Soulslikes. I am so fucking sick of hearing about them. Elden Ring and it’s jank ass UI did not deserve GOTY.
I don’t have much against any particular game since I can see something that someone would enjoy.
However there are sone things that I actually don’t understand how someone would enjoy;
Always Online: all of your time, money, and love could just vanish underneath you
P2W / P2S: Ah yes, let me make the gameplay loop doing a 9-5
Gacha: Gambling is 80% of the gameplay but somehow they make it unfun
Live Service: By itself not bad. However it enables games to be released completely broken.
I would add games that have no final ending, which are are endless time sucks.
Hero Shooters, specifically Overwatch and R6 Seige. Really any sort of MOBA too. I dont really get the point of having unique characters with loads of lore and an underlying story if you aren’t going to get to experience any of it in gameplay. TF2 gets away with it because the classes arent really characters, they are more like an archetype of that class and the story is just supplemental stuff.
For me its Metroid, and really the whole Metroidvania genre. I can never tell when a challenge is supposed to be possible, or if I’m supposed to come back later, and and up wasting hours trying to do something only for it to be trivial later. I don’t find this at all rewarding.
That said Tunic was a fantastic game, and I love the concept of the ‘Metroid-Brainia’, purely because of the concept that every challenge is theoretically possible from the start, you just need to learn how to do it.
Dark Souls type games that are just pure grinding wasting time.
I bought this shadow game that look awesome gameplay was fun at first… Then something felt off… Things were just ridiculously hard for no reason I kept dying on level one…
I was like… Wtf is this shit? Little googling and the game is made by the dark souls people and apparently this grinding over hard shit IS the appeal…
Na man, I got a job and kids and responsibilities and my one hour of playtime better be fun… And dieing and grinding ain’t it.
Same, what I hate is how many souls like games they make, it’s just cheap
Souls. I’ve tried em and find them repetitive and cheesy in their lack of little details that make games fun for me.
I tried Elden ring and thought it was the ugliest, most repetitive game I’ve ever played. I don’t get the hype for the souls series, it’s just making a game repetitive and difficult to justify its lack of substance
Sports games.
Apart from the endless EA, Ubisoft and similar AAA copy/paste titles I never understood the hype around MOBA games.
I don’t get it. Its not real time strategy, but not an ARPG either, you dont create a character, instead have an insane pool of unique characters with a few abilities each. Its just feels like someone wrote down some random game mechanics and choose 5 at random.
All levels are basically the same with mild variations and the whole gameplay loop boils down to optimised fast clicking on abilities and to get strong asap.
Its super boring for me and couldn’t spend more than a couple hours with the games from the genre. Same goes for watching other people play.
Its just a cherry on top to have the biggest tournaments and cash prices, while the top players are celebrated as superstars. Also somehow the biggest MOBA communities are infamous for toxicity.
Definitely not my cup of tea.
MOBA started as RTS mods for people who liked micro and didn’t like resource management. Add hypermonetization of everything for 20 years and here we are. I don’t get it, either, but to each his own.
I liked the old WC3 mods because of RPG-like level progression. Gave a little hit of dopamine to see a build come together and steamroll the other side. This was well before there was a competitive scene.
The genre got hyper-monetized, and I noped out of that shit.
Everything you wrote is true, and I gotta respect that you’ve at least given mobas a try. It’s not your cup of tea and that’s alright.
One thing that you didn’t mention is the team work. While there are toxic people out there, mobas tend to be games that a group of friends can play together for free. You are correct that the abilities can feel limiting - along that vein finding ways to chain spells together with your team mates was one of the most fun ways to get creative.
This is what makes watching pros play a lot of fun. There are people out there constantly experimenting with mixing items and spells to create hilarious strategies to gain an edge. There are all kinds of spells that can come off as overly subtle and dumb sounding, but you pair it up with something else and all of a sudden you have a wombo combo.
Mobas came out of War Craft 3, so any of the millions of people with a blizzard rts background will have skills that will transfer. The single hero format means you can focus all your attention in one place instead of keeping track of your army and your economy at all times. Starting with an established and automated base means that the game isn’t on a knife’s edge like RTSs. There’s a lot of stability and simplicity here over RTSs.
The games tend to be simple in concept to understand but very difficult to master. I had a lot of fun picking a handful of heroes and learning how to best use them. They all have their own quirks and limitations that may not be obvious at first. Conversely, it was rewarding to learn how to shut down heroes that had stomped me in the past.
It is very difficult to get established in these games. It can feel like one of those tv shows that you have to get to the third season before things get better. And I can completely understand people wanting games that don’t start off as rough. The high skill cap can keep people coming back for years though.
I hope this helps 😊
MOBAs are shit, but they struck a chord with people who are bad at games but want to feel good.
They survive based off of MMR and obscuring people’s true ability. If most people playing MOBAs could see how bad they were, they would lose interest over night.
FIFA and Madden NFL
Souls like. There are literally situations you cannot win on the first try, like when you walk through a door and something stabs you from behind because it was leaned against a wall out of sight.
Also just don’t enjoy fighting gigantic things with ambiguous hitboxes.
Exactly, when a game on purpose disrespects your time and forces you to repeat things for no reason.
Some call it a difficulty curve, I don’t call it anything, just uninstall it.
Definitely avoid monster hunter if ambiguous hit boxes aren’t your thing.
I know I’m biting bait but I rarely got jumped by the “guy around the corner” traps because I looked before walking in. Counter intuitively, running in will also often avoid the worst of it.
I remember people complaining about the floor traps in the first game and I was like “you mean the raised tiles that are a different color? Yeah I was careful around those”. Player messages also help.
It’s okay the game isn’t for you - but “literally can’t win on the first try” is hyperbole.
FIFA and other sport team manager; Farming Simulator; Call of Duty; Fortnite and other battle royals (its just not my game mode.
Yeah, those games are lame as fuck.
Call of Duty was once good, but they chose to milk it to oblivion and now nobody cares.
Most games I just didn’t like and felt it wasn’t fair to call them out, but gambling addiction pushing games like FIFA are high on the list, especially since the annual releases seem to be somewhat identical.
I also don’t really like the sentiment of judging types of games in general; we like different things and that’s good.
But, gacha games can fuck right off. Manipulative, exploitative, addiction seeking nonsense. I’m not even commenting on gameplay or anything so it’s not a specific one… it’s the whole core concept of making a digital slot machine for children that I find offensive.
Balatro. There’s just no motivation to keep playing. It’s just uninteresting. Love me some Slay the Spire, though.
Same. I tried Balatro as something for my tablet.
The ‘permanent’ voucher upgrades aren’t actually permanent at all, and I lost interest after that. There’s no meta advancement beyond unlocks, which is not for me.
The Total War series should theoretically be right up my alley, since I’m a history nerd and I put a LOT of time into Paradox games (EU4, CK2, HOI4, Stellaris, and Surviving Mars are all high on my hours played chart).
But for whatever reason, I’ve just never clicked with the Total War versions of the same thing. For old school, I played Empire and Medeival. For new school, I dipped into Atilla because it was on a sale. I figured old mechanics/new mechanics, maybe one will work better than the other. But while I did somewhat enjoy Empire, the Total War series in general just has never grabbed me.
I have the same issue with the Assassin’s Creed series. History Nerd…should be right up my street. But just have never clicked with me despite trying multiple games. THOSE however are much more clearer to me as to why. It’s the cut and paste gameplay loop that Ubisoft has in ALL of their series.
Unlock an area, do random missions based on a number system for difficulty, interspersed with main plot missions. Move to another area, repeat. Some missions encourage you to team up with other people and go online. Others can be bypassed by micro-transactions. They literally haven’t changed their core loop in years, whether that’s Assassins Creed, Watchdogs, Shadow of War/Mordor, The Division, Far Cry…the list goes on and on.
I tried Warhammer total war thinking I would love it. But the game was just… Not funny to me. I felt like the game was trying to make itself funny too hard. Like I was never able to breathe. Game would be literally spamming armies out of nowhere so I cannot stay a single turn idle, it was always giving me another mission, a new thing to do. Too overwhelming.
I suppose it’s specifically engineered with some other public in mind, but certainly it doesn’t seems to be me.
I’m going to get absolutely roasted for this, but Elden Ring. I put about 10 hours in trying to like it, but it just made me angry and miserable. And it was kinda boring.
I also don’t care for Souls games, but I think ‘angry and miserable’ is the intended experience.
I’m a fan of the Soulsborne games but gave up on Elden Ring because I wasn’t a fan of the empty open world gameplay.
Souls games in general for me, but especially Bloodborne. My girlfriend at the time loved the game so much she had multiple tattoos. She was so happy to guide me through Bloodborne and tried to explain lore, but there’s so very little actual plot that anything I learned just fell out of my head. I couldn’t tell you anything about what happened despite finishing the game and DLC. I don’t get it.
I really tried, maybe 20-30 hours, but didn’t enjoy it much.
Playing as a spellcaster was maybe a mistake.
I recognize it’s a quality game though. I might try again with a melee character. Maybe modded?Dex/arcane bleed builds. Beautiful.
I can recommend a dual Strength/faith build. I did that my first playthrough and it was a lot of fun. I think the Incantations was much funner to play with than the Sorceries. They have far more variety in them. Plus there is a cure Scarlet Rot Incantation that I got a lot of mileage out of to make certain parts less oppressive.
Thanks, I might try that!
I generally like hybrid builds with more variety. Don’t know why I went full mage…
I also think it’s fine to just go full strength if you want something powerful and dead simple.
Carry a colossal sword in each hand, wear the beefiest set of armor you can without going into heavy load, and then just bonk things to death while tanking a lot of hits that would otherwise instantly kill squishier characters.
And don’t be afraid to use Spirit Ashes. There’s this weird machismo thing among players who think that real players don’t need summons, but they’re there for a reason and the game was designed around them.
I might try again with a melee character.
Maybe. The sorcery/incantation/various melee is less of a distinction than many make of it. A lot of it ends up feeling the same: you dodge, wait for the opening, hit your ‘attack.’ If the ‘learn to be a badass by learning patience and boss attacks’ isn’t your thing though, you might never find yourself liking it.
The best elden ring experience is elden ring seamless coop. It makes the game 100000000x better. If you want to play with someone, hit me up. I just got elden ring working again on linux (it had a freezing problem until I reinstalled the OS, probably the nvidia drivers borking out), and am loving it.
