Being on the patient side of things, two games I’ve played in recent years and didn’t enjoy were:
God of War (2018) - it just felt like AAA slop to me. Meaningles upgrades, tons of obvious puzzles at any corner - never throwing in even a single brain teaser, boring combat - the best option was almost always to throw the axe, that thing were you start walking at a snails pace to mask loading and/or play a cutscene and on top of that your god powers being mostly cutscene exclusive. Just your bog standard AAA game with no ‘friction’ - boring.
Factorio - it just feels like work to me. On top of that, going in blind, I just didn’t enjoy building something up just to tear it down again because I’ve unlocked something new changing the requirements. Once again, feels like a job in IT. Also, resource patches being limited just gave me the weirdest kind of anxiety despite never actually seeing one run out.
I feel vindicated. I have the exact same feeling of factorio feeling too much like work, having to refactor everything because the requirements change is one of the more frustrating parts of software engineering imo, and the game feels tailored specifically to invoke that frustration.
I imagine that part gets better after the first hundred hours where you basically know what’s coming. I don’t have the patience to learn the tech tree though, given that I don’t even enjoy the game.
I’m curious how you play factorio because when I played there was very little refactoring, just adding more and more onto the assembly line.
That being said, that genre of game is absolutely not for everyone.
Factorio sucks for perfectionists. You have to be able to embrace the spaghetti, and not everyone can
Yeah I’ve seen people try to balance things perfectly in factorio, but my strat is always to overproduce and let belts getting backed up balance out the throughput.
Yeah same. I’ve seen other people stockpile intermediate resources to try and smooth out bottlenecks, but I think that’s wasteful. Build extra throughout, and have as little product sitting there as possible.
I’m fuzzy on the details, but it went something like this:
- I set up long resource lines of coal, copper and iron.
- I needed a thing#1 and built a neat little package to build it, exactly to order and on minimal space.
- I copy pasted that design 10 times left to right along my resource belt line.
- Then thing#2 came along. Needed the same stuff and combined with thing#1 into thing#3. So I wrapped my resource belts, designed a second package on minimal space and also copy pasted it 10 times. So I had pairs of thing#1 and thing#2 with a line in the middle to combine them and a belt to collect them. Worked nicely.
Then:
- Coal was replaced by electricity. I had no space for powerlines.
- I got other types of the grab thingies, potentially simplifying my setup.
- Suddenly I got sorting, making my belt setup a waste of space (I had one line per thing/resource).
- All belts needed to be replaced by better belts.
Oh and:
- Thing#4 came along, needing 2 of thing#1 and one thing#2 with some additional resources. Since I built to order, I basically had to start from scratch or severly hamper the production of thing#3. Also, my packages didn’t work anymore without wasting space and/or entirely fucking up resource belt management.
Therefore, I designed stuff from scratch to fit the new requirements.
That’s from the very beginning, but after repeating this pattern a few times, I gave up. Building it non-optimized felt even worse.
Interesting. Optimizing the factory for your immediate current needs sounds very tedious, because those needs change all the time. I instead optimize for expandability and adaptability. The factory game genre isn’t for everyone, but if you are interested in some tips:
My solution is usually something like:
- really long line of basic resources (usually a belt of smelted copper and a belt of smelted iron, eventually adding more stuff and adding more belts of iron and copper as supplies are needed)
- when I need thing 1, I make a little package that builds it, drawing resources from the line with splitters so the excess can continue down the line
- thing 2 is an independent little package farther down the line
- When it’s time for thing 3, I build copies of the packages for building thing 1 and thing 2 as necessary to feed the construction of thing 3, again as separate feeds splitting off the main resource line
- when it’s time for thing 4, its again independent of the production of things 1-3, except they are splitting off the same main resource belt
- If the resources on the main belt are insufficient to feed all of those machines, one of three things needs to happen: 1. Add more raw resource processing until your belt is full and backed up at the beginning 2. If that’s not enough, upgrade the belt 3. If you don’t have a belt upgrade available, build another main resource line and use splitters to rebalance it onto the main line
This construction allows for easy expansion without having to destroy anything. I typically don’t disassemble anything unless it’s actually a problem for some reason or I need the space. This is especially important because you often need some basic components like the level 1 belts even into the late game.
Also, once you unlock robots, you can literally copy-paste, just select an area to upgrade all belts/arms/etc. in, and a lot of other neat tricks that drastically speed things up.
And one last peace of advice: Overproduce everything and let belts backing up balance out the resource distribution. Then if you discover that belts that previously were backed up are now sparse, figure out why and optimize it, usually by adding more production of whatever the missing resource is.
Ultimately throughput is all that matters. Loss of throughput because you don’t need something isn’t wasteful. Loss of throughput because you aren’t producing enough of something is a problem to solve. Things that don’t affect throughput don’t matter and aren’t wasteful.
I played pretty much the same way De_Narm did. I tried caring less, though because I had no idea what would come next, it inevitably descended into spaghetti. I am stressed out about technical debt enough at work to be playing a technical debt simulator lol.
Dedicating the space needed to expand, ensuring everything you build is scalable, inevitably requires you to know a lot about what’s coming.
Yeah, if you know what you’re doing you can avoid these issues. I did not enjoy myself in the slightest, so after some hours of giving it a chance I decided that learning how to avoid these issues was not worth the pain. I’ll just stick to work instead.
I absolutely love Factorio. I even bought the DLC the moment it came out.
I’m also absolutely rubbish at the game. I’ve never managed to finish the game on my own, and usually struggle to get blue science producing at all, much less at the correct ratio.
I do have fun with trains though, so I’ll often jump into friends’ games and just optimize (replace) their train networks.
I feel both of these strongly for the same reasons, also GoW had all the sluggishness of a Souls-like which immediately made it not fun to play.
Agreed. New GOW was much better.
Factorio’s the awakening for a lot of people on certain ends on the spectrum. My AuDHD makes it crack for me. I will say though, while the tutorial teaches you some essentials, it just throws you into the deep end once you start a real game.
I only discovered all the tips and quality of life from videos online, and there are some troubles in the game you can solve on your own but good fucking luck (belt balancing).
Might not be your kinda game, but if you ever feel like giving it another chance, check out some vids online for beginner tips (: It’s a game about stimulating the Eureka! part of our ooga booga caveman brains and it feels amazing.
Doom dark ages. Just upgraded my computer, and I thought ‘hey, I really liked 2016 and eternal, this’ll be great, and it’s got great reviews’. Nah, the whole game just felt…okay. I might try it again at some point and mess with the difficulty settings, but I felt like I was forcing myself to play it the whole way through.
I personally didn’t love the atmosphere of this game. Didn’t feel very doom like. The gameplay mechanics are also different, but I got used to them. The game is turning more and more into a rhythm game like DDR or Guitar hero where you need to do the right attack at the right time depending on what enemy you’re dealing with.
I’m grinding through this one now. The graphics are great, and the game does feel like a modern doom, but the fun does seem to be lacking.
I’ll finish it, but don’t think I’d replay it.
You know, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. I’d say Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is worth playing for a lot of reasons, but I think it’s got huge fundamental issues in both its combat and narrative design; it’s still on the short list for most outlets’ game of the year awards this year. Hades just got a sequel, and I didn’t even care for the first one. For many people, those two games are just about the only roguelikes or -lites they’ve ever played, but I don’t think they’re even good ones of those; the level generation is so limited that you’ll have seen all their permutations quite quickly, and the bonuses from boons just about all feel superfluous and interchangeable. Hollow Knight holds this legendary status among metroidvanias, and Silksong followed suit. I thought Hollow Knight was just fine, but I was surprised to find that this was the game with that sort of following. When facing the possibility of playing Silksong this year or about 5 other video games that came out this year, I don’t think Silksong is making the cut.
But your mileage will absolutely vary. These games have hype for a reason: a lot of people love them. You might, too.
All of the games you listed here were pretty under hyped IMO except for perhaps Silksong.
I understand this is all subjective, but I think you’re leaning toward like indie gaming hipster material with this comment…and that’s my opinion.
I leaned toward games that came highly recommended that I actually played.
I’d go for CO:E33 too. Its a decent enough game but I don’t understand the absolute hype it receives. Probably a 5/10 game for me.
I can answer this for you. So imagine a genre of game that you grew up playing, loved, and sunk possibly thousands of hours in. Now imagine for like 15 years they only made the most dogshit version of that genre of game. Then someone comes along and makes a decent, even passable, modern version of that game.
It’s like giving dirty water to a dehydrated person. Is the water good? Fuck yeah in the moment it’s fantastic. Is the water the greatest water you’ve ever had? Well technically no, but please don’t take away the dirty water please.
The worst part is, that decent game isn’t even in the same genre. E33 is too damn heavy on parrying. Imagine if all 2000-2015 Zelda games were garbage, and Breath of the Wild was the first good one. I’m sure some OoT fans wouldn’t be too thrilled, while a majority of gamers would be.
As a JRPG fan though, I concur, most JRPGs suck ass, and it’s often for the most obvious, easy to fix problems like slow combat speed, or throwaway random encounter design.
continues playing trails games in the corner
I agree regarding Hollow Knight… It was fine. I don’t really get the hype though, people would make you believe it’s the best game ever made.
A big part of the appeal of Hollow Knight and Hades are their respective art styles. They are both genuinely gorgeous games, and it really improves the experience. I would rather open up Hades again instead of, say, TBoI for exactly that reason, despite my thinking that TBoI is the better roguelike.
Admittedly I can’t bring myself to enjoy Hollow Knight at all, but that’s just an issue of me disliking metroidvanias.
hades’ strength is its narrative; hk’s strength is its worldbuilding.
it’s very difficult to stand out on pure gameplay in the 21st century.
I played E33 for about 4 hours. The combat system is atrocious. It feels like I’m playing a turn based RPG but with elements of Dark Souls? The almost necessity of dodging in combat made me give the game up.
I just played it on easy difficulty then it became enjoyable for me.
Was it good though? I imagine you’d be AP starved until you get the Picto for AP on hit, and then it sounds like the opposite where you can spam costly skills.
I already said in my comment that I enjoyed it?
To clarify, I meant gameplay, because you can (and a lot of people do) turn on easy mode just to ignore it and focus on everything else.
The easy mode could win battles for you automatically and most people would “enjoy” it all the same, but I hardly think anyone would love it.
Edit: The context was explicitly combat, but, I feel there’s still a difference of enjoyable combat and actually engaging combat. Is parryless easy mode challenging enough?
Easy mode doesn’t mean you can ignore parrying in this game so yes I still enjoyed it.
statisfactory 1.0: the game is pure eye candy there’s no endgame. factorio is leaps and bounds better
Yeah I’m a huge factorio player and I so badly wanted to like satisfactory but i can only describe the gameplay as cock and ball torture. For the first 6 hours you are getting kicked in the balls repeatedly by pointless tasks that drag you out of the automation loop. The game is not playable until you unlock the hydro power.
With friends it helped mask the pain.
Oh, damn. I’m like a few dozen hours in and still no hydro power. I must be a slow player. :(
I do, however, have a fifteen gajillion story high factory that I’m building, so there’s that!
I was playing in a group of 4 and am just spitballing time. Its been a while so maybe it was 12hr+
I was not throwing shade in the game as it is pure eye candy, when you unlock the space elevator that was a “holy shit” moment. It does really look good, but factorio the base game, I could get lost in for days, nevermind doing mods like pyanodon.
Yes I agree it looks so amazing. I love seeing Satisfactory base tours and seeing all the different setups I just cant enjoy playing it myself sadly.
Spoken like someone who never built a hypertube cannon to fling yourself beyond the boundaries of the map
Elden Ring. It is good for what it is, probably the best in its genre, but after so many Soulsbornes, it just feels like more of the same. Formulaic. I’ve tried it three separate times and it never grabbed me.
It’s definitely not the best in its genre, if only because they did away with the level design ethos that makes their other games so good.
This is something that gets completely lost in the translation to an open world game. The DS trilogy, Bloodborne, and even the original Demon’s Souls feel hand-crafted and carefully structured without being completely linear. ER loses a lot by leaving that formula behind.
On top of that, the boss/enemy design is imo some of the worst they’ve ever done. The past games (with DS2 being the one with the most exceptions) typically give you very fair but challenging fights. Telegraphs are clear without being slow and obvious. Particle effects and such are generally kept to a minimum to prevent visual clutter from taking over the screen. Bosses hit hard, but very few hits or combos, if any, would one-shot most builds outside of challenge runs. ER throws all of that out the window - bosses tend to hit like trucks, are visual clusterfucks (either enormous models with a terrible camera, tons of particle effects blasting out the ass, or both). I feel like the final boss of the DLC as an example is the most egregious example of this sort of design philosophy. Hell, Nightreign works so much better with the exact same designs because it’s such a faster-paced game where getting knocked down once or twice isn’t usually the end of a run.
To me, the Souls combat does best in a tightly knit and highly curated environment. I really enjoyed Elden Ring but I do not think it was a step forward for the series. Open World worked to the detriment of the game IMO.
I echoed this in another thread. I honestly feel like ER is the weakest “Soulsborne” game they’ve put out. It feels like a lot of conflicting design philosophies at once.
The lore and worldbuilding are phenomenal but gameplay-wise it falls short of what made their past games shine.
I (re)play Soulsborne for builds, and I think that’s necessary to appreciate ER. Trying out all the spells and different weapons is most of the fun, the rest being trying them out on bosses.
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Dark Souls is a 14 year old game
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I finally have a computer that can run Cyberpunk 2077, but it is such a dull game.
You tried playing with mods though?
No, any recommendations?
LOL I could have told you that before you spent the money.
Thankfully there’s a lot of good games that really shine on high-end hardware. Like that Indiana Jones game and the Spider-Man games. Also you never have to worry about games being an unoptimized mess, when you can just brute force them with pure processing power.
Deus Ex Human Revolution and Mankind Divided do a similar cyberpunk vibe to Cyberpunk 2077 but with better gameplay and plot IMO.
Absolutely. The original Deus Ex is pretty excellent too. And the turn based Shadowrun games. It’d be cool if 2077 was better though, the tabletop game is sick.
HR is great.
MD is half a game, with disjointed quests due to it. It’s sorta funny how the developers made all the Sonic and Knuckles references…
I really liked and the story. But after taking a year break and then playing the dlc phantom liberty. I kinda was over it. Just felt like work. Not really fun.
So idk. Maybe you just have to be in the right mood for it.
any game that is very short for its cost. plus i saw re6 and its just dragging on the boss battles(like making them very hard to kill) to prolong the game. SWSH to recent pokemon game, knew the slop in the beginning never bought into the future switch games, and it turns it gets worst every game. by the way the gamefreaks ceo said it was going to be SLOP after slop, but people bought it anyways.
The new Silent Hill 2.
The use of DLSS makes it look like a fugly, smudged mess unless you’re totally motionless. The combat is inconsistent; hit a monster, it gets stunned but then jankily cancels the stun animation to grab you or attack through your attack so it hits you but you don’t hit it.
Not sure what is better than the original other than the graphics when standing still. Even the voice acting is the same not good delivery as the OG, despite having been re-done.
Deep Rock Galactic. I was really excited to play it and I tried to like it. The colors and graphics were 10/10 awesome, I just found it to be extremely boring and repetitive.
For me, deep rock really shines when you’re playing the higher hazard levels. Seeing a wall of the cave move because it’s covered in enemies, and then hitting them with a fat boy gave me happy chemicals.
Very fair, I had a lot of fun with it as a casual game to relax with. Not so easy it’s trivial, not so hard it needs a lot of thinking.
Man I LOVE drg. A good team on a call made this the most fun I’ve had playing in recent years. Unfortunately, the population is lower and one may have trouble finding new players. Veterans are usually happy to help, but you’d need a patient one.
Prey. It’s inferior to the older Dishonored games in pretty much every aspect.
Wild, I had the opposite experience, I loved Prey (I also love the Dishonored games). What stuff did you end up not liking about Prey?
Compared to Dishonored, Prey lacks all the movement. But I wouldn’t have compared it to Dishonored anyway; It’s more like System Shock 2 and is pretty good compared to that.
Unless they’re talking about the older Prey… 🤔
For me the difference is simply being a scardey baby who cant handle horror
I felt dishonored offered many more options to move around, the level design had more surprises and verticality which multiplies options. Sneaking is a viable gameplay approach which I love (personal taste here). The characters and dialogs have a lot more depth and there is a lot more lore to discover along the way.
Also It might be my fault because I opted to avoid typhoon upgrades, but the mid game was really tedious due to ammo scarcity and the end game was too easy after that.
Luigi’s Mansion 3. At least if you consider 6 years ago recent. It got some really good reviews at the time, and it honestly makes me wonder if we were playing the same game. I loved the first one, by the way - I got an A rank while also getting golden frames on all the portraits (on the PAL version where you need more money).
I only persisted with the game because it was a birthday gift (and due to the sunk cost fallacy, I suppose), but I think it might be the game I’ve completed that I enjoyed the least. It looks nice, and some of the boss ghost encounters were charming, but the gameplay itself was fairly monotonous since they simplified the ghost catching mechanics from LM1 (I didn’t really play LM2, since it was on 3DS). Gooigi would have been a decent addition, but his puzzles generally just didn’t feel very fleshed out. It felt like they were either “I need two vacuums” or “I can’t fit through this grate”.
Also, I think Nintendo took the criticism that the first game was too short well and truly to heart, because LM3 might be the most filler-stuffed game I’ve ever played. Half the time when you get an elevator button, you get screwed over in some way and have to find it again. And don’t get me started on fucking Poulterkitty, when that little bastard showed up for the second time I legitimately thought about quitting the game there and then. The final boss was awful, too, which left an even more bitter taste in my mouth.
Luigi’s Mansion 3 might be the only game I’ve ever played where I thought “Thank god I don’t have to play that anymore” once I finished it.
Slay the Spire for me, I thought it’d be a slam dunk because I love Balatro, but it just didn’t land for me at all.
That’s funny, I love Slay the Spire, but I have mixed feeling about Balatro.
Balatro is addicting in that once I start playing I don’t want to stop, and yet after playing for a few hours I couldn’t say for sure I had fun at any point the whole time.
Playing Balatro feels like exploring the backrooms to me - just infinite bland nothingness.
Kinda the same, but I did like slay the spire. But balatro is leaps and bounds superior.
Huh opposite for me. I have played Slay the Spire for like 2000 hours. I have beaten it through ascension 20 on all 4 characters like 20ish times at this point. I still pick it up and play it when I’m bored and it still is fun somehow.
I could not get into Balatro like that. I think I have roughly 50 hours in it and like 3/4 of the way through it with all the decks and challenges and simply cannot bring myself to complete it. The last 10 or so hours just felt like a slog. Still a good game but the sheen wore off for me well before I could 100% it much less start replaying.
To each their own I guess! Funny how similar the games are and how there’s just some people that love one but can’t get into the other.
2 thousand hours‽ That’s just fucking impressive.
Edit: there’s at least six characters. I’m replaying it though plus dicey dungeons l(which I love as well)
Friend recommended one of the hitman games. But the steam port is so incredibly janky in regards to controller layout. And it was fucking made for consoles is what’s bonkers!!!
I’ve never played a consoley Hitman nor tried a controller, but I loved the original hitman (silent assassin) and the original series sequels up till about Blood Money. I didnt enjoy Absolution, it’s too choreographed unlike the originals where you could actually be creative and kill people in a variety of ways.
Then got pretty confused when I realised they reset the numbering with “Hitman” and “Hitman 2” (why do games do this?) and just gave up at that point and haven’t tried them or anything newer
Huh what?
There’s a game series called “hitman”. A friend recommended one of the games. I installed it and had difficulty playing it because it was difficult to control the character. The game was made in an era when it needed to be released on consoles to be financially viable. If it is released on consoles, it follows that it needs to be made for people controlling the character with a “controller”. The steam deck is kinda set up as a “controller”.
Despite these two seemingly perfect intersections, the game does not play well on the steam deck.
That explains. What Hitman version are you referring to? You said Steam port but I own Hitman World of Assassination on Steam using an XBox controller, and I never thought the controls were poor. But you’re specifically talking about Steam Deck. I cannot comment on that
Blood money
Can you give me an example of what you found difficult? I’m unsure because, huh what?
They didn’t add controller support in the steam version so it’s more or less emulating the keyboard. I’m the top left corner it has “E”,“SPC”,& another key, and gives you a description of the action associated with those keys which change depending on the situation. Getting the rifle in the intro mission was a chore between picking up the case and having to choose it from the inventory to take it out, then trying to get into scoped mode because none of that is labeled on the action keys. Also having a joystick emulate a mouse comes with it’s own issues. It just wasn’t an enjoyable experience trying to pay it.
Are you playing the first Hitman game from the early 2000s by any chance? Because sounds like it. The new ones have full controller support, silly.
Blood money
Ah, Blood Money. Phenomenal game but old 🫤
I enjoyed Blue Prince, I’m exactly who it was made for, but it was definitely much worse than people would lead you to believe.
The game makers had no respect for players’ time. You solve one of the large, run-independent puzzles and it all clicks, then it could take you several hours to playtime to luck into the conditions to actually test your solution. Everything takes longer than it should. It’s obvious that I’m going to toggle security settings every time I’m in the Security Room, why do you make me go through this slow as hell PC every time? It’s not for realism because no PC back then had such fantastical functionality, so why not make the PCs load screens faster? How does the slowness enhance the experience? Why not just put buttons on the wall you can toggle for the security settings, at least? There were times where I figured something out, and rather than spend ten hours trying to actually do the thing, I just looked up that part of a walkthrough to get the next info.
Really interesting game, but I did some napkin math and I wasted 25 avoidable hours during my playthrough (long unskippable loads and such) that could have been spend completing an entire different game.
Check out Seance of Blake Manor, doesn’t have the rng
It’s funny, I literally downloaded that one last night.
Same. The game is fantastic but the RNG is only cool on paper and falls apart just a few hours into the game. The methods they give you to influence your luck are just not enough to do much at all.
It’s really frustrating when you are trying to do something but you constantly have to do something else because that’s what the game is giving you.
I cheated at the end and gave me infinite rerolls for rooms so I could create the layout I needed in that moment. Much better that way.
I bought into the review hype, bought the game, then realized about two hours after the Steam refund window expired just how tedious this game felt to play.
I really wanted to like it, but it stopped being fun and started being so tedious that I uninstalled it.
I bought it ages ago but finally decided go give it a go. From the first day I could tell it wasn’t gonna be a game for me. Note-taking is basically mandatory, and it seems so easy just to get fucked out of a run by RNG.
Narrative seemed interesting but I feel like the whole “ability to decide what room you’re going into” thing should be weaved into the story off the bat.
Neat concept but not for me, but I think since I’ve owned it for so long I’m outside of the refund window.
I absolutely agree with you, I got to a point where I had solved the “main” puzzle, but was struggling to complete other puzzles (that I knew the solution to) simply due to room draws.
I wanted to love the game, but it held itself back on the RNG design. It can be so detrimental to the game that I wouldn’t recommend it to most people.
The game makers had no respect for players’ time.
I don’t know that game, but the importance of respecting the player’s time cannot be overstated.
I wish more game makers understood this and prioritized it accordingly.
It’s a huge part of why I quit Destiny 2 entirely. A game that doesn’t respect the player’s time and pads it with RNG on top of RNG to extend playtime feels awful.
