I stopped playing it after the credits rolled only for someone to tell me there’s a secret Act 3 if you do some really specific stuff. I don’t really care for games that require guides, especially if they gate a bunch of content behind it, so I never came back to it.

However, I did enjoy the first two acts of Silksong much more than the first game. I was never a big fan of Hollow Knight and considered it among the worst of popular metroidvanias. But Silksong was pretty good outside of the fetch quests. Unlockable alternate move sets was probably my favorite bit

I couldn’t connect with Outer Worlds either. I gave it a good shot but it didn’t give me any new feelings or enjoyment.

New Vegas was one of the best games of its type… for the time. It doesn’t hold up well on a technical level, the side quests are largely less immersive and interesting because our expectations have broadly changed. It was by far the best game I had played… in 2010. A lot has changed in the intervening 15 years and now the game feels small, cramped and limited in scope, to say nothing of how dated the graphics are.

What people are really saying when they hype up New Vegas was how much the story mattered. And how you had actual choices that impacted things, something that is dreadfully absent in modern games that have to play it safe and make sure the player has exactly the experience intended. When was the last time you played a game where you could skip right to the last boss and kill him (or join him!) and then the game goes on and people now know what happened or can learn that you did it? It would be AMAZING with today’s technical advances to have that kind of freedom and involvement with a storyline.

Oh really? I did have fun with the Outer Worlds. Nothing too amazing, but it was fun enough to keep me invested. Parvati was also a large reason for that, I loved her character.

With 2 out I thought I’d give the original one more chance. I wish I hadn’t. The story is just as bad as I remember, and the gameplay is somehow worse.

I mean the only way to talk about the story is that you’re better off just running through without thinking about it, because at every level it just fails at its messaging. It simply is what it is. What compounds that suck is that the game isn’t even that well designed of a shooter, or implemented well. The controls are gummy, your character feels weightless, and as someone almost 7 feet tall IRL I still feel like the POV is a foot too high. Guns feel boring, the skill system is unimpactful, dialog is stilted, characters are flat as cardboard, and overall the entire game just feels like you’re meant to squint at it until you forget what you’re doing and just reminisce about playing fallout. All I feel when I play is a distinct fear that I will see the seeds of Outer Worlds in games I loved as a kid before I knew to look for such flaws.

I didn’t think it was so bad I had to stop playing, but I did stop playing one night once it got late and just never started it again, nor had the desire.

It seemed fine enough, but it just didn’t click with me I guess.

Well just fyi. The end missions are currently, still today, broke. So only one ending available that is regardless of whatever choices you made.

I loved the first one. I like this one but they made some bad changes.

But mostly they need to fix the mission bugs.

First one you could change the armor and weapons on the companions.

Also I really liked the vicar and Parvati. Vicar was like a snarky gay guy and I loved it. I will admit the other 3 were blah. But the new companions on OW2 are kinda bland.

I don’t really like any of them. Niles and inza had potential but wasn’t developed.

And I straight up dislike Tristan’s personality. He’s just awful.

Aza can be entertaining. If they made her more impulsive I think that could have been fun.
For instance if you take too long in negotiations and shes present. She just starts attacking people after some time limit.

Or randomly attacks strangers she doesn’t like the look of.

They could have done something interesting with her.

But mostly they need to fix the damn quest bugs so I can finish the game.

Also there was a quest in ow1 where some sketchy dude asks you to do some sketchy thing. And you realize this during the quest. You can go back to him and get the reward. Or sucker punch him.

I wanted more of that in ow2. Didn’t get it.

I played through fhe whole series thinking the good part was about to happen since there was hype for the game.

Out of curiosity, who did you romance, and why?

I love the series, but I played the games when they came out. It’s true that the level design of ML2 suffers from it being a cover shooter and ML1 is very dated now.

Which of the three titles did you hate most/represents your dislike best?

I do wish they’d done more with the buildings.

The structures being carbon-copy was lore, they’re built in factories and dropped from ships.

But that doesn’t mean they all need the same boxes in a row layout internally, some personality would have been great and pretty easy to implement.

I feel vindicated. I have the exact same feeling of factorio feeling too much like work, having to refactor everything because the requirements change is one of the more frustrating parts of software engineering imo, and the game feels tailored specifically to invoke that frustration.

I imagine that part gets better after the first hundred hours where you basically know what’s coming. I don’t have the patience to learn the tech tree though, given that I don’t even enjoy the game.

I feel both of these strongly for the same reasons, also GoW had all the sluggishness of a Souls-like which immediately made it not fun to play.

Factorio’s the awakening for a lot of people on certain ends on the spectrum. My AuDHD makes it crack for me. I will say though, while the tutorial teaches you some essentials, it just throws you into the deep end once you start a real game.

I only discovered all the tips and quality of life from videos online, and there are some troubles in the game you can solve on your own but good fucking luck (belt balancing).

Might not be your kinda game, but if you ever feel like giving it another chance, check out some vids online for beginner tips (: It’s a game about stimulating the Eureka! part of our ooga booga caveman brains and it feels amazing.

I absolutely love Factorio. I even bought the DLC the moment it came out.

I’m also absolutely rubbish at the game. I’ve never managed to finish the game on my own, and usually struggle to get blue science producing at all, much less at the correct ratio.

I do have fun with trains though, so I’ll often jump into friends’ games and just optimize (replace) their train networks.

Agreed. New GOW was much better.

It’s absolutely a generic open world game, bit that’s not necessarily a bad thing. The formula is fun if it’s done well, which I think it is for Horizon Zero Dawn. The combat style is also uncommon and provides a satisfying loop of stealth and bullet time mechanics.

Took me awhile to get into it. I did eventually finish it. My criticism of the game was more that the dungeons aren’t really all that challenging and are mostly just places where the story advances. Not many puzzles or fights. You just do your fighting out in the open world. Also, eventually the fights are easy as you learn how to fight each type. Eventually you just avoid confrontations because they’re just time consuming.

Dude. I have tried like 3 times to get into the horizon series. Just can’t do it. It’s so generic, just pretty.

I liked both games, but combat is ruined in the second. Literally just constant spamming of massive AOE attacks. All the nuance of the first is literally nuked from orbit.

I had a great time with that game with the difficulty turned up a few notches. It really makes you use the tools in your tool belt, plan ahead for weaknesses, and lay traps. Without that stuff, I likely would have found it to be a generic open world, too. The story will always be ridiculous, but even taking itself seriously, there’s a payoff toward the end of the game where taking itself so seriously is still satisfying and makes sense, even with a world filled with absurd robot dinosaurs.

I don’t think it was quite as generic at the time of release, but yeah I tend to agree

That’s because you’re playing it wrong. You see, at it’s core Skyrim is actually a puzzle game you play on the Nexus Mods website. You spend 30+ hours carefully researching, building, and tweaking the perfect pack of mods, only to immediately run out of interest in playing Skyrim once you’re finally done. The actual Skyrim installation only exists to check if you solved the puzzle correctly and it runs.

Skyrim came out 14 years ago.

Just get openmw and play a real elder scrolls game before Bethesda got got

I recently tried Fallout 4 based off of the same expectations. Probably didn’t even make it a quarter of the way through the main story. I was having absolutely no fun. The thing that finally killed it for me was spending 5 minutes calculating which items needed to be sold at a shop and which I should keep, then getting blown up a block later, then respawning right before I did all that inventory management.

I have the opposite opinion. I avoided it for years because of the hype (and not having proper hardware to run it).

Now I have almost 900 hours in it, and sometimes I jump in just to walk around and revisit some places.

I love that game, spent hundreds of hours in it a while back, and don’t remember fuck all about the story.

it’s a shoot 'em up loot game, and it does a great job of it IMO

absolutely a brainded activity though. it and Bioshock are two different frames of mind when you’re playing them

Did you play it solo or with people? I found the game to be fairly dull solo. It was better with people but the loot system still allowed a lot to be desired especially if you played with greedy people.

Yeah, I enjoyed a bit of 2016, but got bored a didn’t finish it. I think Doom Eternal I had from Steam Family Sharing (or other source I didn’t pay for) and just couldn’t get into it. I hate both of them forcing the melee kill thing that takes you out of the action to watch a cutscene, but Eternal just didn’t feel like it worked for some reason.

The new Doom games are all very different from each other. I liked what Doom 2016 was doing (even if it got repetitive) but really didn’t enjoy Eternal because the constant juggling didn’t sit with me. I haven’t tried Dark Ages but it seems like it’s doing something between 2016 and Eternal (not quite use what you want and not quite always juggle) while also adding its own dimension with the mix of melee and guns.

I would never recommend each Doom title based on the last title. But it doesn’t mean I don’t like what they’re doing. I think it’s brave to do its own thing instead of doing what is expected.

Yeah. I didn’t really enjoy it, but I got into it and finished it. Once I realized that you’re expected to die and respawn frequently, and you don’t lose anything when you do, playing went a lot better.

I still don’t get that decision, because Doom has never been like that. Even arcade games don’t do that. It just felt trivially cheap at that point.

The game makers had no respect for players’ time.

I don’t know that game, but the importance of respecting the player’s time cannot be overstated.

I wish more game makers understood this and prioritized it accordingly.

I bought into the review hype, bought the game, then realized about two hours after the Steam refund window expired just how tedious this game felt to play.

I really wanted to like it, but it stopped being fun and started being so tedious that I uninstalled it.

I absolutely agree with you, I got to a point where I had solved the “main” puzzle, but was struggling to complete other puzzles (that I knew the solution to) simply due to room draws.

I wanted to love the game, but it held itself back on the RNG design. It can be so detrimental to the game that I wouldn’t recommend it to most people.

Check out Seance of Blake Manor, doesn’t have the rng

Same. The game is fantastic but the RNG is only cool on paper and falls apart just a few hours into the game. The methods they give you to influence your luck are just not enough to do much at all.

It’s really frustrating when you are trying to do something but you constantly have to do something else because that’s what the game is giving you.

I cheated at the end and gave me infinite rerolls for rooms so I could create the layout I needed in that moment. Much better that way.

Deus Ex Human Revolution and Mankind Divided do a similar cyberpunk vibe to Cyberpunk 2077 but with better gameplay and plot IMO.

I really liked and the story. But after taking a year break and then playing the dlc phantom liberty. I kinda was over it. Just felt like work. Not really fun.

So idk. Maybe you just have to be in the right mood for it.

You tried playing with mods though?

LOL I could have told you that before you spent the money.

Thankfully there’s a lot of good games that really shine on high-end hardware. Like that Indiana Jones game and the Spider-Man games. Also you never have to worry about games being an unoptimized mess, when you can just brute force them with pure processing power.

I think this is one of the reasons why Pathfinder 2e has been doing so well.

It’s a middle ish ground and it feels good to progress.

My current issues with it are how underpowered the items are. So boring.

Differentiation comes from role play, which is the least interesting part of the game for me.

Can you explain why you would play a TTRPG if you’re not interested in role play? Seems like a battle sim like warhammer, or just a video game might be the thing you’re looking for.

As a DM, the cooperative story telling IS the interesting part. D&D has never been an airtight game system, it’s a bunch if hand waving to give just enough illusion of structure and randomness so you don’t feel like you’re just arbitrarily deciding everything yourselves. But at the end of the day, you are. The characters and story you’re left with is the only thing of value.

I started TTRPGs with Pathfinder (1e). Some people talk about it like some impossible thing to play. It does have a lot more detail than 5e, but it isn’t that bad. (I did play one character as a wrestler, who did grappling a lot, which is notoriously one of the most complex systems.)

5e sells itself as being simple, and it is in how little control it gives you. However, the rules are anything but simple. There’s so many contradictions and stipulations every player has to memorize. It’s a mess. For example, some spells can be used as bonus actions, but not if you’ve already cast a spell, except for some that can anyway. It’s stupid.

Pathfinder 2e seems to make things so much simpler for everything, while still giving players freedom. Actions are just actions. If you’ve got the points you can use them for anything. Movement, attacks, spells, etc. Pretty much everything just is what it says.

2024 is even worse. On top of that, they also stack extra abilities, and try to give everyone everything.

One of these days I should try Pathfinder

I haven’t played any 3.5e proper, but I understand Pillars of Eternity 1 is largely based on it, and I’ve played a handful of the 2e games. I dig a lot of the changes in 5e. I wouldn’t say the power is so flat that the differentiation only comes down to role play; I’d say a lot of it comes from the apples and oranges comparisons between classes, like things beyond to-hit roles. Your fighter has no AoE attacks like the wizard has but has Second Wind and Action Surge, for instance. The advantage to flattening the differences a bit more is that your character’s role is less preordained (“you are playing class X, so you must be responsible for Y”) and that you are less hamstrung by the absence of one particular role, which scales better to small parties.

3.5e being the best is an opinion I’ve heard for my entire life. I would say preferring 5e is a more unpopular opinion.

5e character progression does feel kind of bland.

I feel the 5e rules are poorly organized, too. Lots of interdependent rules scattered far from each other in the books, and sometimes buried in the middle of seemingly unrelated sections, so unless you’ve memorized multiple chapters, understanding how to resolve common situations sometimes requires stopping the game for 15-30 minutes while someone digs through the books to find all the relevant factors. Even when you do find the relevant info, it’s often in ambiguous language describing what could have been made perfectly clear with a few keywords. The books are pretty, and the text might be nice to read for entertainment, but they’re pretty bad the the job of being game manuals.

Does 3.5e use the d20 system? Does it have the advantage/disadvantage mechanic? I like those aspects of 5e; they’re simple and they help keep games moving along.

Maybe I should give it a try. Or perhaps 4e, which I have read does a better job of clearly defining its gameplay mechanics.

I liked 4e the best.

Graphics are great. Hardware requirements are low, but there are bugs that accumulate with more play time. Learning curve is infinite and permadeath is only option despite a bunch of claims to mod/patch it. PVP is broken, constant spawn camping and pay to play behavior. Microtransactions are a pain. Huge variety of mission types, yet it still ends up feeling like a bunch of fetch quests sometimes. Side quests are the way to go, the main campaign is not super rewarding

Yeah, mid characters except few…