To me right now is the first Red Dead Redemption. Finally I’m able to play it, I’ve wait for over a decade. No spoilers, zero youtube gameplay videos, zero questions about the game to my friends. It gotta be me, and the game, it happened, and I think it sucks.
Maybe you thinking in “well, you shouldn’t play the second first”. I did not. My first Red Dead game was Red Dead Revolver, I was able to play it a few years ago when I could buy a PS2, but I couldn’t get a PS3 nor a Xbox 360 to play RDR1. It grinded my gears because we got the prequel in PC. When RDR1 came to PC it was so freaking expensive, yet today, I think it is expensive. I was able to buy the game some weeks ago while there was a Steam Sale, and well, I regreat it now.
I don’t like its exploration, its missions, its characters, its world, its secondary missions. its wanted system, and nothing but less important: has a lot of bugs.
That’s my experience in a few words.
What’s the game that you wanted to play but it was a total mess?
I wanted to play Cuphead because I really liked the concept and the aesthetic. I got it not knowing its reputation for being hard as absolute fuck. Played it for several days with increasing frustration, started watching walkthroughs, those didn’t help, still tried to stubbornly stick with it, and eventually got to the point where my heart just wasn’t in it anymore.
Yeah, I loved the concept, hated the gameplay. There’s a TV show that’s way better than playing the game.
If it helps, ive felt this way about a few games throughout my life and after beating my head against them for a while i would gice up and take a break. However, when returning later, i found things weren’t quite as hard for me, and i was able to make progress.
Don’t [permanently] give up!
…Or do. Gaming doesn’t have to be that deep. There are plenty of other experiences to enjoy, anyway!
Any pokemon game after gen 2.
I started in 1999 with red. It was a childhood-defining experience. I spent all summer with my nose in that game boy. Keep in mind I had to use a loupe mounted in a glasses frame and had to hold the screen an inch from my eye, so the ergonomics weren’t ideal, but the experience was compelling enough for me to bear through it. Then I got gold in the summer of 2001, I think, and was blown away. It was an upgrade in every way. I personally think the series peaked with gen 2. To be absolutely clear I am not a “gen-wunner” or whatever the word is. I just think the combination of the game itself and the zeitgeist it created for those first few years came together to make something unrepeatable.
Gold and Silver came out while Pokemon was still everywhere, but by the time gen 3 released, the craze had ebbed. Yes it was still popular but it was no longer in everyone’s mouth. I was also in the latter half of high school, and most of my friends were no longer into it. I bought the game, so it’s not like I thought I was too old, but it just didn’t feel the same. They removed the day-night cycle and the calendar functionality. It felt like a downgrade.
I’ve tried several times since to rekindle that feeling I got in 1999. The closest was with Pokemon Go in 2016. For a few weeks it felt like the late 90s again, with everyone and their dog talking about Pokemon. I actually beat Pokemon Let’s Go, but I think the nostalgia is what kept me going. Tried with the first Legends game and just couldn’t stay interested. Ditto with Brilliant Diamond.
There has to be a word for not wanting something but wanting to want it. That’s how I feel. (Of course the nice thing about being a conlanger is I can make the word myself 😁)
spoiler
sdC CBa serial verb construction consisting of the verbs
sdC(to pine for/yearn for/be nostalgic for) andCB(to want). Perhaps “to miss wanting” is a close translation.sdC CB qGr qGrbfrp 0 sdC-0 CB-0 qGr-0 qGrbfr-p [1sg] yearn-A want-A play-A video_game-3D I miss wanting to play that video game. 1sg = 1st person singular (0 means it's dropped) -A = authoritative verbal mood (-0 means a null morpheme that isn't pronounced) -3D = 3rd person distal noun suffix ('that video game')Any after gen 5 for me. Gen 5 is actually my favourite
I feel this one deep.
I think you just grew up. People seem to forget that these are games for children. Nostalgia can only take you so far.
Pokemon is games for babies
The word you are looking for isn’t “wish”? Like “I wish that happen again”. My first experience with a Pokémon game was with Pokémon Red Fire in a GBA, back in 2006 or 2007. That game itself obfuscate the third gen games. Ruby and Saphire aren’t bad games, but something definitively felts off.
Funny for me it was RDR2. I still think I probably would have liked it if I stuck with it, but 20 minutes in I was told that I would have to regularly clean my gun and hunt to feed my camp etc. and it just felt like doing a bunch of chores and I noped straight out.
Gun cleaning, hunting, feeding camp, doing chores, etc are all optional in that game. You can just do missions to get to the end of the game with no problem.
Thats where I stopped. I played the prologue and was having a blast, then you get to the first camp and it shows you all the stuff youre expected to do and it just looked like hassle.
I couldn’t agree more. RDR2 has this aura of “you can do so many things, in any order, all the exploration, etc” and to me it feels like no one stopped to ask “are any of the things fun?”
Baldurs Gate 3 for me. I like the game mechanics and everything like that, but the story and characters put me off. The characters in general because of how unlikeable they all are, and the story I think my main problem is mostly that I know nothing about D&D and the game doesn’t try to introduce anything. So I can’t even follow the conversations properly because half the time I have no idea what they are talking about.
Just fyi, if you hate the main characters you can kill then if you want and just have generic NPCs as your companions.
Or you can ignore them full on it you don’t want to kill them - you don’t need them to join you.
I’m surprised you dislike Karlach though, the most normal/relatable one.
I really enjoyed the game with 0 knowledge about the lore
That’s promising. I want to try it but don’t want to play the two precursors
You don’t have to, they are very old games and quite hard to play if you are not used to the genre. I believe that practically the only connections are two reoccurring characters whom you don’t need to know anything about beforehand.
My experience was the opposite (hated the gameplay, loved the lore). I couldn’t finish it because every fight was a lopsided slog and nonstop environmental hazards made exploring annoying as fuck.
Really sorry to hear. Imho, it’s a strong candidate for best game of all time. I actually love the characters and I think you don’t need that much knowledge on lore to follow the story… I do know some lore, having previously played NWN 1 and 2 only…
My least favorite thing about BG3 is every enemy seems to be able to do so many actions and will nail your team from a mile away, yet you have a slim to none chance to hit, and when you hit you do a whopping 2 damage or something.
I finally started having an OK time with the game by messing with the custom settings to make combat more fun. But I have never finished it. Much more fun games keep popping up.
I’ve played D&D and can’t follow half the BG3 conversations either. Names of places and characters have no intrinsic meaning. I find it to be a major pain in the ass to manage my own character’s abilities, let alone ~8 in total. Yes, there’s auto/suggested builds so you don’t have to choose everything, but it’s still difficult to remember how to utilize everyone. Plus, all that freedom of choice means freedom to pigeon hole yourself into some situation - unintended consequences, missed opportunities, that sort of thing. Yes, that’s great for roleplay, depth of game, replayability, and all that, but I just don’t have the time to get into that anymore.
Still playing tho. Took me like 20 hours to get into the swing of things. That’s also about how long it took me to get comfortable with Elite Dangerous, actually. But the 1200hrs in THAT game certainly paints a different picture about enjoyment
Witcher 3. Absolutely hated the sluggish movement, only made it a few hours
Same I’ve tried 3 times to get into it, but after a couple of hours I quit.
Oh, I gave it about an hour before giving up. I expected more.
Would you recommend the other games in the series?
I haven’t played any of the others but was assured it was no problem. My real controversial opinion is that I didn’t think the voice acting was that great either
It’s just an incredibly soulless game, towns are filled with cardboard cutout npcs, there’s generic guard, wandering peasant, blah blah blah
Fighting, even on Blood level, is trivial
“Searching” around with witcher senses is an absolutely pathetic mechanic
I’m not into “dark” games so I’ll just accept that this one isn’t for me
I modded it quite a bit to make it more enjoyable. Eventually just stopped playing without finishing everything though.
An old one: SPORE.
Cool creature editor. Lacked all the depth that was promised in the presentations. Instead of being a cohesive game through the ages, it’s like 5 bare-bones shallow games glued together.
I loved spore as a kid, but I do agree that when I tried it again and an adult I was disappointed by the shallowness that I just hadn’t noticed as a kid
Control. stuck in an office with dull attack options. I played about half way through then looked up my progress and walked away. Way too dull for me. Friends were raving about it.
I think the ray tracing drew a lot of people in. It certainly did me. I think it also rides on its reputation as a big-budget spiritual adaptation of the SCP Foundation.
Like my experience with most remedy games by this point. Cool concept, interesting world, so many things I SHOULD love…but the combat got so damn repetitive and unfun. Same enemy types over and over again. Killed all enjoyment for me. At least I finished it.
Starfield. I tried it on a more recent update and it was just boring. There was no point to exploring because outposts were useless and space combat was trivial. Just an overall boring game
Skulls and bones. Sailing in black flag is probably my favorite gaming experience ever. Ubisoft announced a sailing game right after. All they had to do was add some upgrade paths so people could set up their ships for different playstyles. Like 10 years later, the game finally came out. It’s the only game I’ve ever refunded. Everything about it was terrible.
I have a friend who defines his gaming existence by black flag. He’s bought it, multiple times on multiple consoles out of sheer love for the game.
Skull and bones came out, I expected that to define the next 6 months of my life. Not a peep. Mentioned it and he just shrugs and goes: they had something good, and ubisofted it (this is after they’ve lost all consumer goodwill). I can’t help but agree
Dragon Quest Builders 2 kind of fits the bill for me here. I wanted to play it from the moment I learned about it. I had zero experience with 1, or any other dragon quest games. My biggest issue, and im still quite angry about it, is that the game I wanted to play, and the game the trailers promised actually does exist. Its all functional. The only way to play it though is the campaign, and its so frustratingly hand-holding and text-heavy it actually hurt to play.
“we need to build the BRONZE ROOM. So we’ll need some BRONZE. Theres some BRONZE in the cave nearby.” [Camera pans over to where the bronze is.] “Okay! We’ll go and get the BRONZE!” “I think 3 pieces OF BRONZE should do it.”
Head over towards the cave.
Hey! We’re near the BRONZE cave! Isn’t this where they said we could get the BRONZE that we need to complete the BRONZE ROOM? Let’s get the BRONZE!
Head towards the bronze.
Hey! It’s the BRONZE that we need to make the BRONZE ROOM! Lets mine some quick so we can make the BRONZE ROOM! You can do this! Let’s go!
Mine the bronze
[BRONZE acquired!]
Hey! Thats it! We just mined the first piece of BRONZE that we need! Didn’t the quest-giver say we needed 3 pieces? What are we waiting for? Lets mine 2 MORE!
Mine 2 more
Thats it! Weve got all the BRONZE that we need to make the BRONZE ROOM! lets Head back to the base as quickly as we can to make the BRONZE ROOM.
Head back to the base, get talked to by the quest giver for a solid minute about the importance of the bronze room. Then the concept of the silver room comes up. You think 'that was a really really really long-winded tutorial, but they’ll leave me alone to do the silver and gold now that I know what to do. No. Go back to the top of that list but replace BRONZE with SILVER. Then gold. Then do it again and again and again until the credits roll and you realise the game never actually happens and you just wasted a bunch of your life and you’ll never ever get it back and they could have made an excellent game, and they actually did, they just wouldn’t let you play it.
Im still pretty bitter about that whole experience.
Never played this game but I’m aware the same devs are involved with Pokopia in some way. Makes me worried.
It’s like they saw Minecraft’s complete and utter lack of direction and decided to overcorrect.
Yeah this game is definitely better if you’re totally burned out/ depressed, cause then the handholding is kind of nice. Plus the main island is kind of sandboxy to create your real home/ base since you basically have very little autonomy in the main quests, and you don’t get that in the first one. I feel like my whole life is so many decisions and I’m too tired to actually do hobbies or game, but I can do a cute game like builders with no brain, just mindless fun.
I feel the same way that it’s like if Minecraft came with a Lego manual and all you’re doing is following it.
Do you like Lego? Do you like following a kit, or do you want to build how you want without instructions?
- CD Projekt RED’s Cyberpunk 2077:
the trailer showed V riding a crowded monorail train. I bought the game in promotion with Google Stadia. There was no monorail in the game. Or rather, you could look at it, and you could find some stations, but they were teleport points; - Obsidian Entertainment’s The Outer Worlds:
it was marketed as a role-play game, but your possible choices were either bad or good, with no in-between, and they did not influence your story at all. It’s just a shooter game, the SciFi setting is secondary and forgettable; - Blackbird Interactive’s Homeworld 3:
too far from what I loved in Homeworld and Homeworld: Cataclysm. For some reason the developers believed they had to introduce physical people with mental issues in a game about faceless ships blowing up each other. Nevertheless, the story is bland. I would like to pretend that this game did not ever exist.
A game that I’ve been waiting years to play for years is Mobius Digital’s Outer Wilds.
I have only heard praise about it. I can’t find the courage to finally play it and end up disappointed.Outer Wilds (not Worlds) is incredible, I doubt you’ll regret playing it.
Well, you might. Some people do bounce off; usually due to not knowing where to go next, or what to do next. But if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t want your hand holding and are okay to persevere a little, you’ll probably have a good time.
No other game for me has ever matched the feeling of exploration and discovery, and that is only possible because the game gives you a long leash.
Funny! Outer Wilds was exactly the OP question for me.
Utterly frustrating realistic space controls, unguided exploration that leads to reentering the same planet for the 8th time and still not finding anything new, annoyingly specific timing-based puzzles…
Tap for spoiler
And a nihilistic “friends we made along the way” ending that doesn’t solve the initial problem. Fuck that.
I’ve had games in my wishlist now that I see “It’s like Outer Wilds!” and I start to think twice about them.
I too came in here thinking about outer wilds.
The controls are less realistic than you think, because they attempted to have the ship correct itself but it constantly fought me. I program spacecraft for a living, I know how the orbital mechanics and movement in 3D space works, and they made it super frustrating it made me rage quit the game for years. I only finished it because a close friend wanted me to experience the story.
For me, the story >!was the games weakest point. Putting together the history and the question of “what happened” was cool, but the dialogue was insufferable, I hated reading the story walls and having to string together the order things were said. Then to finally put everything together, get a half baked story about being marooned on effectively a desert island and it ends with a shrug and “yup, everyone died, you too”… Man fuck that.!<
Different experience for everyone I suppose :)
I found the space controls and conservation of momentum to be such a fun aspect. I loved getting consistently good at it, and feeling like a competent rocket pilot when I nailed fancy manoeuvres.
Silksong on the other hand, I had to give up because it was way too hard for me!
Just pull the trigger and do it so you can know. Don’t rush it. Take your time enjoying the puzzle and piecing together the mystery. There is no rush, a couple moments require good timing but you’ll know what to do when they come up. It’s not everyone’s thing, but if it is your thing, you’ll wish to forget everything so you can play it anew.🙂
Uptick for the awesome nickname.
Thanks mate, it’s my wish to live up to that name.
Now, though, read my comment too!Haven’t played any of the RDR series. I have RDR2 but it won’t work in my Linux box.
A game I had high hopes for was Witcher 3, simply based on internet hype. Somehow it doesn’t work for me. Maybe I was expecting a better Skyrim. The main character is too opinionated. The immersion is not there for me.
- CD Projekt RED’s Cyberpunk 2077:
I never wanted to play any specific games but I did avoid playing Dave the Diver for months thinking it was boring. I could bet money that I would hate it. Gave it a try one day out of boredom and could not sleep until I finish it a week later. 70 hours. (yes I have a full time job)
fucking great game
OP, you should post the exact opposite of this question, too (unless it already exists and i missed it).
Someone already did. https://lemmy.world/post/43801635
Cyberpunk - great environment but gameplay was boring and certain events were downright horrible, like the one were you watch/examine a past event.
Same! I played it for a while got a nonlethal hacker attack pattern down pretty well, i WAS enjoying the story but its a game that makes you feel like you SHOULD be doing the busy work. Then i just stopped because i didn’t want to.
Also something about the absurdity of just sprinting through town smaking strangers to help the obvisouly corrupt cops felt like a tonally stupid thing to do.
God of War: Ragnarok.
I don’t have a console so I had to wait for it to port to PC, then wait til it went on sale and I could snag it at a more reasonable price. I loved the one before it and was so excited to play. The first couple hours were good, and then I felt like it was an endless repetition of fight a boss, talk about our feelings while we walk to fight another boss, talk about our feelings some more, and repeat. The part where you have to play as Atreus helping that giant girl do her daily chores made me want to weep from boredom and it just went on forever. I think I gave up shortly after Freya met her brother again, but I don’t really remember the storyline because it was just so mind numbingly exhausting, like listening in on a bunch of therapy sessions (and I’m super pro “take care of your mental health and go to therapy if you need it”, but if I have to listen to a literal god whining and acting willfully helpless for an entire video game I’m out).
I have been told that it is actually a good game that gets better and I should give it another go, but I’m not sure if it’s good for MY mental health.
