What's a popular game series that you just can't understand the hype for?
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Sonic.
I've been trying to like them when they were published, but no. It's not really much fun.
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Dark Souls type games that are just pure grinding wasting time.
I bought this shadow game that look awesome gameplay was fun at first... Then something felt off.. Things were just ridiculously hard for no reason I kept dying on level one...
I was like... Wtf is this shit? Little googling and the game is made by the dark souls people and apparently this grinding over hard shit IS the appeal...
Na man, I got a job and kids and responsibilities and my one hour of playtime better be fun... And dieing and grinding ain't it.
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Pretty much. They need a different genre name, like "masochist" or "try-hard". A lot of these games are significantly more punishing than the original Dark Souls ever was
wrote last edited by [email protected]It's not even punishing IMHO, like it's just cheap 'hard' walk around corner insto death because you didn't know whatever event was there was there, and only way to learn this was... Walk around the corner and die, now, proceed to waste your time walking back get past that corner, die on next... Repeat.
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Fascinating. Do you feel the same way about Stardew Valley, My Time At Portia, Palia etc?
I know nothing about Stardew Valley aside from its name, and I've never heard of the other two. I can't say I have an opinion about them
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Yeah, I tried giving it a shot twice, but both times after 5-6 hours I just came to the conclusion that the game wasn't respecting my time, and was punishing me for exploring.
The worst part is that its popularity lead to other games copying it, meaning half of metroidvanias released after it have the same issues. I started to just filter out any game that had corpse runs as it was a good indicator of how much I'd hate it.
the game wasn't respecting my time
Hit the nail on the head. That’s why I stopped too. And I don’t even mind difficult games; Sekiro is an all-time favorite of mine. But Sekiro is compact, dense, no filler. Hollow Knight felt empty and sparse and traversal was a chore.
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Balatro. There’s just no motivation to keep playing. It’s just uninteresting. Love me some Slay the Spire, though.
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Souls.
I’ve tried em and find them repetitive and cheesy in their lack of little details that make games fun for me.I tried Elden ring and thought it was the ugliest, most repetitive game I’ve ever played.
I don’t get the hype for the souls series, it’s just making a game repetitive and difficult to justify its lack of substance -
Dark Souls type games that are just pure grinding wasting time.
I bought this shadow game that look awesome gameplay was fun at first... Then something felt off.. Things were just ridiculously hard for no reason I kept dying on level one...
I was like... Wtf is this shit? Little googling and the game is made by the dark souls people and apparently this grinding over hard shit IS the appeal...
Na man, I got a job and kids and responsibilities and my one hour of playtime better be fun... And dieing and grinding ain't it.
Same, what I hate is how many souls like games they make, it’s just cheap
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Fascinating. Do you feel the same way about Stardew Valley, My Time At Portia, Palia etc?
As someone who put a lot of hours into both, I don't see the comparison between Stardew and Animal Crossing.
Not meant to be an aggro response. I just think the depth of each game is wildly different.
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Darksiders is pretty much a mix of Legend of Zelda and God of War.
And your point is?
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yes, i really liked it. it was a bit difficult in some places (i don't know how many times i had to re-do the tree flooding) but the aesthetic really made it worth it.
one of my more recent stand-outs in the genre was yoku's island express, which is also a real treat.
Hmm. I'll have to check out the demo. The screenshots of the gameplay make me thunk I'll bounce off it, but figuring that out is what a dwmo is for
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Zelda and Pokémon. They bore me. I love the Pokémon tv show tho
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I agree with your critique of souls-likes, but there was something really special about the original Dark Souls that none of its successors really captured. This was before they decided that "ultra-hard" was a good selling point and the attack patterns were far more simple. The atmosphere and difficulty were still there, but they made sense and fit with the rest of the game and its ideas very cohesively.
Not sure if anybody will understand this, but it's like the difference between spicy food that's spicy because it has peppers and spicy food that's spicy because they added a bunch of artificial stuff. Spicier usually means tastier, because it has more of the flavorful peppers. But in the case of, for example, Dark Souls 2 or Elden Ring, it's like they just added a bunch of capsaicin (difficulty) without including any more flavors of the peppers. The difficulty is beyond the degree to which it was artistically meaningful in the original Dark Souls.
Yeh I get you. It’s like when turning the difficulty up in a game all they do is make enemies take more damage to kill and do significantly more damage when they hit you. That’s just crap. Difficulty increases should be about more than that, like better AI and more/different enemies.
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For me its Metroid, and really the whole Metroidvania genre. I can never tell when a challenge is supposed to be possible, or if I'm supposed to come back later, and and up wasting hours trying to do something only for it to be trivial later. I don't find this at all rewarding.
That said Tunic was a fantastic game, and I love the concept of the 'Metroid-Brainia', purely because of the concept that every challenge is theoretically possible from the start, you just need to learn how to do it.
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“Souls-like” games - memorise attack patterns, the game. Not hard, just tedious.
Are people memorizing attack patterns? This one comes up a lot and I don't really get it. The boss does a thing and I react, which is how most real time combat games are, I think?
I guess something like Skyrim you mostly just stand there and trade blows.
Yes, that’s how you’re reacting to the boss or any other enemies in games. You know that they do attack x, y, and z and then are vulnerable for 2 seconds, or which moves are parry-able to stun them, etc. Enemies in games have set move lists, and they have pre-set patterns and weak points etc.
For example when you see a skeleton you know exactly which moves and attacks patterns it has, and when to block/parry/strike to defeat them.
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How many of the bosses can you walk in and just wipe the floor with on the first try
A pretty good amount, though that's confounded by playing lots of similar games over the years. But, like, I see the boss lift his weapon way up and I go "I bet he's going to swing. I should get out of the way." Sure, there is an element to "I've seen this before - I know if I run behind him after the big butt stomp I can hit him easily", but that's hardly unique to fromsoft.
What sort of games don't have enemies that you learn their moves? Like, you play Baldur's Gate 3 and you learn "ok, that wizard has Sleep prepared, I should keep my HP up." Or you play Hades and learn "ok, these guys like to charge but then take a second to recover". This complaint is not unique to souls-likes but I don't know if I've heard it brought against any other game.
It’s not unique to from soft games, but it is literally the entire games “difficulty”. They usually just give them extreme levels of health and make them do tonnes of damage so you have to make few mistakes in recognising and reacting to the patterns.
Its a big reason why I don’t care about single player action games.
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I don't have much against any particular game since I can see something that someone would enjoy.
However there are sone things that I actually don't understand how someone would enjoy;
Always Online: all of your time, money, and love could just vanish underneath you
P2W / P2S: Ah yes, let me make the gameplay loop doing a 9-5
Gacha: Gambling is 80% of the gameplay but somehow they make it unfun
Live Service: By itself not bad. However it enables games to be released completely broken.
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The Total War series should theoretically be right up my alley, since I'm a history nerd and I put a LOT of time into Paradox games (EU4, CK2, HOI4, Stellaris, and Surviving Mars are all high on my hours played chart).
But for whatever reason, I've just never clicked with the Total War versions of the same thing. For old school, I played Empire and Medeival. For new school, I dipped into Atilla because it was on a sale. I figured old mechanics/new mechanics, maybe one will work better than the other. But while I did somewhat enjoy Empire, the Total War series in general just has never grabbed me.
I have the same issue with the Assassin's Creed series. History Nerd...should be right up my street. But just have never clicked with me despite trying multiple games. THOSE however are much more clearer to me as to why. It's the cut and paste gameplay loop that Ubisoft has in ALL of their series.
Unlock an area, do random missions based on a number system for difficulty, interspersed with main plot missions. Move to another area, repeat. Some missions encourage you to team up with other people and go online. Others can be bypassed by micro-transactions. They literally haven't changed their core loop in years, whether that's Assassins Creed, Watchdogs, Shadow of War/Mordor, The Division, Far Cry....the list goes on and on.
I tried Warhammer total war thinking I would love it. But the game was just... Not funny to me. I felt like the game was trying to make itself funny too hard. Like I was never able to breathe. Game would be literally spamming armies out of nowhere so I cannot stay a single turn idle, it was always giving me another mission, a new thing to do. Too overwhelming.
I suppose it's specifically engineered with some other public in mind, but certainly it doesn't seems to be me.
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I don't have much against any particular game since I can see something that someone would enjoy.
However there are sone things that I actually don't understand how someone would enjoy;
Always Online: all of your time, money, and love could just vanish underneath you
P2W / P2S: Ah yes, let me make the gameplay loop doing a 9-5
Gacha: Gambling is 80% of the gameplay but somehow they make it unfun
Live Service: By itself not bad. However it enables games to be released completely broken.
I would add games that have no final ending, which are are endless time sucks.
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By the 4th gen, things started to get stale. I think most of the love was gone by that point.
Instead of going forward, I recommend looking back. Try playing Pokemon Crystal on an emulator. I started recently and it's eye-opening how enjoyable it is.
Stale? Yes. But I would recommend bw/bw2, hgss, pla, and usum before crystal
