What's an absolutely medium quality game? Not great, incredible or terrible or any single ended extreme. Dead medium quality
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Following up on this comment since I haven't seen a thread about it: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/14639216
Team Fortress 2:
I'd say its gameplay is more "robust" than special. Like you can have any and every kind of fight in TF2 but none of it is more special than an FPS that specializes in any game mode.
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Neverwinter Nights
The multiplayer is supposedly incredible. But I remember being extremely whelmed by the main game.
But it's hard to remember the mid games. Because it is very likely that they didn't leave any lasting impression.
And especially if previous titles in a series or from a studio were great a mid game would feel disappointingly bad. Although compared to other games they might actually still be considered great.
Neverwinter Nights is the best PC game I've played, all thanks to the custom content the players made.
Bioware made the toolset and modding support a big part of the prerelease interviews and live demos. The message to the tabletop RPG crowd was "hey, you can finally build and run your D&D modules as a real DM-led multiplayer group experience online". Probably the only problem with that marketing was that making modules from scratch was still an involved process and making usually needed scripting skill, so maybe the TTRPG crowd didn't end up as enthusiastic as they could. But people still ended up making boatloads of great singleplayer and multiplayer-capable adventure modules! And the multiplayer persistent worlds were essentially like MMOs but in small scale.
I think the built-in campaign was more of a hindrance in retrospect, because if you hadn't heard this, you probably expected another game like Baldur's Gate 1/2. A lot of people went in thinking that the official NWN campaign was the main offering. The campaign was incredibly mediocre by Bioware standards because Wizards of the Coast was incredibly needy. They wanted high level of control, and essentially only approved a committee-built pile-of-meh plot, leaving Bioware to build something around that.
This, by the way, led to Bioware swearing they'd not work with needy licensors anymore and ended up designing Dragon Age instead.
(And if anyone is saying "wait, didn't this just happen again with Baldur's Gate 3?" Yes. Yes it did. WotC is basically impossible to work with.)
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The original single player is so bad I'm certain it was just cobbled together as a demo of the engine and for inspiration for user content. Then the team had time to develope proper story with the expansions
Wizards of the Coast spent lots of time in meetings with Bioware to make sure every damn detail of D&D 3e was implemented according to the book. And even longer time micromanaging the campaign design. A lot of the scenarios are essentially repeats of the others - "do these four smaller thingies and then go kick the main baddie" - because getting that approved by WotC was easier.
Why are there so few D&D games these days? Why do video game dev houses want to make their own RPG systems instead? Well, they don't want the headache of dealing with WotC.
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The main thing I remember about this game is that it was financed by the fortune of a former MLB baseball player, independent of any game studio.
Yes, it was developed by Curt Shilling’s 38 Studios - but it was actually largely financed by the state of Rhode Island, and the studio ended up defaulting on payments!
Honestly, the story of the game’s development was more interesting than the story within the game itself!
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The outer worlds . it was just meh in my opinion. Not to be confused with the outer wilds game that I've yet to play
Outer Wilds is absolutely superb if/when you get it try to get the DLC too its a good value. Steam summer sale coming up soon if you’re in the states
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Following up on this comment since I haven't seen a thread about it: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/14639216
Pretty much every modern AAA game. Theres an exception here and there but really smaller studios have been making bangers that AAA studios just cant seem to touch
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Nier Automata
How dare you feel this way, you scruffy-looking Nerf-herder!
I am unhappy with your comment! But I respect it, so I hope you have a great day ahead.
For real - one of the best games, maybe all time. But Square Enix does churn out some meh games.
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Following up on this comment since I haven't seen a thread about it: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/14639216
Probably everytbing put out by Nintendo in a long time. Yes, even that one. That one, too.
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It's a very different game, although it does have vehicles, so it has something in common with UT2004 in that way.
Unreal 2's multiplayer only has one game mode. It's kind of like capture the flag with some resource management. There are power generators that you need to take for your team in order to use vehicles. You can also capture respawn points which give your team more choices of where to respawn from.
You choose one of three classes when you spawn, with each class having specific weapons. You don't pick up weapons as you go.
There is a release of the multiplayer that's available for free here: https://xmpcommunity.com. After Epic tool all Unreal titles off of digital stores a while ago, they specifically mentioned xmpcommunity.com in a blog post as a way of still playing the game. So it has their blessing.
Sounds like the Onslaught mode of UT2004 and 3, though more strategic, especially with the classes
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Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning
Had all the individual makings of an exceptional game (with input from Todd Macfarlane, R A Salvatore and Grant Kirkhope), and while it was definitely enjoyable enough - it lacked any wow-factor whatsoever, winding up an otherwise forgettable 7/10.
7/10 to me is a good game. I hate how people rate games. I’ve always hated it. A 6/10 game is enjoyable. A 5/10 game is absolutely mid. A 4/10 game is okay. 3/10 has huge flaws but is worth playing if you’re into that.
Subnautica is an 8/10 game for me. I thought it was amazing. I loved it. Below Zero was a 6/10 game. I thought it was good. I enjoyed it, and I would not call it “absolute mid.”
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Unreal 2, at launch, was the most absolutely 7/10 game I've ever played. Just a very generic singleplayer FPS, and not the sequel to Unreal that everyone was hoping for.
I say "at launch," though, because almost a year after the game's release, they added multiplayer, and that is still my favorite multiplayer game.
Oh my GAWD 7/10 is NOT mid. I just ranted on another comment about this. 7/10 is a GREAT score. Everyone: please make 5/10 your mid-game point I am so tired of this aaaaaaa
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Pretty much every korean MMORPG released from 2006-2014, as they were desperately trying to be "World of Warcraft, but better". Perfect World, Aion, ArcheAge, 4story, Granado Espada, etc etc etc, even when you have the better experience of playing on a private server with significantly less P2W (as in, nearly everyone gets most of the shop for free)
To me, personally, ArcheAge would be the best fit for "dead medium quality". It boasts naval combat, which is meh; player run trade caravans, which probably only worked as intended in the first 2 months after launch; limits on gathering and crafting, which just forces free players to buy premium; graphics are the generic korean mmo variety, pretty but almost impossible to distinguish between games; music, enemies, dungeons and most gear exist
Ragnarok Online was the last incredible MMO.
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In my opinion ( haven't played or really seen the DLCs, so I'm just talking about base game ), Pokemon Scarlet and Violet.
Definitely had ups and downs when I did my only playthrough. Absolutely middle of the road compared to the official games ( completed gen 3, part way through gens 4-7 ) I have played and still even middle of the road compared to some of the fan games I've played over the years.
Pokemon ScarVio were horrrrible. Unplayable for me.
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I think it was the way that exploration felt like a grind that made it so “meh”. A whole universe to explore, and you’re either going to come to a barren rock planet, or find the same enemy base/outpost 5 times in a row.
For a game where space exploration was one of the main selling points, it felt remarkably unlike exploring at times.
The first space exploration game without space or exploration
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Nier Automata
How dare you feel this way, you scruffy-looking Nerf-herder!
I am unhappy with your comment! But I respect it, so I hope you have a great day ahead.
I had to stop when the villians were monologuing right in the middle of a fight scene, in the most cliched way possible. And this was after some mid gameplay, with a clearly telegraphed rugpull plot point that seemed like it was going to be the centerpiece of the whole story.
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Ragnarok Online was the last incredible MMO.
Eh, debatable. I've played it for roughly 2 years (2004-6) on private servers and even then I knew it wasn't "the best" or "incredible" by any means, but it was light years ahead of Tibia (which was my first taste of MMORPGs, back when the starter island was a mess with too many players and not enough rats in the sewers for people to kill and level up) in every regard. Even with higher rates and an incredible teenage patience for braindead repetition, the grind got old really damn fast, not to mention that the game penalized fucking around (no stat resets, only on the 99 rebirth) and fucking up (1% xp penalty on death hit harder and harder the higher your level).
Played for a long time on EuphRO server (3x/3x/2x), my highest level character was 75 or something close to that. I think I gave up playing altogether around the time I got a super novice to level 50 on a different, higher rate server
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Following up on this comment since I haven't seen a thread about it: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/14639216
The incredible adventures of Van Helsing. Decent rpg with loot but was fairly imbalanced among character classes. The real winner was the mini tower defense games in it and the spinoff tower defense game, imo.
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The outer worlds . it was just meh in my opinion. Not to be confused with the outer wilds game that I've yet to play
Well, I can sort of be impressed with what outer wilds did. I didn't actually find it all that much fun to play, whereas I completed the outer worlds.
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7/10 to me is a good game. I hate how people rate games. I’ve always hated it. A 6/10 game is enjoyable. A 5/10 game is absolutely mid. A 4/10 game is okay. 3/10 has huge flaws but is worth playing if you’re into that.
Subnautica is an 8/10 game for me. I thought it was amazing. I loved it. Below Zero was a 6/10 game. I thought it was good. I enjoyed it, and I would not call it “absolute mid.”
In a world where games are scored across a full spectrum 0-or-1 to 10, then yes - anything 4-6 would be considered middle of the road.
However, due to a number of factors - that’s unfortunately not the reality we find ourselves in.
Firstly, “mid” is hard to define as it can mean anything from ‘mediocre’ to ‘fine, but forgettable’.
Secondly, ratings/scores tend to skew upward as people tend to reserve 1s for outright scams, broken games and review bombs. With 2 & 3 often used for ‘asset flips’ and similar non-games - so we end up grading on a curve from 4-10.
This also works well for mainstream outlets as it keeps advertisers happy, due to arbitrarily inflated scores.
Lastly, in a world of cumulative media (new releases don’t cause older ones to stop existing) - even ostensibly good games will fall by the wayside as players have access to 10/10 titles from previous years.
So all things considered, a 7/10 is well and truly “mid” in this topsy-turvey IGN-eque world
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Eh, debatable. I've played it for roughly 2 years (2004-6) on private servers and even then I knew it wasn't "the best" or "incredible" by any means, but it was light years ahead of Tibia (which was my first taste of MMORPGs, back when the starter island was a mess with too many players and not enough rats in the sewers for people to kill and level up) in every regard. Even with higher rates and an incredible teenage patience for braindead repetition, the grind got old really damn fast, not to mention that the game penalized fucking around (no stat resets, only on the 99 rebirth) and fucking up (1% xp penalty on death hit harder and harder the higher your level).
Played for a long time on EuphRO server (3x/3x/2x), my highest level character was 75 or something close to that. I think I gave up playing altogether around the time I got a super novice to level 50 on a different, higher rate server
wrote on last edited by [email protected]I am biased because RO changed my life. I played on a 2x/2x server with like 3k people and it was incredible. I met so many awesome people to braindead farm with and WoE was so fun, I didn’t have a lot of close friends in real life but I had some incredible people in RO. Also as a young bi furry bitch Moonie gave me very confusing feelings. I might not be here today if not for RO, so I have some opinions on RO hahaha
Quick edit: I played from when it came out here until when it became F2P and I disagreed with that choice. I hate MTX shit.
