It’s days like this that remind me I’m not a typical gamer.
When Sims 4 came out, I put Sims 3 away thinking it was time for something bigger and better even though I’d had wishlisted DLC unpurchased. When Sims 4 clearly had basic content locked behind future DLC, I quit and didn’t go back to anything because playing the old version when the new version is out “didn’t make sense”. Went from being a Sims player to not a Sims player, not in protest but because their business model “failed to monetize” me. Obviously, if I were the base case, EA would have backpedaled.
Reminds me of the “mini-outrigger and story collection” thing with fantasy literature. I’ve gone from being a diehard fan to no longer even reading simply because I didn’t have the bandwidth and research hours to take it all in (Dresden and Iron Druid, lookin at you).
With the namedrops in the main stories on things I didn’t recognize and my not being able to keep up with side stories, my interest waned and I moved on. I still haven’t read anything after Peace Talks, and I don’t recall what’s going on in Iron Druid anymore.
I am cautiously hopeful for Life By You. My favorite thing in the Sims was to set up crazy soap opera dramas and see what happens, but Sims 4 sims are so docile and boring, it feels a lot more like just playing with dolls and decorating the house. I'm not judging if that's the part you like, but it's just not for me.
This is stuff that should be available on release day for all fps games. I can’t believe companies keep getting away with releasing beta version of games as a full release.
Oh the joys of King’s Quest V. The most notorius soft lock is one that happens so fast that you would never suspect it to be a soft lock. Early in the game, the player will come across a scene where a cat is chasing a mouse. Now, this should make the player go “OH NO, THE POOR MOUSE!” and help the mouse. However, the scene is tied to your CPU speed so you have a total of 2-4 seconds to go into your inventory, select the item to yeet at the cat, and save the mouse. Many players will blink and just go, “Alright well that happened.” So, the player goes on and finally gets to a point in the game where Graham gets knocked out and tied up in a basement. Yeah your game just ends here if you didn’t save the mouse because the mouse chews through the ropes. THERE IS NO INDICATOR, AT ALL, THAT THE MOUSE IS THE KEY TO SOLVING THE PUZZLE. NONE.
There is also another soft lock into the end game that involves you having decided to pick up a fishhook earlier so you can use it on a mousehole for a piece of cheese. Yeah, if you don’t do that, you can’t power a wand to use to beat the game’s villain. And you’d probably think; “Oh I can just go back and get it.” Yeah, you can, but if you do you’ll also be trapped in there and your game is over again. So you HAVE to know to get it the first time.
And people wonder why LucasArts titles are more fondly beloved over the earlier Sierra titles.
King’s Quest VI, if you wait a few minutes on the strting beach, there’s a 5-pixel momentary glint that turns out to be a coin. If you leave the beach beforehand, it’s gone forever and the game is in an unwinnable state.
That game was horseshit and I really want to give it another go
I always forget about the coin because I learned my lesson from all the bullshit one screen items from Space Quest IV as well. Also, I’d like to mention the game that was programmed to never let you get the true ending due to legal issues. I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream could never be truly beaten for the best ending in the French and German releases. Mainly due to the character Nimdok’s storyline being entirely centered around Nazis and the surgical “experiments” that happened. I’m not here to dwell on that, but what I am here to dwell on is that when the game was released, French and German players could not get the true ending due to CyberDreams forgetting to check off the trigger for Nimdok succeeding in his game. So, the game was always in its fail state up until 2013 or so when it was finally released on Steam and GOG. The game was in an unwinnable state for those releases for almost 20 years. No revised version with a fix was ever issued until the worldwide release.
How can reviews be monetized also the overall score is what really matters and is far more trustworthy than any games reviewer. Oh you mean points, I still fail to see how that matters when a game has 10k+ reviews and some tiny portion of them are memes. There is literally nothing better in terms of reviews.
Steam reviews are generally 90% memes or circle jerking.
Ghost Recon Breakpoint had mostly negative. The reviews all complain about either no achievements or the fact that the game was locked to their Ubisoft launcher first. Not real criticism of the game, especially considering most of what people complained about on release was fixed by the time it got put onto Steam.
It’s now 7 months later and it’s finally gone up to mixed with mostly positive reviews recently, despite no changes to the game.
Compare Breakpoint to Wildlands, it’s not as good previous game, all of the recent reviews are still circle jerking but posting positively.
You do realize you are cherry picking right? The power of steam reviews it that it’s just users posting what they want and there is a score aggregate with cool tools that tell you if a game is being review bombed. There are plenty of very good reviews on steam and I use them all the time when going through my many thousands of wish listed indie games. Please don’t tell you me you think reviews done by “game journalists” getting early review copies and going to review events is better… on the whole. At least with steam reviews I know it’s people like me rating a game.
It shines in 2D where Unity falters, yes. But it’s perfectly capable of doing 3D competently. It’s shaders and lightning pipelines that are a bit rough on the edges, but that can be overcome with time with more brainpower coming in to contribute. The scripting is also far more robust than the hodgepodge that Unity tries to pass off as C#. The great advantage is that Godot is a non-profit foundation with a transparent governance model. Not a predatory venture capitalist behemoth like Unity.
Godot is a passable engine. It doesn't have a massive pile of money behind it, but it'll generally do most things adequately.
Honestly - and I may be biased as I'm a AAA dev who works with the engine - Unreal is really the way to go. Reasonable pricing on a powerful engine. The main issue is that it's bloated as hell and there's a learning curve... but if you're an indie, it's just as usable as Unity. Plus if you wanted to get into AAA development someday, Unreal is super popular and used everywhere.
It’s been really great for 2d, 4.0 made it really good for 3d, and it’s even decent for general GUI applications, as an engine it feels ready for wider adoption to me.
I think it’s not up to Unreal quality, but for the vast majority of indie games I believe it’s enough.
Curious if some of the many internal AAA engines out there might start to get shopped around as a new alternate to UE. Sony, Ubisoft, and Microsoft all have a few in house engines that at least on paper seem viable for branching out — the biggest obstacle would be support, I suspect. Which isn’t a trivial obstacle, to be clear.
idTech is due for a resurgence. Maybe Valve could even get a revival in usage of Source.
I’ve basically never seen a free to play title cost less than a paid one (for similar content). Typically free to play has some sort of completely uncapped money-sink as well. Given that Sims 4 already costs $500+ for all content, I can only surmise that Sims 5 will cost thousands for the same amount of content.
I said this would happen back when it was just the ISPs having data caps and cell phone companies charging for every text/data caps/ peak hours. Oh, but I was just a raving lunatic then. Fuck the human race. We get what we deserve.
I don’t understand the people who spend a hundred hours on a game to then give it a bad rating, calling it boring. Why don’t they just quit much earlier and play Chrono Trigger or something?
I have about 30 hours in it now. I wouldn't say it gets any better over that time, if you didn't like it at the beginning you won't like it after 30 hours.
With some games after 20+ hours the honeymoon phase is over. But I want to finish it so that all this time doesn’t feel wasted. And there’s hope that the game will get better. I mean everybody else loves it so it must be a great game right?
However, often it just feels like work and it makes the flaws of the game even more obvious. And I just end up despising it.
This is the best answer, players are invested after a certain point, but the realization that they don’t like the game comes later in the process. The more you play the game you don’t like the more you’re frustrated with it and the more likely you are to give it a poor rating, especially when the things that are your biggest complaints feel like obvious bug fixes that should have already happened, but continue to exist.
That is a great question! I’ve certainly asked myself the same thing and the only answer I can come up with in 2 parts.
1: The game is compulsive. While you are playing you want to keep playing. And while the moment to moment interactions are dull (imo) but not so dull as to drive me away. There may be plenty of Oblivion nostalgia keeping me playing.
2: Many of the games problems appear in retrospect. The dumbing down of the subsystems, for example. Much like Outer Worlds; it feels fine while you’re in there but once you stop and step back you realise how crappy they are.
Yes, this was exactly how I felt when playing Fire Emblem Engage. God. I hated how the hub world basically sucked an equal amount of time for each map I cleared. Sure, the mini-games are optional,But so is brushing your teeth.
I may be getting older but it feels like a lot of games are just padding their runtime with gameplay that doesn’t mesh well at all.
To be fair, the game is so massive, any review (positive or negative) done on less than 60 hours probably won’t do the game justice. It’s entirely possible to hold hope for redeeming qualities only to be a bit disappointed in the end.
Customers aren’t professional reviewers. Paying customers are entitled to have their opinion at any time. Tiny Tina’s Wonderland immediately put me off with that lame overworld. I think I clocked around 3 hours and then uninstalled it. Never ever would I spend dozens of hours in a game where a significant portion massively annoys me.
IDK, I think 10 hours is plenty for any game, and 2 hours is enough for most. By two hours, you’ve likely discovered the core gameplay loop and seen how it handles progression, and by 10 hours you’ve seen whether that core gameplay loop changes throughout the game.
I don’t like negative reviews for games when they’ve spent double the time HLTB gives for a playthrough. I don’t expect to play much more than “main + extras” on any game, so any review that’s expecting content beyond that just isn’t useful for me.
But it doesn’t excel at any of those play styles. It’s the classic case of “Jack of all trades, master of none.”
I guess it’s fine if it’s the only game you play, but if you have choice, I don’t see why you’d pick Starfield over other games you could get. It’s kind of like the cult around Minecraft, you can play pretty much any style you want with mods (e.g. soccer, Pokemon, roller coaster, etc), but every style is done much better in a standalone game.
So I give Starfield an 8/10 or a B, it’s pretty good, but it doesn’t really stand out in any particular way.
Honestly, the games that take the most time I often have more negative opinions about. The Assassin’s Creed games, for example, purposefully waste your time. They shove a bunch of junk in and try to make you interact with it when I could be doing something enjoying with my time. Enjoyment per hour should be the measure of a good game, not hours alone. If the game takes me 300h to complete and I only enjoyed 10h of that, it’s a bad game.
Games are meant to entertain. If they aren’t fun or force you to do unfun things, then why waste your time on them?
I got the same with collectibles in games. Chasing collectibles is boring to me, and you will never see me going for one that isn’t directly on my path. It is meaningless fluff.
Chrono Trigger was the first example of a game that came to my head that’s just great. I replayed it a few weeks ago as well. It’s time better spent than playing a shitty game for 100 hours.
IDK, I bailed around halfway through. I got to the Magus fight, and it felt really RNG dependent. If he attacked in a certain order, I would lose a team member and eventually lose because I couldn’t keep up with healing.
Maybe I was too low level, or maybe I didn’t have the right items equipped, IDK, but I completely lost interest when I failed several times without knowing what to do differently except hope that he attacked in a different order. So I bailed.
Maybe I’ll try it again sometime. I originally played on my phone, but maybe I’ll have more patience on my Steam Deck. I really enjoyed the game up to that point, but I just couldn’t bear the RNG. I have no problem failing over and over (I love the early Ys games and some bosses took a dozen tries), but I need to see some sort of progress.
If a narrative-heavy game takes 60 hours and then fucks it up on the third act, it deserves the hate. Games having a bad payoff 200% warrants bad reviews.
Wait you think danganronpa fucks up it’s third act? I was absolutely hooked from start to finish for danganronpa 1 and 2. Not yet had the time to play 3 properly yet though but I’ve looked what I’ve played so far.
If a narrative-heavy game takes 60 hours and then fucks it up on the third act, it deserves the hate. Games having a bad payoff 200% warrants bad reviews.
2 hours doesn't let you experience even 10% of what a game like this usually offer, less alone giving you time to tinker with the systems and see if they actually work, and furthermore if they are actually fun once you're good at them.
Of course I agree. But it’s still not that great game design, if you are bored for hours. It’s like people telling me about tv show that gets good after first season. What should I do until then… :)
How else do you explain to someone what dwarf fortress is, for example? You need dozens of hours just to get the grasp of mechanics and UI, less alone to figure out whether you even like the game. Same goes for many bigger games, for example mount and blade (bannerlord) starts off strong with a promise of you establishing and leading a kingdom but once you actually reach that part through tedious grind, you realize it was all for nothing and the game's a badly designed, shallow, unfinished sandbox with absolutely no vision or execution in that regard. Good luck getting to that conclusion without already investing at least 50 mediocre hours in it though.
You need dozens of hours just to get the grasp of mechanics and UI, less alone to figure out whether you even like the game
The problem with this thinking is that you split the game in 2 parts: first a tedious learning process of dozens of hours, and then an enjoyable experience once you know how to play, and imply that you need to get over the first part before being able (or allowed) to rate the game. But the learning part is the game, even more so if you need to invest dozens of hours.
Many players will simply enjoy the grind of Mount and Blade, because they don’t care about the endgame. Many players (maybe the same) will uninstall Dwarf Fortress after half an hour, because they will estimate that the learning curve isn’t worth their time, even if it was the greatest game ever.
I understand your point. But, if I take your example of mount and blade. If it’s starts off strong with 50 hours of fun, that’s a win in my book. But yes, in this regard steam ratings fail, because of binary recommend or not recommend voting. On the other hand, you can see how many hours did the user that posted a review played, so you can kinda make your own decision.
Also, I would like to add that games like dwarf fortress, rimworld, factorio and similar, all start of fun, if you’re into this genre….at least for me, they did. Thinking back, I think I never experienced playing a game for X hours having a horrible time, and somewhere in the middle changing my mind. At least from the gameplay standpoint. Maybe sometimes story had some unexpected bump in quality (thank god), but not really core gameplay.
Overall, I agree with you, 2 hours is too little for a complete review of a video game. But these are user reviews that can be helpful as well. For an example, for someone who hasn’t that much time to invest in a game to get to the good part. Professional reviewers (or people who have themselves as professional) should play the game for a suitable amount of time, before making an informed review.
If I game can't keep you engaged while doing that for the first 2 hours it's not a good game, at least for that person. You don't need to know everything the game has to offer if it's bored you for 2 hours.
I think there are too many exceptions to this that the best way to truly know is to play it for yourself. I hated Death Stranding, Control, Days Gone, Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Fallout 3 and many other games in their initial few hours, but as they opened up they quickly became my one of my favourites. I’ve started my first playthrough of Witcher 3 and in the first 3 hours I’m not yet impressed, but I’ll give it a good chance before dropping it. Not sure if Starfield is any good but given its systems, it’ll probably need some buildup time I guess.
It’s such a bizarre, but real issue. I’ve always been boggled by the idea that you can’t offer your opinion on some games without first giving them a full work week. “I know you just sat there for the length of 5 movies and didn’t like it, but it doesn’t really get good until you sit through another 10.”
If you give it 2 hours, a game should have made it worth your time.
The Sims 4 base game is already free. So if I’m understanding this correctly, EA, of all game publishers, is announcing that, against all odds, a free-to-play game with in-game MTX is an efficient business model that they want to promote? This might not be related at all that the Sims has always been a license that caters to the general, not particularly gamer audience.
With Sims 4 already being F2P this announcement just means they are once again going to resell the same content back to you at a premium. Piecing up their game even more.
While playing Final Fantasy X the first time, I got to Old Zanarkand and inside the dome, I saved behind a sealed door in the Cloister of Trials. I wasn’t savvy to good saving practices and after solving the puzzle, got into a battle I was completely hopeless to defeat. There was no way to walk back out the door from which I entered, the only way out was through; and with my existing inventory, spells, charged up aeons, etc. I absolutely could not defeat the boss.
It was pretty crushing because this moment is so close to the end of the game, but I gave up and had to come back months (years?) later to fully start the game over. I think maybe I played 99+ hours of Final Fantasy VII and then decided to give X another try. The second time, I was much smarter with maintaining multiple save games for safety. Not to be bested again, I grinded up all of my limit breaks and aeons for safety and completely obliterated the boss in one go the next time around.
Oh I vaguely remembered it being beyond the ¾ point, but also I wouldn’t have known and it certainly FELT like that was the case when I got soft locked.
You must have such a refined taste to not waste more than 90 minutes on starfield. May I recommend Elden Ring or Baldur’s Gate 3 for a discerning individual such as yourself.
Because they’ve been making the same game just with different settings for 20+ years and it been overused. You may have fun with the game if you didn’t play the last few Bethesda games or you still enjoy that type but it is stale for most who have played fallout 3, nv, 4 and the elder scrolls games for most of their lives. There’s just nothing new.
If you can already know the game is boring after 1.5 hours, the game is indeed not for you.
I thought it was yet an other boring scifi shooter, but gave it a try after seeing someone else playing it. Then I saw how much of a Star Trek TNG vibes it had.
games
Aktywne
Magazyn ze zdalnego serwera może być niekompletny. Zobacz więcej na oryginalnej instancji.