What's a really popular game franchise you just can't get into?

[goldholz@lemmy.blahaj.zone]

Pokemon, TCGs in general, Fallout, Darksouls and the related things

[renegadespork@lemmy.jelliefrontier.net]

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.

[ziggurat@jlai.lu]

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,

[ponyofwar@pawb.social]

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.

[tal@lemmy.today]

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.

[plzgivhugs@sh.itjust.works]

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.

[postnataldrip@lemmy.world]

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.

[tal@lemmy.today]

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.

[lifeinmultiplechoice@lemmy.world]

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

[graphy@lemmy.world]

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

[frenchfryenjoyer@lemmings.world]

the combat in Skyrim always felt so stiff so i get you, just didn't feel enjoyable to me

[tal@lemmy.today]

While I like Bethesda games quite a bit, I do agree on the in-game lorebook stuff. I can't see the appeal of the stuff. It's a collection of extremely short, in my opinion not-very-impressive stories. I just can't see someone sitting there and reading them and enjoying the things --- if I'm going to read fantasy, I'd far rather spend the time on an actual novel. Yet I've seen people obsess online about how much they like the in-game lorebooks.

I've wondered before whether maybe people who are talking about how much they like them haven't gone out and read full-length fantasy books, and so they're getting a tiny taste of reading fantasy fiction and they like that, but it's the only fantasy that they've read.

[little8lost@lemmy.world]

Walking simulators
Something like outer wilds should be fine but i get easily annoyed from just running around
Even that i know that in some cases its very fast running around or something

[theskyisfalling@lemmy.dbzer0.com]

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!

[9point6@lemmy.world]

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.

[daggermoon@lemmy.world]

Final Fantasy, it's too grindy for me.

[ronnieb@lemmy.world]

Assassin's creed. The movement and combat didn't feel satisfying to me at all

[plzgivhugs@sh.itjust.works]

I wouldn't say the problem is with their length or simplicity. I'm sure I could enjoy a short anthology in one of these universes. The bigger problem is the fact that its embedded into a game, effectively breaking the pacing and flow of both the written text and the game. Ideally, this would at least allow you to use environmental and visual storytelling alongside the text, but this is rarely done well enough to justify all the downsides, so you end up with the worst of both worlds.

[crazi_man@europe.pub]

Same. I tried 3 times to get into Witcher 3. No success.

Doesn't matter, there's tons of other fun stuff out there.

[browseman@sh.itjust.works]

Same for me!