Octopath Traveler. The UI was terrible, the loot was nothing but stat sticks, and most of the dungeons, of which there were too many, were just long tree walk with potions at the leaves. Genuinely the worst game I’ve ever played. The three-directional sprites were also extremely lazy. I think I lost my mind right at the start when the lazy script response saw one of the characters’ childhood friend suddenly develop amnesia and treat him like a stranger because everyone needs generic dialogue.
The music and cast of thousands worldbuilding was fantastic, but otherwise, I hated almost every single of the 80 hours I put into it trying to give ti a fair shake.
I got about 1/2 way through the game, but as soon as I hit the first boss of act 3 I just couldn’t progress. He’d wipe the party every time. Walkthroughs were useless.
Yeah, the game had severe balance issues too with classes not scaling properly and consequently being either completely dominant or totally useless based on what level you were.
I’m glad I’m not the only person to dislike this game! After going through like three of the chapter 1 missions for the characters, the game felt very very samey, and on top of that, it’s probably one of the only story games that I haven’t finished.
From the moment it was announced, I could not contain my excitement for Octopath Traveler from the art style to the graphics to the music. I was even into the name. I was so enamored that I bought the collector’s edition.
Then it finally came out and never have I regretted a game purchase so much; not because it was awful, but it was so mediocre. Honestly, if it were awful, I might have been more okay with it, rationalizing how a game could turn out so bad with everything going for it, mourning what could have been, etc. It did everything it promised it would, I just realized that it didn’t really promise much beyond an art style and being a turn based RPG with 8 main characters. The package was delivered, but it turned out to be Game Gear, not Gameboy.
I think buying that game put me off collector’s editions. The package for it was very impressive, but I think I finally saw the man behind the curtain and realized that what I was buying was just a bunch of plastic and art books that I was never really going to touch anyway. The only physical bonus I cared about from that point on was Steelbooks, but I don’t even buy physical games all that much anymore thanks to my Steam Deck.
Honestly, Octopath Traveler put me off blindly preordering games in general. Now I just blindly buy old games, so if they’re bad, I have no one to blame but myself for not doing the research LOL
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.
most multiplayer shooters to me, they’re typically filled with the most vile shit you’ll ever hear coming from an 8 year old, and the adults are just as bad and should know better.
competitive shooters like Rainbow Six Siege or Counter Strike are also really bad in casual modes, especially if you’re a new or lackluster player. You’ll be flamed, team killed, and your teammates will try their absolute best to ruin your entire day over a hobby
Trying to get into those as a newbie is miserable dor all those reasons and also because, unless maybe if you get in right when the game first comes out, your competitors will be far more comfortable with the mechanics and have memorized the maps and so on. It’s especially bad if you’re a newbie to multiplayer shooters a whole, even if you’re good at single player shooters. It becomes and exercise in: spawn, die, respawn, die… Super frustrating to begin with. And then people insult you. Noooot something I find worth bothering with for a thing that’s supposed to be enjoyable in my free time.
You see other people playing it and think “wow, that’s cool. I wanna try it”, only to be welcomed by what you just described. Your success then depends on whether you have a hard skin to endure the bullshit, or if you’re social enough to have others play with you that won’t dismiss everything you do so easily. More often than not we don’t have the patience/ability for either.
competitive shooters like Rainbow Six Siege or Counter Strike are also really bad in casual modes, especially if you’re a new or lackluster player. You’ll be flamed, team killed, and your teammates will try their absolute best to ruin your entire day over a hobby
I would be fine with all of that if they didn’t also have the power to kick you from the match
The thing about the From Software games is that they’re (mostly) fair. Most action games give the player a huge leg up compared to the enemies - the boss has a glowing weakpoint that can be revealed with the item you found in the dungeon - or you’re a badass cyborg assassin vs rank and file goons.
In Dark Souls, you’re just a stubborn dude with a sword - and even the lowliest enemy can take you out if you get careless. But everyone is playing by the same rules, it sucks when an enemy staggers you and hits you while you can’t move - but you can figure out how to do the same to them. And the bosses really are doing everything in their power to make you dead.
The satisfaction of Dark Souls comes from meeting those challenges head on and beating them at their own game - or being clever enough to bypass or weaken the obstacle. It’s not for everybody, and it’s certainly not for anybody all the time - but it’s pretty awesome when you get to be David finally taking down Goliath.
I just wrapped up the last one on my list: Sekiro.
It wasn’t as hard as everyone makes it out to be but that could be due to my having previously gone through Bloodborne and learned how to be aggressive.
All of their games are superbly fun but it did take me a lot of tries for it to click.
I started out terrible at them - and frankly am still nothing special - but am super glad that I persevered.
While I have other favorites as well, the Soulsborne will always rank at the top of my list for gaming perfection.
On paper it’s everything I like in games. But when my friends invite me to play, I get bored so much, that I have microsleep episodes. It’s so incredibly boring I can not understand the hype at all.
Even as someone who enjoys it, I also feel it’s overhyped and not for everyone. You’re just doing the same 8 mission types over and over. The only progression is unlocking new weapons and skills/overclocks for said weapons to use in the same missions. And whenever there’s a new event, there’s no actual theme or anything, you just do those same missions yet again just to get a cosmetic for said event, and the actual missions themselves don’t change in any way.
I think it’s one of those games that you play when you specifically have a craving for it. Otherwise, playing it non-stop does get boring after some time
Got into super breeding. Maxed out damage and health and got a lot into speed on my rexes. Its very rewardimg being able to 1 or 2 shot a 150 rex. Takes like a month+ to get anywhere with it. That rex with those stats took like a year of breeding
The thing is Ark isn’t a dino game, it’s a scifi survival/exploration game. You start from nothing and work towards conquering the island and discovering it’s secrets.
I really hope you like it. To me it is best played with friends on a private server, or a server with good rules and active admins.
I began playing it after so much praise from all over the place and it just uses predatory tactics to hook the gamer. I only had fun with the game for maybe a day or so but overall clocked in many more hours of hate-playing. The only good thing is that the developer (who's background is developing gambling games) does not use those tactics for microtransactions.
Once I deleted the game, I was never even tempted to go back.
Really? I guess you could consider the game’s visual flair to be predatory that way but I always felt that stuff was a joke because it doesn’t have microtransactions
Predatory usually implies that you’re being lured in to buy something, but the game has no microtransactions. At its worst the mobile version (which is free) has the option to watch an ad to get 1 revive per run. Don’t watch the ad? The game is the same as the console/PC version.
I think the lights, sounds, slaughtering massive hordes of enemies with overwhelming damage, and constant dopamine rush from them could certainly be predatory in nature if they were used to bait you into buying microtransactions, but that’s not the case here. I see where they’re coming from, but I can’t necessarily agree.
What’s the difference between predatory tactics to hook people into a game, and “normal” gameplay, whatever that is? If neither cost any money or have microtransactions in any way?
Is Diablo 2 using predatory mechanics? Is Counter Strike? Is Factorio?
Games are artificial constructs. If you deconstruct them entirely, unless they got some story to tell as the center point of the game, their mechanics and goals are entirely artificial and constructed to get you to keep playing, be engaged, and have fun, whatever that means and implies.
Because, well, in the end, games do not have a grand purpose. Their purpose is entertainment(or be art, but not all games have that goal). And so if vampire survivors keep you engaged and enjoy the game… Is that really that much different to other games? Another example to this are idle/incremental games, as a pure distillation of what games are. Are they predatory? Is there really much difference from the very core of other, more “proper”, games?
A game can offer an experience that leaves the player feeling satisfied or at least content with how they spent their time. There is a large space of possible interactive experiences that extend far beyond the simple dichotomy of fun vs educational or productive.
A game can certainly be considered predatory if it exploits psychological vulnerabilities to hook someone on engaging gameplay that gives the player very little in return in terms of fulfillment or mental recovery. Whether or not it takes the opportunity to swindle the player on top of that is a matter of degree in severity. Wasting a player’s time (or worse, induce stress or other harmful mental states for no good reason) is not a particularly nice thing to do.
Sure, he worked in the sector, but that’s because he couldn’t find better jobs. What you’re implying here is really unfair, especially considering there aren’t even any microtransactions in the game. As far as I know, he just made a game that he felt was fun.
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.
When I mean “specific,” I mean things like something dedicated to a certain genre, a certain video game, to gaming suggestions, to asking whether you should buy a certain game… anything that isn’t just one catch-all for any video gaming topic. So I’m not including the various !games@instance or !gaming@instance links.
I know about the following and will be adding to this list with links people comment with:
Not saying this resentfully, honestly curious. What need does reposting my post as a comment with the instance names that I had in parentheses removed fulfill, what benefit is gained? I put the instance names there for communities that have the same name or close to it, and/or cover the same thing, so that you can tell the various same-name links apart. If it does something useful, I'll be happy to repost this when no more links are submitted with the instance names taken off. Is this kind of like what some people used to do on Reddit, reposting the post as a comment because otherwise mobile users would be unable to copy/paste the content?
If you look at the source between your post and the OP of this chain, you can see that they haven’t got any special link formatting, but the links will all work correctly for any lemmy user no matter their instance - not sure if kbin handles it correctly.
e.g. [!destroy_my_game](https://programming.dev/c/destroy_my_game) vs !destroy_my_game@programming.dev
I suspect it’s just a convenience thing, since a number of your links point to kbin.cafe search results.
I can’t actually see the source of the OP of this chain on kbin.
I’m going to be honest, I have no idea why this is happening. I never thought I would be the idiot who would have to have other users reformat their unusable links and I’m upset that I am apparently that idiot and I’m incredibly frustrated by it. I thought !communityName@instanceName and @communityName@instanceName were supposed to work across the Fediverse so I didn’t have to resort to [text I want to display](URL) every time I wanted to share a community, I guess not. I cannot grasp why some of these are not working for people and are sending everyone to a kbin.cafe search link, even if they’re from Lemmy. Especially since when I used @communityName@instanceName on a different post, I was told by a Lemmy user that !communityName@instanceName was instance-agnostic and would let you access the community through your own instance. Not through mine (kbin.cafe). And that I shouldn’t use @communityName@instanceName because it would send everyone straight to that instance, where if it isn’t also your instance you’re probably not logged in so interacting would be inconvenient.
I wanted to make a helpful resource, not something people have to spend time fixing because it doesn’t work and I’m very upset that 1) it had to be fixed for me and 2) I can’t understand how to fix it myself. Apparently @communityName@instanceName should be equivalent to [text I want to display](URL) but given that listening to that Lemmy user didn’t work out for my current links I have no idea if swapping the ! for @ would actually work. Plus even if it did, interacting from your own instance would be inconvenient.
For whatever reason, your post is just showing as !community rather than !community@instance.tld. When I click on your links it is taking me to a kbin search results page, while when I click on ram’s links it is taking me to the communities viewed via my instance.
Edit: I’ll just add, I know it sounds like you tried to do it the right way and it didn’t work. But most people don’t even try and just copy/paste the URL as viewed from their instance so thank you for at least making an attempt!
I’m gonna piss a lot of people off, and say that I really, really cannot stand Halo - the whole franchise, not just the 343 stuff.
The way I see it, my problem with the series is twofold: storytelling and gunplay. The storytelling is weak at best: whilst I’m usually a huge fan of environmental storytelling, there’s just so little information in game for me to go off! It wasn’t until I read the Reach novel that I figured out who the Covenant were beyond just “evil aliens”. I questioned this issue on the site we don’t talk about and was told to read the books, but put simply, if I have to read a book to understand your plot, then you haven’t told your plot well enough. Chief is presented in the game as this incredible figure (as are the Spartans), but the games never really tell you why, and as such I never really care about Chief or his bullshit.
Regarding the gunplay, I find it (and movement) simply too floaty to be enjoyable. There isn’t enough recoil from a lot of the weapons, and the SFX on most of the guns don’t give a great sense of power.
I understand that it’s a massive series of nostalgia for a massive number of people. I understand that it redefined FPSes, and I respect the games for this. They deserve every bit of praise people give them. They aren’t bad games, but I just do not enjoy them.
Great question! Really loved the Bioshock series, along with Bethesda FPSs (although they’re not great, I rather enjoy the open worlds). Cyberpunk was great fun, although disappointing in a lot of ways. The Doom series is a personal favourite, although Eternal wasn’t perfect, I really loved how the stories were handled in the previous two games.
For me, I like to seek a balance between story and gameplay. My big thing though is immersion, and being able to really understand the Universe the game takes place in.
Whilst not FPSs, the closest thing to Halo that I loved (Space-Opera shooters), the Mass Effect trilogy tops the list.
Halo excelled at being a FPS on console before auto aim and aim assist were a thing. The terrible, tank-like movement and super floaty, slow jumps would be trash in any PC FPS around its time. But having players move at Quake speeds in Halo would be frustrating, and no one would hit things in multiplayer.
Or would, on a game without modern control assist, anyways. Games don't tend to be as fast as they used to, and Halo has really sped up as a series, but it is still on the slower side.
Street Fighter 1 is an interesting case of an historically extremely important game, that just wasn’t very good. Which in turn explains why it was largely forgotten and completely overshadowed by its sequel. While it invented most of the conventions for the fighting game genre, it implemented them all in a really clunky way. Special moves can’t be triggered with any kind of reliability, jumps don’t even follow a smooth arc but just jerk around and the thing is a button masher, due to originally not having the six-button layout of the sequel, but two huge buttons that would register how hard you pushed them. It’s barely even a functioning game by modern standards, yet it is the birthplace of a franchise that lasts to this day. It’s fascinating seeing all the elements from later fighting game on display in such a rough shape.
This is so true. I bought the anniversary collection years ago. When I went to play SF1 I was flabbergasted. It’s legitimately terrible. Even by standards back then. Though, as someone who is a bit obsessed currently, I am so glad they kept up with it.
Hotline Miami 1 was such a fantastic game. Frantic, high energy, fun, good art style, a confusing at best story but that’s not why you played it. HM2 was full of off-screen instant kill bullshit that you literally could not prepare for in any way other than to die to it a handful of times before you memorized enemy positions off-screen. In the first game, you could always see threats before they could kill you. Not the case in the sequel. “You died and there’s nothing you could have done to prevent it” is a bullshit mechanic in any game.
When you get to the area with the bazillion spitting statues that respawn when you do, it became very clear that Fromsoft was out of ideas for making the game both interesting AND challenging.
The one I still remember is Donkey Kong 64. Just a boring collectathon with too much retreading. And it missed the funny writing of previous Rare platformers. Also it had a cringe rap song like every piece of pop media had in the late 90’s even my eleven year old self hated it.
I loved Rare games before that. After that game I stopped buying any Rare games. Probably because Dk64 was the first game I bought with my own money that I saved for a long time. I didn’t even buy Perfect Dark
This game came out pre-Twitter, so I've been surprised to see how many people hated this game. I've revisited it several times since childhood and still enjoy it quite a bit. The different Kong stuff made it feel somewhat like a metroidvania.
Pretty much all the new AAA games. Kind of lost interested the moment games stopped being innovative. It’s nice to have super dooper realistic looking game and millions of small details but I still haven’t seen a game that would really improve on the game play in the last 20 years. They are still full of simple rules and mechanics. For example, 20 years ago it was common to have the “enemy spotted you but just hide and don’t move for 3 seconds and they will move on” rule in games and it pisses me off when new AAA games do it. Modern games are full of this shit. “If you do A in situation B, C will happen”. Just learn the rules and beat the game. There are more rules, more details, animations are nicer but I still find it boring. It’s still just a bunch of fixed rules, NPCs still move like robots, you can still see the algorithms behind everything. I prefer to play an small indie game that actually tries something new than AAA game that tries to build ‘realistic’ world and fails at it.
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