Soulslikes. I am so fucking sick of hearing about them. Elden Ring and it’s jank ass UI did not deserve GOTY.
Hero Shooters, specifically Overwatch and R6 Seige. Really any sort of MOBA too. I dont really get the point of having unique characters with loads of lore and an underlying story if you aren’t going to get to experience any of it in gameplay. TF2 gets away with it because the classes arent really characters, they are more like an archetype of that class and the story is just supplemental stuff.
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.
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.
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
Sports games.
Balatro. There’s just no motivation to keep playing. It’s just uninteresting. Love me some Slay the Spire, though.
Same. I tried Balatro as something for my tablet.
The ‘permanent’ voucher upgrades aren’t actually permanent at all, and I lost interest after that. There’s no meta advancement beyond unlocks, which is not for me.
Sonic.
I’ve been trying to like them when they were published, but no. It’s not really much fun.
It has some ups and downs for me. It’s premised on speed and momentum and crazy loops. The first zone of the first game does a lot to establish that. It then promptly throws it all away in the second zone with a water level that puts in stops everywhere.
Second game figured out the formula.
To reopen the 16-bit playground wars, looking back at the merits of just the games, I’m surprised this was ever considered competition for Super Mario World. Sonic is fine, but Mario World is a masterpiece of design.
Zelda and Pokémon. They bore me. I love the Pokémon tv show tho
FIFA and Madden NFL
Apart from the endless EA, Ubisoft and similar AAA copy/paste titles I never understood the hype around MOBA games.
I don’t get it. Its not real time strategy, but not an ARPG either, you dont create a character, instead have an insane pool of unique characters with a few abilities each. Its just feels like someone wrote down some random game mechanics and choose 5 at random.
All levels are basically the same with mild variations and the whole gameplay loop boils down to optimised fast clicking on abilities and to get strong asap.
Its super boring for me and couldn’t spend more than a couple hours with the games from the genre. Same goes for watching other people play.
Its just a cherry on top to have the biggest tournaments and cash prices, while the top players are celebrated as superstars. Also somehow the biggest MOBA communities are infamous for toxicity.
Definitely not my cup of tea.
MOBA started as RTS mods for people who liked micro and didn’t like resource management. Add hypermonetization of everything for 20 years and here we are. I don’t get it, either, but to each his own.
I liked the old WC3 mods because of RPG-like level progression. Gave a little hit of dopamine to see a build come together and steamroll the other side. This was well before there was a competitive scene.
The genre got hyper-monetized, and I noped out of that shit.
Everything you wrote is true, and I gotta respect that you’ve at least given mobas a try. It’s not your cup of tea and that’s alright.
One thing that you didn’t mention is the team work. While there are toxic people out there, mobas tend to be games that a group of friends can play together for free. You are correct that the abilities can feel limiting - along that vein finding ways to chain spells together with your team mates was one of the most fun ways to get creative.
This is what makes watching pros play a lot of fun. There are people out there constantly experimenting with mixing items and spells to create hilarious strategies to gain an edge. There are all kinds of spells that can come off as overly subtle and dumb sounding, but you pair it up with something else and all of a sudden you have a wombo combo.
Mobas came out of War Craft 3, so any of the millions of people with a blizzard rts background will have skills that will transfer. The single hero format means you can focus all your attention in one place instead of keeping track of your army and your economy at all times. Starting with an established and automated base means that the game isn’t on a knife’s edge like RTSs. There’s a lot of stability and simplicity here over RTSs.
The games tend to be simple in concept to understand but very difficult to master. I had a lot of fun picking a handful of heroes and learning how to best use them. They all have their own quirks and limitations that may not be obvious at first. Conversely, it was rewarding to learn how to shut down heroes that had stomped me in the past.
It is very difficult to get established in these games. It can feel like one of those tv shows that you have to get to the third season before things get better. And I can completely understand people wanting games that don’t start off as rough. The high skill cap can keep people coming back for years though.
I hope this helps 😊
MOBAs are shit, but they struck a chord with people who are bad at games but want to feel good.
They survive based off of MMR and obscuring people’s true ability. If most people playing MOBAs could see how bad they were, they would lose interest over night.
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.
Assassin’s Creed
I think when I tried it originally I wasn’t into the controls and how they felt. I’m more forgiving these days so I wonder if I’d enjoy the series now? I love a good story.
Black Flag was the 1st I played and the only one I enjoyed. Tried others and they were just ‘meh’.
(Why is a decent pirate/sailing game so hard to make? - almost 15 years later and still nothing seems to come close to what Black Flag offers)
If you’re in it for the story, stay far away.
Ubisoft fired the creator of Assassin’s Creed way back after the 2nd (and best) one released. After that, they’ve just been milking it and only useful idiots haven’t caught on yet.
I still recommend replaying the old ones. They were hit-or-miss depending on the person even back when they released, but I was one of they people that got hit hard.
The first one is one of the few games that actually has something to say for those paying attention.
spoiler
“That war your ancestors started, it never ended.”
That’s what I was wondering is should I play certain games and then skip others? I have a PS5, is it possible to play first at all?
You can watch the story on YouTube if you want. Other games did the formula better now. The “shadow of” games and horizon series are very similar gameplay loops done better.
I’m not sure about PS5, but the first 2 are available on PC. They’re pretty old now, so you shouldn’t need an expensive computer to play them.
You can download them for free at 1337x.to and use the free VPN at https://riseup.net/en/vpn to do it safely. Don’t forget that you can use a controller with a computer!
Thank you for the recommendation!
I’d watch a story recap for the first game, then play all of them after that up until black flag. Origins/odyssey/valhalla are good if you are into massive open worlds that can get pretty repetitive and have about a billion side quests and stealth doesn’t matter nearly as much unless specifically required for some rare quests. I love them, but the Ezio trilogy was peak AC imho.
