2 picks for me: Stardew Valley, most boring shit ever, I don’t see the appeal, seriously how the hell did that thing sold 20 million copies?
And Witcher 3, I own that game since 2019 and I regret buying it, funny thing is that I’ve finished Dragon Age 1 and 2, which are kinda same genre but I actually enjoyed those games. I guess the old BioWare sauce carried those games unlike Witcher where there’s nothing to enjoy in its massive pointless world.
FIFA. Every man and boy in England loves FIFA, except me. I find it totally boring and pointless.
The game is popular but isn’t universally beloved, even the fans hate it, but they got the monopoly in football games
Just like any sport game, I only enjoy FIFA in small doses.
Sports games are literally the definition of “playing the same game over and over again”. I can only ever do maybe a handful of games in a “season” before I start just simming and focusing solely on the management side of things. And even that doesn’t last more than a season. I don’t think there’s any sports game where I’ve run more than one or two seasons.
PES back in the day had an amazing manager mode. And become a legend mode was so much better than fifa career. Being just one player and starting in small forgotten clubs and going all the way up to the champions league plus trying to win the “fifa” World Cup was addicting back in the day.
Anyone looking to scratch that itch on PC, consider looking up SP Football Life. Totally free and excellent.
Sensible Soccer was the last football game I was able to get into.
On the Amiga, not the shitty remake.
Sociable Soccer isn’t that bad. But it definitely doesn’t beat SWOS
Amiga games were so good.
the only sports games I ever enjoyed were snes NHL 98 and mario hoops
Elden ring yawwwwn.
It’s beautiful, and it seems like an interesting world, but learning exactly how to dodgerollattack for every enemy with deliberately delayed reflexes is not my kinda fun.
I’ll go ahead and say this also includes all “Souls-like” games for me.
Combat seems clunky, buggy, and unnecessarily difficult. I don’t have a ton of time to play games, so when I do, I want it to be relaxing.
Very well said. I played with a buddy for like 50 hours before I admitted I just wasn’t having fun.
I hear the lore’s really interesting and some guy linked me a YouTube channel full of elden ring lore so I might look into that.
But playing it, not so much.
I don’t even think the lore is interesting. I played maybe 5 hours before giving up because my friend told me that the creator literally wrote the story and then had them scramble it up and remove sections so you’ll never ever get the actual full story. Then they proceed to hide it behind a bunch of meaningless drivel. Utterly stupid game to me.
That doesn’t sound like engaging plot delivery on part of the creator, and the gameplay wasn’t my style at all, although I did like the character, creature and world design and am interested to see how this guy presents the lore.
As it was introduced to me, it’s a guy who enjoyed playing but really enjoyed the main story and wen into a deep dive connecting every little scrap of lore to put together a full history.
I like that kind of stuff, so I’ll give it a whirl
Any first person shooter. I’m just not into something that requires that kind of reflexes and precision, especially with a first person perspective where you can be killed instantly from behind.
I agree. On top of that, I get motion sick really easily, so I can play a lot of FPS games for about 15 minutes max.
First person shooters are just dumbed down point and click games.
It is like they just removed the entire puzzle element, so you can play brainless.
That’s not fair, mostly within the context of multiplayer. The puzzle is outsmarting other players.
For real. What a reductive analysis of a large and varied genre.
You can literally call any game a point and click game.
Or if you develop wrist pain… most FPSs just go right out the window. Or you play on controller and get whomped by the mouse and keyboard players.
Controller is actually better in most modern FPS games due to over tuned aim assist. Gone are the days of mnk supremacy in fps games
Maybe I’m just bad then. Wouldn’t surprise me 😬
The way it’s worked for a few years is that the bottom half of controller players are about even with the mid tier mnk players and then the top tier controller players are better than the top tier mnk players.
It’s not an issue if you only play casually, but if you get into the high level competitive stuff it quickly becomes seen.
I wish I was bad enough to not be part of the group affected. Games would be so much more fun
Hollow Knight.
I played for probably a dozen hours or so, beat a few bosses and then just hit a boss I couldn’t beat. (Don’t recall which.) I would get to the boss and die almost immediately. Then I’d be sent back to a far away checkpoint. I’d slog back to the boss, and die. Repeat again.
I’ve played plenty of games like this. I get at some level that’s the point. The problem is that I wasn’t enjoying the game. I wasn’t making progress. Just repeating the same over and over again.
I’ve played and loved similar games. Super Meat Boy & Celeste? Excellent. Ori and the Blind Forest/Will of the Wisps? Top games.
By all accounts I feel like I should like Hollow Knight… but I just don’t feel they got it right.
I broke through the exact same situation you had and finished the game beyond what most Hollow Knight players will achieve just so I can legitimately criticise this game that so many people apparently love.
You’ve picked out the exact same mechanic that I also criticise. It wastes the players time and is anti-fun.
I’d also add that the map mechanic is also terrible.
My fun factor increased 10x when I found a hollow knight map online to use that had key locations marked. Ironically it was a very soft touch map that just gave general guidance without too many spoilers and this improved my experience of the game.
It’s a game I wanted to enjoy, and I had some amount of fun, but ultimately it just fell flat.
The Ori games were so much better while following the same basic gameplay, but Hollow Knight gets all the extra attention. I do think Hollow Knight is bad, it’s just a game that is ok, and by the next game will be enjoyable after they iron everything out.
The other possibility I assume is that there is something Souls-like about the game that I don’t get. I’ve only played DS3 and I found it boring quickly. I understood what the game wanted me to do, but I wasn’t having fun doing it. Maybe some folks do, but not for me.
Pretty much every first party Nintendo game, especially Mario and the Zelda series. I’ve had some enjoyment from the 2D era Zelda games at least, but have yet to finish any of them as they just don’t seem to hold my attention.
I’ll reserve my judgement on the most recent Zelda game as I understand it’s quite different from the classic 3D and 2D games, but I don’t have any particular desire to give Nintendo money given their increasingly lawyer heavy behaviour.
Trust me, breath of the wild is boring as shit. Very directionless.
I agree. I cannot finish it. It shouldn’t be a Zelda game.
I really enjoyed Breath of the Wild although I haven’t tried Tears for the Kingdom. It really suited me but it’s lack of direction is how I play every open world game anyway. I actually can’t go back to other AAA open world games without getting irritated by how hand holding and limiting they are of their own medium, but it wasn’t just breath of the wild that made me realise that.
I’d you enjoyed Breath of the Wild, you’ll probably love Tears of the Kingdom. Some people felt it wasn’t different enough from Breath of the Wild, but there’s so much more to explore. And there was a part in the story that was so emotional, it made me ugly cry.
I am pretty sure I’d love tears of the kingdom, I just don’t have a switch.vi played breath of the wild on a friend’s Wii U years ago while living with him, then tried to replay it with an emulator a while later but encountered a few big bugs.
My hope is to just wait 5 years and play a stable emulation of Tears of the Kingdom, or maybe by then I’ll be able to pick that and the console up quick.
Lack of direction is fine, empty feeling world is not. There was never anything interesting to find in my opinion. No interesting quests, very few towns or other landmarks. Just a lot of space filled with the same 10 enemies.
yaaaasss. Empty world, repetitive mechanics, crappy story. I don’t understand the hype.
What about Wind waker?
Anything with that boring lazy Batman Arkham fighting system that they put in every game anymore.
It’s such a shitty mechanic. I don’t understand why people like it. It’s just an extended QuickTime event. The same identical QuickTime event, over and over again, for fucking hours. It wasn’t so bad in Arkham because the stealth was so fun that I never fought unless I had to.
But for 15 years it’s infected every other goddamn game. Shadows of Mordor, Mad Max, Ghosts of Tsushima off the top of my head.
It sucks. It’s awful. Harrumph.
At first I liked it because it was good for people like me who like games but are really not good at them, but yeah, it’s way overdone now.
It’s weird because I always think of it as the Sands of Time combat system.
…ghost of Tsushima has the best and most satisfying combat system in recent memory.
The Perry was the most satisfying in any game (imo obviously).
I’ve just never gotten into Pokemon. The games just feel like 99% grinding. I’m sure that’s an incredibly unpopular opinion, but I still find them unspeakably dull.
It’s weird, because Pokémon didn’t invent turn-based RPG’s, nor did they even invent the pocket monster genre because Dragon Warrior Monster arguably had a better game than Pokémon out around the same time - with more monsters, breeding, and a better storyline.
But Red/Blue and Gold/Silver were great games of their time. Very basic, but great, mostly because of the world built around them. If you didn’t appreciate Pokémon, it’s probably easy to see why you’d find it dull.
Worth mentioning, regarding Dragon Quest, the monster teaming up with the player was added in DQ5, back in 1992, something that was arguably first introduced in Megami Tensei 2 (1990). Dragon Quest Monster was released only in 1998, after the first pokemon games.
What set pokemon apart from them was the amount of pokemon you could get. That Game Freak managed to cram another 100 in Gold/Silver, a night/day cycle, berries, friendship, breeding and the entire original Kanto region in a gameboy color cart is a small miracle
I don’t even mind some turn-based RPGs. I mentioned Wasteland in another comment, which I loved. Wasteland was basically remade as Fallout 1. Fallout 1, 2 and the Wasteland games which now have their own sequels are all turn-based RPGs, but they give you so many more options than Pokemon and they are also about team building since you don’t play as a single character.
I guess Pokemon was just not the game for me. 🤷♂️
If you look at the first game from a historic perspective
The first game basically was an open world RPG with 151 unique characters with each their strengths and weaknesses, and their own attacks, and all could be customised. Running on a handheld that previously could only play Tetris.
It was a freaking coding masterpiece.
But I agree the gameplay loop hasn’t upgraded the way it should. It didn’t evolve with the medium and stuck too much to its roots.
Although the grinding in the newer games has been minimised. You can play through the games without grinding once.
I admit I haven’t played a recent Pokemon game because of my previous experiences, but I’m open to checking a new one out at some point if the grinding has been reduced. Thanks.
I never really got into the Pokémon games. Don’t find turn-based combat very fun. I mean, I guess turn-based is easy and relaxing for when you just want to put your game down and take breaks.
Animal Crossing. I have friends who became obsessed with that game. They wouldn’t stop pestering me about how much I would love it, and how I should start playing so we could trade turnips or some shit. Anyways, I bought it. What a weird thing to be obsessed with. It was boring, childish, and pointless. But it was hugely popular for a period of time.
Covid did wonders for that game. It came out right before the lockdown, and people suddenly had free time and a reason to escape to a happy place.
Fucking chore simulator. My roommates couldn’t be assed to do their actual chores, but every morning during covid they’d get up and make sure their fucking farms had whatever the shit they needed.
I bought it for the same reasons and also hated it. It just felt empty and boring. I then had to bite my tongue so hard when those friends would start gushing about their latest Animal Crossing thing.
Factorio is a total slog to me. Which is funny, because my favorite game of all time is Satisfactory.
I haven’t been able to go back to Factorio after playing Satisfactory.
That’s funny, it’s the opposite for me. Got into Satisfactory, loved it. Buddy bought me factorio, and now Satisfactory seems like an extremely feature-neutered version of Factorio.
This is how I’ve always felt about satisfactory. It’s so much more limiting in every way than factorio
I will grant you, you can build much more granular things in Factorio, it’s nittier and grittier. I’m real excited to play the full release this September.
Picked up Satisfactory just a few days ago and I am pretty bored tbh. Does it get better?
How far in are you? If you haven’t started unlocking the MAM tree, I’d start there.
I already got the MAM. Currently working towards delivering those 50 Smart Platings for the space elevator’s platform assembly project.
Oh, then you’re about to unlock phase 1, right? I’d say that’s pretty much the biggest wall in the game. There are others, but the path to unlocking phase 1 is generally the biggest slog.
Yes I think so. Alright, I’ll try to get through that. ^^
Super Mario Brothers. The whole thing us based on ultra-precise timing, which is both miserable for me as well as inordinately stressful.
I have a specific opinion about the older mario games; they expected a much more narrow game literacy than new games do, so the people who played them already had a little bit of transferable ability from other games. Nowadays, not just are precise skills less required because the games are designed to be easier, but the player base is starting the games with less skill due to their previous game being totally different.
Helldivers, the gameplay is fun but I just can’t do GaaS games. The constant “seasons” and shit requires.more attention than my actual children do.
Deep Rock Galactic has nailed the formula with seasons as ways of adding things with using them as FOMO. Missed skins and loot from previous seasons used to just get recycled into the RNG loot. Now they added a system to toggle and play missions as if you were a in a previous season and earn the old loot.
Well you picked two of my favorite games there… :p
For me it’s Monster Hunter. There’s no appeal to me fighting endless boss fights grinding for better gear. People often compare it to Soulslikes, which I do like. But IMO Monster Hunter doesn’t have the best part of Soulslikes, which is the exploration of an intricate world full of mysteries.
I find Smash Bros uniquely frustrating and obtuse.
If someone hands me a controller I’ll button mash away because I’m just here to hang out, but I don’t really like the game either. Ditto Mario Cart
Buttons go smash.
That’s… an interesting one. Uniquely frustrating from what sort of perspective? Like, do other fighting games work for you but platform fighters don’t? Or are fighting games in general just not your thing?
The control scheme, the health bar system, and the general chaos just never hit right for me. I can appreciate the game in a party setting, but maybe a little begrudgingly. In maybe similar veins, I’d prefer Towerfall or Power Stone 2, for example.
Any of the soulsborne games.
If your game is advertised as being “extremely difficult”, it just means it is lacking tons of quality of life features and goes out of its way to punish the player by making them repeat the same slog over and over. It is quite easy to make a difficult game, much harder to make a fun game.
Just imagine how much better and shorter Dark Souls would have been with a marker telling you where to go, instead of you fumbling around going through the same areas because you have no idea where to go next. It artificially lengthens the game.
But the worst part about those types of games is the community. They go insane when you even propose an easy or story mode. As if the the difficulty is the only redeeming quality those games have.
I don’t have to “git gud”, I can just close the game and never play it again while I enjoy actual good games.
Eh, just wasn’t made for you. Not everyone needs to listen to death metal either.
I can just close the game and never play it again
True and healthy!
while I enjoy actual good games.
blatant copium
Look I think there are valid complaints to be made about the Dark Souls franchise, but criticizing them for not giving you waypoints says more about you than it does the games themselves. The lack of any sort of hand holding was by far the most interesting thing for me when I first played Dark Souls and is the thing that got me hooked. The tension in exploring a new area, having no idea what to expect and being so scared you’re going to die is a wonderful feeling, especially when you overcome it and survive to the next bonfire.
You’re making me want to write a boomeresque comment about how kids want video games to hold their hands. Don’t you have a sense of adventure? Is exploration and mystery not interesting to you?
I’d like to make a counterpoint here, but first I want to acknowledge that you are 100% entitled to your opinion and maybe souls-like games are just not for you. It’s a shame that people are kicking downvotes your way because this is in no way a new or controversial opinion, but like you said, the community can sometimes take their love of the game/series too far and blame the consumer for not liking the same stuff they like, which isn’t fair and just makes the souls community looks like clowns.
Anyway, my counterpoint is that I don’t feel like these games are as difficult as people make them out to be. IMO, older games were just as hard, if not harder to complete even when playing optimally. In the framework of just about every Souls-like game, you have tools that you can use to almost completely trivialize the toughest encounters if you want. DS1 can be beaten by a complete amateur if you do the gravelord speedrun (which doesn’t require any real speedrunning tricks and there are many youtube tutorials that you can follow along with, takes about 10-15 minutes from character creation) and get the gravelord greatsword which can inflict Toxic on all the bosses, so you can just hit them a few times and run away for the rest of the fight, waiting for the poison to finish them off. That’s just one example. Just about every installment of FromSoftware’s Souls’ series has some overpowered cheese that you can research to essentially trivialize the game. Some people might argue that you’re not beating the game in the “intended way” if you take such shortcuts, but I disagree. Any way you make it to the end is the right way.
For a lot of people, part of the fun of a game like Dark Souls is the adventure, the discovery, and yes, pounding your head against a tough boss trying to beat it over and over. If you’re the type of gamer who gets easily frustrated to the point where you feel like quitting when encountering a challenge that feels unfun or unfair, I can see it not being an enjoyable experience. The thing that keeps most people coming back is the dopamine hit that they get when they do finally overcome that challenge and they are rewarded with more stuff to explore, new items to pick up, and so on. I think if there were any argument to be made against making the game easier for yourself by exploiting broken game mechanics (or with an easy/story mode added or modded in), it’s that you probably won’t be super invested in the outcome and get bored easily. Without the challenge aspect, the Souls games are very much a bare bones experience. It’s essentially a generic fantasy RPG with a story hidden behind item descriptions and cryptic NPC interactions. That doesn’t exactly make for the most compelling gameplay, so there’s no trail of breadcrumbs to keep the gamer uninterested in the challenge going. There’s a sort of intrinsic value in these games that can’t be quantified, because everybody gets something different out of it.
The games usually have an easier mode that is still not easy. In DS 3 playing the Knight and using the shield heavily works pretty well and make a lot of bosses trivial.
But yeah, it’s not for everyone, grinding timings and level information can be really frustrating so if the satisfaction of beating a level is not enough there’d be no point.
The real easy mode in Souls is to have you and three friends get burner accounts, then get anticheat-banned on purpose so you can co-op the entire game with low risk of getting griefed by some jerkoff PvP player, as the ‘banned people’ ghetto server is a ghost town. Played through the entire Souls trilogy like that during the 2020 lockdown, and had the time of my life. Never really felt “hard” because we could gang up on enemies. It did help that one of my mates was a veritable Dark Souls encyclopedia, and would give us pointers and strategies while also telling us about the lore. Great time.You’re just mad cause the bad red man got you lol
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Well. Yes? That’s the point, stranger.
Saying “you felt an emotion, argument invalid” is childish at best, especially given my comment was specifically about wanting to make things easier.
Co-opping is not an easy mode if the “bad red man” can get you, but it is if you’re in a ghost town server and it’s literally just you and your friends.
Lol, k
