whether it is for the grinding mechanics, or the camping mechanics, or the unfair situations, but that tension does well for streaming guys, I think that is why the genre got so popular? Like those brainless games that you see on social media like Facebook about driving trailers in messy roads or those Five Nights at Freddie’s kinds of games?
Are you a more eloquent me? This is exactly what I feel about both Battle Royales and MOBAs. How and why? I just don’t see it. I have friends who enjoy both genres and I’ve talked to them many times and asked them to explain why they find it fun. I still don’t get it. Dark psychology indeed. That’s the only thing that explains it for me.
Totally agree with point #1. I was a staunch supporter of Fortnite when it was a zombie defense base building game. Then everybody latched on to the battle royale and I hated it, and every battle royale that hopped on the bandwagon afterwards.
Spend 20-30 minutes collecting loot just to win or lose it all in a sudden burst of conflict… shit gives me hypertension
This is a hard question to answer, because the really unfun ones either get dropped so fast I forget I ever played them unless someone jogs my memory by naming them directly, or I'm willing to just shrug and say "this is probably great to some people, but it's not a genre I like." I guess for this category, I would point to The Witness. I heard so many recommendations for it, but aside from the occasional "oh, neat" when I saw how a puzzle was placed in the world instead of on a board, I couldn't tolerate it for nearly as long as it wanted me to keep doing the thing.
The game I memorably should have enjoyed - that I had the highest hopes for (and the biggest subsequent disappointment for) was Hellblade: Senua's Sacrifice.
At first, I loved the deeply disturbed main character and grim Norse fantasy world being crafted around me, but the combat felt so disjointed from the story (on purpose) that it felt like there was one guy on the dev team who liked combat who everyone was afraid to piss off, so they had to make concessions and put one token immersion-wrecking battle in every so often. And it's mad that Senua has two entire character traits - "psychotic" and "warrior" - and one of them managed to feel immersion breaking.
Then the ending destroyed the bits of the game I DID like and made me feel like a tool for ever having bought into the grim fantasy world to begin with. That shit is everyone's most hated ending trope, and I walked away from the game feeling like I'd wasted my time.
That’s an interesting comment, because I felt almost the exact opposite. I greatly enjoyed the story and world building, too. But I also mostly enjoyed the combat. What was boring to me were the mundane riddles. I did not finish the game because of all the stupidly easy riddles that I felt were only wasting the player‘s time without adding much. However, since I was already pretty invested in the story, I watched the ending on YouTube. I liked it, and while it was not particularly surprising (there were many not so subtle hints about the circumstances of her „illness“) it gave me some closure.
I understand why they did the two disjointed variants of gameplay together with that story/theme. It didn’t work for me. Maybe they should have focused on one type of gameplay instead of two.
Oh, I'm positive yours is by far the more common experience - I haven't met anyone who agreed with me about it, haha. (But starting with "unpopular opinion, but..." is so tainted by popular opinions seeking attention that I couldn't bring myself to say it)
And yeah, the puzzles were simple, but the world was cool enough (until the ending loljk'd it all) that I enjoyed spending time in it even doing the simple stuff.
Its very rare that I actually finish a game that’s just plain miserable but I got a nomination since it was also (thankfully) short: Photographs
Photographs is an indie puzzle/narrative game, where you solve dilemmas through a different set of mechanics in 5 different narratives. So far so good, that’s somewhat interesting. It falls apart completely, however, on the absurdity of its attempts to be tragic. Every story in Photographs has to be a tragedy - which in itself is already a negative point. You start each of these vignettes already expecting how it’ll all go wrong, which by the third or fourth time is already stale. You’re just waiting for what will be the inevitable Bad Thing™ that will randomly happen to these people.
But its biggest failure is that those tragedies just don’t hit. I’ll spoil some of those so be wary if you’re still interested in that. In one of those, a swimmer is caught in a doping scandal, which ends with her being scorned, kicked out of the competition scene, and homeless. In another, a newspaper editor decides to only publish bad and infuriating news to get more readers, and ends up being bombed by one of his former employers, after publishing a paper that says people deserved to get fired. The quickness in which things go south and the intensity is absurd, to the point of almost being comical. Worse of all, it also fails in one critical point (one which even big names fall for) which is not building up its characters. You rarely get an idea of who you’re dealing with before tragedy occurs. You’ll often only have a general understanding - old man lonely, athelete stressed, editor scared of bankruptcy - before the inevitable happens, and by that point you’re on the rollercoaster watching a castle fall down, but it was more like a makeshift, straw castle that you never really cared about.
And at the end, you get one final “tragedy” where you as the player will decide one of these stories to rewind and have a chance at a happy ending. Its a distressing attempt at emotional manipulation where the multiple characters will beg you for their lives and futures, but once again…you have no investment in any of these. They’re all 1 dimensional cardboard cuts, all struck by baffling circumstances. You might as well pick at random - for my part I did the one story that angered me the least, the lonely alchemist - but at the end its just one more alternate future for empty characters.
Its by far one of the games I’ve hated playing the most, and a massive stepdown from a developer that made some kickass mobile games before (You Must Build A Boat is still a must have)
Now I kinda want to make a thread for highly rated AAA games that disappointed you…
I wouldn't necessarily say unfun, but "not for me". Stardew Valley. I went in ready to relax and farm, but oh God, time moves quickly! And I only have limited energy per day. That wombo combo when I was starting out just stressed me out and I didn't get into it immediately.
I know there are mods for it or that it's a good game even with the time, but out of all possible farming type games there were plenty more my speed than Stardew.
The first days are indeed really short. You have to upgrade your tools and your player to have days long enough to explore. It is still a limiting factor for big explorations. You have to pack your stuff. I can understand that it can be unfun.
I wasn’t interested in it at all but then my partner (who has played it a ton) and I started a co-op game. Stardew is way easier and plain more fun if you’re playing it with someone else.
papers please. i thought i was doing pretty well in the beginning, but i guess it’s built in to the narrative of the game that no matter how hard you work, your family will still get sick and die, and the story progresses by you unknowingly screwing up and letting in a terrorist. not only are you responsible for paying for your own mistakes, it only gets harder and more unforgiving with each level. i realized pretty quickly that it’s not fun at all to spend my precious free time playing an extremely punishing game about working.
It’s more of a tragic story than a game. The misery is kind of the point. If you don’t see that point or can’t enjoy that, then yeah, it’ll be terrible.
While i agree that it’s rather punishing, but to me it feels like that’s how it works under a dictatorship. I like how i need to work toward some of the ending by breaking the law
Fwiw, it is absolutely possible to save your whole family in Papers Please. First time players aren’t necessarily expected to manage it, though, so you’re not wrong about losing family members being the intended experience. It’s definitely a game that tries to be “engaging” rather than " fun". I enjoyed it a lot back in college, but who knows how I’d feel now that I have a full-time job.
The game is more of a short story. Which means the gameplay is intentionally grinding because the job is grinding. Which honestly IS bad gameplay, but delivers the message it's going for. If reading depressing alt history dystopia is not how you want to spend your time, then I don't blame you one little inch. ♥
For me, my “misery is the point” game was This War of Mine. I got it just before Ukraine, but still couldn’t stomach it. My first character had a kid that was constantly crying and whimpering and I just couldn’t do it. I was bad at it—if you can be good. I couldn’t help others in the ways that I wanted to. I couldn’t stop the whimpering. Then I went out as someone else and came back and the dad and kid left. And I had to stop there for a bit.
I set it down to come back later, then Ukraine happened. Where it was hard to stomach while I knew this was hypothetical and the Euro-setting was pretty abstracted from the current reality there—though still very present elsewhere—knowing that people on the ground were looking and sounding similar to what was happening in game and seeing that in news daily just cut off any desire I had to play. It’s powerful and DEEPLY empathetic, but that spiral of misery and failure was the point and it made it in spades.
I feel these games are important, but I also know I don't want to put myself through them. Thanks to people like you who tell me about them so I don't have to play them myself lol
I only played that game briefly, and I was so confused with the game mechanics, maybe I didn’t stick with it for so long, but I remember it wasn’t very clear at the beginning how you should proceed?
That’s a hard question, but the first two games that came to mind were Final Fantasy XV and Snowrunner.
FFXV is just… There’s no nice way of saying it, it’s garbage. A huge open world with nothing interesting in it, the story is pure nonsense and it’s all full of holes, the characters are generic jrpg fodder, the shallow combat literally plays itself and you don’t even get to drive the damn car yourself. I was never a fan of the series, but after that one I swore off it completely.
And Snowrunner is just utterly disappointing, for a game that describes itself as a “driving sim” the physics are horrendous, the trucks squid all over the place and they have no traction whatsoever, the entire game revolves around you driving from point A to B through the most sadist maps imaginable, if you get stuck or flip over you have to start everything from start and it’s such a slow game, I can’t stress this enough it’s glacial slow. It’s just incredibly frustrating and stressful, coming from Euro Truck Simulator 2 (a game that I consider zen like) this was just torturous.
I was pretty on-board with FFXV until the exact moment I realized the boat portion was supposed to lead you to a LOT of cut content instead of literally 1 other area. Definitely left a bad taste after that. I feel like it could have been a masterpiece if not for issues during development that I can noticeably feel the effects of during gameplay
I can totally see why you wouldn’t like Snowrunner … I love it, and doing rescue missions to recover flipped trucks and struggling through hard terrain at a slow pace are the parts I like about it, lol
Square’s writing has always been garbage. Only the cringiest weebs like that shit. Like the only ones I liked were FF7 and 9 and even then it was only tolerable because they didn’t had voice acting. Because I could read trough some of the awful dialogues quickly. The FF games always have cool over arching storylines but the god awful dialogues always ruins it for me. Now that their games have voice acting I can’t stand to play any of their games any more. I tried Octopath and Triangle Strategy recently and I just couldn’t force my self to listen to the bullshit those characters were muttering, voiced by those shitty anime voice actors.
I never understood the praise for Octopath. Even though they were technically intertwined, it almost never felt like the characters were interacting with one another; it felt like they were just monologuing and not actually conversing. It didn’t help I hit a huge difficulty spike at the end because I didn’t level up my characters the way the game wanted me to and couldn’t continue.
You are welcome to criticize and dislike the writing of the games, but you can do so without insulting people who disagree with you. This is your reminder of the main rule of this instance to “be(e) kind”.
Maybe this puts me in the “cringy weeb” category but I just put the language to Japanese and use English subtitles. Most Japanese games I’ve played really suffer from poor dialogue localization, and this helps. Except for Exoprimal, the English voice acting and dialogue was fucking great in that game
FFXV isn’t the worst game I’ve ever played. It’s not even my least favorite Final Fantasy. But it’s probably the biggest lost opportunity of any game I’ve ever played by a wide margin. The combat is almost a lot of fun. The magic is really neat. The summons would be awesome if they were more controllable (some summons you will rarely see because of location criteria). The open world is cool, but mostly empty and completely removed from the EXTREMELY linear story.
But the worst offender is all of the story beats that are devoid of context or follow up. Apparently all of the backstory is spread out between the movie, a cartoon, and the DLC. But playing through blind it’s just random stuff happening. The game had potential to be the most epic story if they could have stuck the execution of it.
I have a really complicated relationship with FFXV because while it’s an objectively pretty bad game, I enjoyed it way more than I reasonably should for a game of its quality. Maybe it was the fishing minigame.
I absolutely agree with the overambition being one of the downfalls of the game. They wanted to go too big and create some kind of multimedia “experience” where you had a movie, a novel and many many DLCs to spread the content over.
The end result is an empty shell of a game, and even after watching the movie first and pausing the main story at the appropriate points to play the DLCs (I didn’t play on launch and bought the complete edition), I was still missing context and having beats not land because apparently crucial backstory was meant to be told through the Lunafreya DLC that never got released because the game did poorly.
The game has a lot going for it. It just has a hard time sticking the landing in a lot of ways. Once you get to Altissa the entire story goes at breakneck speed (because apparently they expect you to put dramatic sequences on hold to mill around in the open world that you already left). There’s a lot of really cool story bits that just aren’t given the respect they deserve.
Lunafreya and Prompto are two that really stick out to me that should be huge moments that the game just skims past. (I didn’t play the DLC, so maybe Prompto’s DLC helps this. I also didn’t watch Brotherhood.)
Having said that, I liked the combat mostly. I like the magic system mostly. I like the summons mostly. I like the traversing mostly. Also, I meant to mention that I’m pretty sure you can drive the car despite what the other poster said. Playing the entire FF music catalog in the car was cool. I like the characters mostly.
It’s a mostly good game that could have been amazing with some better choices.
You can indeed drive the car, but you couldn’t on launch. You can even put on some monster truck off-road wheels, I think.
The Prompto thing is a perfect example of the game shipping as incomplete. I did as was apparently intended and stopped playing the main game when he disappeared for a bit to play his DLC, and it does give a much better context. The lines after he comes back would barely make sense if I hadn’t.
No, it was genuinely bad. Yes bugs, but it was also the classic example of corporate overlords forcing “creativity” and hoping that the licensed property would make it a success regardless of the quality.
Noita, it’s the most sadistic “normal” game that i’ve ever played, barring those troll game that’s meant to be rage inducing. It’s a good game, but dang this game is bloody hard it become unfun the more i play as i couldn’t make any progress.
I’m really into games centering around magic or being a wizard. Noita regularly got recommended on r/gamingsuggestions for that kind of thing. I think it might have also gotten recommended for some other kinds of things I browsed r/gamingsuggestions looking for, like deep mechanics or having lots of different ways to solve problems. And the idea of spell creation, which Noita has, really appeals to me.
I’ve also heard of how infuriating this game can be, and I know I don’t like roguelikes or roguelites, so I didn’t pick it up.
I know, i’m enjoying the first few hours just learning thing and then the fun-ness just keep plunging afterward because i keep getting bad rng after bad rng for a few days and just decided to quit.
Download the mod that allows you to infinite respawns, and explore the outer bounds of the game. I really don’t understand the point of the roguelike nature of the game, except to purposely put itself into meme/streamer culture as one of the hardest games ever made.
It’s a fuckton better than spending four hours of prep on a run, securing all of the buffs, HP, and weapons to try to figure out some deep lore in some complicated area, only to die to a single pink pixel of Polymorphine. Roguelikes are meant for short and quick playthroughs, not hours-long doomed runs.
Yeah, i get games like binding of isaac or risk of rain 2 that the first level i can already know whether this run is gonna be shit/fun/sure-win, or game like rogue legacy where i can slowly upgrade my stats, this one i feels like i can be ultra careful but i can still get destroyed instantly without it being my fault. It’s what makes me give up
My go-to for this is Resistance: Fall of Man. Invisible walls everywhere, a cover system and a health system that were absolutely at odds with a gun that shoots enemies through walls, and an uninteresting story told in boring slideshows. The only reason I played through it is that my college roommate and I were broke and needed another co-op game after we finished all of the good ones.
Was the game at least good enough to pass the time with your roommate, or would you rather have been doing something else?
Off-topic, but kbin isn’t letting me send you a direct message so I have to post it here. I think it’s because we’re on two different kbin instances. I like your username!
I totally forgot this game existed until you mentioned it. I think this was the first game I actually played with the intent of writing a review for it and maaaan it sucked so fucking hard.
kbin.cafe
Najnowsze