I’ll start. pokemon. doesn’t matter if the game’s old or new I just can’t get into how it plays. idk the gameplay just gets old to me pretty quickly, palworld is an upgrade in every way tbh
I think I/we were too old to get into pokemon. I tried 3 games, and got bored about 4 fights in. I’m sure back when that was the peak of gaming, it was amazing. But now after modern games, turn based gameplay is just not for me too
Except Baldurs Gate 3, that’s an awesome way of doing turn-based combat
Final Fantasy. JRPGs just aren’t my thing
RDR2. Played, but didn’t beat the first one. Some other game pulled me away from it. Tried the sequel and was disappointed by the gunplay.
Same, didn’t enjoy playing someone I didn’t like in a world I wasn’t interested in. Good game, not my preferred setting
I did finish it but man do the missions get stale after the halfway point. It’s just shooting and that is it.
It’s a cool world and all but it feels more like a movie that’s too long than a video game. Not a lot of meaningful interaction with the world apart from shooting things.
Yeah I really liked the story tbh but just the mission repetitiveness killed it.
I mean I finished the game but the replayability for me is nonexistent.
I wanted so bad to enjoy this game, but I felt like it did not return the sentiment. The biggest challenge was trying to get Arthur to do what I actually wanted him to do.
GTA. It just seems really boring to me, I dunno. A lot of shoot em up and not so much substance. To be honest I feel like that for a lot of open world games. It may be wide as an ocean but it’s deep as a puddle. That’s not ALWAYS bad but I generally would prefer a more linearly running game that’s a lot deeper.
Grand thef auto. Simply I don’t get it
Dark Souls and any of its copycats. Grinding a boss for hours on end just to learn it’s patterns is not how I like to spend my free time. Aside from that: why is that whole genre so bleak? Apart from maybe “Another Crab’s Treasure” they’re all dark and gray/brown and unrelentingly depressing. Does the gameplay lend itself to that particular aesthetic? Or is everyone just copying Dark Souls that hard?
I can understand, but heartily disagree! For me, the firey hope in the face of a dark bleak world inspires me, and the way the games tend to have you earn your victories makes victory so, so much sweeter.
For me, soulslikes are pretty weird. I’ve loved the art direction and gameplay of Dark Souls and especially Elden Ring, and I get why people like them and I appreciate what they’re trying to do, but something in them doesn’t click the addiction button. It’s not even the core gameplay that is the problem - I get flattened by some enemy and I’m like “oh I’ll get you one day”. But I booted up Elden Ring last time months ago. I’ll be done with the game in 10 years I guess. It’ll happen though!
Plenty of Soulslikes that don’t have that bleak look to them. I think many of them do because the genre takes place in apocalyptic settings.
That decayed aestethic is immemsely popular and it works fine in making you feel like a survivor.
That said, i like jolly things and grimdark stories, and I tend to like the bizarre. Maybe grimdark games lack the bizarre and the occasional bit of fun. I personally say this is the byprpduct of the success of a specific subgenre of games in the 2020’s.
I tried factorio a while ago but couldn’t get into it.
I got completely addicted for about a week and a half and then dropped it and never thought about it again. The core gameplay loop is crack, but it’s also very shallow and I can never think of a good reason to come back to it.
it’s also very shallow
You take that back!
In all seriousness, if you’re talking about something like the fact that all machines are functionally doing the same thing, that’s kinda fair, but there’s a lot of complexity in all the options available, made even greater with DLC and mods. Just the logistics of getting items to the right places have many different approaches with various upsides and downsides, and I love all the emergent mechanics that come from belts having two sides and splitters handling two belts.
It’s not a game for everyone, but calling Factorio shallow seems really odd. If anything, I feel like it allows you to explore its mechanics deeply, instead of having a breadth of shallow mechanics that don’t leave anything to be discovered.
Ok yeah that was poorly phrased. It’s shallower than it appears on first impressions, or at least was for me.
The belt management is the best part IMO and kept me playing for a lot longer than I would have otherwise. I loved ripping up the floorboards and doing it newer and better and bigger and … Oh god I’ve made a mess again, time to start over!
It is undeniably a very fun game… but for me it was a bit like binging a netflix debut, and it didn’t stick enough to make me want to come back for “season 2”.
I’ll say that I’m also not a huge roguelike fan and while it isn’t a roguelike, I got that same feeling I get after spending a few hours in Enter the Gungeon.
Haven’t tried DLCs so can’t comment, but the gameplay is built for extension so I can imagine they’re pretty damn good.
Are you a Satisfactory fan? I have that in the library and it looked more like my kind of thing (except that I much prefer the look and feel of Factorio)
I haven’t properly tried satisfactory, I tried the demo back when that first came out, was asked to run around collecting leaves to put into a power generator for half an hour, and bricked my game trying to put it into borderless or something… And then I switched to Linux, the game was epic exclusive despite promises otherwise, and I passed.
I got the impression it’s got a tedious early game, having a prebuilt map might make replaying less fun, and it sadly seems to have a very point-to-point, purpose-specific-device approach to logistics. I also like the performance of Factorio, it’s really lightweight on the GPU, and well optimized for CPU (though with the entire map and tons of individual entities loaded at all times there’s only so much you can do), which I imagine isn’t as great for the modern 3D game Satisfactory is.
I don’t want to rant too much about it, but I think the splitter taking in and outputting two belts in Factorio is brilliant. There’s only a few types of logistics, but they are versatile and nuanced. Being able to belt items onto the side of an underground belt lets you filter out belts by side, the mechanics of belt sides and how they interact with inserters let you create compact designs or maximize throughput if you spend time on it. There’s no dedicated buffer machine, no separate splitters and mergers, all the neat things you can build come together out of component parts in an organic way.
I will also mention that I like to try to plan ahead specifically to avoid starting over, but when rebuilding is necessary (and when laying a rail network) robots are a must-have.
On the topic of the DLC… If you’re not drawn into the base game, might be best to pass on it, but they did a good job giving each planet some interesting unique challenges, including organic items that spoil after a certain amount of time. There’s plenty of straight content expansion mods, big and popular ones, but they mixed up the gameplay quite a bit in Space Age.
All in all… Yeah, different people, different tastes. I’m currently doing a second playthrough of Space Age with friends, but one of them might’ve been felled by Gleba. If you want some more unsolicited gaming takes, I can recommend Mindustry and Outer Wilds ;D
Interesting take and thank you for being detailed. Part of my problem is various commitments mean I only get short and sporadic spells to play these games, so forward planning feels like a chore when you want to get stuck in for 3 to 4 hours, but might not return for a week or two.
It sounds like the way you play here is the way I played the various Tycoon games (particularly Transport) when I was younger. Paper and pen optimisation was part of the grind and made it very fun.
Now I just want to get things going and bask in my barely working mess of a solution. (This probably makes it feel way more roguelike than it actually is!)
In that sense I guess Satisfactory might be structured enough to fit my schedule, but I’ll definitely be looking out for the things you mentioned.
Outer Wilds might not work well if you play sporadically, I think a big part of the joy is piecing together everything you’ve seen and grasping the connections and bigger picture… But who knows.
Mindustry might work well though, it’s much simpler on the factory mechanics, but ties them into tower defense and RTS, needing to supply towers with ammo, and later supply factories with the right materials to create units. It’s FOSS, available for free from some official sources. And importantly, sectors are mostly isolated, meaning you can take it one mission at a time, bringing a few resources to kickstart things and building a new setup every time.
Also, hard read on the tycoon games, I love playing OpenTTD with friends, though I lament the lack of something better than cargo distribution to require us to provide supply to the actual demand (as opposed to being paid to shunt passengers/cargo to the most convenient location). That said, I never really did any calculations in that, especially since supply and demand can change rather dynamically.
Persona
Almost all of them. The only real thing that I played with pure joy was Minecraft, Cities Skylines, Planet Coaster and Sims series. I think its pretty clear what games do I like.
Anything with story/ending I find them unbearably boring and tedious. I’ll play Cities Skylines for hours though.
Anything Bethesda sadly. I want to like them, something about the control and movement is just so janky it’s not fun.
Weirdly, I love them. They’re absolutely shallow main story wise but they do exploring and looting right which is the point of open world (for me!). The Witcher 3 or Red Dead Redemption 2 for example are great games, but I didn’t enjoy them nearly as much as the arguably bad Fallout 3.
The games are appealing, I just despise something about the controls.
That’s why they’re easy to mod, and there are mods trying to fix control problems. Whether the bugs are left there deliberately or not, modding them is what keeps them saleable as other games in the genre come and go.
I thought Fallout 4 was okay but I agree Bethesda clunk is hard to get used to
Fallout 4 is a surprisingly good colony builder though. Shame that’s literally the only thing it has going for it haha
I find the games very appealing. I would love to love New Vegas but every time I try it just feels… off.
I always thought it was because they tried for an “anatomical” perspective and it never worked. Like I think the goal was supposed to be you could look down at your own character model but it was never really inplimented, leaving a janky forward and back motion to the vertical tilt. It’s just enough to make some people a little motion sick.
It’s like the controller is reacting to your inputs after they are pressed, rather than your inputs reacting as you press them. It’s a very very small difference, but it just feels clunky.
Bioshock. I tried the first game and liked the story and atmosphere, but got bored of the gameplay every time I’ve tried it
I love the first BioShock but couldn’t get into the other two because it didn’t feel like they took the gameplay anywhere new.
Terraria
Are you into minecraft? I’m working on the theory that people are into one or the other of those but not both
Yes, I am into Minecraft
Monster Hunter, Persona, Dark Souls, Witcher.
I did get a good 30-40hrs out of Elden ring but felt I saw what I needed to from the genre and moved on.
Basically any SRPG but if I had to choose one I would say Fire Emblem; this gente always leaves me bored with how long combat takes.
Though I am powering through, on easy, in Hundred Line Last Defense Academy because the story is that good.
Witcher. I tried. The series was great though.
I’ve tried 2 and 3 and just can’t really get into it. Story wise I see what people like, but everything seems a bit more clunky than it should be and it’s just more frustrating than enjoyable.
