Halo. I’ve been hearing about how cool and just good the games are. How deep and interesting the lore is.
I was visiting old games I heard good things about but never played. I had finished with the Half Life games and enjoyed them.
Then I decided to get the Master Chief Collection.
Started with Reach. Shooting immediately felt bad. The characters started dying off almost immediately after meeting them. Then the game was finished.
That was… Disappointing.
Well alright. Maybe Reach is a black sheep.
Onto Halo CE. Shooting felt even worse. The open areas were pretty cool, but there were a lot of small frustrations with the game. Story wasn’t anything special. Certainly none of that “deep lore”.
Well… Halo 2 then? Felt a lot like Halo 1. More story, yes, but it was as if the game assumed I was already invested in the story. About two thirds in I realised I was still waiting for Halo to finally become cool or good.
I stopped playing.
Decided Halo as a whole is very overrated.
damn, should have started in order of release instead of jumping straight into reach. love halo
I highly doubt that would’ve changed anything.
How deep and interesting the lore is.
Could the people telling you that have possibly been talking about the books? There’s >20 books telling various storylines from the franchise and they go way deeper than the games.
I will agree that the games are pretty sparse for storytelling. They tend to go more “show, don’t tell”. The problem with that is that the lore of Halo needs to be told and can’t really be shown
Yes, often books and movies are brought up when it comes to Halo, but I don’t see the point at all. I have been shown a few “cool” or “epic” clips from the movies by Halo fans but… they looked pretty bad.
When I get interested in getting into the weeds of some lore, it’s because the main-line (be it movies, or games) has made me interested to learn more. Halo never made me interested. Stuff just happened in cool alien environments, and it wouldn’t be the first time I’ve played a shooter with little story in cool alien environments (even from the era Halo is from… probably especially in the era Halo is from).
Personally, I think Halo’s heyday was decades ago when Halo first came out. It was a huge success back then, and I’d argue that’s half the reason it’s enjoyed by some today. Halo 2 was also very excellent. Halo 3 came out on the Xbox 360, so it had a different feel to it since it was on a different platform. The other games (Reach, 4, ODST) couldn’t even hold a candle to the literal monumental success that the original Halo was.
Halo is probably the biggest series that I never got into, because I didn’t have an Xbox.
I have the MCC pirated on my PC, just waiting until I can get a full group to do the entire thing co-op.
Co-op is pretty cool, but be careful with playing co-op with friends who know the game well; they will absolutely rush ahead of everything.
I had the same experience.
I kept comparing it with the absolute masterpiece that is Half-Life and it felt boring.
The story doesn’t pull you, no characters are memorable, in some areas I felt like I was cleaning the exact same room over and over.
Even compared to something like Doom II, which lacks any real story and is all about playability and fun, it felt lacking.
I guess it’s just not for me.
Halo was good because it was good when it was released. The concept of ‘good story with gunplay’ has been massively upgraded by now, AND the story told has been repeated by other games/tales with their own twists so it feels like you’ve seen it before. Completely agree with you on shooting feeling off. The only reason I would play it in the coop modes is for nostalgia.
Final fantasy, FIFA, GTA, CoD, Modern warfare and Persona are the ones that spring to mind for me.
Not Persona, no! It’s basically Pokémon + dating sim, what’s not to love (besides the usually slow af start)? 😭
I was going to suggest CoD as well … the whole series is mostly a carbon copy of the previous version. Let alone the gameplay is "run for 30 seconds, die, respawn and repeat.
COD games are fun but not interesting, and they’re pretty interchangeable.
Final Fantasy is about atmosphere and presentation above all else.
Their production values are some of the highest in the industry.
It’s a shame so much of it was used on turn-based game, but they’ve since pivoted to action combat and now we can get a balance.
All of them! GTA… I know 1 game series
I liked GTA 2. 3D ruined everything.
Hmm, I really liked most of the GTA series.
- So much fun driving around and shooting stuff up. Great humor as well.
- Even better with nice graphics and lighting effects.
- Just wow, GTA but you are actually in a 3D city.
- Vice City had a great vibe and colorful world.
- S.A. huge world (felt like it at the time) and a great radio soundtrack. So much to see and do.
- Depressing, slow and mostly a chore… Didn’t like this one.
- Alive, funny and beatiful open world. Really great if you skip multiplayer and the later milking of the franchise.
- We’ll see…
The Lazlo character was also great on the radio show… He was kind of the voice of reason until they completely ruined him with an apprarance as sleazebag on GTA V.
Vice City had a great vibe and colorful world.
Vice city is my personal favorite, maybe just because of the helicopter, but the feeling of its setting was sick. The whole mobster schtick really worked, while the later games all felt sort of forced with their criminality.
SA and its multiplayer mods were so freaking cool, though.
I’m going to get absolutely roasted for this, but Elden Ring. I put about 10 hours in trying to like it, but it just made me angry and miserable. And it was kinda boring.
I really tried, maybe 20-30 hours, but didn’t enjoy it much.
Playing as a spellcaster was maybe a mistake.
I recognize it’s a quality game though. I might try again with a melee character. Maybe modded?I can recommend a dual Strength/faith build. I did that my first playthrough and it was a lot of fun. I think the Incantations was much funner to play with than the Sorceries. They have far more variety in them. Plus there is a cure Scarlet Rot Incantation that I got a lot of mileage out of to make certain parts less oppressive.
Thanks, I might try that!
I generally like hybrid builds with more variety. Don’t know why I went full mage…
I also think it’s fine to just go full strength if you want something powerful and dead simple.
Carry a colossal sword in each hand, wear the beefiest set of armor you can without going into heavy load, and then just bonk things to death while tanking a lot of hits that would otherwise instantly kill squishier characters.
And don’t be afraid to use Spirit Ashes. There’s this weird machismo thing among players who think that real players don’t need summons, but they’re there for a reason and the game was designed around them.
I might try again with a melee character.
Maybe. The sorcery/incantation/various melee is less of a distinction than many make of it. A lot of it ends up feeling the same: you dodge, wait for the opening, hit your ‘attack.’ If the ‘learn to be a badass by learning patience and boss attacks’ isn’t your thing though, you might never find yourself liking it.
The best elden ring experience is elden ring seamless coop. It makes the game 100000000x better. If you want to play with someone, hit me up. I just got elden ring working again on linux (it had a freezing problem until I reinstalled the OS, probably the nvidia drivers borking out), and am loving it.
Dex/arcane bleed builds. Beautiful.
I also don’t care for Souls games, but I think ‘angry and miserable’ is the intended experience.
I’m a fan of the Soulsborne games but gave up on Elden Ring because I wasn’t a fan of the empty open world gameplay.
Souls games in general for me, but especially Bloodborne. My girlfriend at the time loved the game so much she had multiple tattoos. She was so happy to guide me through Bloodborne and tried to explain lore, but there’s so very little actual plot that anything I learned just fell out of my head. I couldn’t tell you anything about what happened despite finishing the game and DLC. I don’t get it.
Darksiders. Shit is ass.
I don’t know that it’s that bad, but yeah, I couldn’t get into it either.
Agreed. I got about halfway through the first one before I quit
Do you like God of War and/or The Legend of Zelda?
I’ve played a number of Zelda games, including the original and enjoyed pretty much all the ones I’ve tried.
I’ve only tried the first of the new God of War games and hated it. I dropped it after 3-4 hours. I was annoyed with how clunky the controls were and it was mainly set arenas for combat with boring hallways with slow running in between
Darksiders is pretty much a mix of Legend of Zelda and God of War.
And your point is?
No need to be rude.
Since Darksiders draws a lot of influence from God of War, it would make sense that you aren’t a fan of either.
I would’ve been surprised if you liked Legend of Zelda, the original God of Wars, but didn’t like the first Darksiders.
Really? Which one(s) did you play?
The first 2 are actually great games, and we’re especially fortunate to even have the 2nd one considering it’s insane budget.
I haven’t played 3, but it looked like it tried to do things differently and that didn’t work.
Most games I just didn’t like and felt it wasn’t fair to call them out, but gambling addiction pushing games like FIFA are high on the list, especially since the annual releases seem to be somewhat identical.
I also don’t really like the sentiment of judging types of games in general; we like different things and that’s good.
But, gacha games can fuck right off. Manipulative, exploitative, addiction seeking nonsense. I’m not even commenting on gameplay or anything so it’s not a specific one… it’s the whole core concept of making a digital slot machine for children that I find offensive.
Mass Effect and KotOR
Both have absolutely terrible gameplay. Fans tell me the story makes it worth it but if I want a good story I can read a book.
Lowkey objectively false.
objective
Not sure you know what that word means my doodle
“expressing or dealing with facts or conditions as perceived without distortion by personal feelings, prejudices, or interpretations”
Mass Effect 1’s gameplay is clanky, but 2 is much better.
ME3 is fantastic. Andromeda’s campaign is somehow even better feeling, and IMO Me3Coop is absolute peak FPS.
…KOTOR is indeed bad to play, heh. SWTOR is even worse.
I feel 2 leant too hard into the “generic cover shooter” trope pretty hard and although I love all of them, I think the gameplay of 3 really got the best mechanically, though it was also the lightest on the RPG mechanics and was weaker in that regard.
Story wise, they all do their respective jobs as a trilogy excellently. 1 introduced the world and the main players well and setups a good “big bad” to defeat. 2 is a good transition to the darker tone and fleshes out a lot of the galaxy and in 3 you have the cataclysmic final showdown.
The worst thing about ME is the continuing EAness of the whole publication.
Yeah, to be clear I felt mixed about ME2’s gunplay as well. But ME1’s gameplay in particular always felt so off to me, and if that’s OP’s only experience I can totally sympathize with that.
Yeah. I’m finding that literally the only Bioware game that I’ve enjoyed is Dragon Age: Origins.
I really enjoy it, though.
Yeah, the first ME you need to really just get in the right mind-frame that it’s old and the controls are clunky. I loved 2 and haven’t played 3.
The controls are clunky, but that’s not the main issue. It’s the gameplay loop itself.
Ah man I loved ME1. Heard the later ones were more gun-focused and decided to not check them out.
I’m curious what you thought was terrible about KOTOR’s gameplay. It was pretty much D20 star wars (I can’t remember if d20 was the ffg or the other company’s) with the computer rolling the dice, and D20 games are pretty neat.
The “make the decisions and then spend five minutes watching them play out” thing was the main frustration with that one. Maybe it feels intuitive and natural for someone who grew up with tabletop RPGs, but for someone more used to roguelikes and JRPGS it felt like the feedback loop was too long.
ME1 is playable if you pick a gun focused class. The caster classes are brutal to play. 2 is a bit better for casters, but ammo and cover mechanics get annoying. 3 is pretty good but has the weakest story and the space exploration is the most annoying.
Expedition is the most prominent: I really fail to see anything good in that game. I stopped playing after the 3-4th enemy on the island, so I might miss the plot, but the game did everything to halt me from being interested in that plot if there is one.
How so? I havent played yet but have been considering it
Just try a torrent version before buying. Rather unusual game. Many people love it. I really dislike it. Make your own opinion before paying money.
All of the Monster Hunter games. The gameplay is awful and the story drags on. I thought it was just that I picked the first one, but after trying the others it feels like a $5 game series.
And trying to play with your friends? Fuck you, do 30 minutes of boring solo stuff before we even think about letting you have fun.
And did you want to just connect and go? Fuck you get online and search up a guide how to do coop missions with your friends
idk about popular series but as an rpg enjoyer i got around 15 hours into clair obscur and bounced off.
Don’t hear that take very often. Almost everyone is too busy glazing it. I feel that way about Sea of Stars.
What didn’t work for you in Clair Obscur?
the act 1 finale twist was painfully telegraphed and i just wasn’t feeling the new guy in act 2.
what got me to drop the game though was doing one of those extremely vertical platforming challenges and falling off on the very last jump. twice in a row. i know there’s only cosmetics for finishing it but the platforming was so aggressively shitty that the prospect of having to do any more of it was enough to just move on.
Any games that have gatcha mechanics.
Genshin Impact
The characters look like sex dolls with uncanny valley face
“Mom, can we have Zelda BOTW?”
“We have that at home.”
Zelda BOTW at home: …
what is this male traveler slander
and what about the gameplay
and what about the gameplay
That also looks shit
The gameplay is fun, but it’s hindered severely by the grind built into its core progression.
Like all grindy games, it starts fun and you feel powerful for the first few hours. But then they introduce the concept of world level and character progression as soon as you’re out of the tutorial. Everything turns into damage sponges, so you have to upgrade your characters and weapons, either by grinding dailies/misc world objectives or by spinning the gatcha wheel (ideally with real money, for the developer).
Then you start to get a bit stronger, but subsequent upgrade materials are locked behind higher world levels, so you advance up. Everything gets even tankier, you feel more inclined to just spend cash to skip the grind, and then you repeat this cycle several more times until your character is all statted up and has the right relics at the right levels that you want.
To further add salt to the wound, progression is character-specific, so when you get a new character from the gatcha wheel out of its >100-strong cast of waifus and twinks, you have to start the progression from scratch for that character.
Pokemon. I had a blast playing Emerald, but starting leaf green directly after, I lost all interest in the series. It just felt like being punished to have to start from 0 again and maybe Emerald is just a better game. I’d like to give it a try… if you’d let me play it on my phone or pc, Nintendo! old woman yells at cloud
By the 4th gen, things started to get stale. I think most of the love was gone by that point.
Instead of going forward, I recommend looking back. Try playing Pokemon Crystal on an emulator. I started recently and it’s eye-opening how enjoyable it is.
Stale? Yes. But I would recommend bw/bw2, hgss, pla, and usum before crystal
Those are all for DS systems, which can be cumbersome to emulate due to have 2 screens on one monitor.
Indirectly pokemon go for me lol, played it a bit but meh
It seems like all of the answers are “I personally didn’t enjoy this game therefore I can not conceive of anyone else enjoying it.”
I find that interesting.
How else would you interpret OP’s question?
Something that is popular (or sells well) despite having no apparent appeal to anyone the commenter can think of.
This question may as well be “what popular game don’t you enjoy?”
I don’t enjoy Bloodborne. I think I can figure out why there is a lot of hype for it.
While I’d interpret it this way, too, “can’t understand the hype of” usually translates to simply “dislike”, but with a stronger emphasis on invalidating the opinions of the people who do like it.
No Man’s Sky: I’ve tried playing it and just end up getting bored. Every once in a while I’ll go back and check it out again, feeling like I somehow didn’t give it a fair shake, but remain underwhelmed.
Maybe next time…
People KEEP saying that they “fixed” that game but every time I try it it’s still a pretty generic survival game in space. I don’t see how it’s even close to what they promised.
It’s really not even a survival game.
You might like Star Citizen when it comes out.
Just another 30 more years of development, and we’ll finally have a space sim with retro graphics.
By that time we might have… Pffff… I dunno, X5, maybe even 6, that will have surpassed it on every front. Or Elite Dangerous will have all the features Star Citizen promised.
Star Citizen
when it comes out
Good one.
This was the game that made me realize I prefer story over infinite sandbox games.
Even after it started getting praise due to all the updates, it just felt… empty every time I went back.
I really like sandbox games, but this one just didn’t grab me (at least not yet).
Something about the way you fly in that game isn’t satisfying.
It was better in the beginning I think… they gave you more control now but honestly it feels less satisfying
