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.
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.
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.
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 accidentally beat the Mantis Triplets far earlier than I needed to because I couldn’t find the path into the ruined capital city I was meant to take.
Long route back to fighting the optional boss to enter a far too difficult zone for me. Only after beating them and discovering that that was not where I was meant to go did I backtrack and find the turning I’d missed to actually progress. (I rather liked Hollow Knight despite this, but you don’t and that’s fine. I just think it would be funny (, and a sign of poor map design if you made the same map reading error I did).)
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.
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.
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.
Overwatch and Fortnite. I feel like I’m catching ADHD just playing them. Strangely Apex Legends is quite enjoyable. Though I stick to HLL and Squad for shooty mcpewpews.
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.
They came from a different era. If you didn’t grow up taking long road trips with a Gameboy pocket/color for your only distraction then you probably don’t get the nostalgia rush that most pmon fans do.
I was born in 1977. I had a Gameboy. I just never cared for Pokemon.
Exactly right. We spent hours and hours in a Ford van playing Pokemon red/yellow/blue in the 90s 😂
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.
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. 🤷♂️
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.
yaaaasss. Empty world, repetitive mechanics, crappy story. I don’t understand the hype.
What about Wind waker?
I find Smash Bros uniquely frustrating and obtuse.
Buttons go smash.
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
Super Mario Brothers. The whole thing us based on ultra-precise timing, which is both miserable for me as well as inordinately stressful.
Any MOBA
Most of the Soulsborne games. The only one I’ve been able to enjoy is Sekiro.
In most Soulsborne games, it seems like difficulty is artificial simply because your character is so damned clunky. I enjoyed Sekiro specifically because the character was snappy and didn’t feel like they were running through waist-deep water. If I lost a fight in Sekiro, it was never because I was animation locked or because my character was too slow; It’s because I was too slow.
I also just dint have the time to get good at them. I get maybe 2-3 hours a week to game on average these days. I’m not going to dump a year into getting my ass kicked for a single game.
I tried Dark Souls and quit pretty early because I couldn’t pause. I don’t care about doing inventory or anything like that, but I’d like to be able to just stop things if I need to go check on the door or something. The outside world doesn’t stop just because I’m gaming.
IIRC, lots of people originally used the Home button as a sort of super-pause. But that’s not as easy on the PC version, where the game just keeps running in the background.
Gacha games, but surprisingly not for the gacha elements. FOMO events, where you either play during a limited period or miss the event and its rewards forever, killed my interest in every one I played.
The worst are the ones that put critical parts of character stories in them, then never rerun the events. Genshin and other MiHoYo games were especially bad about this (Albedo’s evil twin says hello).
I’ve gotten into one of those games over the past few months for the first time and I’m still not even sure why. It’s so transparent what they’re doing, trying to milk users for money with artificially ridiculous drop rates for characters and gear, and just constant grinding to get anything. I’ve stayed F2P the whole time, but it’s kinda aggravating seeing stuff essentially locked behind a paywall. And the prices are absolutely ridiculous, I can’t imagine what kind of idiots would actually buy anything at their arbitrarily inflated rates for fake, digital crap. Yet I keep playing.
The battle pass from Genshin/Star Rail boggles the mind. You have to grind like crazy or play almost every day to complete it, and the majority of the rewards are character and weapon advancement materials. You know, something you’d usually have to grind for.
Escape the grind through more grinding.
Oh, and you only get 1/6 of the battle pass rewards as a F2P player. It’s ten bucks to unlock the majority of the rewards. And the headline feature, the weapon/star cone you unlock at tier 30 (only it you pay, naturally), is easily outclassed by stuff you’ll get as a F2P player.
fuck why did you have to remind of the double albedo thing. Which one survived?! He was missing the mark for a bit!! arggg…
I tried to like FTL, I really did, but it’s just too much RNG for me.
I’m having that problem with slay the spire currently. I’ve spent 50 hours trying to beat it with the witch character, and keep getting fucked by the RNG. FTL I’ve beat with every ship/variation on normal, but it takes a lot of Memorization or looking up events to make sure you’re not screwing yourself. Into the Breach is way less RNG.
Minecraft. I just couldn’t get into it and it doesn’t interest me.
Some friends tried to get me into Destiny 2. It seems really pointless. I recognize the mechanics and aspects common to other games but somehow it just never clicked with me.
I put 1.2k hours into it during lockdown. Not enjoying Destiny 2 is probably the best thing that’s ever happened to your wallet tbh
I had a co worker a few months ago say they needed to head home to their second job after work, curious I Inquired further and it turns out he has just been busting out ~40 hours a week of destiny 2 for a few months now while also working 40 hours a week at our job.
To be fair we work from home 2 days a week so I’m sure he had some cross over work/destiny time.
That sounds about right. It’'s easy to spend ridiculous amounts of time playing during a good annual expansion or particularly good season, especially if you’ve got a clan that plays and raids regularly and/or you use the LFG discord. I used to be the same way, 40-50hrs a week at my peak. But I was in college, I don’t know if I’d have the energy for that and a full time job now.
seriously, I tried playing with my friends for like 2-3 months and had to spend at least $100 just to get the DLCs to play with them. Great investment at this point…
Yup, that tracks. I think it was a total of about $150 for me starting Y3 and up to the beginning of Y4. When D2 is good, it’s REALLY good, and nothing quite compares to grinding that game with a bunch of friends who are also super into it.
My friends I used to play with I actually met in-game when I was F2P. I couldn’t buy the DLCs myself at the time so they just bought me the DLCs (which I still think is wild and I’m unbelievably grateful for). But the content got stale as hell at around Y4 and they stopped playing for the better part of a year. By the time they were back, they still didn’t wanna do most of the content and I was getting burnt out on the power grind every season. Raids became more about the loot, less about having fun. Eventually we all kinda fell off it. By the time I could pay for it myself, only some of them were playing sporadically, and the monetization kept getting more and more insane (like fuck Bungie for thinking dungeon keys were a good idea).
I really miss those days though and I’d pay in a heartbeat if it meant playing like we used to.
Yeah, that makes sense. I’ve had some runs like that on games that were great but just aren’t ever coming back, like PSO and even Half-Life DM or Quake. I agree the monetization is extreme.
I was trying to play with my friend from elementary school, who I had reconnected with after several years. Him, plus a couple of his friends who i sort of know from years ago too. Destiny is his favorite game and he’s been at it for 12 years straight, which is cool, because he knows everything and I could learn from him, but the other two were fairly new, and I was brand new, which unfortunately falls into his tendency to want to be the cool guy who knows everything and tells everyone what to do. Also, we couldn’t play ANY other game, just Destiny 2 for 4 hours a night. Also, I have a bad habit of getting overly drunk around that time. So, it didn’t quite work out. Might still talk to him in the future and might still play Destiny 2 sometime (sorry if that was overly personal ha).
Ditto. Dull as dishwater
