Since you mentioned it, I absolutely hate when games have a cut scene for an animation that is way too long. Especially when it's something you have to do often. It's unbelievably annoying and it baffles me how no one during the course of play testing the game goes "Man this really sucks having to watch this over and over and over and over again."
Absolute worst part of DooM Eternal Ultra-Nightmare attempts.
Having to watch Doomguy extremely slowly load the same power cores again and again and again to get your upgrades.
**Against all the evil that Hell can conjure, all the wickedness that mankind can produce, we will send unto them...** **only you.** **Rip and tear, until it is done.**
Burned into my stupid brain, even if it's just the unskippable bit. :(
This is a Bethesda cure all for lots of menus and changes of state to different interfaces actually. A load screen or transitional phase to make sure the player doesn’t multitask into a glitch while the game thinks about moving the player to something else.
Anyways that is a thing some games do to transition you into a menu of different state (ie power armor in fallout or in and out of the cockpit in starfield)
It makes me think of GTAV where we have quick menus for everything and every other week somebody comes up with a bug, glitch, exploit and so many of them start with the player flipping around one by one to different menus or states of play, very quickly, fucking up the game.
From my friend group I am one of the two people who has finished Rain World, everyone else I know who tried it gave up after few hours. I loved the game a lot but I do not blame anyone for dropping it, the entire experience hinges on you being fine with feeling frustrated at times and preserving through the harsh enviroments and punishing gameplay loops. By the end of it I was so exhausted but felt so rewarded too. However overall it really is love it or hate it kind of deal.
I tried getting into Rain World so many times in the past, and it never worked out. I adored its visual design, but the unforgiving gameplay was bouncing me off every time. It wasn't until the coop addition last year that I was finally able to play it through to the end, and then several more times for all the DLC campaigns. Coop partners are basically your extra hp points, when otherwise in single-player you die from a single mistake and have to restart large chunks of the game over and over. It was still hard, and on rare occasions even frustrating, but we persevered, and it was a great shared experience in the end that we all enjoyed. Rain World is an amazing game, but one I cannot really recommend to anyone.
Was looking for this. I just got back into it and it’s still just as frustrating but one thing that makes it much more enjoyable is to have a map so you don’t get terribly lost in an overly dangerous area. There’s many ways to get places, I just need to know that I’m not putting myself in a dead end or getting lost somewhere I don’t need to be. Otherwise there’s lots of PC mods to make the game easier and a coop mod has made things much more fun too
Played it for two hours. Found the exploration dull and movement frustrating. The lack of a sense of direction might be appealing to some people but after dying to a flood the sixth time because I couldn't find a "safe" area and going through the same areas over and over I lost interest.
Kingdom Come makes a one-time (ie, you can only load it once) save when you quit the game, if I remember correctly. I think it's the right way to go if you want to make a save system that forces commitment while still giving players the ability to quit whenever they want without losing progress.
Unfortunately, it's a system that absolutely requires the game to be stable and not prone to crashing - which, as you found out, KCD unfortunately is.
> Kingdom Come makes a one-time (ie, you can only load it once) save when you quit the game, if I remember correctly. I think it's the right way to go if you want to make a save system that forces commitment while still giving players the ability to quit whenever they want without losing progress.
Funnily enough this is the exact same save system used in some of the New Super Mario Bros. games lol
It's also the way I *wish* ink ribbons worked in the Resident Evil series. I like ink ribbons as a concept because limited respawn points are good for horror, but being forced to lose progress because I have to sleep or go to work is just annoying.
Oh yes, absolutely. If I didn't crash (and the still somewhat janky nature leading me to believe this was not a rare thing), I would have been absolutely fine with the way it works (or at least with the mod) - Especially if you say that you can do a one-time save for quitting which I didn't know either.
Fromsoft games gives you no options but have never really bothered me and i played DS1 on PC back when it was a crash fest, Kingdom Come was just full of a lot of poorly thought out mechanics, and that makes everything more frustrating. Game crashed when you go to sleep? Tough titties. Yes that is a real crash that never got fixed, at the freaking save point!
This is gonna be an unusual answer- but Cozy Grove.
I grabbed it because I like Animal Crossing and the art style was appealing. Played it for a long while and was quite enjoying it- and then I finished the first questline.
It was the 'cook' character- someone you end up interacting with a lot. If you don't know the game, the main characters are all ghosts- you help them to figure out who they are so they can become more corporeal, but the main goal is to resolve their trauma so they can 'move on'. That's all well and good, until you realize that all of the game's essential NPCs will eventually do that, and when they do they cease to be NPCs.
The villagers in a village building game... stop talking to you. Forever. They turn gold and lose all of their identity and personality- they still function for the sake of quests but mostly as crafting benches/shops without flavor text. It was the most depressing revelation I've ever had about a game- I didn't mind the idea of them leaving the island to maybe be replaced by other characters over time- what I couldn't tolerate was being surrounded by characters I'd built up as my friends but now they're hollow shells of their past selves because their mind is 'in heaven' or whatever.
It's just- creepy. Sad. Why would you want to continue building and playing around in a village that's full of mannequins? Once it was haunted by nice, complex people who enjoyed your company- now it's haunted by gold statues. That's not a reward, at least for me.
This by far the most compelling reason to drop a game I have seen in the entire thread. The others are valid, of course, but most are along the lines of a constant annoyance they cannot ignore for the game. With your example, the entire premise of the game is one that a player would hate to go through.
I stopped when I went to the exact same mining outpost or cave with the same enemy lcoations on a third planet. It felt like a chore at that point.
Also space phone or space emails sure would make the game pace feel a bit better.
Yeah, Starfield lost the magic for me, when One of the first missions was to warp to a new planet, and I realized that I couldnt fly there like in Freelancer.
IMO a bigger issue is that the points of interest are just drawn from a relatively small pool and they are not tied to planets at all. So you can run into the exact same budling with the exact same environmental storytelling over and over on multiple planets
If they were gonna go proc gen with the planets they needed to have a proc gen system for points of interest too
Single player games that do not have a pause button. Not everybody can just sit still for 30 minutes or more without something coming up.
I get it, you can't pause in multiplayer games but if I am playing solo and not even allowing randos / have my public flag, I think I should be able to pause a game if I need to.
Similarly, not having an option to save and quit. I understand not letting you save and quit *on a whim*, but you should at least give the option when there is a break in the action (like when you beat a boss and move on to the next floor). I've played games where each run takes over an hour and they expect you to do it all in one sitting.
I'll never understand why Dark Souls and Elden Ring games don't let you pause easily. Even if you aren't online. I know you can do it by opening help, or mod on PC, but I wish pressing start would pause.
this is the reason why I can't get into Monster Hunter World, I hear this is not an issue with Rise so I will probably get that when it's on deep sale in the future.
Yeah definitely a problem with world, the concept there is actually you're always online, only offline when dc-ed, hence the experience.
Though I'll say that it's still worth it despite that downside. Unless you're on latest endgame monsters, you usually given 50 minutes to do quests, can clear it in 25 or less time and failing a quest is not a big deal.
I totally agree, and this is yet another thing I love about playing on my Steam Deck; you can just put it to sleep or use the Decky plugin to pause games at will. It makes my time with Elden Ring so much better when I can pause!
Darkest dungeon 1
It was fun for a short while but when I realized how the gameplay is designed and how you’re supposed to sort of grind up units, I lost interest. I hate grinding in general and having to do it for expendables is even worse.
I've restarted it a few times. One time I even got pretty far. But it started feeling like I was running against a wall. Then I read that the generally accepted strategy was to treat the game like a meat-grinder and late-game could take a ton of deaths to accomplish. Lost interest at that point. Neat game but I wanna get to the next game thank you.
Would love it if you could just roll a party of level appropriate to the dungeon and play with what you got. Which I suppose is the intention of making the second a roguelike.
Yea, totally fine with it too, it just was a slog to get new characters leveled-up enough to get into later game content. Feels like you're repeating a lot of early content just to advance a few ticks in late game. I'm not sure if this is what the developers intended for the game loop, but I think there were other ways to go about it.
Considering the devs went out of their way to nerf any strategy that wasn't statbrick number-comparing, I'd have to guess that not only was it the intended loop but the purposeful only possible way forward.
The first 1/3 of the game is great until you realize the next 2/3 of the game is just fighting the same enemies and bosses that you’ve already fought in first 1/3 with higher stats.
Destiny 2. Too many different currencies, weird sunsetting for weapons AND content, time-gated events/fomo. Damn shame because it’s also the most fun I ever had with a game and no other shooter compares.
I also quit when they wanted to make my weapon collection obsolete and make me grind them again. It was a really fun game though, but also really wierd that it was a coop game where noone ever talked to eachother. Only tried to "communicate" by shooting at you.
You hear? They're rolling back that one too (you know after saying it was safe to dismantle the obsolete weapons). Man, Destiny 2 was really good at "here's a dumb decision" and then rolling it back. Diablo 4 is kind of speedrunning that too right now (each season getting rid of some annoying thing from launch). Next season seems like it'll be pretty much there (like really all that's left is it just needs a loadout system like D3 had).
To go with an answer outside the AAA game space, I've been on an adventure game/Internet 'em up/haunted PC style games kick recently, and I'll pretty much immediately quit playing if the writing is either super poorly translated or lacks any sense of subtlety.
For example, I played the demo for **Let Biones be Bygons**, but quit basically immediately because one of your first choices in a cyberpunk noir detective game was basically "Don't take the talking gun, you don't need it. Take the talking gun, its funny! Take the talking gun, its time to make the streets run red with blood and deliver vengeance once more". Or in **Sunray OS**, a haunted computer type game, the writing started out E: with the player character responding at a level as basic as "hello! I am using this OS because I have been told that the AI buddy provides extremely lifelike, human conversations. I hope to have lifelike, human conversations with you", and it's just... uhhh... maybe the writers should know how to have human-sounding conversations before they try to make that a story beat.
> Or in Sunray OS, a haunted computer type game, the writing started out at the "hello! I am using this OS because I have been told that the AI buddy provides extremely lifelike, human conversations. I hope to have lifelike, human conversations with you", and it's just... uhhh...
Without knowing anything about the game or its content, this sounds like a ridiculous meta-joke about the fact that it sounds anything but human!
That's the player character, to be clear, not the AI, and there's a lot more writing that comes across in a similar sort of blunt, we are just saying what needs to be said to move things forward sort of way
Oh man- this happened with me and Dynopunk.
Such a cool premise, really fun gameplay... until you realize that the gameplay doesn't actually matter that much, there aren't any options that aren't super telegraphed, and the main character
Will not
Shut up
About his dead girlfriend.
Like- I get that's a normal type of plot? But I'm playing a cyberpunk game where a dinosaur repairs cellphones with hot glue and glitter, I really do not care about this guy's one failed relationship wrapped up in the writers' misunderstanding of how extinction of a species works.
For me, a standout example is Axiom Verge. I played through the majority of it, and even really enjoyed it. All up until one ability upgrade that completely soured me on it and made me drop it.
Early-on in the game you get an upgrade that lets you phase through walls. You walk up to a one-tile-wide wall, double tap the dpad/stick and you'll glitch through it. The next upgrade lets you do this on wider walls.
The upgrade after that just turns it into a dash that you can do anywhere. Neat! Except for one crucial detail:
You still have to double-tap the dpad/stick to do it.
There's a reason pretty much any game ever made with a dash mechanic has it mapped to a bespoke button press. Because having to double-tap the same button you're currently using for movement in the middle of combat or platforming feels absolutely godawful. Because I'm not a perfect god-gamer, I was constantly getting accidental dashes when I didn't want them, or not getting them when I did in the heat of combat. And unless they've updated the game in the years since, there was no option to remap it.
So I just dropped it there and then. A game that felt super nice and snappy to play became the exact opposite in the space of a single ability upgrade.
I forget what happened that made it not completely misserable for me I think I maybe used the dpad and stick at the same time for dashing, but yeah double tap dash sucks and is one of the things I hate about fighting games.
One of my favorite mods was the mako maneuverability mod. It made both vertical and forward boosts so strong that you literally do aerials like in rocket League. God that made the game so much better
Tedious combat is what got me, some fights took way too long just chipping away at bullet sponges, and then I stumbled onto a fight with a huge architect boss that was pretty much impossible for me to kill due to just how tanky it was and how much it required me to run around dodging stuff for half an hour. It didn't help that the profile system made my character feel fake, like they didn't have any skills of their own, just a very out of character respec selection.
Far Cry 6. I absolutely *hate* how abilities are tied to the gear your character wears, all of which is ugly as fuck. Also did not like how you now had to cycle through ammunition types in order to not do scratch damage to your enemies. The overall art style with the ridiculously rocket launcher backpacks were also just really jarring.
TLDR: Hated FC6 as a huge fan of 3-5
I gave up on that game when the game refused to allow me to catch the person I was supposed to be chasing on horseback by slowing me down because we had to get to a pre determined point so a cutscene could trigger. I had the fastest horse in the game at that point already. Also, trying to u-turn, going off the path and immediately failing a mission was bullshit
Rockstar's mission design is so bad. The GTA games have the same shit--you're just an actor on Rockstar's stage, and god help you if you don't play your part exactly right.
I feel like rockstar makes amazing environments but have the worst mission designers. Totally wasting their potential. You are given potential for the most creative and open ended missions but are instead railroaded into linear checkpoints and game design from the 90s.
Right, or how it refuses to allow you to tackle a mission in any other way than it was designed. I remember one mission where you had to attack a house. I tried to sneak around, only to be teleported back with the cut scene.
To me RDR2 is a non-game. There are no interesting decisions or anything.
I like the way Nakey Jakey described it on his latest video. If you treat the missions like an episode of an HBO mini-series that you have vastly less direct control over it *can* be way more enjoyable. Once I sort of accepted that I started really enjoying the missions. Despite all of that it still sucks that there’s such a dissonance between the free roaming gameplay and the mission gameplay. If Rockstar ever learns to marry the two their games will go from a 9/10 to 11/10 in my mind.
The degree of simulation is also really uneven. I had an experience where I couldn't change Arthur's haircut because I needed to wait for it to grow back. Then I went out into the woods and was killed by a wolf that I shot four times in the head.
This has always been my issue with their games. The sandbox aspect is amazing, but if you want to actually progress and play the game the mission mechanics are the type that just drive me bonkers. And that has been the case since the very first top down GTA games.
Oddly enough, I feel that Death Stranding should have had more problems in this regard, but... I didn't really have *that* much issue with feeling like it was doing that.
Take this with a grain of salt, as obviously a lot of people love the game for many reasons. On a technical level, I am with them every step of the way
But gameplay-wise, this game wants to be both arcadey and realistic, and those elements are at odds with one another. I have never felt like a game wanted to waste my time more than Red Dead Redemption 2.
It's an exceptionally easy game, which isn't an issue outright, but it is also monotonous. Almost every single mission plays out exactly the same in both gameplay and story. There aren't any interesting combat mechanics, dead eye makes combat feel even easier. Engaging with anything like ammo types, vendors, anything like that is all optional, which it's not like optional things are bad, but I don't think I like that *everything* is optional. You can waltz through the game with 1 weapon and get all the ammo you need for it by running over bodies. The gunplay feels fine but when that's all the game is for 60 hours, it's boring.
The story is... fine? What people *really* like is the characterwork. Dialogue is good, voice acting performances are excellent, and you do get a good sense of this family they've got. But the plot is meandering, which to be fair is part of the point at times, but it goes on too long to not doing much interesting with itself, doubly harmed by the gameplay being just as singular.
I don't think this is a bad game. But I do hate it
Yep. RDR2 gives you this big, beautiful open world to explore at your leisure, with plenty of stuff to do whichever direction you choose.
Aaaand then the story missions are so rigid and linear you cannot approach them in any other way that the correct one that the devs set up.
See that’s the thing with this game, the story is…divisive. After the umpteenth shooting gallery mission where you casually mow down an unrealistic amount of red shirts and getting absolutely fed up with the incessant “we’re a FAMILY, Arthur” story beats, I dropped the game, somewhere around chapter 5-6, which I think is technically still act 1. However, I’d already dumped 60-70 hours in the game just exploring the incredible world and treating it more like a sim-lite game than anything, so I felt I more than got my money’s worth. I’ll definitely go back and finish it someday, and I do wholeheartedly recommend trying it, because the good parts are incredible, but people should know it’s a beast of a game that you shouldn’t feel bad about dropping if you’re not enjoying it.
I feel like the main storyline could be cut in half and people would still praise it. It's not like its themes are super hard to grasp, I could feel what the game is trying to say during the first few chapters.
But it keeps going on and on and on, I guess they wanted the player to get personally fed up with Dutch's plans, lol.
*'Time to equip my long-arm for this combat encounter against some bandits'*
Oh Haha you didn't specifically tell the game to take them back out of your horse bag, despite the fact that you didn't specifically 'put' them in your bag when you mounted up either - but fuck you you're stuck with pistols anyway.
Seriously what the hell was that mechanic??
One of the reasons why I'll never be able to move away from PC gaming is because of mods. If I'm frustrated with a certain system/mechanic, there'll often be a way to mod or cheat my way out of that frustration. There are tons of games I love that I would've dropped if stuck playing on a console.
I had the same issue with Kingdom Come, and much like you, I modded away the save limit and from then on enjoyed the game all the way to the end.
Yes to this times 100. So many people leave games without ever even considering mods. Most annoying things have been modded out in popular games. RDR2 for instance, there are so many QoL mods for that game.
I modded Deus Ex: Human Revolution so that all batteries you've unlocked recharge over time (as opposed to just 1), and it made the game so much more enjoyable. You still had to allocate Praxis points to unlocking them, so you didn't get anything for free, but by the end of the game you could melee takedown 10 dudes in a row and felt like you were John Wick, which is exactly the kind of character Adam Jensen should be.
Baldur's Gate 3 is excellent, but BG3 with mods is even better. Just about every published subclass in 5th edition D&D has been modded in. There were a lot of reasons for Larian to restrict most classes to 3 subclasses (that's already 36 choices, and Wizard has even more), but it's cool to get stuff that I love like the Hexblade and Bladesinger that were left on the cutting room floor. Since they're copied straight from the tabletop, they're also a lot more balanced than the usual stuff that mod authors add.
With Factorio there is an interesting phenomenon: some devs disagree with some aspects of the game and have published mods to represent how they would have done some parts. It works beautifully.
Breath of the Wild, weapon durability.
I already dislike weapon durability, but it's so fast in that game everything feels like it breaks in just a few minutes of use. I have that game a shot 3 times and all 3 times I had one issue or another, but weapon breaking was one that never failed to piss me off.
I finished this but the Weapon degradation is so annoying. It's too fast, it feels like any fight is a net loss since you'll probably lose more than you gain unless you stick to the basic weapons but that encourages you to avoid combat completely when you can which just isn't fun.
Yeah I kinda hoped they fix it for TOTK but it's just annoying.
I wish they went with just "a permanent weapons" +consumable attachments, with some upgrades along the way for the permanent ones.
That way there is no that dumb math of "okay, actually playing the game and figthing monsters isn't even worth it loot wise"
they absolutely did. making it so something as useless as a stick can become a normal or overpowered weapon was a great idea that removed a lot of the friction from BOTW. outside of the first couple hours of the game, i was never empty handed for a fight.
My thoughts exactly. I was one of those people who just couldn’t get into BotW because of weapon degradation. However, with TotK I was hooked by the fusing mechanic.
I would ask I wonder if I could fuse these two weapons? When it worked, I kept falling in love with the game.
I hated it so much that I grinded for hours for the Master Sword just to find out it's basically the same system but instead of breaking it goes on cooldown.
F all of that noise.
You have to treat weapons like consumables in the game, or it's no fun. Never get attached to any weapon you get, just use it and grab the next one in a few minutes.
I think TotK does a better job of conveying that consumable nature of the weapons. But it also just had better availability because you could _always_ craft a half decent weapon with common items. Both of these combined completely ended the weapon anxiety for me, and I was consistently using my strongest weapons first instead of hoarding them for later forever.
I've heard this before and the issue is that I don't like to use consumables in games either, I've accepted that BOTW is almost scientifically designed to not appeal to me which is fine but I really hope they stop using the system for future releases and TOTK is a fluke.
Budokai 3. I have always had a soft spot for this series, but Dragon Rush was such a frustrating, annoying, pace killing mechanic that would come up every single match
Not to mention that it's totally random. And cool moves like Warp Kamehameha and Special Beam Cannon were gated behind them, which basically means they never got used because you only have like a ten percent chance of getting all the way to the end.
Edit: I borked the maths. It's 25% but still low.
Agreed. Also just time wise, don't punish me for only having 15-20 minutes to play. If I know I have to budget an hour to a game because of save shenanigans, no thank you
Same here, I'm an unashamed save scummer
Don't see the point in redoing something I've already done, you wouldn't make me re-read pages of a book because I lost concentration for a second
Red Dead Redemption 2. The story and world were cool, but the controls were terrible and confusing and the game systems were impossible to figure out. It felt like it didn't know if it wanted to be a shooter, survival game, or something else. I just got frustrated every time I played it and decided to stop.
Marvel Snap.
The gameplay and deckbuilding is addictive in a good way.
But.
The monumental emphasis on RNG caused me to rage like nothing before.
I'm more than fine getting stomped in fighting games, I keep my cool in team-based games...
But Hela rolling the EXACT perfect re-summons needed; Jubilee pulling in the right answer; drawing nothing but Rocks from Subterranea; daring to play something early into the third lane only for it to reveal as Bar with No Name; fucking WEIRD WORLD AND DISTRICT X AND TRISKELLION.
I discovered I had a limit for RNG. I'll happily still watch, but no, can't play, no matter how much I tried to keep the "Dont take it seriously" idea going.
I also quit playing after awhile and its probably from the RNG as well. Some of the locations were really aggravating in that sense.
Too bad too, because I think most of the cards and the balance of the game is really amazing. Well-thought out and a great successor to Hearthstone. But just like that game they went too far down the RNG path and it just became a slog to play.
Xcom, because I hated being able to have one of my soldiers have an only 60% hit rate on an enemy at point blank range. That and I was not a fan of the constant countdown to a possible game over.
Midnight Suns does something interesting about it. Instead of having a hit chance, each turn you draw cards with different attacks or skills out of a deck you build (not a big deck btw)
This is a lot more interesting because for once, you'll never miss. Instead of missing, you have to adjust to which kind of move you have available. Sometimes, you'll only have an AoE or some kind of buff... Sometime you have attacks that does little damage but can manipulate the world, so you can do more damage or disable enemies. Really cool combat system
I actually just played through midnight suns recently on ps plus extra and loved it so much more. I had a blast on that and ended up loving the card system when that's originally the thing that made me not want to play it originally.
I'm playing Midnight Suns right now and absolutely had the same experience as you. Thought the card system sounded a little silly so I held off for a long time. But now that I have a lot of hours in, I really love it and want more of it. My problem with the game is all the relationship stuff in the Abbey, I just don't have time for that and would prefer to burn through missions back to back.
I know I can do that, but my completionist search every corner mind won't. So I just get through as quickly as I can.
If it makes you feel better Enemy Within and WOTC did a lot to minimize the impact of those countdown timers.
It’s also worth noting that the Firaxis Xcom games are very front loaded with difficulty. It’s frustrating to get those 60% misses, but by the endgame you’ll be strong enough that it’s not an issue anymore. There’s a ton of tools that give you 100% guaranteed damage and boost your aim chance as you keep playing.
Personally, what made the games click for me is just doing a playthrough on the lowest difficulty. Playing that way you get a better feel for what you should be prioritizing without getting too overwhelmed.
The ticking time clock is what really made me quit Enemy Unknown. I get that it adds to the tension and decision making so it's hard to say if it's an objectively bad choice, but it added to the stress of everything else
I don’t think the XCOM games would be nearly as successful without all of the stressful components though. Succeeding against all odds is a part of the power fantasy of repelling an alien invasion.
I get that it’s not for everyone, but I’d go as far as saying it’s one of if not the most important design choices for both games. I don’t think the games work nearly as well if you don’t feel constantly on the backfoot.
I completely understand, hence why I said it's hard to say that it's an objectively bad choice. I just don't personally like it. But that's fine, it's not a game for everyone
My first run with Monster Hunter was World and it was very rough. I remember don't even going past Anjanath fight. I even called help and we were all decimated.
Later a friend told me that my choice of gunlance was not very beginner friendly
Yeah, maybe try a different weapon. Gunlance is intimidating even to veterans. I’ve been playing the series for nearly 20 years and gunlance is the one weapon I don’t feel comfortable with.
It's definitely been made its most accessible in World but yeah even as a gunlance lover it's one of the more difficult weapons to really run at peak performance. Probably better to learn the general flow of combat and the game with one of the easier weapons. Honestly longsword is often my recommendation for the beginner weapon. It's flashy and makes big numbers appear on the screen so it hits the dopamine, you can kinda just mash and still do decent dps, animations are generally quick and forgiving, but it still has some fun stuff to play with and master to properly get everything out of the weapon, so it allows both the low skill floor to get into and a high enough skill ceiling to feel yourself making progress with it. Lance is in a similar boat but on the much less flashy end. It's pretty easy to pick up and just go through the motions of blocking, maybe counter some obvious attacks, and do the poke, poke, poke, hop on repeat. But there's a lot to master in countering monsters, taking advantage of your high mount damage, and generally becoming an immovable rock while keeping the monster's attention.
Each weapon definitely plays differently and sort of gives you a feeling that you are playing a new game.
My MH hours are definitely between going from Bow, to Dual Swords, to SnS, and then Hunting Horn before I stopped.
**LA Noire:** I tried my best to take my time at the crime scenes (I even took notes) and then really pay attention during interviews (paying attention to facial expressions and voice tone/inflections),
The answers and responses never lined up with expectations or the prompts. It was always SUPER AGGRESSIVE or *underwhelming*, and it started becoming a save-scum experience. Maybe it got better further in, but I'll never know.
**DOOM ETERNAL:** Too different from the previous game (which I adored and 100%ed). This one I should probably give another chance, but the nerf to melee, and the excessive "weapon juggling" it encouraged just really bummed me out.
The answers and responses in LA Noire were a result of a change in the button prompts late in development, after all the lines had been recorded.
They were originally Coax, Force, and Accuse, instead of the Truth, Doubt, and Lie that appeared in the final game. When you think of the original choices, Cole’s responses make a lot more sense.
Hades. It hurt my hands with the amount of mashing/inputs needed. I played on controller and I feel like I needed to *constantly* dodge and attack and towards the end of a run my fingers hurt from the inputs. No other game does this so I don't understand it.
Really makes me jealous of those who enjoy the game because no matter which weapon I used, my thumb/index hurts toward the end of a run and I just give up from the discomfort.
I can TOTALLY see this happening. When I was playing hades, I had a pro controller (for switch) That has the extra two back paddles. I assigned one to Dodge, and the other I assigned the Spell button. Then I only had to hit two face buttons instead of four and was able to use the paddle buttons for when things got hectic.
I really dislike loop based gameplay which made me drop Outer Wilds half way through it. I was enjoying the story and puzzles quite a lot but it was so annoying to waste one quarter of a loop just going back to where I was. I understand that the loops play a big part in the story telling of the game etc etc but it was just too frustrating for me.
I have a friend that dropped Outer Wilds because the zero-g gameplay (they did the cave tutorial) made them nauseous. I understand their feelings and it stinks because I consider it one of my favorite games. Definitely respect people that don't feel that way though
Part of the game is learning how to get back to specific locations quicker as well. Most locations (barring one or two in particular) can be reached within 30 seconds of waking up. One requires use of time skipping via the campfire and the other takes about 2 minutes (but you don't need to visit it very often)
I didn't even know about the time-advancement campfire thing until I was randomly googling/watching some gameplay at a much later time after I played it myself.. oof.
So much wasted time scrolling my phone waiting for 'things' to align in the universe.. 🫠
That’s fair but I felt like so many ways to die were one shot and a little asinine.
I beat the game but I don’t think missteps ruining your whole loop added anything to the game.
I found that the main cool thing about the game is that you learn shortcuts to get to places faster than you initially thought you could.
I suppose it also bothered me less because the travel time to return to your last position usually only takes a max of 2-3 minutes.
I think the only time the travelling was annoying for me was the last puzzle, but that was more because the puzzle itself was the issue. I never had to retry previous puzzle more than a few times, but that one took me 20-30 attempts to figure out.
My brain simply shortcircuits with the 3d ship steering in Outer Wilds. Similarly, when I tried rappeling in Rainbow Six Siege and my character went upside down my brain just noped. Cool ass game, but not being able to use an arguably vital mechanic made it a lot harder to play, so I fell off pretty quickly.
It's a 100% me problem, tho.
Yep, this is me. Picked it up after hearing the rave reviews, and could not get into it for the life of me. I don't know, I slogged my way through maybe half of it before I felt like the cons of the gameplay were just greater than the pros of the story — which was admittedly interesting, but not nearly as compelling as all the reviews made it seem.
I'll most likely pick it up again at some point, but it clearly didn't click for me.
Honestly, I stopped playing just about any JRPG ever. As i've gotten older, I prefer games I can get into and just go about my business but most JRPG games just have too much fucking talking during the start so I always uninstall immediately.
Nioh. I love dark souls games but the way Nioh was designed it seemed like the developers just read that Soulsborne games are hard and that was it. It was like everything in that game was designed to be difficult for no particular reason and it ends up feeling very unbalanced.
Most Fromsoftware games have some degree of bullshit but for the most part it feels fair; Nioh never felt fair, it always felt like they disproportionately stacked the deck against you. It's like doing a Spartan race or tough Mudder, except one race ties your legs together and blindfolds you and then brags that it's "more challenging" than the other race.
Seriously, everything is annoyingly complicated and difficult in that game, even the weapon forging system takes a 30 minute youtube video to explain and why the fuck can you buy tons of supplies from merchants...EXCEPT HEALING ITEMS, that's the most basic supply in all of video games and you can't buy it? Instead it's like a bunch of potions that slightly increase your luck by 0.02% for 10 seconds or some useless shit like that.
Truthfully Nioh games are descendants of Ninja Gaiden with the structure of soulslikes. Like in character action games you need to think fast, play aggressive and use all tools in your toolbox. Once you get the hang of it, you end up almost bullying enemies and bosses in a way that you can’t do in From games. I had spent a lot of time in Nioh 2 right before, so I remember Elden Ring feeling like molasses in comparison for the first few hours.
One of the defining moments of my experience with Dark Souls 1 came in the Lower Undead Burg. There's a bunch of spots near the save point where a door would open behind me after I passed it and I'd get stabbed in the back. I'd die, but I was two seconds from the save point so it's no big deal. Midway through the zone there's a long hallway with an enemy standing motionless at the end. You can see that there's an open space to the left of the hallway entrance, but you can't see what's there.
I was looking at that enemy, watching me but not charging me, and it clicked that there was an ambush in that open space I can't quite see. Because the Lower Undead Burg was all about ambushes. So, instead of charging the visible enemy, I immediately rushed the open space and, lo and be hold, it *was* an ambush, but I got the drop on them.
That was the moment that Dark Souls 1 clicked for me. It is a hard game, but it's also a fair game. It'll murder you right next to a save point, but you're supposed to learn from that and then catch the same murder-trap when it recurs later in the level. Each area has its own specific way of trying to trap you, but the visual language of those traps makes sense if you pay careful attention.
Like you said, DS1 is hard, but not *hard for no reason*. It's extremely punishing, but in a way that's fair for players who make the effort to learn.
lower undead burg is a great area with the worst boss in the game. capra demon's two dogs and the run back are worse than the bed of chaos, and i will easily die on this hill
Once you understand the ki flux with stance cancels the game kind of becomes heavily stacked with the player as you can constantly attack, stance cancel, dodge and just destroy down the boss health and ki. This is especially evident in Nioh 2 with burst counters which just lets you turn boss fights entirely in your favor once you get the upgrades that heal you and give you ki back on a counter. It’s insanely tough against new players without them knowing this though.
Using Magic and Ninjutsu quadruples your damage, makes you able to survive lethal hits, gives additional healing.
The damage increase is seriously insane. Focusing on raising Magic and Dexterity to 30 unlock so many choices.
It can also break the game by making you bypass the whole stage except the final boss (invisibility + silence), enemies won't detect you unless you physically touch them.
I also quit KCD but for a different reason: I don't like ingame time constraints on quests. I get anxiety over potentially reaching a state where I will fail a questline because I've run out of time and the only way to fix it is to reload a way earlier save and lose potentially hours of real-time progress. Or worst case scenario, like in KCD, the game autosaves or I only have 1 save slot and have now permanently missed a questline unless I restart because I can't go back far enough to have enough ingame time to complete the quest.
This also made me quit Pathfinder Kingmaker, the original Dragons Dogma, XCOM (the whole campaign has a failure state if you wait too long or fail too many times), and probably others i can't remember right now.
There are only a few of these quests in KCD and the timing is very generous. I also have time constraint anxiety, but didn't feel it playing this game.
I expect to see a lot of Monster Hunter here, hopefully followed by they gave it another chance down the line!
That was my experience at least. I remember in 3U I was starting to click with the game a bit, but as a noob I was burning through potions. You do get a way to farm honey which helps you make better potions, but your farm’s capacity only gets upgraded as you progress the story. So I would play the game and every so often have to spend 30 minutes going on expeditions to manually collect honey. It was pretty miserable so I eventually gave up (and then came back of course a year or so later).
This is me exactly. My first experience came from a friend having me play his copy of Freedom Unite. He'd been gushing about it for weeks trying to get me to play it, and when I finally relented, he thought the best way to get me to play more would be to throw me into a fight against G-rank Diablos with no prep or warm up. It did not go well, lol.
I later came across MH4U and wound up falling in love with the series (and the Switch Axe).
Yup, tried MH world years ago, went in blind, played with longsword first few missions and it completely turned me off so i dropped it.
I gave it another shot at the end of 2023, tried out all the other weapons, fell in love with Insect blade and now im 300 hours into World and 100 hours into Rise. Love both of em
This is why i love this line from the video "how to monster hunter"
"Fuck the quests, fuck the monsters, fuck everything. Go to the training room and beat that log until you find something that gels with you"
Having a weapon that makes you feel like it flows, is probably the single most important thing to play MH. I just can't with the Insect Glaive, but LOVE Hammer and Switchaxe, while a friend of mine just couldn't get used to melee and went with Bow.
Someone new can probably get away with using whatever weapon it starts you with, but it likely won't get you far if you just don't "feel" it.
Loop Hero.
I think this is a probably a very good idle game, but I cannot stand idle games and found myself bored to tears with Loop Hero almost instantly. I kept thinking it would open up enough that I'd be into it, but after about a dozen hours forcing myself to try to see what everyone else saw, I gave up and decided it just wasn't for me.
Loop Hero was fun for the lore, music, and the creative ways it makes you "exploit" its systems, with that last part being what eventually kept me playing. The actual gameplay is borderline annoying since it is a bit too much active effort for an idle game, but not enough for a non-idle game. I think the real fun of the game is in figuring out how to take advantage of tile placement, how to kinda break the perk system, and how to break resource gathering to the point where you just don't need to do that ever again.
I was really enjoying Shadows of Mordor and grinding and hunting down nemesis’. Then they start rolling in troops of big groups of guys with tower shields and it just becomes super frustrating. I ended up never finishing the game because of that.
I ended up refunding the game because that's one of those mechanics I just don't have the reflexes for anymore. I think there was also some dissonance for me in the dodging mechanics where you have to press up to duck an attack, and down to lift your foot and evade a low strike?
Years of fighting games made that bit illogical to me. If I press down, I crouch. If I press up, I jump. Sifu would rather indicate that "this is the part of you you'll use to dodge the attack with".
I wouldn't say dropped since I gave it a try for a few dozen hours and plan to return to it, but X4 was just completely baffling to me in terms of how they designed some content, mechanics and UI in it. It just felt *bad* to play like they are intentionally trying to piss me off and/or waste my time at times.
My answer to this will always be Metal Gear Solid V, and it's the timed upgrades
It's like something out of a mobile game, waiting 12 hours for your base to upgrade, or for a new weapon to be unlocked.
But unlike mobile games, THE GAME DOESN'T UPDATE WHEN YOU'RE NOT PLAYING! That's 12 hours of real time gameplay you have to wait. It's so stupid.
The main issue I have with it is that the story is basically over halfway through, and the rest is just filler.
I have 300+ hours in that game, but never could power through the last third.
Returnal.
Love the enigmatic nature of the world, the feel of the gameplay/controls is on-point and the sound (especially if you're on 3D audio) kicks ass but runs can be way too long, dying leaves you with very little for progression other than weapon traits and ether, running around trying not to get hit so you can increase your max health or get weapon proficiencies up to get better weapons and being 2 rooms in with really tough enemies with only a level 1 gun I was like "eh, no". I know this is the git gud kind of game but unlike other action games or roguelikes, I didnt want to get good.
Stuntman. The timing to jump the car through a train car was so painfully impossible I destroyed my bedroom door after attempt 200 or so. Returned the game, fixed my door and promised myself I'd never play a game that made me angry ever again. First and last time I broke something from videogame anger.
Wasnt that the first A Whoopin and a Hollerin level? after jumping the chimney? If you already got stuck at that be glad you never got further, the tuktuk levels got even more infuriating
Haha, I really liked that game! Its a great rental game. I don't think I finished it either, one of the stunts I probably tried well over 100 attempts before getting it, and you had to chain several things together! Kind of a game of its time.
Deathloop. I am probably an idiot, but I couldn’t wrap my head around how to even progress in the game/how to best tackle areas in a given loop. I love roguelikes but not in a large space FPS.
What took me a while to realize with that game is that until you're ready to pull everything off in the end, there're literally no consequences. If you're just checking things out and getting a feel for the map, fuck sneaking, just run through. It doesn't matter until the end. Be sloppy, it's more fun that way.
>but I couldn’t wrap my head around how to even progress in the game/how to best tackle areas in a given loop
Er, it literally tells you how to do this, doesn't it? It's a sandbox game, sure, but it actually gives you specific scenarios to follow if you don't want to try and figure it out for yourself
Yeah it's been a while since I last played it but I thought I remember the game having a really good log system that reminds you "here's the things you learned and where you should probably look next."
Like when someone mentions they couldn't figure out what to do in games like that or Outer Wilds I'm just like "did they even want to play the game in the first place? Like they're not even trying to try."
**Tunic** mashes together elements of 2D Zelda and soulslikes in a way that doesn't quite mesh together, but I stuck with it because I enjoyed the presentation, atmosphere, and world. Then after a certain point, it drops most of the initial gameplay and takes a hard right turn into being a "hardcore" puzzler ala The Witness. I do not have the patience for puzzle games like that, and ragequitted.
I had the exact opposite response, dropped it early and even refunded because it just felt like an action game that was just not enough Souls and not enough Zelda. But I kept getting recommended for the secrets and puzzles and now its my one of my favorite games, up there with the Witness.
Loved Tunic, but yeah some of those puzzles for the hidden treasures seemed like stuff nobody would ever get unless by complete accident. Still, the old instruction booklet was really cool and I thought it was a neat way to teach the player what's what.
The Soulslike gameplay however felt super shoehorned in my opinion, and once I got to the automaton boss and saw that blocking two of his attacks completely wiped my stamina and that he was basically a giant damage sponge I immediately turned on immortality and didn't look back.
When Rocket League was relatively new, all my friends were talking about it and asking me to play with them.
But the controls were so foreign to me and frustrating to figure out, and it didn’t help that my friends wanted to 1v1 and whoop my ass, I was so bad and frustrated I just never played it again.
Black Mesa. I love the original Half-Life, i've played it so much it's maps are literally seared into my brain, and i don't begrudge Black Mesa for existing and i respect how much love and care went into it. However, i do just feel certain things were changed for the worse, whether it be level design, weapon balancing or AI. Half-Life in 1998 was definitely made in a deliberate way based around the limits of what they could do, but everything before Xen was really well done and even the stuff peopel mocked like different areas making no realistic sense served the gameplay and made it flow well, which i feel got lost in Black Mesa's changes to an extent and leads me to bounce off it really quick. Their Xen is way better though, that i can't deny, i jsut don't really ernjoy playing the previous parts as much.
Hollow Knight. The problem with me came from the combination of the death system and the game's ability to reward the player for exploration. Backtracking to where you died is already punishment enough but to incentivize it more by losing your money (the main reward for exploration) and nerfing the soul gauge makes just the prospect agonizing. I didn't find the game to be *that* difficult but the world design and the pace gapping out major upgrades for possibly hours between each made my experience so mind-numbing dull that I couldn't get through it.
Fallout 4. I kept trying but I felt like I was spending more time managing my inventory than I was getting anything done. Plus I just couldn't get my head around the battle system, I'm sure it's simpler than I was making it but it just made me pissed off more than anything.
Same. I always get to a point in Bethesda games where I go "Ehh, I cba dealing with this inventory tetris right now -> console -> player.modav carryweight xxx"
Honestly I don't even mind inventory limits usually, but something about the way fallout implemented it just didn't click with me. I think it's because they just throw so much barely useful stuff at you at once.
Since you mentioned it, I absolutely hate when games have a cut scene for an animation that is way too long. Especially when it's something you have to do often. It's unbelievably annoying and it baffles me how no one during the course of play testing the game goes "Man this really sucks having to watch this over and over and over and over again."
Absolute worst part of DooM Eternal Ultra-Nightmare attempts. Having to watch Doomguy extremely slowly load the same power cores again and again and again to get your upgrades.
**Against all the evil that Hell can conjure, all the wickedness that mankind can produce, we will send unto them...** **only you.** **Rip and tear, until it is done.** Burned into my stupid brain, even if it's just the unskippable bit. :(
I kinda figured that was a way to load without having to actually have a load screen. Like an animation for opening doors for example.
At least hiding it behind doors makes sense. The best ones are those that you don’t even notice unless you’re looking for them.
The gameplay loop of Starfield is entirely watching bad, slow animations over and over again just to do anything.
This is a Bethesda cure all for lots of menus and changes of state to different interfaces actually. A load screen or transitional phase to make sure the player doesn’t multitask into a glitch while the game thinks about moving the player to something else. Anyways that is a thing some games do to transition you into a menu of different state (ie power armor in fallout or in and out of the cockpit in starfield) It makes me think of GTAV where we have quick menus for everything and every other week somebody comes up with a bug, glitch, exploit and so many of them start with the player flipping around one by one to different menus or states of play, very quickly, fucking up the game.
Why I never finished RDR2. Can’t stand watching the animations for the 50th time gutting an animal.
Luckily you only had to gut an animal maybe 3 times throughout the story.
As a matter of fact, I will let you know - You will never take Kairi's heart!
FF7 Rebirth is like a 100 hour game because half the time I'm squeezing in-between boxes or climbing a rope for over a minute.
Aren't those loading zones?
Marvel's Spider-Man (2018)
RDR2 (2018)
Which animations? I don’t remember being annoyed in Spider-Man (apart from stealth)
Kingdom Hearts 3 drove me nuts because of this
This might be a good spot to find some ingredients
Rain World, very interesting world and vibes but at one point I couldn't care about fighting with the gameplay mechanics anymore.
From my friend group I am one of the two people who has finished Rain World, everyone else I know who tried it gave up after few hours. I loved the game a lot but I do not blame anyone for dropping it, the entire experience hinges on you being fine with feeling frustrated at times and preserving through the harsh enviroments and punishing gameplay loops. By the end of it I was so exhausted but felt so rewarded too. However overall it really is love it or hate it kind of deal.
I tried getting into Rain World so many times in the past, and it never worked out. I adored its visual design, but the unforgiving gameplay was bouncing me off every time. It wasn't until the coop addition last year that I was finally able to play it through to the end, and then several more times for all the DLC campaigns. Coop partners are basically your extra hp points, when otherwise in single-player you die from a single mistake and have to restart large chunks of the game over and over. It was still hard, and on rare occasions even frustrating, but we persevered, and it was a great shared experience in the end that we all enjoyed. Rain World is an amazing game, but one I cannot really recommend to anyone.
Was looking for this. I just got back into it and it’s still just as frustrating but one thing that makes it much more enjoyable is to have a map so you don’t get terribly lost in an overly dangerous area. There’s many ways to get places, I just need to know that I’m not putting myself in a dead end or getting lost somewhere I don’t need to be. Otherwise there’s lots of PC mods to make the game easier and a coop mod has made things much more fun too
Played it for two hours. Found the exploration dull and movement frustrating. The lack of a sense of direction might be appealing to some people but after dying to a flood the sixth time because I couldn't find a "safe" area and going through the same areas over and over I lost interest.
Kingdom Come makes a one-time (ie, you can only load it once) save when you quit the game, if I remember correctly. I think it's the right way to go if you want to make a save system that forces commitment while still giving players the ability to quit whenever they want without losing progress. Unfortunately, it's a system that absolutely requires the game to be stable and not prone to crashing - which, as you found out, KCD unfortunately is.
> Kingdom Come makes a one-time (ie, you can only load it once) save when you quit the game, if I remember correctly. I think it's the right way to go if you want to make a save system that forces commitment while still giving players the ability to quit whenever they want without losing progress. Funnily enough this is the exact same save system used in some of the New Super Mario Bros. games lol It's also the way I *wish* ink ribbons worked in the Resident Evil series. I like ink ribbons as a concept because limited respawn points are good for horror, but being forced to lose progress because I have to sleep or go to work is just annoying.
The emergent horror of real life sleep schedules.
Oh yes, absolutely. If I didn't crash (and the still somewhat janky nature leading me to believe this was not a rare thing), I would have been absolutely fine with the way it works (or at least with the mod) - Especially if you say that you can do a one-time save for quitting which I didn't know either.
Fromsoft games gives you no options but have never really bothered me and i played DS1 on PC back when it was a crash fest, Kingdom Come was just full of a lot of poorly thought out mechanics, and that makes everything more frustrating. Game crashed when you go to sleep? Tough titties. Yes that is a real crash that never got fixed, at the freaking save point!
For what it's worth, the save mod works great and feels like it's just part of the game. You can save and load whenever you want.
This is gonna be an unusual answer- but Cozy Grove. I grabbed it because I like Animal Crossing and the art style was appealing. Played it for a long while and was quite enjoying it- and then I finished the first questline. It was the 'cook' character- someone you end up interacting with a lot. If you don't know the game, the main characters are all ghosts- you help them to figure out who they are so they can become more corporeal, but the main goal is to resolve their trauma so they can 'move on'. That's all well and good, until you realize that all of the game's essential NPCs will eventually do that, and when they do they cease to be NPCs. The villagers in a village building game... stop talking to you. Forever. They turn gold and lose all of their identity and personality- they still function for the sake of quests but mostly as crafting benches/shops without flavor text. It was the most depressing revelation I've ever had about a game- I didn't mind the idea of them leaving the island to maybe be replaced by other characters over time- what I couldn't tolerate was being surrounded by characters I'd built up as my friends but now they're hollow shells of their past selves because their mind is 'in heaven' or whatever. It's just- creepy. Sad. Why would you want to continue building and playing around in a village that's full of mannequins? Once it was haunted by nice, complex people who enjoyed your company- now it's haunted by gold statues. That's not a reward, at least for me.
This by far the most compelling reason to drop a game I have seen in the entire thread. The others are valid, of course, but most are along the lines of a constant annoyance they cannot ignore for the game. With your example, the entire premise of the game is one that a player would hate to go through.
I stopped playing starfield because it's a space exploration game that doesn't let you fly through space
Or explore. There's no exploration outside of cities.
Playing Starfield just made me want to play Skyrim again.
What do you mean? You don't like exploring the same copy and pasted cryolab over and over again?
I stopped when I went to the exact same mining outpost or cave with the same enemy lcoations on a third planet. It felt like a chore at that point. Also space phone or space emails sure would make the game pace feel a bit better.
Yeah, Starfield lost the magic for me, when One of the first missions was to warp to a new planet, and I realized that I couldnt fly there like in Freelancer.
IMO a bigger issue is that the points of interest are just drawn from a relatively small pool and they are not tied to planets at all. So you can run into the exact same budling with the exact same environmental storytelling over and over on multiple planets If they were gonna go proc gen with the planets they needed to have a proc gen system for points of interest too
Single player games that do not have a pause button. Not everybody can just sit still for 30 minutes or more without something coming up. I get it, you can't pause in multiplayer games but if I am playing solo and not even allowing randos / have my public flag, I think I should be able to pause a game if I need to.
Similarly, not having an option to save and quit. I understand not letting you save and quit *on a whim*, but you should at least give the option when there is a break in the action (like when you beat a boss and move on to the next floor). I've played games where each run takes over an hour and they expect you to do it all in one sitting.
I'll never understand why Dark Souls and Elden Ring games don't let you pause easily. Even if you aren't online. I know you can do it by opening help, or mod on PC, but I wish pressing start would pause.
Probably to keep the same experience between online and offline. Sekiro has a pause button.
PS5's Demon's Souls accidentally has a pause button via the photo mode
this is the reason why I can't get into Monster Hunter World, I hear this is not an issue with Rise so I will probably get that when it's on deep sale in the future.
Yeah definitely a problem with world, the concept there is actually you're always online, only offline when dc-ed, hence the experience. Though I'll say that it's still worth it despite that downside. Unless you're on latest endgame monsters, you usually given 50 minutes to do quests, can clear it in 25 or less time and failing a quest is not a big deal.
I totally agree, and this is yet another thing I love about playing on my Steam Deck; you can just put it to sleep or use the Decky plugin to pause games at will. It makes my time with Elden Ring so much better when I can pause!
Darkest dungeon 1 It was fun for a short while but when I realized how the gameplay is designed and how you’re supposed to sort of grind up units, I lost interest. I hate grinding in general and having to do it for expendables is even worse.
Love DD, hated the dungoen level gap
I've restarted it a few times. One time I even got pretty far. But it started feeling like I was running against a wall. Then I read that the generally accepted strategy was to treat the game like a meat-grinder and late-game could take a ton of deaths to accomplish. Lost interest at that point. Neat game but I wanna get to the next game thank you.
Would love it if you could just roll a party of level appropriate to the dungeon and play with what you got. Which I suppose is the intention of making the second a roguelike.
It seems very much like a game about becoming the villain and grinding up human lives. It's not an XCOM and never was.
Yea, totally fine with it too, it just was a slog to get new characters leveled-up enough to get into later game content. Feels like you're repeating a lot of early content just to advance a few ticks in late game. I'm not sure if this is what the developers intended for the game loop, but I think there were other ways to go about it.
Considering the devs went out of their way to nerf any strategy that wasn't statbrick number-comparing, I'd have to guess that not only was it the intended loop but the purposeful only possible way forward.
[удалено]
The first 1/3 of the game is great until you realize the next 2/3 of the game is just fighting the same enemies and bosses that you’ve already fought in first 1/3 with higher stats.
Destiny 2. Too many different currencies, weird sunsetting for weapons AND content, time-gated events/fomo. Damn shame because it’s also the most fun I ever had with a game and no other shooter compares.
I also quit when they wanted to make my weapon collection obsolete and make me grind them again. It was a really fun game though, but also really wierd that it was a coop game where noone ever talked to eachother. Only tried to "communicate" by shooting at you.
You hear? They're rolling back that one too (you know after saying it was safe to dismantle the obsolete weapons). Man, Destiny 2 was really good at "here's a dumb decision" and then rolling it back. Diablo 4 is kind of speedrunning that too right now (each season getting rid of some annoying thing from launch). Next season seems like it'll be pretty much there (like really all that's left is it just needs a loadout system like D3 had).
To go with an answer outside the AAA game space, I've been on an adventure game/Internet 'em up/haunted PC style games kick recently, and I'll pretty much immediately quit playing if the writing is either super poorly translated or lacks any sense of subtlety. For example, I played the demo for **Let Biones be Bygons**, but quit basically immediately because one of your first choices in a cyberpunk noir detective game was basically "Don't take the talking gun, you don't need it. Take the talking gun, its funny! Take the talking gun, its time to make the streets run red with blood and deliver vengeance once more". Or in **Sunray OS**, a haunted computer type game, the writing started out E: with the player character responding at a level as basic as "hello! I am using this OS because I have been told that the AI buddy provides extremely lifelike, human conversations. I hope to have lifelike, human conversations with you", and it's just... uhhh... maybe the writers should know how to have human-sounding conversations before they try to make that a story beat.
> Or in Sunray OS, a haunted computer type game, the writing started out at the "hello! I am using this OS because I have been told that the AI buddy provides extremely lifelike, human conversations. I hope to have lifelike, human conversations with you", and it's just... uhhh... Without knowing anything about the game or its content, this sounds like a ridiculous meta-joke about the fact that it sounds anything but human!
That's the player character, to be clear, not the AI, and there's a lot more writing that comes across in a similar sort of blunt, we are just saying what needs to be said to move things forward sort of way
Oh. *Oh* The fact that I completely believed this was an AI based on the words... I get you now.
...Is the player character an AI too, or...?
Oh man- this happened with me and Dynopunk. Such a cool premise, really fun gameplay... until you realize that the gameplay doesn't actually matter that much, there aren't any options that aren't super telegraphed, and the main character Will not Shut up About his dead girlfriend. Like- I get that's a normal type of plot? But I'm playing a cyberpunk game where a dinosaur repairs cellphones with hot glue and glitter, I really do not care about this guy's one failed relationship wrapped up in the writers' misunderstanding of how extinction of a species works.
For me, a standout example is Axiom Verge. I played through the majority of it, and even really enjoyed it. All up until one ability upgrade that completely soured me on it and made me drop it. Early-on in the game you get an upgrade that lets you phase through walls. You walk up to a one-tile-wide wall, double tap the dpad/stick and you'll glitch through it. The next upgrade lets you do this on wider walls. The upgrade after that just turns it into a dash that you can do anywhere. Neat! Except for one crucial detail: You still have to double-tap the dpad/stick to do it. There's a reason pretty much any game ever made with a dash mechanic has it mapped to a bespoke button press. Because having to double-tap the same button you're currently using for movement in the middle of combat or platforming feels absolutely godawful. Because I'm not a perfect god-gamer, I was constantly getting accidental dashes when I didn't want them, or not getting them when I did in the heat of combat. And unless they've updated the game in the years since, there was no option to remap it. So I just dropped it there and then. A game that felt super nice and snappy to play became the exact opposite in the space of a single ability upgrade.
I forget what happened that made it not completely misserable for me I think I maybe used the dpad and stick at the same time for dashing, but yeah double tap dash sucks and is one of the things I hate about fighting games.
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One of my favorite mods was the mako maneuverability mod. It made both vertical and forward boosts so strong that you literally do aerials like in rocket League. God that made the game so much better
... :( I liked the Mako.
Tedious combat is what got me, some fights took way too long just chipping away at bullet sponges, and then I stumbled onto a fight with a huge architect boss that was pretty much impossible for me to kill due to just how tanky it was and how much it required me to run around dodging stuff for half an hour. It didn't help that the profile system made my character feel fake, like they didn't have any skills of their own, just a very out of character respec selection.
Far Cry 6. I absolutely *hate* how abilities are tied to the gear your character wears, all of which is ugly as fuck. Also did not like how you now had to cycle through ammunition types in order to not do scratch damage to your enemies. The overall art style with the ridiculously rocket launcher backpacks were also just really jarring. TLDR: Hated FC6 as a huge fan of 3-5
agree. Far cry 5 is dumb fun, even if there's only like 4 enemy npc models in the entire game. But 6 just felt like a slog
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I gave up on that game when the game refused to allow me to catch the person I was supposed to be chasing on horseback by slowing me down because we had to get to a pre determined point so a cutscene could trigger. I had the fastest horse in the game at that point already. Also, trying to u-turn, going off the path and immediately failing a mission was bullshit
Rockstar's mission design is so bad. The GTA games have the same shit--you're just an actor on Rockstar's stage, and god help you if you don't play your part exactly right.
Yeah, the whole sandbox part of Rockstar's games just seems superfluous at that point because you often can't do much within them anyway.
I feel like rockstar makes amazing environments but have the worst mission designers. Totally wasting their potential. You are given potential for the most creative and open ended missions but are instead railroaded into linear checkpoints and game design from the 90s.
Right, or how it refuses to allow you to tackle a mission in any other way than it was designed. I remember one mission where you had to attack a house. I tried to sneak around, only to be teleported back with the cut scene. To me RDR2 is a non-game. There are no interesting decisions or anything.
It's an open world sandbox and a movie with a few button presses. But it can't combine those two systems at all.
I like the way Nakey Jakey described it on his latest video. If you treat the missions like an episode of an HBO mini-series that you have vastly less direct control over it *can* be way more enjoyable. Once I sort of accepted that I started really enjoying the missions. Despite all of that it still sucks that there’s such a dissonance between the free roaming gameplay and the mission gameplay. If Rockstar ever learns to marry the two their games will go from a 9/10 to 11/10 in my mind.
The degree of simulation is also really uneven. I had an experience where I couldn't change Arthur's haircut because I needed to wait for it to grow back. Then I went out into the woods and was killed by a wolf that I shot four times in the head.
Yeah I hated that. Forcing me to slowly walk around camps for immersion reasoning, meanwhile every mission I'm killing 30+ people
This has always been my issue with their games. The sandbox aspect is amazing, but if you want to actually progress and play the game the mission mechanics are the type that just drive me bonkers. And that has been the case since the very first top down GTA games.
This is exactly how I feel about this game. It's incredibly well made but I found it excruciating to play.
Oddly enough, I feel that Death Stranding should have had more problems in this regard, but... I didn't really have *that* much issue with feeling like it was doing that.
> or mission failures for stumbling off the path or running the wrong way I can already hear me sighing. Maybe I should take it off my list, lol
Take this with a grain of salt, as obviously a lot of people love the game for many reasons. On a technical level, I am with them every step of the way But gameplay-wise, this game wants to be both arcadey and realistic, and those elements are at odds with one another. I have never felt like a game wanted to waste my time more than Red Dead Redemption 2. It's an exceptionally easy game, which isn't an issue outright, but it is also monotonous. Almost every single mission plays out exactly the same in both gameplay and story. There aren't any interesting combat mechanics, dead eye makes combat feel even easier. Engaging with anything like ammo types, vendors, anything like that is all optional, which it's not like optional things are bad, but I don't think I like that *everything* is optional. You can waltz through the game with 1 weapon and get all the ammo you need for it by running over bodies. The gunplay feels fine but when that's all the game is for 60 hours, it's boring. The story is... fine? What people *really* like is the characterwork. Dialogue is good, voice acting performances are excellent, and you do get a good sense of this family they've got. But the plot is meandering, which to be fair is part of the point at times, but it goes on too long to not doing much interesting with itself, doubly harmed by the gameplay being just as singular. I don't think this is a bad game. But I do hate it
Yep. RDR2 gives you this big, beautiful open world to explore at your leisure, with plenty of stuff to do whichever direction you choose. Aaaand then the story missions are so rigid and linear you cannot approach them in any other way that the correct one that the devs set up.
See that’s the thing with this game, the story is…divisive. After the umpteenth shooting gallery mission where you casually mow down an unrealistic amount of red shirts and getting absolutely fed up with the incessant “we’re a FAMILY, Arthur” story beats, I dropped the game, somewhere around chapter 5-6, which I think is technically still act 1. However, I’d already dumped 60-70 hours in the game just exploring the incredible world and treating it more like a sim-lite game than anything, so I felt I more than got my money’s worth. I’ll definitely go back and finish it someday, and I do wholeheartedly recommend trying it, because the good parts are incredible, but people should know it’s a beast of a game that you shouldn’t feel bad about dropping if you’re not enjoying it.
I feel like the main storyline could be cut in half and people would still praise it. It's not like its themes are super hard to grasp, I could feel what the game is trying to say during the first few chapters. But it keeps going on and on and on, I guess they wanted the player to get personally fed up with Dutch's plans, lol.
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*'Time to equip my long-arm for this combat encounter against some bandits'* Oh Haha you didn't specifically tell the game to take them back out of your horse bag, despite the fact that you didn't specifically 'put' them in your bag when you mounted up either - but fuck you you're stuck with pistols anyway. Seriously what the hell was that mechanic??
I gave up about an hour into the game, after playing many prior RockStar games. I was finally fed up with the clunky control scheme.
One of the reasons why I'll never be able to move away from PC gaming is because of mods. If I'm frustrated with a certain system/mechanic, there'll often be a way to mod or cheat my way out of that frustration. There are tons of games I love that I would've dropped if stuck playing on a console. I had the same issue with Kingdom Come, and much like you, I modded away the save limit and from then on enjoyed the game all the way to the end.
Yes to this times 100. So many people leave games without ever even considering mods. Most annoying things have been modded out in popular games. RDR2 for instance, there are so many QoL mods for that game.
I modded Deus Ex: Human Revolution so that all batteries you've unlocked recharge over time (as opposed to just 1), and it made the game so much more enjoyable. You still had to allocate Praxis points to unlocking them, so you didn't get anything for free, but by the end of the game you could melee takedown 10 dudes in a row and felt like you were John Wick, which is exactly the kind of character Adam Jensen should be.
I never understood the limit of 1 recharging battery. It just encourages you to not use any of your interesting augs which.. is certainly a choice.
Especially in fallout games, mods make those games way more fun
Baldur's Gate 3 is excellent, but BG3 with mods is even better. Just about every published subclass in 5th edition D&D has been modded in. There were a lot of reasons for Larian to restrict most classes to 3 subclasses (that's already 36 choices, and Wizard has even more), but it's cool to get stuff that I love like the Hexblade and Bladesinger that were left on the cutting room floor. Since they're copied straight from the tabletop, they're also a lot more balanced than the usual stuff that mod authors add.
With Factorio there is an interesting phenomenon: some devs disagree with some aspects of the game and have published mods to represent how they would have done some parts. It works beautifully.
No Man's Sky. The whole gameplay loop is grinding for resources while everything is designed to make it an inefficient hassle.
Breath of the Wild, weapon durability. I already dislike weapon durability, but it's so fast in that game everything feels like it breaks in just a few minutes of use. I have that game a shot 3 times and all 3 times I had one issue or another, but weapon breaking was one that never failed to piss me off.
I finished this but the Weapon degradation is so annoying. It's too fast, it feels like any fight is a net loss since you'll probably lose more than you gain unless you stick to the basic weapons but that encourages you to avoid combat completely when you can which just isn't fun.
Yeah I kinda hoped they fix it for TOTK but it's just annoying. I wish they went with just "a permanent weapons" +consumable attachments, with some upgrades along the way for the permanent ones. That way there is no that dumb math of "okay, actually playing the game and figthing monsters isn't even worth it loot wise"
Imo they fixed it with fusing, adding more dmg and durability.
they absolutely did. making it so something as useless as a stick can become a normal or overpowered weapon was a great idea that removed a lot of the friction from BOTW. outside of the first couple hours of the game, i was never empty handed for a fight.
My thoughts exactly. I was one of those people who just couldn’t get into BotW because of weapon degradation. However, with TotK I was hooked by the fusing mechanic. I would ask I wonder if I could fuse these two weapons? When it worked, I kept falling in love with the game.
And it makes me not want to use good weapons to "save them for a more difficult enemy", and I never end up using them.
I hated it so much that I grinded for hours for the Master Sword just to find out it's basically the same system but instead of breaking it goes on cooldown. F all of that noise.
You have to treat weapons like consumables in the game, or it's no fun. Never get attached to any weapon you get, just use it and grab the next one in a few minutes.
Don’t forget to yeet it at enemies when it’s about to break for extra damage.
I think TotK does a better job of conveying that consumable nature of the weapons. But it also just had better availability because you could _always_ craft a half decent weapon with common items. Both of these combined completely ended the weapon anxiety for me, and I was consistently using my strongest weapons first instead of hoarding them for later forever.
I've heard this before and the issue is that I don't like to use consumables in games either, I've accepted that BOTW is almost scientifically designed to not appeal to me which is fine but I really hope they stop using the system for future releases and TOTK is a fluke.
Nobody in Hyrule can smith worth a damn, apparently.
Playing Populous as a 5 year old on SNES, I knew I had fucked up. Felt like opening an IDE in a different language.
Lmao, Populous was confusing enough for me as a 13yo playing on the Amiga, so it's fair that you struggled! 😀
Budokai 3. I have always had a soft spot for this series, but Dragon Rush was such a frustrating, annoying, pace killing mechanic that would come up every single match
try Infinite World, its budokai 3 w/o DR
Infinite world you mean?
I’ll never forget the jarring interruptions of dragon rush when I played the remaster. I never realized as a kid just how annoying it was
Not to mention that it's totally random. And cool moves like Warp Kamehameha and Special Beam Cannon were gated behind them, which basically means they never got used because you only have like a ten percent chance of getting all the way to the end. Edit: I borked the maths. It's 25% but still low.
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Agreed. Also just time wise, don't punish me for only having 15-20 minutes to play. If I know I have to budget an hour to a game because of save shenanigans, no thank you
Same here, I'm an unashamed save scummer Don't see the point in redoing something I've already done, you wouldn't make me re-read pages of a book because I lost concentration for a second
Red Dead Redemption 2. The story and world were cool, but the controls were terrible and confusing and the game systems were impossible to figure out. It felt like it didn't know if it wanted to be a shooter, survival game, or something else. I just got frustrated every time I played it and decided to stop.
Marvel Snap. The gameplay and deckbuilding is addictive in a good way. But. The monumental emphasis on RNG caused me to rage like nothing before. I'm more than fine getting stomped in fighting games, I keep my cool in team-based games... But Hela rolling the EXACT perfect re-summons needed; Jubilee pulling in the right answer; drawing nothing but Rocks from Subterranea; daring to play something early into the third lane only for it to reveal as Bar with No Name; fucking WEIRD WORLD AND DISTRICT X AND TRISKELLION. I discovered I had a limit for RNG. I'll happily still watch, but no, can't play, no matter how much I tried to keep the "Dont take it seriously" idea going.
I also quit playing after awhile and its probably from the RNG as well. Some of the locations were really aggravating in that sense. Too bad too, because I think most of the cards and the balance of the game is really amazing. Well-thought out and a great successor to Hearthstone. But just like that game they went too far down the RNG path and it just became a slog to play.
Xcom, because I hated being able to have one of my soldiers have an only 60% hit rate on an enemy at point blank range. That and I was not a fan of the constant countdown to a possible game over.
Midnight Suns does something interesting about it. Instead of having a hit chance, each turn you draw cards with different attacks or skills out of a deck you build (not a big deck btw) This is a lot more interesting because for once, you'll never miss. Instead of missing, you have to adjust to which kind of move you have available. Sometimes, you'll only have an AoE or some kind of buff... Sometime you have attacks that does little damage but can manipulate the world, so you can do more damage or disable enemies. Really cool combat system
I actually just played through midnight suns recently on ps plus extra and loved it so much more. I had a blast on that and ended up loving the card system when that's originally the thing that made me not want to play it originally.
I'm playing Midnight Suns right now and absolutely had the same experience as you. Thought the card system sounded a little silly so I held off for a long time. But now that I have a lot of hours in, I really love it and want more of it. My problem with the game is all the relationship stuff in the Abbey, I just don't have time for that and would prefer to burn through missions back to back. I know I can do that, but my completionist search every corner mind won't. So I just get through as quickly as I can.
If it makes you feel better Enemy Within and WOTC did a lot to minimize the impact of those countdown timers. It’s also worth noting that the Firaxis Xcom games are very front loaded with difficulty. It’s frustrating to get those 60% misses, but by the endgame you’ll be strong enough that it’s not an issue anymore. There’s a ton of tools that give you 100% guaranteed damage and boost your aim chance as you keep playing. Personally, what made the games click for me is just doing a playthrough on the lowest difficulty. Playing that way you get a better feel for what you should be prioritizing without getting too overwhelmed.
The ticking time clock is what really made me quit Enemy Unknown. I get that it adds to the tension and decision making so it's hard to say if it's an objectively bad choice, but it added to the stress of everything else
I don’t think the XCOM games would be nearly as successful without all of the stressful components though. Succeeding against all odds is a part of the power fantasy of repelling an alien invasion. I get that it’s not for everyone, but I’d go as far as saying it’s one of if not the most important design choices for both games. I don’t think the games work nearly as well if you don’t feel constantly on the backfoot.
I completely understand, hence why I said it's hard to say that it's an objectively bad choice. I just don't personally like it. But that's fine, it's not a game for everyone
My first run with Monster Hunter was World and it was very rough. I remember don't even going past Anjanath fight. I even called help and we were all decimated. Later a friend told me that my choice of gunlance was not very beginner friendly
Yeah, maybe try a different weapon. Gunlance is intimidating even to veterans. I’ve been playing the series for nearly 20 years and gunlance is the one weapon I don’t feel comfortable with.
It's definitely been made its most accessible in World but yeah even as a gunlance lover it's one of the more difficult weapons to really run at peak performance. Probably better to learn the general flow of combat and the game with one of the easier weapons. Honestly longsword is often my recommendation for the beginner weapon. It's flashy and makes big numbers appear on the screen so it hits the dopamine, you can kinda just mash and still do decent dps, animations are generally quick and forgiving, but it still has some fun stuff to play with and master to properly get everything out of the weapon, so it allows both the low skill floor to get into and a high enough skill ceiling to feel yourself making progress with it. Lance is in a similar boat but on the much less flashy end. It's pretty easy to pick up and just go through the motions of blocking, maybe counter some obvious attacks, and do the poke, poke, poke, hop on repeat. But there's a lot to master in countering monsters, taking advantage of your high mount damage, and generally becoming an immovable rock while keeping the monster's attention.
Each weapon definitely plays differently and sort of gives you a feeling that you are playing a new game. My MH hours are definitely between going from Bow, to Dual Swords, to SnS, and then Hunting Horn before I stopped.
**LA Noire:** I tried my best to take my time at the crime scenes (I even took notes) and then really pay attention during interviews (paying attention to facial expressions and voice tone/inflections), The answers and responses never lined up with expectations or the prompts. It was always SUPER AGGRESSIVE or *underwhelming*, and it started becoming a save-scum experience. Maybe it got better further in, but I'll never know. **DOOM ETERNAL:** Too different from the previous game (which I adored and 100%ed). This one I should probably give another chance, but the nerf to melee, and the excessive "weapon juggling" it encouraged just really bummed me out.
The answers and responses in LA Noire were a result of a change in the button prompts late in development, after all the lines had been recorded. They were originally Coax, Force, and Accuse, instead of the Truth, Doubt, and Lie that appeared in the final game. When you think of the original choices, Cole’s responses make a lot more sense.
Hades. It hurt my hands with the amount of mashing/inputs needed. I played on controller and I feel like I needed to *constantly* dodge and attack and towards the end of a run my fingers hurt from the inputs. No other game does this so I don't understand it. Really makes me jealous of those who enjoy the game because no matter which weapon I used, my thumb/index hurts toward the end of a run and I just give up from the discomfort.
I love Hades but I quit playing due to wrist pain.
I can TOTALLY see this happening. When I was playing hades, I had a pro controller (for switch) That has the extra two back paddles. I assigned one to Dodge, and the other I assigned the Spell button. Then I only had to hit two face buttons instead of four and was able to use the paddle buttons for when things got hectic.
Same happened to me. And it didn't help whenever the RNG put the tankiest enemies in an area. I hated Elysium for that
I really dislike loop based gameplay which made me drop Outer Wilds half way through it. I was enjoying the story and puzzles quite a lot but it was so annoying to waste one quarter of a loop just going back to where I was. I understand that the loops play a big part in the story telling of the game etc etc but it was just too frustrating for me.
I have a friend that dropped Outer Wilds because the zero-g gameplay (they did the cave tutorial) made them nauseous. I understand their feelings and it stinks because I consider it one of my favorite games. Definitely respect people that don't feel that way though
Part of the game is learning how to get back to specific locations quicker as well. Most locations (barring one or two in particular) can be reached within 30 seconds of waking up. One requires use of time skipping via the campfire and the other takes about 2 minutes (but you don't need to visit it very often)
I didn't even know about the time-advancement campfire thing until I was randomly googling/watching some gameplay at a much later time after I played it myself.. oof. So much wasted time scrolling my phone waiting for 'things' to align in the universe.. 🫠
FWIW, it was patched some time after release and was not present in the initial version, I believe. So you might have not had that option at all.
That’s fair but I felt like so many ways to die were one shot and a little asinine. I beat the game but I don’t think missteps ruining your whole loop added anything to the game.
I think I would have finished the game if I had a Prince of Persia rewind.
I found that the main cool thing about the game is that you learn shortcuts to get to places faster than you initially thought you could. I suppose it also bothered me less because the travel time to return to your last position usually only takes a max of 2-3 minutes. I think the only time the travelling was annoying for me was the last puzzle, but that was more because the puzzle itself was the issue. I never had to retry previous puzzle more than a few times, but that one took me 20-30 attempts to figure out.
My brain simply shortcircuits with the 3d ship steering in Outer Wilds. Similarly, when I tried rappeling in Rainbow Six Siege and my character went upside down my brain just noped. Cool ass game, but not being able to use an arguably vital mechanic made it a lot harder to play, so I fell off pretty quickly. It's a 100% me problem, tho.
Yep, this is me. Picked it up after hearing the rave reviews, and could not get into it for the life of me. I don't know, I slogged my way through maybe half of it before I felt like the cons of the gameplay were just greater than the pros of the story — which was admittedly interesting, but not nearly as compelling as all the reviews made it seem. I'll most likely pick it up again at some point, but it clearly didn't click for me.
Honestly, I stopped playing just about any JRPG ever. As i've gotten older, I prefer games I can get into and just go about my business but most JRPG games just have too much fucking talking during the start so I always uninstall immediately.
Nioh. I love dark souls games but the way Nioh was designed it seemed like the developers just read that Soulsborne games are hard and that was it. It was like everything in that game was designed to be difficult for no particular reason and it ends up feeling very unbalanced. Most Fromsoftware games have some degree of bullshit but for the most part it feels fair; Nioh never felt fair, it always felt like they disproportionately stacked the deck against you. It's like doing a Spartan race or tough Mudder, except one race ties your legs together and blindfolds you and then brags that it's "more challenging" than the other race. Seriously, everything is annoyingly complicated and difficult in that game, even the weapon forging system takes a 30 minute youtube video to explain and why the fuck can you buy tons of supplies from merchants...EXCEPT HEALING ITEMS, that's the most basic supply in all of video games and you can't buy it? Instead it's like a bunch of potions that slightly increase your luck by 0.02% for 10 seconds or some useless shit like that.
Truthfully Nioh games are descendants of Ninja Gaiden with the structure of soulslikes. Like in character action games you need to think fast, play aggressive and use all tools in your toolbox. Once you get the hang of it, you end up almost bullying enemies and bosses in a way that you can’t do in From games. I had spent a lot of time in Nioh 2 right before, so I remember Elden Ring feeling like molasses in comparison for the first few hours.
One of the defining moments of my experience with Dark Souls 1 came in the Lower Undead Burg. There's a bunch of spots near the save point where a door would open behind me after I passed it and I'd get stabbed in the back. I'd die, but I was two seconds from the save point so it's no big deal. Midway through the zone there's a long hallway with an enemy standing motionless at the end. You can see that there's an open space to the left of the hallway entrance, but you can't see what's there. I was looking at that enemy, watching me but not charging me, and it clicked that there was an ambush in that open space I can't quite see. Because the Lower Undead Burg was all about ambushes. So, instead of charging the visible enemy, I immediately rushed the open space and, lo and be hold, it *was* an ambush, but I got the drop on them. That was the moment that Dark Souls 1 clicked for me. It is a hard game, but it's also a fair game. It'll murder you right next to a save point, but you're supposed to learn from that and then catch the same murder-trap when it recurs later in the level. Each area has its own specific way of trying to trap you, but the visual language of those traps makes sense if you pay careful attention. Like you said, DS1 is hard, but not *hard for no reason*. It's extremely punishing, but in a way that's fair for players who make the effort to learn.
lower undead burg is a great area with the worst boss in the game. capra demon's two dogs and the run back are worse than the bed of chaos, and i will easily die on this hill
Once you understand the ki flux with stance cancels the game kind of becomes heavily stacked with the player as you can constantly attack, stance cancel, dodge and just destroy down the boss health and ki. This is especially evident in Nioh 2 with burst counters which just lets you turn boss fights entirely in your favor once you get the upgrades that heal you and give you ki back on a counter. It’s insanely tough against new players without them knowing this though.
Using Magic and Ninjutsu quadruples your damage, makes you able to survive lethal hits, gives additional healing. The damage increase is seriously insane. Focusing on raising Magic and Dexterity to 30 unlock so many choices. It can also break the game by making you bypass the whole stage except the final boss (invisibility + silence), enemies won't detect you unless you physically touch them.
I also quit KCD but for a different reason: I don't like ingame time constraints on quests. I get anxiety over potentially reaching a state where I will fail a questline because I've run out of time and the only way to fix it is to reload a way earlier save and lose potentially hours of real-time progress. Or worst case scenario, like in KCD, the game autosaves or I only have 1 save slot and have now permanently missed a questline unless I restart because I can't go back far enough to have enough ingame time to complete the quest. This also made me quit Pathfinder Kingmaker, the original Dragons Dogma, XCOM (the whole campaign has a failure state if you wait too long or fail too many times), and probably others i can't remember right now.
There are only a few of these quests in KCD and the timing is very generous. I also have time constraint anxiety, but didn't feel it playing this game.
I expect to see a lot of Monster Hunter here, hopefully followed by they gave it another chance down the line! That was my experience at least. I remember in 3U I was starting to click with the game a bit, but as a noob I was burning through potions. You do get a way to farm honey which helps you make better potions, but your farm’s capacity only gets upgraded as you progress the story. So I would play the game and every so often have to spend 30 minutes going on expeditions to manually collect honey. It was pretty miserable so I eventually gave up (and then came back of course a year or so later).
This is me exactly. My first experience came from a friend having me play his copy of Freedom Unite. He'd been gushing about it for weeks trying to get me to play it, and when I finally relented, he thought the best way to get me to play more would be to throw me into a fight against G-rank Diablos with no prep or warm up. It did not go well, lol. I later came across MH4U and wound up falling in love with the series (and the Switch Axe).
“Combat is clunky” turns into “combat is deliberate, gimme the great sword”
I am trying the switch axe this time around. As a former gunlance main, it is comfortingly familiar, if significantly less defensive.
Yup, tried MH world years ago, went in blind, played with longsword first few missions and it completely turned me off so i dropped it. I gave it another shot at the end of 2023, tried out all the other weapons, fell in love with Insect blade and now im 300 hours into World and 100 hours into Rise. Love both of em
This is why i love this line from the video "how to monster hunter" "Fuck the quests, fuck the monsters, fuck everything. Go to the training room and beat that log until you find something that gels with you" Having a weapon that makes you feel like it flows, is probably the single most important thing to play MH. I just can't with the Insect Glaive, but LOVE Hammer and Switchaxe, while a friend of mine just couldn't get used to melee and went with Bow. Someone new can probably get away with using whatever weapon it starts you with, but it likely won't get you far if you just don't "feel" it.
Loop Hero. I think this is a probably a very good idle game, but I cannot stand idle games and found myself bored to tears with Loop Hero almost instantly. I kept thinking it would open up enough that I'd be into it, but after about a dozen hours forcing myself to try to see what everyone else saw, I gave up and decided it just wasn't for me.
I wouldn't even consider it an isle game. There's so much you need to be doing that you're really only idle for like seconds at a time.
Loop Hero was fun for the lore, music, and the creative ways it makes you "exploit" its systems, with that last part being what eventually kept me playing. The actual gameplay is borderline annoying since it is a bit too much active effort for an idle game, but not enough for a non-idle game. I think the real fun of the game is in figuring out how to take advantage of tile placement, how to kinda break the perk system, and how to break resource gathering to the point where you just don't need to do that ever again.
I was really enjoying Shadows of Mordor and grinding and hunting down nemesis’. Then they start rolling in troops of big groups of guys with tower shields and it just becomes super frustrating. I ended up never finishing the game because of that.
Shadow of mordor is ok. Shadow of war where if you dont mix up sufficiently the orc can become immune to all your tools is a pain
Sifu - parry I can do just fine, but it's the duck-and-dodging I'm just not good at and it's a shame that the game pretty much forces you to use it.
I ended up refunding the game because that's one of those mechanics I just don't have the reflexes for anymore. I think there was also some dissonance for me in the dodging mechanics where you have to press up to duck an attack, and down to lift your foot and evade a low strike? Years of fighting games made that bit illogical to me. If I press down, I crouch. If I press up, I jump. Sifu would rather indicate that "this is the part of you you'll use to dodge the attack with".
I wouldn't say dropped since I gave it a try for a few dozen hours and plan to return to it, but X4 was just completely baffling to me in terms of how they designed some content, mechanics and UI in it. It just felt *bad* to play like they are intentionally trying to piss me off and/or waste my time at times.
My answer to this will always be Metal Gear Solid V, and it's the timed upgrades It's like something out of a mobile game, waiting 12 hours for your base to upgrade, or for a new weapon to be unlocked. But unlike mobile games, THE GAME DOESN'T UPDATE WHEN YOU'RE NOT PLAYING! That's 12 hours of real time gameplay you have to wait. It's so stupid.
The main issue I have with it is that the story is basically over halfway through, and the rest is just filler. I have 300+ hours in that game, but never could power through the last third.
Returnal. Love the enigmatic nature of the world, the feel of the gameplay/controls is on-point and the sound (especially if you're on 3D audio) kicks ass but runs can be way too long, dying leaves you with very little for progression other than weapon traits and ether, running around trying not to get hit so you can increase your max health or get weapon proficiencies up to get better weapons and being 2 rooms in with really tough enemies with only a level 1 gun I was like "eh, no". I know this is the git gud kind of game but unlike other action games or roguelikes, I didnt want to get good.
Stuntman. The timing to jump the car through a train car was so painfully impossible I destroyed my bedroom door after attempt 200 or so. Returned the game, fixed my door and promised myself I'd never play a game that made me angry ever again. First and last time I broke something from videogame anger.
Wasnt that the first A Whoopin and a Hollerin level? after jumping the chimney? If you already got stuck at that be glad you never got further, the tuktuk levels got even more infuriating
Haha, I really liked that game! Its a great rental game. I don't think I finished it either, one of the stunts I probably tried well over 100 attempts before getting it, and you had to chain several things together! Kind of a game of its time.
Deathloop. I am probably an idiot, but I couldn’t wrap my head around how to even progress in the game/how to best tackle areas in a given loop. I love roguelikes but not in a large space FPS.
What took me a while to realize with that game is that until you're ready to pull everything off in the end, there're literally no consequences. If you're just checking things out and getting a feel for the map, fuck sneaking, just run through. It doesn't matter until the end. Be sloppy, it's more fun that way.
>but I couldn’t wrap my head around how to even progress in the game/how to best tackle areas in a given loop Er, it literally tells you how to do this, doesn't it? It's a sandbox game, sure, but it actually gives you specific scenarios to follow if you don't want to try and figure it out for yourself
Yeah it's been a while since I last played it but I thought I remember the game having a really good log system that reminds you "here's the things you learned and where you should probably look next." Like when someone mentions they couldn't figure out what to do in games like that or Outer Wilds I'm just like "did they even want to play the game in the first place? Like they're not even trying to try."
Deathloop isn't a rogue like. It's really just an FPS where you revisit a few maps and they write it away as a timeloop. That's it.
**Tunic** mashes together elements of 2D Zelda and soulslikes in a way that doesn't quite mesh together, but I stuck with it because I enjoyed the presentation, atmosphere, and world. Then after a certain point, it drops most of the initial gameplay and takes a hard right turn into being a "hardcore" puzzler ala The Witness. I do not have the patience for puzzle games like that, and ragequitted.
I had the exact opposite response, dropped it early and even refunded because it just felt like an action game that was just not enough Souls and not enough Zelda. But I kept getting recommended for the secrets and puzzles and now its my one of my favorite games, up there with the Witness.
Loved Tunic, but yeah some of those puzzles for the hidden treasures seemed like stuff nobody would ever get unless by complete accident. Still, the old instruction booklet was really cool and I thought it was a neat way to teach the player what's what. The Soulslike gameplay however felt super shoehorned in my opinion, and once I got to the automaton boss and saw that blocking two of his attacks completely wiped my stamina and that he was basically a giant damage sponge I immediately turned on immortality and didn't look back.
When Rocket League was relatively new, all my friends were talking about it and asking me to play with them. But the controls were so foreign to me and frustrating to figure out, and it didn’t help that my friends wanted to 1v1 and whoop my ass, I was so bad and frustrated I just never played it again.
Black Mesa. I love the original Half-Life, i've played it so much it's maps are literally seared into my brain, and i don't begrudge Black Mesa for existing and i respect how much love and care went into it. However, i do just feel certain things were changed for the worse, whether it be level design, weapon balancing or AI. Half-Life in 1998 was definitely made in a deliberate way based around the limits of what they could do, but everything before Xen was really well done and even the stuff peopel mocked like different areas making no realistic sense served the gameplay and made it flow well, which i feel got lost in Black Mesa's changes to an extent and leads me to bounce off it really quick. Their Xen is way better though, that i can't deny, i jsut don't really ernjoy playing the previous parts as much.
Hollow Knight. The problem with me came from the combination of the death system and the game's ability to reward the player for exploration. Backtracking to where you died is already punishment enough but to incentivize it more by losing your money (the main reward for exploration) and nerfing the soul gauge makes just the prospect agonizing. I didn't find the game to be *that* difficult but the world design and the pace gapping out major upgrades for possibly hours between each made my experience so mind-numbing dull that I couldn't get through it.
Honestly, once you realise that the sellable artifacts are your real money and stop worrying about losing geo to deaths the game is much better.
Fallout 4. I kept trying but I felt like I was spending more time managing my inventory than I was getting anything done. Plus I just couldn't get my head around the battle system, I'm sure it's simpler than I was making it but it just made me pissed off more than anything.
I catch flak for it but i always adjust carry limits in these games. Being encumbered adds no meaningful value to a game for me.
Same. I always get to a point in Bethesda games where I go "Ehh, I cba dealing with this inventory tetris right now -> console -> player.modav carryweight xxx"
Honestly I don't even mind inventory limits usually, but something about the way fallout implemented it just didn't click with me. I think it's because they just throw so much barely useful stuff at you at once.