What universally beloved videogame you just can't enjoy?
What universally beloved videogame you just can't enjoy?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
Minecraft. I just couldn't get into it and it doesn't interest me.
Any MOBA
Elden Ring. Didn't grab me at all.
Stardew is definitely in my top 5 ever.
My first Mario Game was Super Mario World, as such I don't understand why Mario 1 and 3 are so beloved. Groundbreaking they might be, fun they are not.
Any time I got the Mario All Stars Cartridge out and said to myself "I am completing Mario 3 today", after a while my mind went "or I could actually enjoy a round of Mario World" and did that instead.
It's not like I totally didn't enjoy it, but Red Dead Redemption 2. The game was good in many ways, and I totally get why it's so we'll loved, but I just have nothing with the setting. I don't like cowboys, I don't like playing as an asshole who makes bad decision after bad decision, and I also don't like a setting where women are basically property. Just not really my vibe. I just came from Cyberpunk 2077 and the contrast was quite big, even though Cyberpunk is supposed to be more dystopian
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.
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.
I’ve never really found turn-based games to be all that fun. A few have had a good enough story or some other mechanic to make them interesting but it’s just not really my thing, for some reason. (It’s not just a video game thing. A bunch of my friends play poker or complex board games and I’d usually rather watch than play.)
So, something like the Final Fantasy series or Pokémon games would be my answer. Everyone loves Final Fantasy and Pokémon. I’m clearly the weird one. And I probably would love them if they were more action-oriented.
Witcher 2 with its semi-open-semi-linear gameplay has definitely been a better experience in terms of pacing and story. Witcher 3 had quite the environment to wander around in a slow pace and is a much, much larger game with a good enough polish in my opinion, but can be very overwhelming with how many hours it requires for a balanced gameplay.
X4 is one that I couldn't figure out. There aren't a lot of ways to make passive income and the entry barriers to get to participate in anything cool seem extremely high. I'm not grinding quests, in the starter ship, making beans until I can buy a space station for example. $30k quests that only pop up sometimes and 1800 credit profit from trading isn't even close to good enough for that. I ragequit when I bought an affordable cargo ship, found that I could do NOTHING with it to gain passive income, grinded manual money making methods for another few hours and then got bored of it.
I expected this to be a spaceship game where I could tell npcs what to do instead of do all the stuff myself. Perhaps it becomes a management game instead of a grind game eventually, but I don't have the patience to play to that point. Starfield at least has fun gunplay.
I don't know if they're considered "universally beloved". But the Total War series of games theoretically should be directly up my alley based on every other game I play, but for some reason they've never clicked for me.
Dead by Daylight and that genre in general.
"Let's all play a horror game where someone running is like a person casually browsing the mall."
Animal Crossing.
Any battle royale games. They all look so toxic.
Most survival builder games. They're all the same. Only exception is Project Zomboid, but it has to be with friends.
Soulsborne games. If the game is hard, just to be hard it's not that fun for myself. I play games to escape the stress from my life. Not add to it.
Horror games. I have enough anxiety about mundane shit as it is, I don't need a game to give me more.
Breath of the Wild. The combat is fun but after that got old I realized there was absolutely nothing about the game I found engaging. The world was sparse and filled with the same enemies everywhere, temples were repetitive, the writing/acting was absolutely atrocious, and many of the mechanics were tedious as fuck. Climbing is tedious, cooking is tedious, gathering is tedious.
I genuinely do not understand why the game is so beloved.
Bloodborne for me. Everyone talked about how hard it is, but the game just encourages grinding until you hit your natural talent level. Plus, the story was gross.
Sekiro. Too hard for me, massive skill issue ik. (And I have beaten Elden Ring and shadow of the erdtree so it's not like I dislike all souls-likes... idk)
Anything made by Riot games. They are just worse versions of already existing games.
Destiny 2. I can't play the whole story so I do not care to start it + yk, microtransactions...
Hollow knight. Same deal as sekiro, skill issue on my part.
Factorio solo. Great fun with friends but I just can't get into playing it solo...
Warframe. Shooty and jumpy. OK. No strategy. Just shooty big guns. Boring. Compare to helldivers 2. No jumpy allllllll strategy. This or that syrategem? Throw or hide? Which objective first?
I
friedtried Kingdom Come: Deliverance and honestly hated everything about it. I didn't enjoy the combat, voice acting, or graphics. I felt like I spent most of the game running (and running and running) to the next quest and it was very boring. On top of all of that, it felt so much like Christian propaganda it made me feel uncomfortable. "Hello random npc" -> "JESUS CHRIST IS YOUR GOD REPENT NOW hello PC would you like to buy some flowers?" -> "um, no thanks, I guess" -> "OK, have a nice day PRAISE JESUS THE CREATOR OF ALL THINGS AND THE ONE TRUE GOD". It would have been bearable if the game was good, but it just wasn't.Stardew is... fine I guess, but there's always something else I'd rather play.
Monster Hunter. The combat is fun, but QOL is miserable.
Didn't see them mentioned yet, but the Civilization games. Which is funny, because I love the 4x strategy game Galactic Civilizations, and many other strategy games like Europa Universalis, Victoria, XCom Total War, and Expeditions. But something about the abstraction and tile system turns me off. I recently tried Old World, and similarly couldn't make it through a single game.
Anything within the MMORPG genre, the Diablo-like genre, and the Looter Shooter genre.
Played them on my own -- Felt like I was grinding just so I could grind some more, the entire thing felt like an exercise in pointless skinner-boxing with no reward other than "number go up"
Played them in the company of friends -- Second verse same as the first, but now less tedious because of voice-chat with people whose company I enjoyed, the micro-instant they had something else to do I'd log off immediately because the whole thing bored me.
Then I'll see people get excited for like, Diablo 4, and it's like -- This is the same skinner box as the last three games, but now slightly prettier. And now you know you are giving your money to abusers and I'm like "?!?!?!?!?????!?!?"
How do people get a kick out of clicking the same monsters until they explode like piñatas for a random chance at a helmet that gives them +.5% gullibility status?
Every video game is this on some level, but these games are so very transparent with this, I just can't. Not only do I not enjoy them, I flat-out don't understand how people enjoy them.
Final Fantasy. Haven’t played any of them, and I’m not interested in playing them at all.
I played one Resident Evil game for 5 minutes, and gave up because of the fucking stupid controls.
Outside of that, probably Halo. I've tried several of them because I loved first-person shooters, but they just felt a little soulless to me, and unbelievably slow compared to the likes of Unreal Tournament, Quake, and Doom.
Bloodborne. I just can't click with the gameplay. I've tried and tried and tried. I've bounced off of it. Been filtered.
Not the game's fault. It seems fantastic for what it's going for, clearly very finely tuned. I just have never been good at doing these frame perfect 3rd person melee games. I just listen to loads of lore videos on it now.
I just can't get into one-player games anymore. My little brother, who's awesome in every way, got me these two great games for birthday and Christmas. Hades, and Witcher III: Wild Hunt. And I can't for the life of me get into them. I want to play with other people! Also, I'm one of those people that wants to explore every little bit of the world before going to fight the boss, because I hate being under leveled for a fight. Leads me to explore for an hour, find a bunch of sweet stuff that definitely will help me later in the game, then I die to a pack of flipping wolves, lose all my stuff and have to start over. Did that a couple times then stopped.
Started Hades, and the game started with blaring music that I couldn't turn down. Nothing in the game controls was doing it, so I turned it off.
Meanwhile I'm basically addicted to DOTA 2, and put over 1000 hours into SMITE just because that was a game my lil bro played. Soon as I got good enough to play SMITE with him, he stopped playing 😥
BioShock Infinite. The gunplay is very basic and it's world doesn't make sense.
Like:
- How can Elizabeth be a up beat Disney princess like character? If she lived in her tower and being experimented on for all her life.
- Why Columbia need slaves? When it haves robots and have control of quantum mechanics.
spoiler
Killing Booker will not stop Comstock being made. Because an Booker who didn't go though with the river baptism still can become Comstock. You need to kill one of Lutece twin's parents. So they never be born. Due to them helping Comstock make Columbia in the first place.
More or less anything “Open World” and to an extent single player in general. I just get bored and ragequit every time mechanics stop being fun (which tends to be 15ish minutes into any session of them). TW3 is a big culprit here. I get about 2 hours in, the combat gets super clunky and I quit, coming back 3-4 years later thinking it might have changed.
I’ve been an FPS player since 2015 and that’s pretty much all I’ve played. Enjoyment in games for me comes from min/maxing a small to medium number of skills/abilities and applying them thousands of times in a similar gameplay loop. I’ve played well over 4,000 hours of apex legends alone, somewhere in the realm of 10,000 games and still could play more if the devs didn’t suck.
Working to love the games… but all of N64!! Who has three arms?!
All kidding aside this year I’ve made an effort with N64 and am finding the gems and that a lot of games are just nicer compared to PlayStation where file size limitations don’t burn the system
Minecraft.
I played Terraria for a bit and I kept getting into the headspace of wtf am I even doing playing the game?
Anytime I touched Minecraft it felt the same.
I've played other, similar builder/mining games, most notably satisfactory and DRG, both of which feel like they have more direction than Minecraft or Terraria.
I don't need much of a push to care enough to progress through a game; an interesting mechanic, a fun playstyle, interesting things to do and achieve... For the most part I'm really laid back when gaming. I don't really get involved in PvP at all, so anything cod/modern warfare/fortnite/whatever, I'm not interested in. I'd rather work cooperatively with people to achieve a goal. Even something like left4dead or counterstrike is pretty decent in my mind. Some competition is fine, but free for all and/or small teams in large battles (like with many Battle Royale games), when it's almost entirely PvP, no thanks. There's always trolls and people who take the game far too seriously, and those are the kinds of people I don't want anything to do with.
I struggled with Terraria because a lot of the mechanics were not obvious. There was a logical progression to get more powerful stuff, and even some fairly good quests and bosses to fight, but you either happen across them and you're wholly unprepared for the encounter, or you have to follow a guide to get the event started. It was a bit convoluted, and the game didn't really explain anything about what you needed to do to move forward. Minecraft feels like the same stuff. It's all exploration and discovery based, basically at random. I know there's some "end game" type stuff in the game, which implies there's progression, but idk, it's all kinds of obfuscated.
Compare with satisfactory, which is largely open, but has a pretty clear set of skill trees and progression. There's no "end" to the game, just endlessly creating items.
There's direction there. It's not a lot, and nobody is going to tell you how to get to the next thing, just that it exists and this is what you need to get to it. There's a hundred different ways to get to that objective, and you have to find your own way.
DRG is basically an endless grind of matches. Procedurally generated, which keeps things lively, but an endless set of essentially the same thing every time. You can get upgrades and cosmetics the more you play, but it's the same gameplay every time you get into a round.
DRG still has a better plotline than twilight.... I mean, Minecraft.
Just getting dumped into an open world with no idea what you can do, or what you should do, isn't really my jam. I tried with Terraria. No thanks.
I enjoyed gwent in Witcher 3 more than the story tbh. Did not enjoy the standalone gwent spinoff they eventually made.
I kind of have the same gripe about Minecraft as you do about Stardew. Not only is it stupid, but it looks like utter shit. The only redeeming quality is being able to do stupid shit in a virtual space with friends. Gmod does all that and more, except better in every way that matters.
Headon blood rites, you would think the big titty orc girl protagonist FPS would be enough to overcome any gameplay issues but no as it turns out I just really HATE hexen inspired games that make you run around in circles constantly searching for hard to find keys and shit to progress the map. I could just barely tolerate that stuff in the OG DOOM games but the hexen likes take the sisyphisus's maze bullshit and make a whole genre out of it. No thanks, I prefer games that respect my time with proper signposting and much fewer bullshit key hunts.
Overload, some of the old FPS fans talk about a game called 'Decent' and how it was actually this underrated gem of a series that offered a novel 6 degrees of movement. So the devs who made that game came back a decade later and put the 6 degrees of freedom in a modern fps game. I gave it about 5 minutes before I was motion sick and ready to go back to my safe and familiar 4 degrees of movement.
Sometimes you gotta pay to figure out what you dont like.
I'm gonna drown in downvotes once I say that I don't like the Grand Theft Auto series. I'm actually serious, I never understood the appeal for those games.
Elden ring
i played like two hours and felt no difference to demon souls, i was like "yep, that sure is a lesser version of demon souls"
Same on Witcher III. I'm the target audience of that game - I love RPGs of all kinds, have played all the classic series like TES, Baldurs Gate, Planescape, Icewind Dale, Dragon Age, you name it. I even play ttrpgs multiple times a week.
I wanted to like Witcher III so bad that I forced myself all the way through the game to an optimal ending. But I just never started enjoying it. The world just feels... Flat. Fake. You do exactly what CD Projekt Red envisions or you hit a stone wall of empty game world.
Despite the skill trees and inventory and all of it, it just doesn't feel like an RPG at all. It feels like a Disney ride on rails.
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Anything published by Ubisoft, Activision, Electronic Arts, Take-Two, Epic, Microsoft, Sony, sadly now Bethesda, and most other major publishers.
"Can a computer make you cry?" So much has been lost.
Ocarina of Time. I tested it out some time ago. I'm sure any game with time travel is going to have this as a weakness, but it's just so clunky. The story feels like a weird living childhood daydream sprinkled with what many accuse of being political undertones, and while I technically don't mind the graphics, those particular ones are weird as a glasses-wearer who is using them to fight.
All of this was especially the case during the level where you're inside Jabu-Jabu, which is the whole reason I ever played the game in the first place, as I had to help my friend through the level because of both the headache-inducing squiggly lines (which go with the graphics like a 60-watt bulb goes with a 180-watt lamp and prevented my other friend from helping, he gets vertigo despite his age) and because the parts right before and right after Jabu-Jabu set off her submersion phobia since you're in the country of Ruto. Sometimes the game seemed to know how to crossover into the style of Garth Marenghi's Darkplace, which is a neutral statement.
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