Games

I hate all online competitive games. Yup, all of em. I can't relax! I can't learn at my own pace! I can't explore! The challenge is unknown! I don't want to get better than strangers, i don't care about them!

i like beating systems not people. Watching my BIL play CoD and that car soccer game, I've seen and heard some nasty shit. I guess it's not unusual that people get competitive (ive seen people lose their composure over drunken kickball, i get its not just online) but considering how toxic people can be i just don't get why people would invite that into their house.

Maybe im just not competitive. Yo, any ranked or generally competitive players, what makes you come back?

Pokemon. It's just a franchise of watered-down jrpgs imo.

Soul like everything, but that's just me being too clumsy for any challenge. I do hope some people could stop complaining other games being too easy tho. Not every game needs to be Soul likes.

Doom Eternal. I don’t usually enjoy FPS games and I’m not very good at them but I absolutely loved Doom (2016) as it took out most of the things I hate about FPS games. But in Eternal I just felt like I was constantly out of ammo, and there was too much focus on using specific weapons against specific weak points on enemies which I couldn’t get the hang of

Sports games.

I know people who like them exist given the sales. But not only do I not play or like sports games - no one that plays games in my social circle does either.

It's like the Venn diagram for people who play RPGs and those who play sports games is just two circles.

Grand Theft Auto.

All of them, but especially V. I have tried a few times to play them but never get more than a few missions in before losing interest in the story. I think I have to like or identify with a protagonist to enjoy a game, and most GTA characters are pretty unlikable.

Elden Ring for me. The kids have all played the shit out of it and killed literally everything in the game. I hopped on for about two hours, wandered around aimlessly, died a few times, avoided everything to prevent dying, died a few more times and decided I never needed to do that again.

League of Legends. I don't understand the appeal at all. It's just ugly and not fun. I really tried to get into it too. An old group of friends I played games with all play it. For over a decade it's been practically the only game they play. They never seemed like they were having actual fun either but they keep coming back. I miss those guys ☹️.

Most Mario games in general. I can play Mario Kart or some of the sports games with friends if someone else chooses them, but the singleplayer Mario games just aren't fun to me. The only exception is The Thousand Year Door. I tried the other Paper Mario games and none were as good.

I also agree on BotW. Nintendo was chasing the survival game trend and I guess it paid off for them, but I find the world empty and boring, made worse by the dull colours in the art style. The worst part is the durability system. If there was a way to repair items it might be okay, but everything is like tissue paper. Even higher end weapons are gone after a few enemies, so eventually I just started avoiding combat entirely. I'm certain they did that and kept it that way in TotK because they couldn't think of anything else to reward players with for exploring their empty world.

Outer Wilds. I think it’s a fine game with a pretty cool gimmick (time loop) and a neat story. The gameplay itself isn’t that fun. I think what ultimately ruined it for me was the online discourse about the game; every time it gets mentioned, hundreds of people flock to the comments to extol the philosophical storyline, and throw around hyperbolic descriptions like “life-changing”. Again, the story is pretty neat, but I was left underwhelmed after having been built up by fans of the game.

Skyrim never "clicked" for me. I remember hearing awesome things about it: a vast open world full of things to discover, the ability to create my own character and build it however I wanted, the option to influence the world around me with my choices......

In practice, I found myself in a very big but mostly empty world, full of copy-pasted uninspired dungeons with randomized loot, and no matter what character I chose to build, the combat system sucks and the AI never tries to do anything more than mindlessly walk towards you (and get stuck on the scenery). I was never able to immerse myself in the world because everything was so drab and insipid: generic characters living in generic cities talking about generic things with a very bad dub.

Choices never matter because the game insists on spoon-feeding you everything it has to offer. You can roleplay as a barbarian and still become the headmaster of Hogwarts; you can side with the romans or the vikings but the world doesn't change aside from the uniform of the guards patrolling the cities you visit; you can ignore the dragons roaming the land and they never do anything, because they are just random encounters in the world without any kind of personality or goal aside from turning up and being a minor annoyance to the player.

The modding community is great, but even after spending a few hours installing a dozen or so mods, I was never able to escape the jankiness of the original game: it was still Skyrim, just with a different coat of paint (and a few less bugs and horrible UI decisions).

Reading about the overall reception of Starfield, I felt like I was going crazy, because everything the people say about that game, I already felt about Skyrim fifteen years ago. On the one hand, I felt like my feelings were being legitimized; on the other hand, I still don't understand why people forgive Skyrim (and still play it to this day) but hate the new Bethesda game so much.

Almost Anything Open World tbh

Every open world game has turned into the same “do this x times to get y reward that has no relevance whatsoever to the game”

I miss the days of games on rails. I could sit down, enjoy a game and play it through to the end in 10-20 hours. Now it seems like every game is trying to milk 100+ hours of gameplay time out of even the most basic of stories and mechanics.

Absolutely agree on Red Dead Redemption 2. Another point considering it's an open world game it plays extremely linearly and sometimes in missions it tells you that you can't leave a certain area for no reason.

In general anything with crafting and/or excessive loot. I find it very boring and especially when a game is advertised as "survival" when in reality it is just a crafting game with no real threat.

With you on BotW. Love the dungeons, but in terms of the open world I never felt the oooh, the aaah, the escapism that everyone cooed about etc. Gliding was fun!

Maybe this is because I've never played a Zelda game before so I have no nostalgia attached to it?

I'm a souls hater. They are just slow and boring games.

Can't stand media that thrusts you into a zany, fantastical world where completely insane shit happens constantly, nothing makes sense, there's no consistency and you're supposed to somehow keep going through the fever dream of a setting for however many hours before you can piece together what's actually going on and become invested

Needless to say I bounced off Nier: Automata really hard

Zelda BotW and TotK. I just kind of get board cus the game is so wide but so shallow. I wish I could like it cus there is a ton to like.

Any souls like. They just seem very lazy and the combat is just silly to me.

Just about any competitive game honestly. Part of it is I suck at them but mainly the trash talking toxic communities. Plus honestly I'm not very competitive.

Pokemon. I can't wrap my head around the complexity and "meta" and the story doesn't real matter anymore. I did like my first Pokemon game but that's it.

Most Mario except Mario RPG. I played the heck out of SMB 1-3 but when that was all that was available. When games expanded so did my tastes I guess.

Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Elden Ring, any "Soulsborne" game really. I get why people like them, and I tried multiple times, but it just isn't working on me.

Fortnite and every souls-like

Monster Hunter, it's just so clunky and boring.

Edit: Also the multiplayer is god awful, why can't my friend and me just team up and play, instead you have to jump through all types of hoops to play together.

Deep Rock Galactic.

Yeah I said it.

I wanted to like it, but the gun play was underwhelming and gameplay kind of boring.

Worst of all was the progression. Upgrades were tiered in ways that made 1 a clear best choice. Perks were uninteresting passives or actives with bizarre activation requirements. No way to upgrade flares or pickaxes. And I’m not a guy that cares about cosmetics, so it just didn’t work for me.

I’m happy for everyone else that got a GOAT experience though.

Basically any game where crafting is a central mechanic. Why do people love repetitive boring tasks and looking at grids of items for hours on end.

Ohhh i just got one that will be really controversial.

I'm not a big fan of Morrowind.

Yeah the world has a very alien style, and the lore is cool. But the actual world feels empty and boring to me. Like IMO the map is way too big for it's own good.

proprietary games that install rootkits(wrongly called anticheats) on the system. the corporations in charge have brainwashed masses into thinking that it's just a benign thing there to fend off "cheaters", conveniently brushing aside the fact that this is a massive and lucrative attack vector. it only helps bad actors(including three letter agencies).
and this is not a what-if scenario. every year you can find an incident where such a "solution" is exploited.

Balders gate 3. Just couldn’t get into it

Most of the fads and AAA big sellers, really.

TLOU - Great story, don't get me wrong; probably some of the best writing in games for it's time. But the gameplay got super boring once every concept was introduced. The loop is just not satisfying, and exploration is more or less go check out the dead end before moving on, because the level design is so linear. This is more or less the same problem I have with most big AAA titles; they look great, have a good story, but are just so incredibly boring to play. You can tell the budget went entirely into graphics and voice acting, because the game itself feels more like an afterthought to those; it's just there because otherwise it would be a movie.

Lethal Company - The game itself is pretty shit and tedious. What makes it fun is not the game, but how voice chat sounds when someone is being chased or getting eaten. 100% a game made for Twitch streamers where more people will be entertained by watching others play than playing themselves.

Palworld - I was interested by "Pokemon with Guns" and then I found out it's more like Rust with Pokemon. I hate Rust and Ark all those kinds of survival PvP games. The genre itself has all the same weird jank, like everyone who has been copying the idea from DayZ or the like also copied every bug and bad idea, too; even the AAA made ones! They usually run like shit, are balanced like shit, and get so stale alone and are super frustrating in multiplayer unless you're playing with a large group of friends so you're not just being singled out for being all alone.

GTA:O - Specifically the online portion of GTA5 has made me never want to buy another GTA or rockstar game period. Not because the game play itself sucks, but rather because it's extremely fun but the game doesn't want you to have fun if you're also making money. I can spend hours and hours doing all the activities that don't earn you cash and have not one single issue other than maybe some other players trying to blow me up (especially if they are modding). But once that Mission Rep meter starts going up, hoo boy... The game starts breaking in all sorts of interesting but frustrating ways. Headshots stop killing in one hit, traffic starts behaving erratically and non-sensically (like straight sliding sideways at light speed to force a collision), triggers start breaking, the server decides to go down or get super laggy, etc. Since none of this happens in single player or while not doing activities that reward cash, and there is no other obvious function of the Mission Rep stat, I can't help but think these are actually features put into the game on purpose specifically to slow down grinding so people will buy Shark Cards. The same kinda shit happens in RDR2:O, too.

In this thread: People who don't like a genre of game, criticizing games for being that genre

I had zero fun playing Breath of the Wild. I was just always looking for new weapons cause they always broke. After 10 hours I just wasnt into it at all so I never opened the game again.

I also have zero interest for CoD, Battlefield or GTA games.

3D Grand Theft Auto games (GTA 3, 4, 5) Some video essay (I can't recall which one) compared GTA's attitude to that of the protagonist of "Catcher in the Rye". Its comedy is very cynical, just pointing fingers at everything and saying "they are phony", "they suck, don't they" and "we are too cool to even admit we're cool". The tone always rubbed me the wrong way and felt like these white gangsta rappers - Vanilla Ice and the kind. Rampant fanboyism does not help, either. I dared critisize GTA6 trailer somewhere (by saying "this is not for me, I will pass") to be downvoted to oblivion and I shit you not, receive threats in DMs.

No Man's Sky When it came out, NMS was a broken, buggy mess of a game with inventory management as a central mechanic. Punch trees got replaced with laser plants, but it's basically the same loop of gather, combine, refine, build better tools. After a decade, NMS is a game chock-full of various content, with inventory management as a central mechanic. Not for me.

Souls-likes and Metroidvanias I have plenty of rewarding challenges in my real live and consider myself lucky enough to have work that's fulfilling and gratifying. I don't seek validation in games - I seek relaxation and escapism. I play most games on easy and don't feel like proving my skills in the game is the right use of my time. I can appreciate skilled players - often watching speedruns, 100% attempts or professional tournaments, but when it comes to playing - I rather pick fun, easy, light entertainment. (Death Stranding is one of my all-time favorites)

on a flip note, a game that everyone seems to hate and I quite enjoy is Forspoken Sure, the dialog is cringe and there's way too much of the same barks repeating (I need to look through menus, I think they added some slider to adjust the rate if I recall), but the traversal is fun, I love the UI design (gold and purple), I think costumes are freaking fantastic and combat is easy enough (on easy) to happily zone out to and play an hour here or there.

I'm going to have to tar and feather and entire genre I'm afraid.

It's the weird intersection of visual novel and dating simulators.

They are truly horrible derivative fantasy, written by severely emotionally stunted incels with less sexual/world experience and writing skill than the average grade 7 student.

The Witcher 3 is just... so god damn boring, it doesn't help that weapons break too easily, yet the oppurutunities to get gold are so few that you'll do several sidequests worth of monster genocide, sell EVERYTHING you own, and just barely afford to fix your weapons... It got so bad I had to hack my save to bypass the constant scrunging about for repairs... then I realized the story is so complicated that you NEED to play the other two games to understand what's going on

I went back and played Witcher 2, and found it to be vastly superior, far more fun, far more immersive, and just an all around better time

I have been warned never to touch Witcher 1

the Netflix series was pretty good, though I only saw the first season

Skyrim. I dislike most everything about this game. It's not a "bad" game as in it doesn't work and it's not exploitative, I just think it's quite average.

Combat is pathetically simple. There are some interesting support spells but by and large magic is either bolt spamming, beam spell, or you summon golems. Melee is even worse just having basic and strong attacks. This is exemplified by the meme that you can make your character however you want...as long as it's a stealth archer. But even then the Stealth Archer gameplay is pitiful. Archery has the same boring attacks as melee and stealth is just watching a little icon.

The story is garbage. Besides a few side quests, the main campaign is just awful.

The open world is pretty decent, but is waaaaay too small and jam-packed. Skyrim is supposed to be a remote nordic province. But Skyrim does a terrible job at having places feel remote and like wilderness. Every time you turn a corner in a mountain pass there's another cottage or bandit tower, etc. It feels like a theme park whose theme is nordic wilderness.

The progression is mostly boring. The skill tree is almost entirely passive bonuses. Do X% more damage, Attacks have a chance to do bleeding, increased range, etc. Very few skill trees have an effect on what you can do; just how well you do it.

Again, Skyrim isn't a terrible game. It's competent at what it does, but not good at it. The only caveat is that there weren't many open world RPGs before Skyrim that were as large or became as popular. Plenty of games who did every aspect of Skyrim better; but I struggle to find one that did them all at the same time. /rant

Battle Royale and extraction shooters

The last of us was a boring shooter with unlikable characters who continually did things i wouldn't do so i couldn't invest myself in their story. The gameplay didn't save it.

I was also disappointed by red dead redemption 2.

The universe is great but why would I feel bad about bandits not being able to be bandits anymore!? Still there is a lot of potential in that wild west universe.

GTA5. I loved the 4th one but not really liked the 5th one. I guess I can’t understand why you have to be a bad guy in these games and I’m getting too old for that.

Assassin’s Creed after the second one. The plot lost me and I don’t think there is a plot anymore.

MGSV. I loved the first 4 MGS and hated that one as it had no good story..

I have tried on multiple occasions to get into 4x games and my brain is just too simple.

The 4x elements have to be secondary and not the primary focus. Age of wonders planetfall and Warhammer 2? Great. Imperator Rome and europa universalis? Might as well look at a fucking spreadsheet lol.

Wish I could get into the micro and efficiency of numbers but it doesn't do anything for me. Even with an interest in Rome.