Just played through Doom: Eternal cause it was on sale for 4€ a bit back. The entire time I was wishing I was playing Doom 2016…
The new Doom games are all very different from each other. I liked what Doom 2016 was doing (even if it got repetitive) but really didn’t enjoy Eternal because the constant juggling didn’t sit with me. I haven’t tried Dark Ages but it seems like it’s doing something between 2016 and Eternal (not quite use what you want and not quite always juggle) while also adding its own dimension with the mix of melee and guns.
I would never recommend each Doom title based on the last title. But it doesn’t mean I don’t like what they’re doing. I think it’s brave to do its own thing instead of doing what is expected.
Dispatch.
It goes the old telltale way of presenting fake choices that dont really matter because the optional character are being written out of team scenes mostly, one romance option is completely ignored because the devs clearly favoured the other and put her in every scene and the dispatching minigame they advertised the game with has absolutely 0 impact on anything. You could fail every dispatch, only do the mandatory ones and nothing would change.
Deep Rock Galactic. I was really excited to play it and I tried to like it. The colors and graphics were 10/10 awesome, I just found it to be extremely boring and repetitive.
Skyrim, it’s so damn mundane.
That’s because you’re playing it wrong. You see, at it’s core Skyrim is actually a puzzle game you play on the Nexus Mods website. You spend 30+ hours carefully researching, building, and tweaking the perfect pack of mods, only to immediately run out of interest in playing Skyrim once you’re finally done. The actual Skyrim installation only exists to check if you solved the puzzle correctly and it runs.
Damn. I feel so seen suddenly.
The end-game lasts about 30 seconds after boot.
“Oooh, pretty sky. Ooh, wavy plants. Ooh, god rays. Alt+F4.”
anyway, back to minecraft
minecraftminesweeperFTFY.
I’m in this comment and I hate it
Real. Without my 800 mods I would‘ve never bothered finishing it. Playing/modding was probably 50/50 in terms of time spent.
Actually. I tried Skyrim so many times and never got into it, then I decided to give it the best shot and play with a cavalcade of QoL mods. I went from a hater to a true Skyrim enjoyer. At this point, with how pessimistic I was about the game, I think with the right setup ANYONE can enjoy it.
If you manage to install the mods
Skyrim came out 14 years ago.
Thanks for the tip
The title of this post was, “What’s a recent game you’ve tried playing that isn’t worth the hype?”
14 years is hardly ‘recent’
It is when you’re over 40.
I started gaming in the 80’s my first game was doom on a 286. Skyrim release date was recent for me and I only recently played skyrim for the first time.
The question is “What’s a recent game you’ve tried playing…?”
Not ‘What’s a recently released game you’ve tried playing…?’
Depends entirely on how you interpret the question. It could be read as “What’s a recent game you’ve tried…” (as in, a recently released game that you tried), as you’ve done, or “What’s a recent game you’ve tried…” (as in, a game you’ve tried recently) as the person you’re responding to did.
I think either interpretation is fine since the title doesn’t actually clarify either way.
can it correctly be interpreted both ways grammatically though? I think only the former is actually correct.
idk. not my area. but I think they have a point, recent can only refer to the game itself, not when you played it
ah fuck you’re absolutely right, it’s ambiguous 🤦
Just get openmw and play a real elder scrolls game before Bethesda got got
Or spin up TES3MP with some friends and experience it together!
I have the opposite opinion. I avoided it for years because of the hype (and not having proper hardware to run it).
Now I have almost 900 hours in it, and sometimes I jump in just to walk around and revisit some places.
I recently tried Fallout 4 based off of the same expectations. Probably didn’t even make it a quarter of the way through the main story. I was having absolutely no fun. The thing that finally killed it for me was spending 5 minutes calculating which items needed to be sold at a shop and which I should keep, then getting blown up a block later, then respawning right before I did all that inventory management.
Paradise Killer.
Amazing soundtrack that is on repeat with the greatest in my playlist, but terrible character design and condescending to the player character.
Too bad.
Dungeons and Dragons 5e is less fun than 3.5e IMO.
There was more of a sense of character progression, and ability differentiation in 3.5e.
5e achieves balance by flattening the power curve.
For example, the attack bonus for a level 20 Fighter in 5e is just 4 points higher than it was at level 1 - same as a 5e Wizard. Both get +2 at lvl 1 and +6 at lvl 20
In 3.5e, a level 20 fighter’s attack bonus is 19 points higher than it was at level 1 (+1 to +20), but a wizard only gains half that much fighting prowess as they level up (+0 to +10).
All 5e characters are pretty much the same statistically & mechanically. Differentiation comes from role play, which is the least interesting part of the game for me.
I liked 4e the best.
4e did some really cool stuff while also going a bit off the rails for me. I think overall I like 5E more, but we played a ton of 4e and I’ll always remember it fondly. I was really into the more defined roles, and how classes were a bit more self contained so they could just keep making more and more niche ones
Differentiation comes from role play, which is the least interesting part of the game for me.
Can you explain why you would play a TTRPG if you’re not interested in role play? Seems like a battle sim like warhammer, or just a video game might be the thing you’re looking for.
As a DM, the cooperative story telling IS the interesting part. D&D has never been an airtight game system, it’s a bunch if hand waving to give just enough illusion of structure and randomness so you don’t feel like you’re just arbitrarily deciding everything yourselves. But at the end of the day, you are. The characters and story you’re left with is the only thing of value.
I think this is one of the reasons why Pathfinder 2e has been doing so well.
It’s a middle ish ground and it feels good to progress.
My current issues with it are how underpowered the items are. So boring.
Heartbreaking that they decided static item attack rolls and DCs was a good idea. It’s my biggest gripe with the system. Some items, like the Holy Avenger, subvert this and are pretty good, but most items suuuuuck the instant you outlevel them. Like, Sparkblade is cool, who doesn’t like chain swordbeams? Anyone over level 4, aparrently, because every creature you come across has learned to dodge lightning from that sword in particular
Being on the patient side of things, two games I’ve played in recent years and didn’t enjoy were:
God of War (2018) - it just felt like AAA slop to me. Meaningles upgrades, tons of obvious puzzles at any corner - never throwing in even a single brain teaser, boring combat - the best option was almost always to throw the axe, that thing were you start walking at a snails pace to mask loading and/or play a cutscene and on top of that your god powers being mostly cutscene exclusive. Just your bog standard AAA game with no ‘friction’ - boring.
Factorio - it just feels like work to me. On top of that, going in blind, I just didn’t enjoy building something up just to tear it down again because I’ve unlocked something new changing the requirements. Once again, feels like a job in IT. Also, resource patches being limited just gave me the weirdest kind of anxiety despite never actually seeing one run out.
I feel both of these strongly for the same reasons, also GoW had all the sluggishness of a Souls-like which immediately made it not fun to play.
I enjoyed Blue Prince, I’m exactly who it was made for, but it was definitely much worse than people would lead you to believe.
The game makers had no respect for players’ time. You solve one of the large, run-independent puzzles and it all clicks, then it could take you several hours to playtime to luck into the conditions to actually test your solution. Everything takes longer than it should. It’s obvious that I’m going to toggle security settings every time I’m in the Security Room, why do you make me go through this slow as hell PC every time? It’s not for realism because no PC back then had such fantastical functionality, so why not make the PCs load screens faster? How does the slowness enhance the experience? Why not just put buttons on the wall you can toggle for the security settings, at least? There were times where I figured something out, and rather than spend ten hours trying to actually do the thing, I just looked up that part of a walkthrough to get the next info.
Really interesting game, but I did some napkin math and I wasted 25 avoidable hours during my playthrough (long unskippable loads and such) that could have been spend completing an entire different game.
The game makers had no respect for players’ time.
I don’t know that game, but the importance of respecting the player’s time cannot be overstated.
I wish more game makers understood this and prioritized it accordingly.
It’s a huge part of why I quit Destiny 2 entirely. A game that doesn’t respect the player’s time and pads it with RNG on top of RNG to extend playtime feels awful.
I absolutely agree with you, I got to a point where I had solved the “main” puzzle, but was struggling to complete other puzzles (that I knew the solution to) simply due to room draws.
I wanted to love the game, but it held itself back on the RNG design. It can be so detrimental to the game that I wouldn’t recommend it to most people.
Same. The game is fantastic but the RNG is only cool on paper and falls apart just a few hours into the game. The methods they give you to influence your luck are just not enough to do much at all.
It’s really frustrating when you are trying to do something but you constantly have to do something else because that’s what the game is giving you.
I cheated at the end and gave me infinite rerolls for rooms so I could create the layout I needed in that moment. Much better that way.
I bought into the review hype, bought the game, then realized about two hours after the Steam refund window expired just how tedious this game felt to play.
I really wanted to like it, but it stopped being fun and started being so tedious that I uninstalled it.
I bought it ages ago but finally decided go give it a go. From the first day I could tell it wasn’t gonna be a game for me. Note-taking is basically mandatory, and it seems so easy just to get fucked out of a run by RNG.
Narrative seemed interesting but I feel like the whole “ability to decide what room you’re going into” thing should be weaved into the story off the bat.
Neat concept but not for me, but I think since I’ve owned it for so long I’m outside of the refund window.
Check out Seance of Blake Manor, doesn’t have the rng
It’s funny, I literally downloaded that one last night.
Nine Sols. Played it right after finishing Silksong to keep the metroidvania kick going.
The parrying was some of the worst feeling parrying I’ve ever felt in any game, the world felt tiny and extremely linear, the narrative was predictable and felt extremely flat, and the final boss is the only time I’ve ever switched to a story mode difficulty in any game just to get it over with, I love difficult games but that difficulty spike is absurd and the game never remotely prepares you for that.
They advertise this game as a Sekiro-like metroidvania, while it feels like they completely miss what made Sekiro work or what a metroidvania is.
You know, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. I’d say Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is worth playing for a lot of reasons, but I think it’s got huge fundamental issues in both its combat and narrative design; it’s still on the short list for most outlets’ game of the year awards this year. Hades just got a sequel, and I didn’t even care for the first one. For many people, those two games are just about the only roguelikes or -lites they’ve ever played, but I don’t think they’re even good ones of those; the level generation is so limited that you’ll have seen all their permutations quite quickly, and the bonuses from boons just about all feel superfluous and interchangeable. Hollow Knight holds this legendary status among metroidvanias, and Silksong followed suit. I thought Hollow Knight was just fine, but I was surprised to find that this was the game with that sort of following. When facing the possibility of playing Silksong this year or about 5 other video games that came out this year, I don’t think Silksong is making the cut.
But your mileage will absolutely vary. These games have hype for a reason: a lot of people love them. You might, too.
I agree regarding Hollow Knight… It was fine. I don’t really get the hype though, people would make you believe it’s the best game ever made.
A big part of the appeal of Hollow Knight and Hades are their respective art styles. They are both genuinely gorgeous games, and it really improves the experience. I would rather open up Hades again instead of, say, TBoI for exactly that reason, despite my thinking that TBoI is the better roguelike.
Admittedly I can’t bring myself to enjoy Hollow Knight at all, but that’s just an issue of me disliking metroidvanias.
hades’ strength is its narrative; hk’s strength is its worldbuilding.
it’s very difficult to stand out on pure gameplay in the 21st century.
The Outer Worlds was so bad I had to put the controller down and abandon it. A fan made song got the feeling of “dystopian capitalism in space” better than the actual game did.
And an older one that’ll get me burned at the stake: Fallout New Vegas is the worst of the first person fallout games.
I couldn’t connect with Outer Worlds either. I gave it a good shot but it didn’t give me any new feelings or enjoyment.
New Vegas was one of the best games of its type… for the time. It doesn’t hold up well on a technical level, the side quests are largely less immersive and interesting because our expectations have broadly changed. It was by far the best game I had played… in 2010. A lot has changed in the intervening 15 years and now the game feels small, cramped and limited in scope, to say nothing of how dated the graphics are.
What people are really saying when they hype up New Vegas was how much the story mattered. And how you had actual choices that impacted things, something that is dreadfully absent in modern games that have to play it safe and make sure the player has exactly the experience intended. When was the last time you played a game where you could skip right to the last boss and kill him (or join him!) and then the game goes on and people now know what happened or can learn that you did it? It would be AMAZING with today’s technical advances to have that kind of freedom and involvement with a storyline.
Hot take alert
Hollow knight silksong.Its such a huge letdown for me as a massive fan of Hk… but they did so many things that are just… mean. They disrespect the player constantly… tc actually TROLLS YOU with trick benches n shit. But mainly waste so much of your time with shitty padded content. Fucking fetch quests, timed ‘flower’ quests by the dozen. Most of the primary content ends up being “just like hollow knight, but worse, and now do 10x more of the worse version.” So its unoriginal AND inferior to the source.
I tried so hard to love it and its nothing but frustration in the end.
The entire Mass Effect series. Many of the missions were dredging through mostly empty buildings that had copy-pasted boxes and random shit in them. Just generic buildings with generic crap stuffed into them. The world felt purposeless, sterile, and generic to me.
Also, the story just didn’t really grab me that much as I cringe at the romance parts of any story. And lastly, the gameplay was just clunky and awkward to me.
I played through fhe whole series thinking the good part was about to happen since there was hype for the game.
statisfactory 1.0: the game is pure eye candy there’s no endgame. factorio is leaps and bounds better
Yeah I’m a huge factorio player and I so badly wanted to like satisfactory but i can only describe the gameplay as cock and ball torture. For the first 6 hours you are getting kicked in the balls repeatedly by pointless tasks that drag you out of the automation loop. The game is not playable until you unlock the hydro power.
With friends it helped mask the pain.
Oh, damn. I’m like a few dozen hours in and still no hydro power. I must be a slow player. :(
I do, however, have a fifteen gajillion story high factory that I’m building, so there’s that!
I was playing in a group of 4 and am just spitballing time. Its been a while so maybe it was 12hr+
For me, it’s borderlands 2
I thought the gameplay was pretty good, in a “turn your brain off and shoot guys with gradually increasing numbers” kind if way, and I absolutely adored whenever Handsome Jack showed up, but that’s pretty much it
I’ve heard from more than a few sources that the shooting on that game’s peak, but it’s just kind of generic. Outside of Jack, I thought the writing was honestly pretty lacklustre as well, even getting annoying in more than one instance (CATCH A RIIIIIDE FUCK OFF DIPSHIT). The cell-shaded artsyle is quite pretty, I will give it that
At its core, I think it’s just… fine.
