I’ve been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don’t mind so much the fact that it’s different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I’m bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
I played this Gameboy advance game as a kid where you adopted a puppy and cared for it and all that and then after a certain amount of time your parents in-game made you get rid of it.
I’ve never felt so fucking betrayed in all my days. I was so mad that I threw the game cartridge out of the car window and my parents weren’t even mad because the ending to the game was so fucked lmao
Cities Skylines 2. I’ve got thousands of hours in the SimCity franchise. Over 500 hours in the original Cities Skylines. CS2 is a fucking mess of a game. It actually ran pretty decently on my PC when it first came out but you could tell it was an incomplete mess right away. The simulation was non-existent. The game looked like dog shit. The only way to get it to run decently was to turn everything down to low and medium. Somehow I squeaked out 75 hours in that first 3 month release window. For a working adult with responsibilities, that’s a lot of time for me now. I install it occasionally and see if it’s any better. It’s not. I did this last week and it actually runs worse on the same PC than it did at launch which is counter to what most people are experiencing.
Mods through the Paradox launcher is a necessary evil for the game to function. I can barely get it to run stable without mods, I don’t think tricking out the game is gonna help the situation. It’s such a sad case of a game killing a whole genre. Especially when it’s my genre. I love city building games and no game has hurt more than Sim City 2013. I didn’t even play SC2013. I watched my favorite franchise die and made probably the smartest decision of my gaming life by saying fuck no to that mess. Fucking Cities Skylines 2 is right there with it, but I made the opposite choice. I gave it a chance and it stings all the time.
What’s even worse is how such a staple of my childhood has turned into an almost impossible task to recreate. I’ll never understand how gaming went from being able to produce 4 generational city building titles in ~10 years to not being able to get one to function at the same level at all in 20. You can count CS1 sure, but even that game was missing something compared to SC4. CS1 is not even close to the same level of SC4. Even now when the game is hard to run on modern hardware.
What’s even more killer is we see other examples of Maxis era staples getting second life in new franchises all the time. Planet Zoo 1 and 2. Transport Fever for Transport Tycoon. Planet Coaster taking it’s place next to Roller Coaster Tycoon. Hell even the Jurassic World Evolution series fills a gap from the old Jurassic Park Genesis game. But the modern city building attempts are all backwards attempts.
They all focus on the wrong thing. Agents. They all want to be able to simulate every living being and everything they do. It never works. It’s why the newest Citystate is such an intriguing project. They’re not doing every individual agent. And the dev finally decided to focus on modernizing the engine to work with fully 3d spaces. There’s a couple contenders out there that are a year or two away. Citystate, Metro 1998 even though that’s more of a throwback. City Masterplan. If just one of these games hit, we’re back in business. Until then I’ve watched my favorite genre die twice. Hopefully the third time is the charm in terms of longevity.
No Man’s Sky. Close to 300 hours across pc and ps4. I sunk a lot of hours into it when it was relatively new and still very sparse (well before the nexus). I end up playing every 4-5 updates, just to see what they added. Everything is a slog. I have been trying to hatch my living ship for what feels like literal years now. I always seem to be one resource shy of whatever tasks I chose for myself, yet I have billions and billions of spacedollars. I have half-finished bases across the galaxy. I never feel like I accomplish anything in this game, and feel like my time is always wasted playing it. According to steam I haven’t played in over a year.
Eh, I didn’t hate it, I just found it rather disappointing. A huge amount of buildup, and even in-game— a lot of effort… Just for very little delivery.
This is a game and a game engine with nearly infinite potential, but once he got into it, once he started playing it, it just falls completely flat. Beyond a few initial and rather novel game mechanics, it just goes nowhere. Immedately
Like, the game devs produced this incredible game engine, and then just expected it to produce the game for them, and it didn’t. You have this incredible, infinitely generated open world, but there’s no game to play. No story.
It’s just… there. that’s not really much of anything to do. that is the major shortcoming. If, in the last 15 years, they bothered to fill this incredible space with anything worthwhile to actually do, it would be amazing
That’s why Star Trek online is still so active. It’s a nonstop universe, full of missions. Also, it runs very well on multiple platforms.
I don’t like Star Trek online because it’s got too much combat. Star Trek is about philosophy and science, not phasers and proton torpedoes.
It’s easier to create a game around combat than science and philosophy though
Then I guess I’ll have to keep playing Fallen London instead
Oh wow a fallen London reference in the wild. I played that like ten years ago, and picked it up fresh this year as something to do during the workday.
The current festival is interesting. I missed the “hell is missing” story when it was new. Turns out climbing into the furnace is a bad idea, even in a dream!
Currently annoyed that I didn’t bring the right thing into the waswood to get a particular item, and I can’t draw the dream card to get one of those pearls. But it’s a very interesting game.
It could also descend into total “pay for power” nonsense, but I have resisted.
Here, I have a present for you!
The following items can be spent in Estival Waswood Runs to acquire equipment: **GCO** -one of a variety of T8s - A Reverie of Heroism + Singed and Stained Work Gloves -free - Sturdy Pick, Prelapsarian Speaking-Tube, that book with all the Underscores, Polythreme Drinking-Vessel, Poisoned Pen, Wax-Hardened Boots **Starved War** -3 Parabolan Orange-Apples - London Horticultural Society -free - Strange Aeronaut, Hard-Earned Knack for Repair -an Oneiric Pearl - Rank of Flight-Captain **Coilheart Games** -a Parabolan Parable - Distinction of Waking Fire -Vital Intelligence and 2 Blackmail Material - Huffam's Good Graces -an Oneiromantic Revelation - Coilbreaker's Prints -free - A Fierce and Terrible Warmth **Museum** -a Vitreous Almanac, 75 Sightings of Parabolan Landmarks and 10 Memories of Light - Miniature Museum -a Viric-Filled Mirrorcatch Box, 3 Emetic Revelations and 250 Venom-Rubies - Perfumer's Arts -another Oneiric Pearl - Gebrandt's Address Book **Hell is Missing** **Presumably this is all, possibly not though:** -1 Searing Enigma + 1 Oneiromantic Revelation - Gang of Outlaws -Climbing into the Law-Furnace when offered - Dream of Law-Glass -Oneiric Pearl + Baited Riddle - Urchin formerly known as Mister Dinners -Free - Elephant to be Refuted
I’m relatively late to no man sky, the original scandal burnt the bridge and I didn’t bother trying to fix it until about 5 years ago when it came up as an option for a space game to play with my brother. He ended up a bigger fanboy space engineer and NMS stayed the only unplayed game in my library until last year.
I genuinely feel like it’s a great sandbox. That is to say, the fun comes more from the people you play with and your imagination than the sand itself. I genuinely feel that it would be my favorite game if I still had 2 or 3 friends to play it with. RPing as the haywired droid pilot of the Vagabond Moon as it smuggles goods to and from free space just doesn’t hit without a captain and crew.
See, I like my own private world. I can just build it and run around and discover stuff. That’s why I loved fallout 4 so much. No man’s sky is great for that because it’s infinitely generative. But that’s kind of all there is in that game. It’s just a big open world. There’s no real “game” to that game beyond the first 30 or 40 hours of gameplay.
Unlike you, however, the one thing I hate the most in any game is other people. I wanna be alone and do my own thing. I never ever encountered another game player who has done anything than just fuck up my gameplay experience. maybe I’ve just had bad luck, I don’t know. But co-op playing has never been anything other than an extremely negative experience for me. other people are assholes.
So, when left on my own in no man’s sky, it’s fine in small doses, but it’s easy to get bored. Because there are no Ongoing gameplay objectives. It really wouldn’t be difficult to build into the game, constant ongoing objectives and achievements that a single person could achieve on their own. Repetitive missions, etc. Star Trek online managers to do it. And it doesn’t have to be combat (although, combat in no man’s sky is actually very well done and quite fun). No man sky has ongoing rewards for discovery and exploration stuff, but it isn’t really structured very well and the rewards are really rather small.
No man’s sky feels like a really fancy version of Second Life, but in space, where you can have a bunch of your own planets and build bases and whatever. And have entire fleets of ships. But to what ultimate end? It doesn’t seem like there’s any purpose to any of it. That’s what’s missing from the game.
I think the key distinction is that you have to know and like the people outside the game. I used to have about 8 other people that regularly played Minecraft together and we did some impressively large scale things for a hand full of people with jobs and lives. It was honestly fun to just chat while we’re collectively digging a massive tunnel to build a functional rail network. Crack open a cold one with the gang but the cold one is actually a 4 month civil engineering project requiring us to terraform a continent.
I haven’t spent as much time as you did in NMS but I have the same feeling. It feels like I should be loving this game but everytime I try to play it for more than a few hours I end up hating it for the same reasons you listed
I heard all about how bad NMS was. Also overwatch. Then I went to university and one of the first friends I made was like “Those are my favourite games!” And I practically bit my lips to avoid blurting out “…um aren’t they crap??”
Obviously it’s not a big deal. I squeeze enjoyment out of shitty games myself. I found it jarring at the time because there was so much Internet discourse about both those games being not worthwhile.
Solitaire. I found out later that the deck only had 51 cards.
Blue Prince. After reaching room 46 and realising that the game was just getting started, I immediately gave up. This is probably the game that respects the player’s time the least that I ever played.
It has amazing lore and overall feeling but is ruined by the RNG. It’s somewhat bearable in the first part but becomes extremely annoying when you know what to do but can’t because of unlucky draws or not enough steps left.
Rocket League and Rust have each taken thousands and thousands of hours.
I fell in love with RL the very first weekend and bought all the DLC as it came out because I wanted to support an indie developer. I was rewarded by having the thing I loved sold to a corporation who systematically used my love against me until I could no longer tolerate it.
Rust of course decided that I wasn’t worth having as a customer anymore and cut me off along with every other Linux user.
Red Dead 2 for me.
I constantly get everything wrong. Never understand the quests or what I’m supposed to do, always making the wrong decisions. Constantly having to retry.
It felt like it was designed by aliens that just read a few books on life on earth and cowboys and made an open world game.
“Hurry you have to do this one thing RIGHT NOW” means you can do that thing whenever you want. Hell. You can even take and 8 year old on a fishing trip but I get tricked into losing sleep on a workday because of appearant lies… I never knew when I was in a quest or not.
BG3 I straight up refunded because it reminded me why I hated D&D. I just end up save scumming and hating melee combat against ranged targets. I walk 2 steps towards the enemy the enemy also walks two steps and throws a dagger in my face. Repeat. To be fair I hated XCOM for the same reason. I loved Fallout 1 and 2 though.
I know I am late to the party here but the Final Fantasy 7 Remake Trilogy just didn’t work for me. I played the first game and suddenly my guard was up. Some of the combat is cool, and of course the graphics are better. But every story change from the original was worse, all of the new characters were boring and clearly shoe horned in, and the general game seemed to lack direction despite have solid rails to coast on.
Still, I bought Rebirth and just couldn’t. In the first town all the flaws of the remake were on display. Uninstalled, sold the game, and have zero plans to buy Revolutions (is that the last one?)
I do not see SE capturing the spirit of FF again, which is such a loss.
Lego: The Hobbit
I give this answer in every one of these threads to raise awareness. My wife and I used to get a little drunk and play Lego games. It’s a lot of fun, and a decent couch co-op.
We get into the Mountain, start screwing around with Smaug, and he flies off to burn Laketown. Roll credits. Game over. The 3rd movie flopped so hard they never finished the game. They don’t say it’s 2/3 of the story, and at that point it’s way too late to return it.
Fun game, terrible experience.
WoW. I sank hundreds of hours in vanilla. Spent forever getting tier 3 armor completed and most end game content completed and then Burning Crusade was launched. I was so excited that myself and about 15 guildmates road tripped from across the country to meet up and play in person for launch.
I remember crossing the portal and within 15 minutes a common mob dropped an item that was better than one of my tier 3 armor pieces. Pieces I had spent weeks farming for. I was so frustrated that I couldn’t enjoy the next 2 days playing, even with everyone there. I got home, played a few more days, and had already replaced half my armor. I quit WoW cold turkey and since then have only logged in once in all these years.
I wasn’t even that mad that my armor was replaced, I was mad that it was replaced so quickly, and not even at boss fights. It was normal mobs dropping rares.
As someone who joined late in Vanilla, I think the fact that tier 3 armour became meaningless a few days into Burning Crusade was a great move, and necessary for the game.
In Vanilla, if you were late joining, you could never catch up unless someone was really nice and basically carried you for a few weeks. I spent months hearing tales about all the fun that my friends were having, but I couldn’t join them because farming the gear to catch up to them was essentially impossible on my own, and would have taken them a lot of time to level me up.
The game needed a reset so that people who hadn’t been playing for over a year could catch up. When BC came out, the Tier 3 stuff helped people for the first 2-3 levels, but by the time everyone hit 70, all the gear was reset and everyone was on the same footing again.
That was really healthy for guilds and for the game. If you already had a bunch of people who you liked playing with, you could start on the harder dungeons and then the raids immediately. Everybody started out in crap gear that kept those initial things challenging, and then everyone slowly got better gear. If you had just joined the game, you could catch up to those groups, and either join them, or form your own new group and you weren’t behind.
What killed WoW for me was all the borrowed power stuff, where you got new abilities and learned a new way to play, which they’d then just reset with the next expansion. There was also ridiculous button creep, where in the early days (ignoring downranked spells) you’d have maybe two dozen abilities, half of which could be used in combat, and a third of those were rare and situational. By the time I quit, you might need two full bars worth of abilities in combat, your typical “rotation” would use 8 or more, and so-on. On some characters, I had so many buttons that even with maxed out button bars, there were some that had to remain in the spellbook.
The story also got stupider. In the beginning, your character wasn’t the centre of the story. You could earn personal achievements, or group achievements, but it was clear that it was a game being played by millions of people, half of whom had also done those same achievements. In later expansions, they tried to pretend that you were the unique person. You weren’t an archdruid, you were the archdruid… and so were the other 100 people on your screen. Or you were the maw-walker, but so were the other 1000 people in the maw. And, of course, the lore got more and more incoherent as they kept trying to find corners of the lore that they hadn’t yet exploited.
The other major issue with WoW is that both time and the advance of technology, but also Blizzard’s choices, killed the social aspect of the game. In the beginning, there weren’t good resources to learn how to play, what kinds of equipment were out there, that sort of thing. That meant that one of the best ways to find that out was chatting with other players. That was great. Even if other players were sometimes obnoxious, the fact that you had to chat with them meant that the game felt alive. The only way to join a group for something was to send messages to other people in the game. And, since servers were isolated, people got reputations. If someone was nice to other people, they’d be known for that. If someone was a jerk, or tried to cheat other people, they’d get known for that too.
These days, people use communications not tied to the game at all. There are amazing resources to learn about the game and optimize how you play outside the game, which means there’s no need to chat with people in-game. They added a group finder and raid finder so you could join a group for something without ever talking to anyone, which also killed socialization. They merged servers and made cross-realm events so that there was always someone to play with you… but now everyone was effectively anonymous to everyone they played with, so being nice wasn’t something that gave you a good reputation, and being a jerk carried no long-term penalties.
Combine all the technological changes with all the lore / storytelling changes and you get a very good, very polished single-player online game, where other people happen to be there sometimes. These days you can be doing a 25-man raid and feel lonely because you’re not actually interacting with any of the other players in any meaningful way.
I really wish another MMO would come out that would add back all the social things that Blizzard broke. But, even if someone did everything right, I don’t think you could ever capture the magic of that early Vanilla / BC experience because the world has changed.
Similar experience here. You missed the biggest turd though, flying!
So cool eh, no more need to walk eh!
What happened was that instead of roaming about with everyone else, you flew everywhere all alone (just point the “fly” in the right direction and wait … Soo funny).
And to alleviate this they tried to make it so you “had” to walk everywhere first, before getting your “fly”, but that just made it worse because now you’d be as slow as before but also alone, everyone else were flying.
Then it became a sort of dungeon-run slot machine, argh.
Vanilla was truly amazing though, what a game…
It’s one of those great ironies, because flight was a requested feature since the beginning and being locked into fixed flight paths left people wanting free flight even more. Back in 2006-7, I don’t think most people, or even Blizzard, could predict how much it’d hurt the social aspect of the game.
That was an integral part of the game design.
Those things, like underpowered weapons for example, is something “gamers” pester about and want changed, but any good gamedesigner knows better than to listen to them, it breaks the gameplay.
Today it’s worse in many games because the “annoying” things still exist but you have to pay to get around them, and it just makes the gameplay suck. IMO.
I’d never be able to find it, but back in the Vanilla days, there was an interview where one of the designers literally explained that flying was a bad idea and would ruin the game for the exact reasons it did. They knew, but someone must have overruled that.
TBC was the worst for that. Modern expansions let you keep your high end gear for most of the leveling process.
It was also the first time it happened, so people were more put off by it.
Anybody who plays now knows that their gear is only going to be useful for the current expansion and that they’ll have to start from scratch again if they play the next one.
Its not even current expansion, ita just current season/content patch at this point.
WoW is a tough one for me because I played it for years and some of my all-time favorite moments in my life as a gamer are associated with WoW. But also those moments are extremely socially-dependent. Hard to extract from the experience was the game and what was the joy of hanging out with like-minded friends.
And it’s extremely difficult for me to judge now because frankly I think that WoW today is still an incredibly good game, especially as a solo player today, but it is impossible for me when playing it not to get sad longing for the absolute peak moments I’ve had with the game.
For me it’s kind of like if you love cheesecake but can’t buy the grocery store frozen kind because every bite makes you think of the perfect $200 gourmet restaurant version you ate once 8 years ago.
I hear this. I kept trying to get back in to it over the years but without my old guild and friends at my back its a hollow shell of the game I loved.
I am completely turned off by mmo rpgs. I like my videogames to convince me that I’m not wasting time playing them; things with short levels or engaging gameplay loops…
Rpgs just take so long, and so little progress is made.
Now I haven’t play WoW specifically, but these mmo rpgs usually have this problem where people get insane loot and xp bonuses for playing in a party. But nowhere in the game does it say “please for the love of God join a guild and play with them all the time!!” No sir-ee, so when people play in a guild or a party for the first time, they notice this. And many completely lose interest in the game, seeing how much time they wasted. I’ve been the same way.
The only mmo I’ve really engaged with for more than a few months on one go is FFXIV which for me is more of a social game with stupid amounts of random side content and a fairly relaxed long story to chip away at. Wow was just a series of ever moving goalposts. I’ve played loads of MMOs and the best ones are good because you’re playing them with people tbh.
This is one of the reasons I liked guild wars (1 and 2). They didn’t do the gear grind. They added one tiny equipment tier early on in the game’s life, and never again in ten years. They add different stat spreads, but that’s it. (Ok, and infusions, which are like a single percentage point of stats.)
Yeah I love that GW2 doesn’t do vertical progression. I’m a casual player and kitted out my characters many years ago, and since then - unless I want to try out a new build - I don’t have to touch them again.
GW was my jam back in the day. I couldn’t get GW2 to click for me because by the time I got into it, it was information overload and I found it hard to keep up. However, GW3 is going to be a no brainer buy when it releases.
I had a similar experience with BC, though I was only in tier 2 armor (our guilds just couldn’t must the runs to get much of the tier 3 stuff). I played further than you did, but I realized that I had been really ready to be done with WoW for a while and had held on just for the expansion. It didn’t revive my desire to play at all, and honestly I haven’t wanted to play an MMO since.
Among Us.
My friends kept suggesting it for game nights, but the social demands are just not compatible with actually hanging out with your friends.
When everyone’s out and about, doing their tasks and getting murdered, we’re all discouraged from actually talking with one another, for fear of revealing a dead body or whatever. Whenever there’s a meeting going on, sure, we’re “free” to talk again, but there’s not enough time to talk about anything but the game. When you’re dead, and thus finally relieved from the pressures of completing tasks or getting kills… there’s still no chit-chat allowed, because ghosts “can’t” talk.
It’s worse whenever random players are involved; having to coordinate between voice chat with friends, and text chat with randoms, or worse, when the randoms are in a voice chat of their own, coordinating to be assholes.
The moment that finally made me say “I don’t enjoy this game”, was a round with two random players in it: one of them spent the whole round watching security cameras, and the other was blocking the one doorway into the room, both players working with each other and refusing to do their tasks. No way for the lone impostor that round to kill them both. When we started calling them out on this, they flat-out said “we’re going to keep doing this just to spite you”. Timer ran out with unfinished tasks. Crewmates lost.
Warframe. 3500 hours in about 5 years.
I watched it develop from just a fun little “be a magic space murderhobo” into a game with some actual story behind it (and some kinda cool cinematic story missions… that went a bit off the rails when they made time canonically non linear)
The unfortunate part for me was the reputation gating and crafting materials grind. Every new update brought another new material and another new hub world with another dozen or so NPC’s to increase your popularity with by running the same missions ad nauseam, just to get another weapon you were going to level up for the Mastery Rank exp and never use again.
I started in the days before Mastery Rank 30 was anywhere near possible, after hitting L1 (30+1) and realising there was no appreciable difference to gameplay I completely lost any reason to play.
I had hopes that there would be something big once you hit the original “max rank”, even if there was intent for the devs to continue adding more after that. I had thought there would be some change in the way the game played, like they would reduce the crafting times from 4 days (a new warframe requires 4 blueprints, a head, systems and torso, all 12h crafts, then a 24 hour craft to stitch them all together, all 4 steps requiring blueprints and materials which are RNG drops from different specific enemies on specific map types/planets/hub world areas gated behind reputation)
The GRIND was unreal. They had to roll back their crafting quantities on Railjack after each individual component, of which there were 6, took 1 million credits and 4 sets of 4 figues worth of materials. I nolifed that game hard enough at the time that I spent an entire week (including wait times for the crafting itself) just to build a ship that was advertised as a ‘dropship for you and your mates to use both in space and as air support on the open world areas’ but that became a “use in very specific missions and one big gamewide event that’s never coming back”
Don’t even get me started on trying to earn platinum (RMT currency to instantly complete a blueprint that’s crafting or buy a new cosmetic/weapon/frame without the crafting steps)
Saying all that, it was a good way to spend time during covid.
Counter-Strike Global Offensive. Too many cheaters and the skins just ruin the game. I still play 1.6 and Source sometimes. CS2 I don’t even bother, because my pc is potato.
I always dislike The Witcher 3. As many times as I tried to like it as many reviews as I read that it was amazing. Dear God the controls sucked and I hated that game. No matter how many times I try it.
Literally any open world survival game.
ARK
Valheim
Rust
No Man’s Sky
Grounded
The entire fucking genre is tired and tedious. Exploration is the best part of the game, but you spend 90% of the time base building, researching upgrades to your base, gathering more stone/wood/BS to improve your base, optimising the layout of your base, crafting automation to produce MORE stone/wood/BS to further improve your base. And all this with a cumbersome inventory or weight management system.
And they always look like absolute crap. It’s either clean sci-fi structures that stick out like a sore thumb, or shoddy ramshackle buildings that look like they were slapped together by an ambitious crack head. So you spend hours placing decorations (that you also have to research and gather materials for) just for it to look kind of ok.
I fucking hate base building.
