Games@lemmy.worldbyRyoae@piefed.social
2 months

Games you've given honest tries for and just don't find fun

English

I’ve just uninstalled and removed Balatro after yet a near, very close 8/8 ante finish. I have been failing and failing, I’ve only ever seen and gotten to 8/8 ante twice, this being the second time. Every other run has been just insulting me to where no strategy has ever worked, I feel like a lot of it is RNG and pre-determined outcomes based on seeded runs.

And I hate that way of playing. It always feels like I’m getting smacked down by a troll bully who I can never overcome. They’d kick me down every failed run I’d have, then they give me a false sense of security the further I get. “Awwww, getting tired of being owned? Here, let me help you by giving you a few seemingly lucky breaks. SMACK Oh! OWNED YOU AGAIN! FUCK YOU! LOLLOLOL! I BANGED YOUR MOTHER, GIT GUD, NOOB!1”

I just don’t understand why these kinds of games are around, even when I have a good idea who it is for.

314
    • Peffse@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2 months

      The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild

      I don’t find my weapon breaking every 10 minutes fun, nor do I find the endless wandering with no context clues very engaging. I swear 90% of the stuff you have to stumble onto by dumb luck. It took me months to accidentally bump into that stupid maraca tree thing and expand my inventory. That’s just dumb design.

      • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2 months

        In a mandatory cut scene, a character tells you “Head toward the dueling peaks, then, follow the road to Kakariko village.” Hestu, the inventory expanding broccoli homonculus, is standing on the side of that road in a conspicuous location.

        • De_Narm@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2 months

          It’s a game about free exploration, it’s silly to expect the player to directly follow these instructions. Just make him part of the mandatory tutorial area or have him come to you after collecting your first 10 seeds or something.

          I only found out about the guy after finishing the game.

          • Cocodapuf@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2 months

            I love these games, but I totally agree with you. I missed hestu and didn’t find him for probably the first 15 hours of the game. Basically it took someone having pity on me and saying “just go here”, Very frustrating.

          • Peffse@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2 months

            It’s not just the tree guy. The whole game’s like that.

            Here, let me give you another example of the counter-intuitive gameplay I encountered:

            The volcano. It’s hot. I need to travel up it.

            First attempt: Check my available tools for something. Bombs, no. Timestop, no. Ice pillar, maybe? no. Swords, Shields, Bows… no.

            Second attempt: Explore the area, see a hotspring. Try to map out a route using hotsprings as a cooling source. No dice.

            Third attempt: Visit all the major cities for info, nothing found other than the volcano is hot. No vendors selling any items that can help.

            Fourth attempt: Circle around and try to find a tunnel, putting on all my desert gear to reduce heat damage. Catch fire regardless, no cave found.

            Fifth attempt: Load up all my food and make meals, brute force my way to the base camp. No assistance there, have to teleport out.

            Sixth attempt: Doing a completely unrelated hunt for a shrine, bump into the NPC selling fire resist potions at a horse stable. A horse stable I mostly ignore because the game lets you teleport everywhere!

            Do I feel accomplished, finally finding this only way up the volcano? No! I feel like Nintendo just wasted my time!

            Even worse, when I finally make it to the Goron city and buy the fireproof armor, I bump into a Goron who gives me half the recipe to make the fire resist potion. Not even the whole recipe. And he was far far beyond the base camp I brute forced to. If he had been in all the other cities, and with the full recipe, maybe this wouldn’t have been such a challenge of dumb luck.

            • who@feddit.orgEnglish
              2 months

              Wow. Seems like your approach must have been really off the beaten path.

              From memory, I think I was offered a fireproof elixir by an NPC at the nearest stable, and by a traveling vendor further up that road, and was given the flamebreaker armor for helping an NPC about halfway to Goron City. (That last one caught my interest because the help needed was in catching fireproof lizards, which seemed relevant to my immediate needs.) Any one of those would have been enough.

              Your experience must have been frustrating. Were you avoiding roads and NPCs, by any chance?

              • Peffse@lemmy.worldEnglish
                2 months

                Nope, I talked to every NPC at all the towns, and on the roads. But, I didn’t stop at any of the horse stables since I never had need of a horse. It’s all cliffs and teleportation!

                Edit: The fireproof armor NPC was only one part of the armor needed to make yourself fireproof, and of course he was at the base camp I had to teleport away from since I was on fire.

                • who@feddit.orgEnglish
                  2 months

                  I think you only need one piece of the flamebreaker set to be fireproof survive in Goron City. You would need a second piece (or one piece and an elixir) to get closer to the caldera, but by that time you can buy a second piece in the city. You never need the third piece.

                  I went to the stables just to check out what was there, and discovered that they have quest information, quest triggers, rumors about the world, vendors that don’t show up elsewhere, mini-game challenges with rewards, hints at the locations of Link’s lost memory photos, etc. It never occurred to me that someone might miss out on all that stuff if they weren’t given a reason to visit a stable. (Maybe the game gives a hint to go there? I don’t remember.)

                  Sorry you drew the short straw.

                  • Peffse@lemmy.worldEnglish
                    2 months

                    I think you only need one piece of the flamebreaker set to be fireproof in Goron City.

                    whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat.

            • De_Narm@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2 months

              I don’t think I ever found a potion before clearing the area. I remember stocking up on food, like you, and eventually stumbling into the merchant selling me fire resistant armour.

              • Peffse@lemmy.worldEnglish
                2 months

                Image

                The only reason I didn’t brute force the whole way was I ran out of food.

          • Captain Aggravated@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            2 months

            Talking to NPCs to find out things about the immediate area is a major part of the game.

            If you do what the King says, you’ll encounter NPCs that have some early world building dialog, an easily climbed tower to start filling in the map and get the shrine sensor, four convenient shrines, one of which has the climbing bandana in it, great time to get that because you don’t have a hat at all yet so the extra armor plus the climbing speed buff is excellent to have, there’s a stable with a sidequest that teaches you how to catch horses, you’ll find Hestu along the path up to Kakariko and likely increase your inventory (or learn that koroks exist), and then in Kakariko the shrine there is a combat tutorial, there’s a fairy fountain nearby, plus Impa sets you on the main quest of the game. Having done four shrines, you can add a heart or stamina wheel sector. Pikango is here, and there are several sidequests in Kakariko to get stuck into.

            Impa sends you to Hateno to get the memories sidequest going. Major location in the game with some adventuring and side questing to do, more expository dialog and world building, you get the camera and shiekah sensor, get sent back to Impa, and then you’re kicking around in Kakariko with no immediate goal. You look out one of the exits of town you haven’t taken yet and you see a wide open area with two visible shrines and a tower. Course charted, you get sucked into the Zora plot. Once that’s done, you’ll have Mipha’s Grace, an additional heart, some more armor, and then the training wheels are off and now it’s up to you to pick a direction to explore.

            “I didn’t do what the NPC said and didn’t find something important the whole game” gives big “why don’t my kids ever call” energy.

            • Peffse@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2 months

              Wow dude, you go straight to insinuating we’re abuser who’s family abandoned them because we accomplished a goal without follow instructions to the letter in a video game?

                • Peffse@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  2 months

                  no reflection at all on how 0 to 11 that reaction is? Huh… Well, another to add to the block list I guess.

            • De_Narm@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2 months

              Ignoring your uncalled for insult, that’s just not how I play games.

              Once I was free of the tutorial area, I set off in a random direction and did my thing. I completed multiple divine beats before ever setting foot in Kakariko.

              If I wanted to follow the direct path as described by NPCs, I might as well go play a linear game. I got to the destinations eventually, but almost never on the beated path.

      • Uranhjort@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2 months

        Having tried and failed to get into it some 8 or 9 times, I have to agree. Maybe it’s different if you grew up playing The Legend of Zelda, but I just found the visuals drab, the combat overly simple and yet slow, and above all like it was trying to be deliberately aggravating to play.

        Not at all what one expects from one of the most acclaimed video games of all time, I do wonder how it would have performed had an unknown studio released it as their first game.

        • caseofthematts@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2 months

          BotW and its sequel are so unlike any other Zelda game, I doubt having played or grown up with other Zelda games would be helpful.

          • Uranhjort@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2 months

            How unlike are they though? I haven’t played any of the other games, but from what I’ve seen the chief difference is the open world setting, the gameplay loop is mostly the same.

            It didn’t seem like a particularly well executed open world to me, either - while it did give the option to stray from the most direct route to the next dungeon, what you found if you did was mostly emptiness. It even had you climb honest to god Ubisoft towers to uncover the map.

            Regardless, I felt like I was missing a frame of reference from the very start. It’s just as well there was no sense of urgency to the central conflict, because I was given no reason to care about the stoic mute elf child or his damsel in the castle.

            • Peffse@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2 months

              You’ve got a really good point. The fact that they don’t gatekeep you using the previous dungeon’s item is completely different than what Zelda games do as a tradition… BUT wandering around an open world and getting a lucky find that is critical to beating the game is so very Zelda 1.

            • ZMoney@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2 months

              I’m really curious about your idea of a well-executed open world. Can you give an example? Also about the caring about the plot. I could argue your point about not caring about the fate of the central characters for any game.

      • kieron115@startrek.websiteEnglish
        2 months

        FWIW, I think they did a much better job in Tears of the Kindgom. Your weapons still break, but you can carry around a basically endless supply of monster parts that you “fuse” to whatever base weapon you happen to come across and it makes them powerful again. Sometimes all you need is a stick to make a good weapon. Still annoying, but waaaaaay less of an inventory management sim IMO.

        • jacksilver@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2 months

          I thought TOTK was worse cause now you’re also managing the parts inventory. It was so frustrating to get to certain places and find out you didn’t have the necessary parts (like a glider) to do certain things.

          I even ended up using duplication glitches to skip resource scavgening and I still felt like I ended up wasting half the game managing my inventory.

          • kieron115@startrek.websiteEnglish
            2 months

            I’ll admit i rarely used the machine fusing, I was just talking about the weapon inventory system. I’d just pick up sticks or whatever was around and slam the first “good enough” damage monster part I had to it and kept going. It’s a lot better IMO than having to hang onto all the good stuff and constantly be underpowered because “what if i need it for a boss?”

    • RipLemmDotEE@lemmy.todayEnglish
      2 months

      Witcher 3.

      I’ve started it 4 times and I never make it past 6 hours in, it’s just painfully slow and feels like a chore to my brain.

        • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2 months

          It was sort of like the Bethesda formula except that every quest was actually interesting and well-written. Plus there’s the part where taking down tougher monsters on harder difficulties requires appropriate prep, which made those fights more interesting.

      • paraplu@piefed.socialEnglish
        2 months

        I’m similar. I did manage better after installing a bunch of mods. Lots were to mitigate/nullify systems I didn’t want to interact with.

        Mods to make equipment scale with level, autoloot, remove inventory weight, remove durability, and I’m sure I’m missing some.

        It’s still a slow game with floaty combat, and not my favorite, but I was able to see at least some of what others rave about.

      • Pyro@programming.devEnglish
        2 months

        For me it was specifically the Blood and Wine DLC. I was really engrossed in the story and when it concluded, I lost my motivation to keep playing.

      • TheNamlessGuy@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2 months

        Gave it a few hours a few years ago, but didn’t grab me.

        As in any open world game, the first thing I did was to walk into a random cave. Turns out that cave had a bugged trigger and corrupted a side quest for me. Reloaded an ealier save, tried another cave. Same thing. After that, I gave up on exploration - and open world games without exploration are (to me at least) just tedium.

        The combat is also seemingly mostly about prep, since the combat itself is largely just “press the dodge button until you can press the attack button”. And on normal (read: developer intended) difficulty, I never felt the need to prep.

      • MIDItheKID@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2 months

        I played that game for about 30 minutes. I got to one of the first areas, picked up some “fetch quests” where I had to kill some type of creature and return their pelts for a prize and some exp or whatever and I was like “Oh… A mid 2000’s MMO with no other players. No thanks!”

        I also remember feeling that all of the movement, animations, and actions were really jerky. Like nothing felt like it flowed correctly. Things were kind of “snap to grid”. Not sure how else to explain it.

        • teft@piefed.socialEnglish
          2 months

          I also remember feeling that all of the movement, animations, and actions were really jerky. Like nothing felt like it flowed correctly. Things were kind of “snap to grid”. Not sure how else to explain it.

          I like witcher 3 but i fully agree on the movement. It’s better now that they changed it for the next gen upgrade but still really weird.

    • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2 months

      I found nearly all of Disco Elysium’s characters so unlikable, (especially?) including the player character, that I could not enjoy it at all. I think I like the systems in it, and I’m happy when an RPG exposes its dice rolls; the voice performances were all very good; I just couldn’t stand it after 5 hours of trying.

      • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 @pawb.socialEnglish
        2 months

        You’re definitely not supposed to like Harry as a person. He is at best insane and at worst a racist, mysognistic, alcohic drug abusing piece of human garbage. It is also very easy to be put off by even the good people because Harry has already wronged most of them and they have already had enough of his shit by the time you take control.

        • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2 months

          I get that. But I consume a lot of crime fiction. The Wire, Guy Ritchie movies, etc. These stories are full of terrible people, but they don’t make me feel like I’m trudging through a story with a bunch of assholes.

        • Coelacanth@feddit.nuEnglish
          2 months

          I don’t know, maybe it’s just because I relate to him but I do kind of like Harry. Yes, he’s not a regular “good person”, but he’s also much more complex than just a “bad guy”. He’s flawed, tragic and ultimately incredibly human. I think he’s a fantastic character, just like most characters in Disco Elysium.

          • CarnivorousCouch@lemmy.worldEnglish
            2 months

            I don’t think I necessarily like Harry, but I sure as fuck empathize with him. Playing him as someone seeking redemption or trying to put his life back together (and SO OFTEN failing) was incredibly meaningful. You put it very well.

      • agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2 months

        The main theme of the game basically centers around failure. How it manifests, how people react to it, how it affects them in the long run. Bitterness, apathy, delusion. Most of the characters are some kind of fuckup (except Kim, my beloved). Some of them are failures because they’re fucked up, some of them are fucked up because they failed again and again, but either way it’s an exploration of what that does to a person, what that does to a people, what that does to a town.

        Some people just disassociate, some people give up and abandon their values to go with the flow, some people fight back impotently against forces they’ll never overcome. Above all, I think it’s basically about perseverance, one way or another, in the face of failure.

        It’s very raw, very bleak, very human. It’s easy to feel vindicated when you strive and succeed, when you’re a virtuous hero, but who among us is just a virtuous hero? It’s much more complex and real to fail over and over and still get back on that horse, because what else can you do? The characters are supposed to be flawed, they’re supposed to be unlikeable. The game is about exploring what it is that made them unlikeable: how much of it is forces beyond their control, how much of it is their own stubbornness and maladaptive reactions, how much of it is just trauma.

        If you don’t like exploring those ideas, you probably won’t like the game.

          • agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
            2 months

            The characters are supposed to be flawed, they’re supposed to be unlikeable. The game is about exploring what it is that made them unlikeable: how much of it is forces beyond their control, how much of it is their own stubbornness and maladaptive reactions, how much of it is just trauma.

            It’s kind of a necessary aspect. You can’t really effectively explore what persistent failure does to a town without feeling like you’re trudging through a story full of assholes. If the characters weren’t so abrasive and broken, it wouldn’t really be the same kind of thing.

            • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2 months

              But I wasn’t exploring failure. I was just annoyed every time I had to talk to Kuno or anyone else.

              • agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                2 months

                And if you keep playing you learn the tragic reasons why Cuno is such a little shit and, I won’t post spoilers, but depending on your choices you can help him become way less of a little shit. It’s roughly the same for most of the asshole characters: they’re assholes at first, you find out why they’re assholes and develop a lot of sympathy for them, and sometimes you facilitate their redemption.

                • ampersandrew@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  2 months

                  Could be, but I didn’t have the patience to see it. If that’s what they wanted me to see, I certainly felt it could have been paced better. You mostly only hear good things about this game, but my friends list on Steam has about a dozen people who stopped playing it around the same time I did. I can’t say why they put it down, as I didn’t poll them, but someone I follow on Giant Bomb had a pretty similar reaction to the front-loaded negativity of this game very recently, so I know it’s not just me.

                  • agamemnonymous@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
                    2 months

                    Sure, but again that’s the point. I can get why someone might not have the patience for it, but you can’t really change the front-loaded negativity or pacing without sacrificing the whole message. It’s a crucial aspect of the storytelling.

                    Honestly, people who give up on it kinda validate the themes. You and your dozen friends didn’t persevere, like many of the characters. Giving up is one response to bleakness. That’s not a value judgement, like I said it isn’t for everyone, but it is kinda poignant that by checking-out you demonstrate exactly what it’s saying, to some degree.

    • OpenPassageways@lemmy.zipEnglish
      2 months

      Balatro should just be renamed to Flush, every single time I win it’s because I use the “discard until you have a flush” strategy, and augment that with Jupiter, wild cards, steel cards, and jokers that give bonuses for flushes or single suits.

      • wcSyndrome@lemmy.zipEnglish
        2 months

        Flushes are satisfying when they work but you can definitely finish runs with pair or two pair decks

      • TommySalami@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2 months

        The pair will get you there. I know it sound crazy, but hear me out.

        I plateaued at purple ante with flushes and two pairs, and had a eureka moment with pairs after some rng gave me a ton of mercury cards. My strategy to get through gold was to run nothing but pairs and try to get as many hands in as possible. You focus on getting some scalable jokers; my best were green joker and supernova. Then you get selective and find a good joker or combination of jokers to get at least x3 mult. At the same time take card packs, spectral, death tarot or whatever else can get more blue seal. I was able to beat gold stake with nothing but green joker and stencil, and I’m pretty sure I suck at the game.

      • BreakerSwitch@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2 months

        I’m a huge fan of flush because of the versatility in builds, but they really stop being viable at blue stake. After that it’s gotta be pairs or less. Flushes stop being viable

      • Cocodapuf@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2 months

        Here’s the secret to Balatro, there are basically two strategies that work. Focus on flushes, or focus on two pairs.

        Also, if you get that joker that makes all red cards the same suit and all black cards the same suit, then a 9 card hand always has a flush.

        Likewise, two pair is extremely reliable, it’s hard not to have it. Just get a bunch of blue seals and pump that two pair up to level 20+.

        Finally, cards that give you flat bonuses are fine, at least early on. But you really want cards that have increasing bonuses, that get better every round.

      • BenLeMan@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2 months

        Eeeh, the length of the cutscenes wasn’t really what put me off but rather the fact that I didn’t care about most of the people in them. I fact, I never got invested in any of the characters, including Arthur.

        Their world building and dedication to creating complex systems are fantastic but Rockstar Games makes their characters so repulsive that I don’t enjoy being around them or advancing whatever agenda they have. Same with GTA V (and presumably VI as well).

        • Fraction9170@infosec.pubEnglish
          2 months

          I agree. Rockstar makes truly impressive games, but I can’t get into them. The characters and stories have no redeeming qualities from what I could tell.

      • whelk@retrolemmy.comEnglish
        2 months

        I gave up after accidentally doing things too many times. The hotkeys felt like an ever shifting mess and I got tired of constantly reloading after pressing the wrong one. It was a bummer because I loved the setting and overall feel of the game, just ran out of patience after so many times not knowing how to do the thing I wanted to do and half the time ending up doing something unintentionally violent.

        Elite Dangerous has a zillion hotkeys as well but that feels more like gameplay and learning to operate a complicated ship. Accidentally wasting a heat sink with a wrong keypress is different from accidentally starting a fistfight with a random person when I meant to wave and say howdy partner

      • lath@piefed.socialEnglish
        2 months

        Any game with unskippable cutscenes instantly drops dead for me. It’s padding I don’t want to wade through.

      • Zaraki42@lemmy.caEnglish
        2 months

        This is the one for me as well. The gameplay is simply horrendous. Just getting on and off the horse was a chore in of itself.

        • ZMoney@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2 months

          Don’t forget to clean your horse off every few hours by brushing it in the same spot 3 times. Just… Why

    • Encrypt-Keeper@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2 months

      The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild. As a die hard Zelda fan, I was beyond hyped for this one. Probably my biggest letdown in all of gaming.

      • No real story to follow
      • No cast of interesting characters outside of optional collectible flashbacks
      • Repetitive, lifeless gameplay. No real dungeons or temples, every “mini dungeon” that does exist is the same copy pasted theme.
      • No score of memorable unique music, just the MiNiMaLiSm of some understated occasional piano.
      • Atrocious lack of enemy variety.
      • a focus on exploration that rewards you with precious little given that any weapons your find will just break, and there are no unique combat or traversal items to unlock.

      Came back to my save a couple times to push through, but the entire game is just the same 4 activities copy pasted 300 times with no variation or progression that makes your 50th hour unique from your first. It’s like. Soulless kowtow to Ubisoft game design in a once beautiful and innovative game series. Makes me mad just thinking about it lol.

      • moakley@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2 months

        I feel this. I’m a huge Zelda fan. It’s my favorite game series. BotW was just ok. Then I played Elden Ring and realized that the vast emptiness of the open world didn’t have to be so unrewarding. Now BotW is mediocre, and I didn’t bother with the sequel.

        Why the fuck does the Master Sword degrade? Garbage concept. Genuinely terrible.

      • aliceblossom@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2 months

        I totally agree with the exception of the music. I know what you mean because there is minimal music in the “open world” parts of the game, but the actual songs made for the actually interesting places are bangers.

        • Encrypt-Keeper@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2 months

          I mean ultimately it’s a matter of personal opinion, but there’s a reason so many legacy Zelda songs are so beloved and memorable, and have been sampled and remixed to death over decades and nobody really talks about or remembers any particular themes from BOTW.

          Like I don’t remember music from BOTW being bad, I just don’t remember it at all

      • jacksilver@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2 months

        I agree with you, it’s a decent open world game but a pretty mediocre Zelda game. I had hoped TOTK might improve upon the direction they chose to take the series, but it kinda doubles down on all the weaker points of BOTW (uninspired “dungeons”, more one-time use resources, etc.).

        I think my biggest gripe with TOTK and Echoes of Wisdom is that you can solve 90% of the “puzzles” with one or two techniques. There isn’t a lot of critical thinking needed when you can use things like the rocket to just skip most of the puzzle and similarly I think I solved a majority of the puzzles in Echoes of Time using the bed echo.

      • smeg@feddit.ukEnglish
        2 months

        Did we play the same game? BotW was the first Zelda game that I actually enjoyed!

        As a die hard Zelda fan

        I guess this is it, it’s quite a different game to all the others, and people like different things.

        I will offer counters to all your points though:

        • The story is “Ganon’s doing bad, stop him”, same as most of the others
        • What about all the NPCs in all the towns?
        • There are 120 shrines, 4 temples, and a big final zone, how’s that no dungeons?
        • The music was great
        • Aren’t there enough different enemies to fill up that huge photo album?
        • The exploration was the most fun! Finding all the shines and secret seeds was great (clearly collectathons are my thing and not yours!), and the weapons breaking didn’t really seem like an issue after a while.
        • Encrypt-Keeper@lemmy.worldEnglish
          2 months

          Did we play the same game? BotW was the first Zelda game that I actually enjoyed!

          Well that sorta says it all. You don’t like Zelda games lol. Botw isn’t much of a Zelda game so it stands to reason you’d like it.

          The story is “Ganon’s doing bad, stop him”, same as most of the others

          So that’s just it, all the others aren’t like that. The fact that BOTW is, is just lazy. It sorta Flanderized itself.

          What about all the NPCs in all the towns?

          What about them?

          There are 120 shrines, 4 temples, and a big final zone, how’s that no dungeons?

          Because none of those things are dungeons. Not in any substantial way we’ve come to expect from a Zelda game at least. There are 120 separate and yet identical puzzle rooms with no unique characteristics between them, and 4 boss fights that sort of act like 1/4 of a Zelda dungeon that all share a single theme. There isn’t really a single dungeon or temple in BOTW.

          The music was great

          It was serviceable ambiance, not all that unique or memorable. It did its job but not nearly the level the series is known for.

          Aren’t there enough different enemies to fill up that huge photo album?

          Idk but BOTW had 15-30 base species types accounting for unique bosses but not every single sub variant. Ocarina of Time from 1998 has over 70. And there was more regional diversity compared to BOTW which is very same across the whole map overall.

          The exploration was the most fun! Finding all the shines and secret seeds was great (clearly collectathons are my thing and not yours!)

          Exploration in older Zelda titles had more rewarding, unique items and treasures to find when exploring, and the way you would explore would change as the game progressed and you unlocked more gadgets. BOTW is as you said just a collection of the same handful of incremental upgrade items copy-pasted hundreds of times. And it never evolves because the game is designed specifically so that the gameplay does not evolve over the course of a playthrough. There’s nothing wrong with enjoying a collectathon but BOTW used it in place of more substantial exploration rewards, and is the exact thing everyone would dog on if the game was published by Ubisoft and not Nintendo.

          Botw is a fine game, it just doesn’t do anything to scratch the Zelda game itch. It’s just a different game.

          • smeg@feddit.ukEnglish
            2 months

            You don’t like Zelda games lol. Botw isn’t much of a Zelda game so it stands to reason you’d like it.

            Haha maybe it’s as simple as that!

            The recent Link’s Awakening remake was pretty well received, reckon they’ll keep making both classic and botw-style Zelda games in the way games like castlevania do?

            • Encrypt-Keeper@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2 months

              Well the problem is it seems they’ve given up on the classic Zelda formula. Botw sorta ate it and spit out the bones, which is why I dislike the game so much. It’s a pod person that replaced Zelda and is living in its place, instead of just being its own thing.

              Meanwhile you have another legacy game series like Resident Evil that in the same span of time seems to have figured out how to evolve the formula twice now into something new without throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

      • M137@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2 months

        Same, and I’m both happy and sad about that. Happy because I don’t need that stress and anger, sad because I like the worlds in most of them and many of my friends absolutely love them and it’d be nice to share that.

    • Assassassin@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2 months

      Dyson Sphere Project. It’s exactly the type of game I’d love, and I’ve tried to get into it 3 or 4 times, but it loses me after the first 4 hours or so.

    • De_Narm@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2 months

      God of War 2018

      I gave it a full playthrough, but since then it has pretty much become my definition of AAA slop.

      • The game is littered with “puzzles”. The solution is always obvious within seconds and on top of that you get commentary on how to “solve” it. They just waste your time.

      • Stats don’t matter. Early on you get your first weapon upgrade, I think I tripled my damage. The very next enemy got some commentary about “showcasing” my new weapon. It took the exact same amount of hits as the same enemy type did before ugrading my weapon. Since weapon upgrade materials are fixed drops from bosses, everything just scales alongside you.

      • The battle system in general is a slog. 9 out of 10 times throwing your axe feels like the best option. Even the post game bosses are annoying at best.

      • Also, why is the camera so darn close. Your “cinematic angles” mean shit when the gameplay suffers from it.

      • There are so many “cutscenes” that have you walk at a snails pace. If your “gameplay” can be executed by a rubber band on my joystick, then just give me a proper cutscene. Annoying me isn’t immersive.

      • You get awesome godly powers - for as long as cutscenes are running. Your super healing and mountain splitting punches mean nothing against any random draugr.

      • Probably some more things, but it’s been a few years.

      The story was fine, but I would have enjoyed watching a cutscene compilation more than playing the game. In fact that’s what I did your second entry.

      • BlackRoseAmongThorns@slrpnk.netEnglish
        2 months

        I gave up on trying/watching the second entry after realizing the first one just wasn’t fun even in the “good” fights.

        It felt worse than the worse games in the original series, the fights we’re not as fun or satisfying, and the game pretty much helped spawn the “modern game” meme, felt gross after finishing it.

      • KaChilde@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
        2 months

        I felt exactly the same way. I only got to Alfheim (with the elf civil war?) before I realised I’d be doing the exact same gameplay cycle for the next 20 hours, and bailed out. The Wikipedia article explains the plot, and I don’t feel like I missed anything.

    • Infrapink@thebrainbin.org
      2 months

      Doom Eternal.

      I like the original trilogy, adored Doom 2016, and I even thought Doom 3 was a decent game in its own right. So a direct sequel to Doom Eternal where Heaven gets involved and everybody says is bigger and better? Sign me the fuck up!

      I bought the game and all the DLC. I played through to the end and beat the final boss, and I did not enjoy one second of it (I only finished because I can be a stubborn fool).

      Things got off to a bad start when I had to sign into my Slayers Club account before the game would show me the main menu. Then when I was playing, it paused every few seconds to tell me that it couldn’t connect to the server, which utterly kills the vaunted flow of combat.

      And the combat. Ugh. Doom 2016 is excellently balanced, providing 10 fun weapons for different situations which let people find their own playstyles, and prioritising ammo drops when the player is low on ammo and health drops when low on health. Eternal fans claim that there is no reason to use anything other than the super shotgun, and I have no doubt that strategy worked for them, but I used all the weapons, and I don’t think I used the super shotgun very much at all.

      Eternal officially gives you nine weapons, but each of them has three different fire modes (except the super shotgun, which just has two fire modes and also a meathook), so there are really 26 guns plus two different grenades. And every single fucking enemy has a hardcoded weakness to two, maybe three attacks, and are barely hurt by anything else. These aren’t weaknesses to individual weapons, but to specific weapons in specific modes, and some of those modes have to be unlocked by meeting specific conditions. Every single demon hits like a dump truck and moves like a motorbike, so by the time you have selected the specific weapon that will do more than a papercut, you have a completely different demon in your face. And the guns in this Doom game hold fuck all ammo even when fully upgraded. And getting upgrades often requires playing suboptimally.

      Speaking of ammo, the chainsaw has been downgraded from powerful emergency weapon to tool for obtaining ammo. You can find the odd ammo pickup in levels, but 90% of the time, the only way to get more ammo is to chainsaw a weak demon (demons don’t drop ammo otherwise). Because you can barely carry enough ammo to kill one heavy demon, I spent the 90% of the arena battles running around, desperately dodging attacks as I waited for the chainsaw to refill so I could get some ammo to shoot at the big demons. And the arena battles don’t use waves; as soon as you kill a big demon, another one teleports in to replace it, so there is no respite until you get near the end. This did not make me feel like a berserker-packing man and a half. I felt like a weak, terrified wimp, desperately trying to survive. Fighting hordes of demons isn’t epicly badass, it’s a long, tiring slog, and at the end of every arena, I didn’t feel empowered, I felt exhausted and relieved it was finally over.

      To make an analogy, Doom 2016 is like an Italian pasta dish: a small number of high-quality, carefully-chosen ingredients that work well together. Doom Eternal is like making a sandwich of rashers, sausages, fried eggs, strawberry ice cream, venison, raspberries, spaghetti, and chocolate cake. All those things are great on their own, but the sandwich is just too much, and the flavours and textures all clash with each other.

      • I Cast Fist@programming.devEnglish
        2 months

        I feel the same about Eternal. In 2016, once I got the upgrade that gave me infinite ammo while at full health and armor, I had some of the best fun in the game, using the railgun like a maniac

        I didn’t finish Eternal, I think I stopped before the cathedral where you’d kill the 2nd evil archbishop or whatever. Combat was annoying and the parkour more so

      • iegod@lemmy.zipEnglish
        2 months

        Playing though eternal for the first time right now. This is pretty accurate. I’ve been let down coming from 2016. Each encounter feels like I need to plan what happens in what order. That’s so antithetical to Doom IMO.

      • amgine@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2 months

        Hit the nail on the head. I can’t stand eternal. I have maybe an hour or two into it. The game forces you to use certain weapons and upgrade them a certain way which is anti-doom. Doom is supposed to let you mindlessly destroy hellspawn in whichever way you see fit since you’re the doom slayer. I played 2016 with just the blaster most of the way to see if I could

    • Deconceptualist@leminal.spaceEnglish
      2 months

      For me it’s Don’t Starve. It doesn’t make any goddamn sense. Early in the game I have to collect rocks and sticks and gold (IIRC) to make a “science machine” (WTF is that?) as a requisite for further crafting. And I found out the hard way that my character has to put flowers on their head to avoid dying from insanity. What were the devs smoking?

      • FatVegan@leminal.spaceEnglish
        2 months

        Don’t starve is pretty hardcore if you don’t know what you’re doing. I love the game, and i absolutely suck at it. Every now and then you get lucky and the game seems pretty easy. Other times you starve and need food, but you’re also insane and can’t eat rabbits, and then it’s winter and you die.

      • early_riser@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2 months

        A friend and I tried playing Don’t Starve Together. We kept dying before progressing very far.

      • glimse@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2 months

        I love survival crafting games but Don’t Starve is a bit too punishing for me. I gave it 20 hours of attempts before giving up.

        Things can fall apart so fast and so easily and like you said, they just throw you to the wolves to figure it out or die

        • Deconceptualist@leminal.spaceEnglish
          2 months

          But it’s not a matter of “figuring it out” if there’s no logic to the items. I’m supposed to just combine random shit and hope something good happens? Seems pretty disrespectful of my time.

          • FackCurs@lemmy.worlddeleted by creatorEnglish
            2 months

            There is a tech tree, you unlock recipes by crafting newer machines or picking up new ingredients. It’s not random and it does make sense

            It’s a type of game very similar to Dwarf Fortress: losing is fun. You need to die many times to learn how to manage survival. Learning basic recipes by heart, efficient cooking recipes, threats for a specific time of year etc.

            I agree that it’s very punishing. I never made it past winter.

            • Deconceptualist@leminal.spaceEnglish
              2 months

              I understand how crafting and tech trees work, and I’ve played plenty of roguelikes and soulslikes. I’m saying this makes no sense (and I’m sure it’s not the only example):

              Early in the game I have to collect rocks and sticks and gold (IIRC) to make a “science machine” (WTF is that?) as a requisite for further crafting.

              Seriously, where did this BS come from? And how the hell would I know this necessary recipe without looking it up? It’s like the devs were like “I guess we need a crafting station. Uhh… throw together some rocks and sticks, whatever”.

              • who@feddit.orgEnglish
                2 months

                Seriously, where did this BS come from?

                The components to build a science machine in Don’t Starve don’t strike me as much stranger than those to build crafting stations in other games. In my experience, they’re often unrealistic.

                And how the hell would I know this necessary recipe without looking it up?

                Did you miss the fact that the recipe is shown in the build menu?

                • Deconceptualist@leminal.spaceEnglish
                  2 months

                  Did you miss the fact that the recipe is shown in the build menu?

                  Maybe it is now? I don’t believe that was present when I played years ago.

                  • who@feddit.orgEnglish
                    2 months

                    Maybe it is now? I don’t believe that was present when I played years ago.

                    I think you somehow missed it, mate. Here’s a screen shot from the year of its release:

      • TacoEvent@lemmy.zipEnglish
        2 months

        I could never get into Don’t Starve but Don’t Starve Together is a blast with friends and mods. The game’s old and developed enough at this point that I wouldn’t try to figure anything out on your own. Just look it up. You’re not gonna miss out on the “discovery”. The game is crushingly hard already.

        • Deconceptualist@leminal.spaceEnglish
          2 months

          If a wiki is genuinely required, then IMO that’s a sign the game probably isn’t designed well.

    • who@feddit.orgEnglish
      2 months

      Elden Ring and Dark Souls 3 both bored me to sleep. I didn’t find anything in their worlds to care about, and the meta-game of endlessly memorizing monsters’ attack patterns just doesn’t hold my interest for more than a few minutes. I guess soulslike games are not my cup of tea.

      • Snowman_sir@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2 months

        I had this with dark souls 2, even though I enjoyed dark souls 1(remastered)

    • Matty_r@programming.devEnglish
      2 months

      No Mans Sky. I think my biggest turn off is the interface - its so unintuitive and slow, I just can’t seem deal with it. I try it once every big update but that part of it doesn’t seem to improve. I haven’t tried it in a while.

      • ameancow@lemmy.worlddeleted by creatorEnglish
        2 months

        I keep going back to it to try it again and again because I recognize the potential is great, but every time I get in there it’s the same feeling of being in a weird technicolor circus, a universe that has a weird scale and no real sense of vastness because the systems are cramped together cartoon solar systems and there’s no real feeling of consequence, no feeling of “going too far, I need to come back later when I’m stronger” or conversely no feeling of “I need to get to that place over there” and it seems the only real challenge is some dangerous robots and animals so you leave that place and go get your fuel somewhere else.

        I think it would have connected a lot better if it was less easy to get around, less teleporters to identical space stations, less fast-travel and less ships flying in the sky, less aliens hopping all over the place on planets, less stuff everywhere. Maybe more of a survival feeling where you really do have to climb down in caves to search for a part to get your life support going, even basic, tired old hunger/thirst type mechanics would have really spiced up the experience and would have made finally being able to fly and explore feel awesome.

        Also, the crafting isn’t fun, they lean into a lot of weird space minerals and space chemicals and such that you have no intuitive idea what you need to keep. To say nothing of how boggling the inventory/upgrade system can be, I don’t know why they reinvented the inventory/skill/upgrade system so much.

      • I Cast Fist@programming.devEnglish
        2 months

        The UI and every interaction is unnecessarily slow and that really builds up stress, not to mention the many times your aim is pretty fucking clearly centered on a vegetable or box or whatever, but the interact will target a nearby NPC because fuck you.

        Learning alien words is one of the worst chores of NMS

      • TalkingFlower@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2 months

        The only game that I’ve refunded after 100 hrs, the breakup stings this one. When you realise it demands so much from your acceptance and tolerance of bad game design, wasted potential and cult-like fanbase. You may as well just do something else meaningful…oh well

    • Kinokoloko @lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      2 months

      Automation games, such as Factorio and Satisfactory. Idk man I keep seeing people say they’re digital crack, but they’re just frustrating busywork sims for me. I’m more content just playing something like Terraria, where I feel like my progress is meaningful

      • nikosey@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2 months

        i loved terraria too. especially the base building part of it. you could get super creative with your bases if you wanted. i had a beach base with a lighthouse, ferris wheel & submarine. a jungle base on stilts. a cemetery base with a big skull, a cozy Christmas snow castle base, a cave base with glowing orbs, lava, and a robot, etc

        satisfactory took all that to 11 for me. instead of bases it’s factories and it’s a beautiful hand-crafted 3d world, instead if 2d pixel graphics. i had a lot of fun building so many cool things there. my last play through was 840 hours which seems insane to me.

      • Snowman_sir@lemmy.worldEnglish
        2 months

        Satisfactory I liked (didn’t finish yet) but factorio? not for me either.

      • Apathy Tree@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
        2 months

        I sort of feel that way but I still enjoy some of them on the lighter side, but complicated af in other ways. I’m not smart enough for full automation in most of the games I play, because I’d wildly complicated, but I do enjoy very much learning how game mechanics work, so as long as I can go sufficiently far without any automation, or at most very basic automation, I very very slowly add it in many many hours after I’ve gotten sucked into the game. Usually not until several new games have been played, and dramatically fucked up because I can’t manage everything manually.

        But stuff where automated base building is the main focus so everything else is kinda slow and painful… I try to like it but it’s all just too much and also not engaging enough.

    • Underwaterbob@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      2 months

      Rainworld. I’ve started it twice now and quit a half-hour in both times. I love a good side scroller/Metroidvania, but this one has one mechanic I can’t abide: a time limit. You have to rush from shelter to shelter because the world periodically floods and annihilates everything out in the open. I just want to explore at my own pace game, thank you.