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!!!
Planet crafter - Holy shit is that game janky, ugly, badly designed etc.
Conan Exiles - I did enjoy it for a while, but it quickly becamse such a chore since so little is explained so you spend so much time having to look things up, and even then it’s often not obvious what to do. I payed solo, and there is a point where doing that just feels impossible, I ended up wanting to cheat to do some things and that’s a point I never cross so I just stopped playing.
I really want to play some game like those; survival with base building, exploration etc, But I think I’ve exhausted the list of ones that are good enough for me. I’ve played Minecraft, Terraria, Star Bound, Enshrouded, Subnautica, Grounded, Valheim, Satisfactory, Factorio, The Forest and more that I’m not remembering right now. There are some that are in early access that I’m interested in but I’ve stopped playing EA games, I now always wait till full release.
If anyone has any suggestions I’d be very happy, I’m craving something to dive deep into. I’m only interested in Single player games through, at least ones that can be played as such.
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.
Kinda the same, but I did like slay the spire. But balatro is leaps and bounds superior.
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.
I enjoyed Blue Prince, I’m exactly who it was made for, but it was definitely much worse than people would lead you to believe.
The game makers had no respect for players’ time. You solve one of the large, run-independent puzzles and it all clicks, then it could take you several hours to playtime to luck into the conditions to actually test your solution. Everything takes longer than it should. It’s obvious that I’m going to toggle security settings every time I’m in the Security Room, why do you make me go through this slow as hell PC every time? It’s not for realism because no PC back then had such fantastical functionality, so why not make the PCs load screens faster? How does the slowness enhance the experience? Why not just put buttons on the wall you can toggle for the security settings, at least? There were times where I figured something out, and rather than spend ten hours trying to actually do the thing, I just looked up that part of a walkthrough to get the next info.
Really interesting game, but I did some napkin math and I wasted 25 avoidable hours during my playthrough (long unskippable loads and such) that could have been spend completing an entire different game.
The game makers had no respect for players’ time.
I don’t know that game, but the importance of respecting the player’s time cannot be overstated.
I wish more game makers understood this and prioritized it accordingly.
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.
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.
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… 🤔
arc raiders
I picked up Vampire Survivors, played one round, and was like yeah I think I’m done here.
I picked it up and thought “this is so stupid,” right before spending many hours playing it.
Try out Magic Survival, the (way better) game VS was copied of
Fallout 4. I could never bring myself to finish it. The furthest I ever got was just before the Mass Fusion mission between the Institute and the Brotherhood, with the Railroad already dead. I just couldn’t summon the will to continue. In every playthrough after that, I rush to Nuka World, finish a few parks there, and call it quits again.
All the souls games. I don’t get it, they’re just no fun 🤷♂️
Also, never finished doom eternal, far too busy. Dark ages was great tho
My first attempt was Dark Souls 3. I went in expecting challenging but rewarding battles, and a mysterious world to explore. Unfortunately, I found myself bored within an hour every time I played, and gave up on it after maybe a dozen sessions.
I tried Elden Ring maybe a year or two later. I stuck with it for longer, but the experience was roughly the same. The combat felt tedious. The art and animation didn’t appeal to my tastes. The world seemed big, but desolate. The controls somehow made me feel awkwardly disconnected from my character. Nothing about the game made me care about it at all. The biggest challenge was in keeping my eyelids open.
I wonder if I would find soulslikes more appealing if I had grown up on console games. They’re clearly popular, but it seems they just aren’t for me.
All the souls games. I don’t get it
They’re memorisation timesinks
I’ve enjoyed a lot of Soulslikes, but none of the ones made by FromSoft. Their style of providing poor explanations of mechanisms just makes no sense to me, even if you want to give players those moments of self-driven discovery.
There was a time when I could not have imagined liking those kinds of games. My partner got me Dark Souls Prepare to Die Edition and I hated it. Hate may be too kind a word for how I felt. I’ve always loved metroidvanias and the style seemed right up my gothy, witchy alley, but I couldn’t get past the first basic zombie.
Then we watched a bunch of videos and realized that the game was designed to be played slowly and deliberately. There were no “junk” enemies and paying careful attention at all times was the game. When it clicked, it clicked, and now From Software games are my favorite.
Souls games didn’t make sense to me until I saw Giant Bomb play through Demon’s Souls. Mechanics that I didn’t know were there were explained in plain English, and then I could better understand where I went wrong when I died.
Skyrim, it’s so damn mundane.
That’s because you’re playing it wrong. You see, at it’s core Skyrim is actually a puzzle game you play on the Nexus Mods website. You spend 30+ hours carefully researching, building, and tweaking the perfect pack of mods, only to immediately run out of interest in playing Skyrim once you’re finally done. The actual Skyrim installation only exists to check if you solved the puzzle correctly and it runs.
Actually. I tried Skyrim so many times and never got into it, then I decided to give it the best shot and play with a cavalcade of QoL mods. I went from a hater to a true Skyrim enjoyer. At this point, with how pessimistic I was about the game, I think with the right setup ANYONE can enjoy it.
The end-game lasts about 30 seconds after boot.
“Oooh, pretty sky. Ooh, wavy plants. Ooh, god rays. Alt+F4.”
Damn. I feel so seen suddenly.
I have the opposite opinion. I avoided it for years because of the hype (and not having proper hardware to run it).
Now I have almost 900 hours in it, and sometimes I jump in just to walk around and revisit some places.
Just played through Doom: Eternal cause it was on sale for 4€ a bit back. The entire time I was wishing I was playing Doom 2016…
The new Doom games are all very different from each other. I liked what Doom 2016 was doing (even if it got repetitive) but really didn’t enjoy Eternal because the constant juggling didn’t sit with me. I haven’t tried Dark Ages but it seems like it’s doing something between 2016 and Eternal (not quite use what you want and not quite always juggle) while also adding its own dimension with the mix of melee and guns.
I would never recommend each Doom title based on the last title. But it doesn’t mean I don’t like what they’re doing. I think it’s brave to do its own thing instead of doing what is expected.
Dungeons and Dragons 5e is less fun than 3.5e IMO.
There was more of a sense of character progression, and ability differentiation in 3.5e.
5e achieves balance by flattening the power curve.
For example, the attack bonus for a level 20 Fighter in 5e is just 4 points higher than it was at level 1 - same as a 5e Wizard. Both get +2 at lvl 1 and +6 at lvl 20
In 3.5e, a level 20 fighter’s attack bonus is 19 points higher than it was at level 1 (+1 to +20), but a wizard only gains half that much fighting prowess as they level up (+0 to +10).
All 5e characters are pretty much the same statistically & mechanically. Differentiation comes from role play, which is the least interesting part of the game for me.
5e character progression does feel kind of bland.
I feel the 5e rules are poorly organized, too. Lots of interdependent rules scattered far from each other in the books, and sometimes buried in the middle of seemingly unrelated sections, so unless you’ve memorized multiple chapters, understanding how to resolve common situations sometimes requires stopping the game for 15 minutes while someone digs through the books to find all the relevant factors. Even when you do find the relevant info, it’s often in ambiguous language describing what could have been made perfectly clear with a few keywords. The books are pretty, and the text might be nice to read for entertainment, but they’re pretty bad the the job of being game manuals.
Does 3.5e use the d20 system? Does it have the advantage/disadvantage mechanic? I like those aspects of 5e; they’re simple and they help keep games moving along.
Maybe I should give it a try. Or perhaps 4e, which I have read does a better job of clearly defining its gameplay mechanics.
I think this is one of the reasons why Pathfinder 2e has been doing so well.
It’s a middle ish ground and it feels good to progress.
My current issues with it are how underpowered the items are. So boring.
3.5e being the best is an opinion I’ve heard for my entire life. I would say preferring 5e is a more unpopular opinion.
I haven’t played any 3.5e proper, but I understand Pillars of Eternity 1 is largely based on it, and I’ve played a handful of the 2e games. I dig a lot of the changes in 5e. I wouldn’t say the power is so flat that the differentiation only comes down to role play; I’d say a lot of it comes from the apples and oranges comparisons between classes, like things beyond to-hit roles. Your fighter has no AoE attacks like the wizard has but has Second Wind and Action Surge, for instance. The advantage to flattening the differences a bit more is that your character’s role is less preordained (“you are playing class X, so you must be responsible for Y”) and that you are less hamstrung by the absence of one particular role, which scales better to small parties.
I liked 4e the best.
4e did some really cool stuff while also going a bit off the rails for me. I think overall I like 5E more, but we played a ton of 4e and I’ll always remember it fondly. I was really into the more defined roles, and how classes were a bit more self contained so they could just keep making more and more niche ones
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.
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’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.
