2 picks for me: Stardew Valley, most boring shit ever, I don’t see the appeal, seriously how the hell did that thing sold 20 million copies?
And Witcher 3, I own that game since 2019 and I regret buying it, funny thing is that I’ve finished Dragon Age 1 and 2, which are kinda same genre but I actually enjoyed those games. I guess the old BioWare sauce carried those games unlike Witcher where there’s nothing to enjoy in its massive pointless world.
Any first person shooter. I’m just not into something that requires that kind of reflexes and precision, especially with a first person perspective where you can be killed instantly from behind.
First person shooters are just dumbed down point and click games.
It is like they just removed the entire puzzle element, so you can play brainless.
That’s not fair, mostly within the context of multiplayer. The puzzle is outsmarting other players.
For real. What a reductive analysis of a large and varied genre.
You can literally call any game a point and click game.
I agree. On top of that, I get motion sick really easily, so I can play a lot of FPS games for about 15 minutes max.
Sucks to suck?
If your need to feel better than other people is the only thing fun about a game, it isn’t a good game.
ROFL!
No, I play it for the same tickle I get from pressing myself to extreme in rhythm games. It’s just gotta suck to not be good because you won’t get that intensity. You’ll just feel clumsy and not get to spend much time alive.
So far as comparison goes, I can’t say I don’t enjoy that some. I’m the top ranked project muse player and definitely feel awesome about that.
Any MOBA
FIFA. Every man and boy in England loves FIFA, except me. I find it totally boring and pointless.
The game is popular but isn’t universally beloved, even the fans hate it, but they got the monopoly in football games
Yeah. I buy one every few years and usually regret it. They’re terrible these days.
Sensible Soccer was the last football game I was able to get into.
On the Amiga, not the shitty remake.
Amiga games were so good.
Just like any sport game, I only enjoy FIFA in small doses.
Sports games are literally the definition of “playing the same game over and over again”. I can only ever do maybe a handful of games in a “season” before I start just simming and focusing solely on the management side of things. And even that doesn’t last more than a season. I don’t think there’s any sports game where I’ve run more than one or two seasons.
PES back in the day had an amazing manager mode. And become a legend mode was so much better than fifa career. Being just one player and starting in small forgotten clubs and going all the way up to the champions league plus trying to win the “fifa” World Cup was addicting back in the day.
Anyone looking to scratch that itch on PC, consider looking up SP Football Life. Totally free and excellent.
Elden ring yawwwwn.
It’s beautiful, and it seems like an interesting world, but learning exactly how to dodgerollattack for every enemy with deliberately delayed reflexes is not my kinda fun.
I’ll go ahead and say this also includes all “Souls-like” games for me.
Combat seems clunky, buggy, and unnecessarily difficult. I don’t have a ton of time to play games, so when I do, I want it to be relaxing.
Very well said. I played with a buddy for like 50 hours before I admitted I just wasn’t having fun.
I hear the lore’s really interesting and some guy linked me a YouTube channel full of elden ring lore so I might look into that.
But playing it, not so much.
I don’t even think the lore is interesting. I played maybe 5 hours before giving up because my friend told me that the creator literally wrote the story and then had them scramble it up and remove sections so you’ll never ever get the actual full story. Then they proceed to hide it behind a bunch of meaningless drivel. Utterly stupid game to me.
Most of the Soulsborne games. The only one I’ve been able to enjoy is Sekiro.
In most Soulsborne games, it seems like difficulty is artificial simply because your character is so damned clunky. I enjoyed Sekiro specifically because the character was snappy and didn’t feel like they were running through waist-deep water. If I lost a fight in Sekiro, it was never because I was animation locked or because my character was too slow; It’s because I was too slow.
It took me a long time to warm to them.
The more armour you wear in the main Souls game, the slower and clunkier you are. It’s kind of a gotcha, in that you instinctively think more armour will help, and it does the exact opposite because you get hit more often. There’s a lot of shit that isn’t really explained at all. Some people like that, but the Wiki is there if you don’t.
Parrying was all but impossible for me, I just went with sword and shield for most of it, switching to the massive zweihander for the DLC.
Dark Souls 2 is the worst of them, I’d skip that if you ever try again. Way too many enemies in every area.
I also just dint have the time to get good at them. I get maybe 2-3 hours a week to game on average these days. I’m not going to dump a year into getting my ass kicked for a single game.
I tried Dark Souls and quit pretty early because I couldn’t pause. I don’t care about doing inventory or anything like that, but I’d like to be able to just stop things if I need to go check on the door or something. The outside world doesn’t stop just because I’m gaming.
IIRC, lots of people originally used the Home button as a sort of super-pause. But that’s not as easy on the PC version, where the game just keeps running in the background.
I’m not sure about universally loved. I’ve never heard of this series…
i can’t deal with this take, i just woke up.
Don’t worry, it’s not as bad as it sounds. I’m familiar with series in the genre. I just hadn’t that term for the genre itself, because I don’t play it :)
“Soulsborne” isn’t a series per se, it’s an umbrella covering all the Dark Souls games, and FromSoft’s other games using the same formula like Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Elden Ring.
I’ve just never gotten into Pokemon. The games just feel like 99% grinding. I’m sure that’s an incredibly unpopular opinion, but I still find them unspeakably dull.
They came from a different era. If you didn’t grow up taking long road trips with a Gameboy pocket/color for your only distraction then you probably don’t get the nostalgia rush that most pmon fans do.
I was born in 1977. I had a Gameboy. I just never cared for Pokemon.
I played Red/Blue as a kid. Enjoyed the crap out of them. And then never played any of the later games ever. I think if I tried now I’d feel the same as you.
A significant number of pokemon fans had to make do with emulating the original gameboy games on the family computer. I know I did
Exactly right. We spent hours and hours in a Ford van playing Pokemon red/yellow/blue in the 90s 😂
It’s weird, because Pokémon didn’t invent turn-based RPG’s, nor did they even invent the pocket monster genre because Dragon Warrior Monster arguably had a better game than Pokémon out around the same time - with more monsters, breeding, and a better storyline.
But Red/Blue and Gold/Silver were great games of their time. Very basic, but great, mostly because of the world built around them. If you didn’t appreciate Pokémon, it’s probably easy to see why you’d find it dull.
Worth mentioning, regarding Dragon Quest, the monster teaming up with the player was added in DQ5, back in 1992, something that was arguably first introduced in Megami Tensei 2 (1990). Dragon Quest Monster was released only in 1998, after the first pokemon games.
What set pokemon apart from them was the amount of pokemon you could get. That Game Freak managed to cram another 100 in Gold/Silver, a night/day cycle, berries, friendship, breeding and the entire original Kanto region in a gameboy color cart is a small miracle
I don’t even mind some turn-based RPGs. I mentioned Wasteland in another comment, which I loved. Wasteland was basically remade as Fallout 1. Fallout 1, 2 and the Wasteland games which now have their own sequels are all turn-based RPGs, but they give you so many more options than Pokemon and they are also about team building since you don’t play as a single character.
I guess Pokemon was just not the game for me. 🤷♂️
If you look at the first game from a historic perspective
The first game basically was an open world RPG with 151 unique characters with each their strengths and weaknesses, and their own attacks, and all could be customised. Running on a handheld that previously could only play Tetris.
It was a freaking coding masterpiece.
But I agree the gameplay loop hasn’t upgraded the way it should. It didn’t evolve with the medium and stuck too much to its roots.
Although the grinding in the newer games has been minimised. You can play through the games without grinding once.
I admit I haven’t played a recent Pokemon game because of my previous experiences, but I’m open to checking a new one out at some point if the grinding has been reduced. Thanks.
Any of the soulsborne games.
If your game is advertised as being “extremely difficult”, it just means it is lacking tons of quality of life features and goes out of its way to punish the player by making them repeat the same slog over and over. It is quite easy to make a difficult game, much harder to make a fun game.
Just imagine how much better and shorter Dark Souls would have been with a marker telling you where to go, instead of you fumbling around going through the same areas because you have no idea where to go next. It artificially lengthens the game.
But the worst part about those types of games is the community. They go insane when you even propose an easy or story mode. As if the the difficulty is the only redeeming quality those games have.
I don’t have to “git gud”, I can just close the game and never play it again while I enjoy actual good games.
Eh, just wasn’t made for you. Not everyone needs to listen to death metal either.
I can just close the game and never play it again
True and healthy!
while I enjoy actual good games.
blatant copium
Look I think there are valid complaints to be made about the Dark Souls franchise, but criticizing them for not giving you waypoints says more about you than it does the games themselves. The lack of any sort of hand holding was by far the most interesting thing for me when I first played Dark Souls and is the thing that got me hooked. The tension in exploring a new area, having no idea what to expect and being so scared you’re going to die is a wonderful feeling, especially when you overcome it and survive to the next bonfire.
You’re making me want to write a boomeresque comment about how kids want video games to hold their hands. Don’t you have a sense of adventure? Is exploration and mystery not interesting to you?
I’d like to make a counterpoint here, but first I want to acknowledge that you are 100% entitled to your opinion and maybe souls-like games are just not for you. It’s a shame that people are kicking downvotes your way because this is in no way a new or controversial opinion, but like you said, the community can sometimes take their love of the game/series too far and blame the consumer for not liking the same stuff they like, which isn’t fair and just makes the souls community looks like clowns.
Anyway, my counterpoint is that I don’t feel like these games are as difficult as people make them out to be. IMO, older games were just as hard, if not harder to complete even when playing optimally. In the framework of just about every Souls-like game, you have tools that you can use to almost completely trivialize the toughest encounters if you want. DS1 can be beaten by a complete amateur if you do the gravelord speedrun (which doesn’t require any real speedrunning tricks and there are many youtube tutorials that you can follow along with, takes about 10-15 minutes from character creation) and get the gravelord greatsword which can inflict Toxic on all the bosses, so you can just hit them a few times and run away for the rest of the fight, waiting for the poison to finish them off. That’s just one example. Just about every installment of FromSoftware’s Souls’ series has some overpowered cheese that you can research to essentially trivialize the game. Some people might argue that you’re not beating the game in the “intended way” if you take such shortcuts, but I disagree. Any way you make it to the end is the right way.
For a lot of people, part of the fun of a game like Dark Souls is the adventure, the discovery, and yes, pounding your head against a tough boss trying to beat it over and over. If you’re the type of gamer who gets easily frustrated to the point where you feel like quitting when encountering a challenge that feels unfun or unfair, I can see it not being an enjoyable experience. The thing that keeps most people coming back is the dopamine hit that they get when they do finally overcome that challenge and they are rewarded with more stuff to explore, new items to pick up, and so on. I think if there were any argument to be made against making the game easier for yourself by exploiting broken game mechanics (or with an easy/story mode added or modded in), it’s that you probably won’t be super invested in the outcome and get bored easily. Without the challenge aspect, the Souls games are very much a bare bones experience. It’s essentially a generic fantasy RPG with a story hidden behind item descriptions and cryptic NPC interactions. That doesn’t exactly make for the most compelling gameplay, so there’s no trail of breadcrumbs to keep the gamer uninterested in the challenge going. There’s a sort of intrinsic value in these games that can’t be quantified, because everybody gets something different out of it.
The games usually have an easier mode that is still not easy. In DS 3 playing the Knight and using the shield heavily works pretty well and make a lot of bosses trivial.
But yeah, it’s not for everyone, grinding timings and level information can be really frustrating so if the satisfaction of beating a level is not enough there’d be no point.
Baldurs gate 3. Just too much going on and I can’t figure it out. Never passed the first board. Also elden ring can get fucked.
I felt this way too, but my husband guilted me into sticking with it and I’m super glad he did, we had SO much fun playing split screen. I’m the type of person who has to look at the controller to see which one triangle is to give you some idea of my adeptness.
First board? Not sure what that means… the tutorial? On the nautiloid? You are missing out on so much
I think he’s thinking of Build a Gate 3, which is indeed the most confusing game ever. It helps to think in terms wood grain, and it really helps if you get the carpentry instruction from BaG 1 and 2.
The very first thing you do. Whatever that was. Never got past it.
The tutorial?
I dont know. The very first part that is gameplay. Whatever that was, was too hard for me.
Probably the Nautiloid then (the area you wake up in that’s all… Bombed and has those pods).
(Ignore the rest of my comment if you have no interest at all in the game anymore, but read on if you want to give it another chance)
BG3 has a lot of content and story, but if you’ve never played a CRPG (like D&D but digital), it’s a bit difficult to get into. If you ever consider revisiting the game, there’s no shame in picking the easiest setting and/or looking up build guides online to make the combat easier (and save scum).
There’s a lot of very well written story and characters in the game and it’s one of those games where your choices actually matter. You can also take your sweet time with almost everything that’s happening in the game if you feel overwhelmed (something that new players aren’t really told).
Signed, someone who thought this type of game wasn’t her jam at all and is now 140h deep into her first playthrough ❤️
Hollow Knight.
I played for probably a dozen hours or so, beat a few bosses and then just hit a boss I couldn’t beat. (Don’t recall which.) I would get to the boss and die almost immediately. Then I’d be sent back to a far away checkpoint. I’d slog back to the boss, and die. Repeat again.
I’ve played plenty of games like this. I get at some level that’s the point. The problem is that I wasn’t enjoying the game. I wasn’t making progress. Just repeating the same over and over again.
I’ve played and loved similar games. Super Meat Boy & Celeste? Excellent. Ori and the Blind Forest/Will of the Wisps? Top games.
By all accounts I feel like I should like Hollow Knight… but I just don’t feel they got it right.
I broke through the exact same situation you had and finished the game beyond what most Hollow Knight players will achieve just so I can legitimately criticise this game that so many people apparently love.
You’ve picked out the exact same mechanic that I also criticise. It wastes the players time and is anti-fun.
I’d also add that the map mechanic is also terrible.
My fun factor increased 10x when I found a hollow knight map online to use that had key locations marked. Ironically it was a very soft touch map that just gave general guidance without too many spoilers and this improved my experience of the game.
It’s a game I wanted to enjoy, and I had some amount of fun, but ultimately it just fell flat.
The Ori games were so much better while following the same basic gameplay, but Hollow Knight gets all the extra attention. I do think Hollow Knight is bad, it’s just a game that is ok, and by the next game will be enjoyable after they iron everything out.
The other possibility I assume is that there is something Souls-like about the game that I don’t get. I’ve only played DS3 and I found it boring quickly. I understood what the game wanted me to do, but I wasn’t having fun doing it. Maybe some folks do, but not for me.
I accidentally beat the Mantis Triplets far earlier than I needed to because I couldn’t find the path into the ruined capital city I was meant to take.
Long route back to fighting the optional boss to enter a far too difficult zone for me. Only after beating them and discovering that that was not where I was meant to go did I backtrack and find the turning I’d missed to actually progress. (I rather liked Hollow Knight despite this, but you don’t and that’s fine. I just think it would be funny (, and a sign of poor map design if you made the same map reading error I did).)
Witcher 3 used to be like that for me. Everyone kept telling me to do the Bloody Baron quest; did it, didn’t care for it, and stopped playing the game. Four years later, I decided to give it another shot and I liked it a lot and finally understood why people like it.
When I tried playing it there were a couple quests near the beginning where you get to choose someones fate. Nether answer is a good one and I felt bad whichever I picked. I stopped playing at that point.
I stopped playing after I saw how slow and clunky the combat was, and how the spellcasting is basically 5 different colours of the same spell.
Doesn’t matter how good the story is when the gameplay in between is a snoozefest.
I didn’t really like the witcher 3. Found the combat wasn’t that great and I spent most of my time walking around talking to people or trying to repair my weapons . I didn’t get very far into the game though so I’m not sure how much that changes later in the game . I did like the card game Gwent though .
It’s not like I totally didn’t enjoy it, but Red Dead Redemption 2. The game was good in many ways, and I totally get why it’s so we’ll loved, but I just have nothing with the setting. I don’t like cowboys, I don’t like playing as an asshole who makes bad decision after bad decision, and I also don’t like a setting where women are basically property. Just not really my vibe. I just came from Cyberpunk 2077 and the contrast was quite big, even though Cyberpunk is supposed to be more dystopian
As someone who both dislikes westerns and liked the first Red Dead Redemption, everything I’ve heard about RDR2 makes me think I would not like it at all.
It sounds like they took a great game and injected it with mindless busy-body gameplay mechanics. I’ve barely ever heard people talk about the story, which doesn’t really help sell a game that’s a sequel to a story focused game.
Helldivers, the gameplay is fun but I just can’t do GaaS games. The constant “seasons” and shit requires.more attention than my actual children do.
Deep Rock Galactic has nailed the formula with seasons as ways of adding things with using them as FOMO. Missed skins and loot from previous seasons used to just get recycled into the RNG loot. Now they added a system to toggle and play missions as if you were a in a previous season and earn the old loot.
Some friends tried to get me into Destiny 2. It seems really pointless. I recognize the mechanics and aspects common to other games but somehow it just never clicked with me.
Ditto. Dull as dishwater
I put 1.2k hours into it during lockdown. Not enjoying Destiny 2 is probably the best thing that’s ever happened to your wallet tbh
As someone who enjoyed the tiny sliver of the free part of game, are the story missions worth paying for?
The good main stories are Forsaken (can’t play this anymore afaik), The Witch Queen (may be worth it), and The Final Shape (from what I hear, no context on this one). There’s also some good stories in specific seasons but I don’t know how they’re handling older seasons and whether or not you can still play them. Back when I was actively playing they were cycling them out every year.
A lot of the value in these is the endgame content though. Unless you’re interested in the loot game, lost sectors, exotic missions and/or plan on getting a group together for dungeons and raids, I don’t think it’s worth it. If all you care about is the story, I think you can get much better stories elsewhere.
seriously, I tried playing with my friends for like 2-3 months and had to spend at least $100 just to get the DLCs to play with them. Great investment at this point…
Yup, that tracks. I think it was a total of about $150 for me starting Y3 and up to the beginning of Y4. When D2 is good, it’s REALLY good, and nothing quite compares to grinding that game with a bunch of friends who are also super into it.
My friends I used to play with I actually met in-game when I was F2P. I couldn’t buy the DLCs myself at the time so they just bought me the DLCs (which I still think is wild and I’m unbelievably grateful for). But the content got stale as hell at around Y4 and they stopped playing for the better part of a year. By the time they were back, they still didn’t wanna do most of the content and I was getting burnt out on the power grind every season. Raids became more about the loot, less about having fun. Eventually we all kinda fell off it. By the time I could pay for it myself, only some of them were playing sporadically, and the monetization kept getting more and more insane (like fuck Bungie for thinking dungeon keys were a good idea).
I really miss those days though and I’d pay in a heartbeat if it meant playing like we used to.
Yeah, that makes sense. I’ve had some runs like that on games that were great but just aren’t ever coming back, like PSO and even Half-Life DM or Quake. I agree the monetization is extreme.
I was trying to play with my friend from elementary school, who I had reconnected with after several years. Him, plus a couple of his friends who i sort of know from years ago too. Destiny is his favorite game and he’s been at it for 12 years straight, which is cool, because he knows everything and I could learn from him, but the other two were fairly new, and I was brand new, which unfortunately falls into his tendency to want to be the cool guy who knows everything and tells everyone what to do. Also, we couldn’t play ANY other game, just Destiny 2 for 4 hours a night. Also, I have a bad habit of getting overly drunk around that time. So, it didn’t quite work out. Might still talk to him in the future and might still play Destiny 2 sometime (sorry if that was overly personal ha).
I had a co worker a few months ago say they needed to head home to their second job after work, curious I Inquired further and it turns out he has just been busting out ~40 hours a week of destiny 2 for a few months now while also working 40 hours a week at our job.
To be fair we work from home 2 days a week so I’m sure he had some cross over work/destiny time.
That sounds about right. It’'s easy to spend ridiculous amounts of time playing during a good annual expansion or particularly good season, especially if you’ve got a clan that plays and raids regularly and/or you use the LFG discord. I used to be the same way, 40-50hrs a week at my peak. But I was in college, I don’t know if I’d have the energy for that and a full time job now.
My first Mario Game was Super Mario World, as such I don’t understand why Mario 1 and 3 are so beloved. Groundbreaking they might be, fun they are not.
Any time I got the Mario All Stars Cartridge out and said to myself “I am completing Mario 3 today”, after a while my mind went “or I could actually enjoy a round of Mario World” and did that instead.
I share your sentiment; but you need to remember that SM1&3 were both originally NES games, and even the All Stars remakes are largely hampered by the original consoles limitations.
That’s why both SMW and Yoshi’s Island are such better experiences overall, they didn’t have to emulate those same limitations in order to preserve an original playstyle.
I know that, what made you think I forgot?
It’s just not fun to me, yet online people describe Mario 3 as “the best 2d Mario” and “one I could always come back to”. This has nothing to do with the NES’ limitations, it’s a difference in taste.
Hearthstone, even back when it was new and not excessively monetized, I just couldn’t get into it.
DotA, the original Warcraft 3 custom map, and every moba afterwards. I just can’t find enjoyment in how it plays.
Man I really want to like Hearthstone but just can’t get into it.
