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Souls games.
I really want to like them too, but they seemingly aren't compatible with how I play games. I need to be able to put a game down for a couple of weeks and not feel like I'm back at square one because the specific muscle memory for that game has gone.
Just kinda kills the fun when the game is effectively telling me to get good, when I don't actually have the amount of free time IRL necessary to do that.
for me it feels like they don't respect me as an adult. i need to be able to pause and save games. sometimes i get phone calls. sometimes the power goes out. sometimes i spill my drink. but no, it's all just "get gud".
also i just can't handle the aesthetics .
Could you talk a little more about the aesthetics thing? I have no intention to pick a fight with you or tell you that your opinion is wrong, I'm just curious because I don't think I've ever heard anyone say that about them before
Also yes the no pausing thing is very frustrating
everything is dark and gray and meaty and slimy and gory and bloody and disgusting and sad and lonely and unpersonal and depressing and hopeless and evil and hateful and murderous and dead and off and...
even screenshots fucking wreck my mental health.
There are some stunningly beautiful scenes too though. I get what you mean regardless, its a grimdark setting for sure.
yeah let me just wade through this ocean of death so i can see a dying sun set over a dead world.
things may be beautiful in isolation but the context is what gives them meaning, and the meaning in most fromsoft worlds (and things inspired by them) is "look at how awful everything is here; it's your fault if it doesn't get better".
"haunting" is a better word than "stunning" there.
Omg I feel seen. Yeah I might not be fully unappreciative of the aesthetic, but shit can be dark and grim in real life as it is and it feels edgy and emo to go all gore gothic all the time. Every videogame trailer that starts with "shit's horrible around here" is an instant "next". Also I've always had a problem with eternal unliveable dungeons that make no architectural sense. Even though it is fantasy, it makes it far more childish, which matters if they're trying to take themselves seriously.
Yeah. Heard so much about Elden Ring, and watched the kids play it, so I thought I'd give it a shot.
After about 45 minutes of wandering aimlessly and nearly as many deaths, I decided I wasn't having a good time.
I finally had the Get Good moment where everything clicks recently, its very real. Now im on Nightreign like its crack.
Level your Vigor, people. Farm that little village with the soldiers and get a few levels into your health bar. And boom! Now you don't die bc you missed a dodge. There's good starting gear there too.
Once you "get it", suddenly Elden Ring becomes like the coolest DnD game ever from an old-school perspective. Honestly, its not much different from Zelda - if you can play that, you can play Elden Ring i think.
That has been my experience with it too. It's probably more fun with good gear, but i just see hours on the couch in my future that I don't want to spend.
The gear would not have saved you. The game gets substantially more difficult as you progress, even accounting for your character getting stronger, and if you don't do a decent job of levelling up appropriate skills that will compound the issue. The starter gear for most of the classes is actually perfectly viable all the way to the end of the game for most players too, it's not notably weak at all
I love Elden Ring, but I can absolutely respect why it wouldn't be for everyone. No sense in playing it if you're not enjoying it, the point is still to have a good and/or interesting time
I feel similar. After having tons of people tell me for years I need to get into them, I finally played Bloodborne, which multiple people have told me is their favorite.
I pushed through it on my own first. I actually didn't die quite as much as I expected, though I definitely had to spend time watching YouTube videos and reading 3 different fan-made wiki's to figure everything out. I managed to finish it, but I didn't think it was worth it and would not have finished it if not for wanting to be able to talk about it with my friends.
Then I did another playthrough with a friend doing co-op. When it worked (ugh) it was a way better experience. Partly because of my previous experience - I had a better feel for how to build my character, I remembered most of the environments and enemy placement, and still had that muscle memory from my first run. Partly because it's better as a cooperative experience. Having an ally makes the world feel less desolate. Having another player to take aggro so you can heal is huge- some bosses almost feel like they were designed for multiplayer. And it's fun just cracking jokes and hanging out, making fun of how ridiculous some of the stuff is.
I still don't have the love for it that other people do though. I agree 100% on the aesthetic: everything in Bloodborne is just dark and wet and looks the same. FromSoft makes a LOT of game design decisions that are different from most other developers in terms of what they prioritize. Which is fine, but there are aspects of design where they clearly cut corners and the fanbae seems to laud it as a desirable artistic choice. I shouldn't need to spend hours watching YouTube and researching fan sites to learn how to play the game, and I would argue I shouldn't have to do that to appreciate the story. They simply do not respect my time.
The multiplayer barely works. It's restricted to bosses and the areas leading up to them, and costs Insight (a valuable and kind-of finite resource) to use. Simply connecting is a tedious pain. You can only play either completely online or offline, so if you want to play with a friend you have to accept your whole world cluttered with annoying and distracting messages from random players and the specters where other players died. And that also opens you up to having hostile players gank you. Like... Why can't my friend and I just pair up and play through the whole game together without inviting the rest of the internet too? Why does it cost Insight? Why are the caps for stats never communicated to the player? Why does the Hunter's Axe do primarily Blunt damage while the KirkHAMMER does almost no Blunt damage, and for that matter why aren't the damage types explained anywhere? I'm still not sure why some gems increase Attack, others increase Physical Attack, and others increase Blunt or Thrust, plus there are hidden damage types.
The game feels like it was designed to really get good on your second playthrough and beyond. Especially NG+, although even starting a fresh file again is much better than the first playthrough. Kinda reminds me of how some MMO fans like to say "it gets good after the first 100 hours". For most developers, the player onboarding experience is one of the most important parts to be developed, but FromSoft basically skills over that and outsources it to their community of hardcore fans.
The Witcher. I really want to like it. It seems like the kind of game I would love and I recognize that it’s an objectively well made game. However, I’ve bounced off it at least 4 times after getting 1-4 hours in.
If you're talking about bouncing of the first one, that's completely understandable. It is absolutely not an objectively well made game, and I will die on that hill. Witcher 2 does hold up well enough though, in my opinion, and is a much better place to start. Just watch a summary video of the first one and avoid a bunch of antiquated jank.
Same actually, I got Witcher 3 as part of a console bundle and played it for a short period, not sure exactly how long but I got to the first of I'm sure many fights with a dragon. Found it really unintuitive, by the time I got frustrated enough to bother doing a web search I'd lost interest. Tried a couple of times after and just got the cbf's every time.
Same. I tried 3 times to get into Witcher 3. No success.
Doesn't matter, there's tons of other fun stuff out there.
Thank God, I am not alone. I thought something was wrong with me for having exactly your experience.
Name any sports title ( NHL, NFL, NBA, MBA, etcetera )that isn't a zany, over the top SuperTuxKart or Cartoon Network Racing style kart racer and I'm out.
Same goes for any PVP shooter games such as Call of Duty, TF2 Counter Strike, etcetera. Anymore I really find no interest in them because I don't feel like breaking things over some 6 month old who can squad wipe me, all while getting their diaper changed and slinging slurs my way.
Pokemon - having to watch animations and not being able to speed anything up killed my interest
Skyrim - tried a melee run recently and the combat feels like you’re whacking air
The legend of Zelda - played Tears and the story and puzzles were a bit too kid friendly
Doom - I really tried to like it but I felt like I didn’t get anything out of it. It doesn’t scratch that itch I get out of FromSoft’s Souls games where I want to learn a boss’s patterns and die to it a million times.
In general I don’t think I can do story games anymore
The legend of Zelda - played Tears and the story and puzzles were a bit too kid friendly
It's actually a kid friendly franchise, all of it. The only surprisingly mature themed zelda game is Majora's Mask, it deal with death and loses and hopelessness way more than BOTW is comfortably touch, and it's made in a year.
Twilight Princess is worth mentioning too. It was rated Teen, and had this scene (no gore or sex or anything, just weird surreal horror).
Zelda is such a diverse franchise it really depends on the game. I love Twilight Princess and Majora's Mask, but didn't like BotW or Windwaker at all. It's almost like 2 or 3 different franchises crammed into one.
Couldn't agree more with Skyrim, Oblivion was the same when I tried that too I just can't stand it. Easily some of the most over rated games IMO.
Also agree with Zelda but I think the same about all of the Nintendo IPs, they are just boring and the fan base makes me dislike them even more!
Modern DooMs are... strange. The legendary status of Doom is granted by Doom 1 and 2. And those games are very different from Doom 3-5.
Original gameplay is quite saved by GZDoom and similar projects. Add there something like BrutalDoom add-on and you'll get the best from both worlds: old Doom gameplay and more modern graphics.
Monster Hunter. Probably tried like 4 of those games since Tri and people keep recommending them to me, saying the newest one will surely be the one to convince me. But I found them all to be a boring grind.
Yeah, I have a friend who develops video games and has given some good recommendations who kept trying to convince me to play the series. I've dipped in a couple times and just walked away unimpressed.
Just about any multiplayer game. I generally don't like playing with randos (why would I want to listen to a 12 yo squeal in my ear that they fucked my mother in a pitch only dogs can hear?), and most of my friends don't play games I'm interested in.
Assassin's Creed.
Love the historical gameplay. But I cannot stand being interrupted by the modern day parts. Even if they are small. They feel so disrespectful with my time that I've always been unable to play those games. I forced my way through AC2 but I have never replayed it, despite loving the actual gameplay, just for the modern day boredom.
There's gotta be a mod for that, right?
Up until whatever came after Black Flag I was a die hard AC fan. Midnight releases and everything. And I'll admit, the modern day sections are bad and jarring and completely unnecessary. At some point you're a game developer wandering around an office and it's obvious they had no idea what to do with those sections, because at that point the modern day story had been told. There was a brief cameo from some of the people you would remember from earlier games but it never got to the level of intrigue from 1-3.
Though an assassin's creed game set in like modern day Manhattan could be fun. Watchdogs got kinda close to that before going completely off the rails.
Capitalism: I refuse to develop my sociopathy to the level required to participate.
I can think of lots of series that I don't like, just because I'm not into the genre. I think that everyone has genres that they don't like.
I think a more-interesting question is about popular series that I don't like within a genre that I do like.
I didn't like Frostpunk, despite liking city-builders. Felt like the decisions were largely mechanical, didn't involve a lot of analysis and tweaking levers.
I didn't like Sudden Strike 4, despite liking lots of real time tactics games, like Close Combat. It felt really simplified.
I didn't like Pacific Drive, despite liking survival games. It has time limits, and I often dislike time limits in games.
I didn't like Outer Wilds, despite liking a lot of space games. Didn't like the cartoony style, the low-tech vibe, felt like it wasn't respectful of player time.
I didn't like Elden Ring, though I like a number of swords and sorcery games. Just felt simple, repetitive and uninteresting.
EDIT: A couple of honorable mentions that I don't hate, but which were disappointing:
Borderlands. The gunplay can be all right, and the flow of new guns and having to adapt to them is interesting. But every Borderlands game I play, the always-respawning enemies are a turnoff. Feels like the world is immutable. Also don't like the mindless farming of every container with glowing green dots. And for a combat-oriented game, it doesn't make me mix up my tactics much based on whatever I'm facing. While I finish the game, I always wind up feeling like I'm not having nearly as much fun as I should be having.
Choice of Games. I like text-based games, but a lot of games published by this company, even otherwise well-written ones, have adopted a convention of making one win by playing consistently to certain characteristics of a character, so one tries to just figure out at every choice what option will maximize that characteristic. That's extremely uninteresting gameplay, even if the story is nice and the text well-written. I feel like the same authors would have done better just writing choose-your-own-adventure type games if they weren't focused on the stats. I also really dislike the lack of an undo, to the point that I've put some work into a Choicescript-to-Sugarcube converter.
I'm not sure I'd count Outer Wilds as a space game (assuming you mean something in the vein of Elite Dangerous), despite it objectively including a lot of space travel. It's a detective game, the point is to unravel a mystery
I found both Knights of the Old Republic and Mass Effect completely unplayable.
Dark Souls and any of its copycats. Grinding a boss for hours on end just to learn it's patterns is not how I like to spend my free time. Aside from that: why is that whole genre so bleak? Apart from maybe "Another Crab's Treasure" they're all dark and gray/brown and unrelentingly depressing. Does the gameplay lend itself to that particular aesthetic? Or is everyone just copying Dark Souls that hard?
That decayed aestethic is immemsely popular and it works fine in making you feel like a survivor.
That said, i like jolly things and grimdark stories, and I tend to like the bizarre. Maybe grimdark games lack the bizarre and the occasional bit of fun. I personally say this is the byprpduct of the success of a specific subgenre of games in the 2020's.
The Bethesda (and related) RPGs. The core gameplay loop just feels so shallow in both, meaning most of your time is spent wandering with nothing meaningful to do, or in spammy, often janky combat. The parts that are interesting, the character builds and the lore, aren't super involved in most of the game. You spend so little time building characters, and most of the lore is in written logs and books.
GTA. It just seems really boring to me, I dunno. A lot of shoot em up and not so much substance. To be honest I feel like that for a lot of open world games. It may be wide as an ocean but it's deep as a puddle. That's not ALWAYS bad but I generally would prefer a more linearly running game that's a lot deeper.
Assassin's creed. The movement and combat didn't feel satisfying to me at all
D&D
I've been playing RPG for decades, but play D&D less than once a decade, and my impression goes form awful to not worth my money/time. When I was young and broke, having to buy a player manual + a GM guide + a monster manual when tons of RPG would fit in a single book (Yes I know, clan-books for let's say Vampire are also a money-pit), was out of my budget, then every-time I played D&D, feel like the story were not interesting as concept like alignment and some spells like detect lies would kill many interesting plot. Too which you had a lot of character optimisation often over the long-term (If you didn't take that feat a low level you cannot have the killer feat at high level), let alone the people mixing RPG and miniature games
Sure you can have some funs game with D&D and play it differently but there is so many other game out-there (and so few time) , that why would I even bother joining a D&D game rather than another,
I was lucky that we just had friends that loved making them. So we wouldn't have books or such, and we just made our player cards on paper with knowledge of what can grow and when. Then the world's would grow crazy if we wanted them to, or not. Hell we had one game we played specifically when we were drunk. We would close the bar down, pick up a 12 pack a piece and cigarettes. Then we would sit out on the porch from 2am and play till sunrise every weekend, sometimes both Friday and Saturday night. In that game we'd note our cards on our phones so we'd remember and the DM would have us send them to him at the beginning and end of the night so he could reference/ make sure they weren't all fucked up before the next play session. It gave us crazy things to talk about at the bar; what we wish we did differently, what we would want do aim to do, where we might want to go, and that just all fed content to the DM and they would draw up ways to integrate possibilities for the next week or so. Even had a couple side characters so if someone else happened to be in town or wanted to join us we could auto scale the character by doing a quick percentage off of some of main characters current stats. 1 or 2 people spend 5 mins to bring the person up to speed with what their character story is and where/what is going on or maybe overall goals while another one of us just writes down their updated stats for them and sends it to them.
So we'd spend nothing on the game itself. We had a blast
Final fantasy or any jrpg really
Soooooooo long and boring
I cannot do balders gate 3, or any rpg of that style. I suspect it's to do with trying to roleplay a character while simultaneously viewing them in that top-down third person perspective. I can do X-COM, strategy, I can do roleplay in third person, but that particular combination just kills it for me. It's bizarre.
Anything Bethesda sadly. I want to like them, something about the control and movement is just so janky it’s not fun.
I've failed at getting into any Battle Royale, Survival, or Extraction type game so far.
RE and Silent Hill and Fatal Frame and Alien Isolation. I just can't get over the horror aspect.
