There’s an indie platformer called Fallen Leaf that has really good reviews. In the opening cutscene you are told a story about how in the past the world was saved by sealing away a great evil underground. The first level of the game sees you exploring a cave that your main character didn’t even want to be in, at the behest of his sister (IIRC).
Some ways into the cave your path is blocked by a talking bear who politely but firmly explains that it is dangerous ahead and no one may pass. If you attempt to get past them, they gently boop you back.
What the game clearly wants you to do is shoot a stalactite so that it falls on the bear. No, game, I don’t think I’m going to murder this innocent bear just so that I can be the one who releases the ancient evil I will spend the rest of the game fighting against. I will just quit here while the world is still safe and the polite bear is unharmed, thanks.
I hate it when games make you do heinous shit like this just to advance the plot. Call me any name you like, I don’t enjoy being a terrible person in a game that I didn’t go into with the expectation of playing the part. It just sucks and makes me not want to play your game.
I’m with you guys on this. I don’t want the plot of a game to hinge on me both being the villain and the hero.
It’s always at a point where the game suddenly requires a skill that isn’t part of its usual gameplay. I played a crafting and exploration game that suddenly has a huge platforming element in the late game in a dungeon, and it was even timed! The rest of the game involved no platforming, and it wasn’t even particularly difficult to do but I suck at platforming, never enjoyed it, and I especially did not need the stress of a timer in an otherwise relaxing game.
Another story rich game which was heavy on logistics suddenly turned into a shooter. No, thank you.
Another thing I hate is when I turn the difficulty down and the only option is to do it across the board so I may as well stop interacting with the game. I know I’m bad at fast-paced precision inputs. That doesn’t mean I don’t want cool puzzles to solve or complex systems.
I know, I know: “get good.” I’m old. Shooting and platforming are not the skills I care to be developing at this stage of my life.
I quit Skyrim when they threw a mandatory stealth mission at me and I hadn’t leveled Stealth at all. Granted, most people don’t play it for the underwhelming story anyway…
Outer Wilds: Echoes of the Eye DLC does this, unfortunately. Halfway through the story, Myst-like exploration of an abandoned location turns into horror wandering around pitch black locations with a janky lantern, being chased by creepy-looking aliens. Nope, made me stop playing. (Horror and jumpy enemies are fine if I have a weapon and can control the protagonist. But not if it’s a death cutscene at a single touch in complete darkness. It made me more uncomfortable than Dusk, or Quake, or Blood did)
Did you try the “less scares” setting? I think it makes this part easier, because I was watching someone struggle with this and as soon as they turned it on they passed it on the next try.
Doesn’t that just turn off their screeches or something?
I absolutely loved Outer Wilds, except for our friends in Dark Bramble. But once I had do those parts of the DLC, I installed a mod that lit the place up and made the things in there not know around.
I was in for a puzzle space exploration game, not a stealth horror game.
IIRC no screeches and they move slower. Not sure how much that would help though since in one location, they wander in the dark, and player cannot see them without alerting them.
I played on the Switch, so no mods for me. I would lighten everything up, at least.
Oddly, the Dark Bramble didn’t bother me as much. I got a surprise once without even seeing the guy, then a jumpscare once, but generally, those guys are chill, hang out in one place, and are visible (or have a giveaway, at least).
Loved the original Outer Wilds too.
It seemed like it made there be literally less guards but maybe she just got lucky on the winning run.
This.
I grew up on Diablo 1 & 2. I could co-op with friends, the grind wasn’t too bad, and the RNG table for loot was acceptable. Then Diablo 3 launched with a real money auction house, it made me realize that GAMETIME = MONEY and it just zapped all of the fun.
Haha i remember the real money auction house. God what a blunder that was. But glad it’s no longer a thing. Didn’t last very long
At the time people used to buy and sell Diablo 2 items on eBay. I guess that’s why they decided to add it to the game.
Fallout 4 - when I kept getting the notifications about my settlements getting attacked. I tried setting them up with rocket launcher turrets to protect them but that was just annoying.
The main storyline wasn’t interesting enough to make me want to play it with the stupid grind of base building.
I’m not a very active gamer, and Fallout 4 was the only one I ever played. I got to the end basically, but no faction really seemed like a good choice so I took a break before starting down the final path with anyone. Years later, still haven’t ever gotten around to it.
Love the whole Fallout universe lore though, and I probably watched more hours of gameplay and lore videos on all the games than I spent playing FO4. I at least got that out of giving it a go.
I have been playing Fallout since the first game barely worked on my parents computer.
The universe is amazing and I would go room by room, reading everything off of terminals and finding all the backstories.
It killed me that I didn’t want to go back and play Fallout 4 because I want the story but the game was just too annoying.
That’s such a shame. I’ve always felt a bit better about it being my introduction, as it didn’t seem terrible going in with no preconceived notion about what it was supposed to be. I could feel lots of cool pieces of an idea, but it never got me hooked on playing. I enjoyed the terminals learning about the world, and the factions were interesting, but none of them were fun or felt like they had too much of a chance to reform the Commonwealth as they were.
After I stopped playing, I still enjoyed watching the lore and the TV show, and some bits of playthroughs since I don’t have anything that will play the other games and I’ve really enjoyed everything Fallout otherwise, so I’m glad I had something to get me interested in the franchise.
Did you go back to the series and play 76? I never learned much about that one as I heard it was even more disappointing and empty at launch, but I’ve heard some story bits since making it sound like they added things eventually, but I’ve never been curious enough to seek it out.
Satisfactory and copper powder. Fuck copper powder
IMO there’s a few recipes that are fairly big momentum killers in Satisfactory. Factory games are probably my favourite genre and I love so many parts of satisfactory but I always hit a point in a playthrough that makes me quit (funnily enough, it’s often not the same item that makes me quit).
I almost quit then too. I eventually built a huge copper mine for just producing copper powder and conveying it to my main factory. It still was a struggle until I maxed all my production out there.
Life is Strange
The entire premise is that the protagonist can turn back time, and make different decisions.
Except for cut-scenes. As soon as a cut-scene hits, suddenly its “You aren’t able to rewind time right now”, with no narrative explanation. Like, I get that you didn’t want to program that part, but the entire premise is about rewinding time, to try different decisions. Now I’m stuck having made an arbitrary decision, because I thought I was going to be able to go back and pick differently.
The ending makes you want to quit even more Just wait and see.
i usually quit after the ending anyway
Absolutely loved Dark Souls until I needed to get the lord soul from the catacombs. I dunno why but the catacombs pissed me off and I quit. Just so dark. Maybe I’ll try again.
Take a divine weapon in and rush the lantern holders. Divine weapons make them stop reviving.
They mentioned the Lord Soul, which means they’re talking about the Tomb of Giants area below the Catacombs.
Which is pitch black, made up of narrow cliffs with deadly drops (that you can’t even see until you’re a few feet away), is filled with giant skeletons that hit hard and aren’t fun to fight, and even with a light source visibility is so poor that you only get a second’s warning before a group of giants kicks your shit in. It’s only not the worst area because Lost Izalith exists - both areas suck but the boss of the Tomb of Giants is at least decent; meanwhile Lost Izalith’s Bed of Chaos is possibly the worst designed boss fight in the entire Souls franchise.
The entire endgame of Dark Souls post-Anor Londo is infamously rushed and uneven. The Duke’s Archives is the only section that comes close to the quality of what came before.
Right, I meant tomb of giants.
Ahhhh yeah you’re right. Been a minute since I played DS1.
Thanks for the tip, I never tried a divine weapon. I think I’ll start a new play through and remember that.
I’ve played and beat the game and I have no idea what you’re talking about lol
They’re talking about the necromancer characters and the skeletons that they revive constantly in The Catacombs. If you kill the skeletons with a Divine weapon, that’s to say a weapon upgraded into the Divine tree, then they’re not revived by the necromancers anymore.
That all being said, necromancers are only found in The Catacombs which is directly before The Tomb of The Giants. The Tomb is probably the dark area that they were talking about where you’d want a Skull Lantern or the Sunlight Maggot (the helmet) instead of a simple torch.
The problem with getting the Sunlight Maggot is that it’s only found pretty early in Lost Izalith which is pretty far away from The Tomb. It requires you to have already defeated Ornstein and Smough, meet Gwynevere, and thus unlocked the golden fog gates then afterwards go to the bottom of Blighttown, lower the lava by defeating Ceaseless Discharge, go through the Demon Ruins, then right after the Firesage Demon you can find the one enemy that drops it.
The problem with the Skull Lanterns is that they’re rare drops from the Necromancers who don’t respawn so you only get one chance to kill each of them for any possible drops. If none of them dropped one then your only choice is to start another save. The game does thankfully have a system so that if none of them dropped a Skull Lantern then the last one is guaranteed to drop one, but some of them can easily run off a cliff/bridge in which situation their drop will remain at the bottom where they died. If you don’t pick it up from their corpse at the bottom of the cliff (which you can get to, but will require completing the entire area) then that drop will despawn and you’re no longer guaranteed to get the final drop since you already had one spawn.
I don’t think either of these options are an easy/simple “oh just go pick this up” type of recommendation since it’s very possible someone could have never gotten either of them before getting to The Tomb of The Giants.
The RC helicopter missions in Vice City.
Rage. Absolute rage. My neighbor at the time was really good at it. We all made him do that part for us 😂
Starfield. God awful pacing and dialog that made you go “oh please shut up”. I went to neon and every vendor had a 5+ minute cutscene wah wah side quest story i couldn’t give a shit about.
“Oh somebody fucked my robot and now im sad so let me explain that again with 20 paragraphs” -Shop Keeper I don’t give a shit fuck about your dumb robo bitch i have 20 spacesuits i need to sell so i can fast travel again.
The fact they didn’t bother to add a dialog box first to access a service or buy/sell goods before the vendor starts telling you their life story was enough to make me not play again.
I was on the verge of breaking down and quitting after I did the math on all the
dragon shoutspace wizard powers, and realized that in order to level everything up to max, I would have to sit through eight hours of just the shitty temple minigame. But that just made me stop trying to get dragon shouts.What broke me was another notification saying that my mannequin of a wife had another gift for me.
Any time it feels like the physical action required to play the starts to feel like a chore just to interact with the game as designed. Like hold buttons to interact with common features or complex submenus where you need to navigate a 3+ button combo where you hold the first then the second then press the third to perform a common action.
THIS. OMG. Pressing down the left stick to sprint is fucking awful. Worst feeling button.
100x this. I always remap to one of the extra back buttons when playing on Steam Deck.
Spec ops the line. White phosphorus.
Can I ask why? That’s where I gave up, but I keep having trouble articulating why.
You’re forced to do something stupid and evil for the story to progress. Even if you try to avoid it, the game won’t let you continue unless you commit an obvious war crime.
Ah yeah, I think that’s it. I was felt mad that I kept trying everything to avoid dropping phosphorous. They take away your agency, and force you to do a war crime. I’m guessing that later they call you out for being a bad person for doing that?
Yes, and worse:
Tap for spoiler
Immediately afterwards you learn that you fired on civilian refugees, not soldiers.
Ah, that’s dumb. That whole area of the game had strong “Stop hitting yourself” vibes.
Usually anything that requires hours of grinding to win. Specifically completive play in Pokemon requiring hours of breeding to get perfect IVs and palworld bosses that require multiple perfect pals in order have enough dps to compete in the time limit
Pokemon champions, basically removed the need to grind for perfect IVs . You can fuck around with any pokemon’s stats, abilities, natures, and moved super easily, all it costs is some in came currency that’s not difficult to get.
I didn’t fuck with competitive pokemon for the same reason as you and with champions being out all aboard, even looking into local tournaments
Every time I try to play a JRPG or some Japanese games in general and they do that thing where they explain the same story beat over and over again or go through gameplay mechanics insanely slowly. Then people say yeah but it gets better after 10 hours, I’m like who the hell has 10 hours to burn on such nonsense.
People complain about the new wolverine game that it plays itself, at least that one seems to have a story that moves on after it told you something.
There are so many popular games like this that I can only reasonably explain by assuming the people glazing them are children or mentally challenged, but then how do they sell by the millions?
People don’t play and enjoy those games for an efficiently told story and nothing else.
Of course, it’s for the click attack, skill, attack, heal sequence of a gameplay loop. I kid, I kid.
Efficiency is one thing, endless repeating and hand-holding is another. I wish I actually understood what people see in these games other than nostalgia.
That goddam monkey level in SNES The Lion King
ALL YOU HAD TO DO WAS FOLLOW THE DAMN TRAIN CJ
