I’ve just uninstalled and removed Balatro after yet a near, very close 8/8 ante finish. I have been failing and failing, I’ve only ever seen and gotten to 8/8 ante twice, this being the second time. Every other run has been just insulting me to where no strategy has ever worked, I feel like a lot of it is RNG and pre-determined outcomes based on seeded runs.
And I hate that way of playing. It always feels like I’m getting smacked down by a troll bully who I can never overcome. They’d kick me down every failed run I’d have, then they give me a false sense of security the further I get. “Awwww, getting tired of being owned? Here, let me help you by giving you a few seemingly lucky breaks. SMACK Oh! OWNED YOU AGAIN! FUCK YOU! LOLLOLOL! I BANGED YOUR MOTHER, GIT GUD, NOOB!1”
I just don’t understand why these kinds of games are around, even when I have a good idea who it is for.
PvP in any context. I find going against other players very stressful, and even when I’m winning, I know I just made the day of other players a little bit worse, and that just sours the experience.
The whole souls universe. It’'s not difficult it’s tedious. I get why people like it, it;'s got great atmosphere and design and ideas. just not for me.
Breath of the Wild. I just don’t see the hype. The weapon durability system really turned me off from the game.
Elden Ring, Lords of the Fallen (the new one – I strangely enjoyed the original enough to beat it, but this one just didn’t captivate me).
I also left Lies of P near the end, because I found a boss too exhausting to keep trying, and life got in the way at some point. Might pick it up again, eventually? Not too sure.
I played and loved Dark Souls 1 and 2, Bloodborne, Sekiro (particularly Sekiro), so it’s not that the genre doesn’t interest me. There’s just something about the above implementations (and DS3, but I did finish that one) that didn’t really captivate me the same way.
Red dead redemption 2. I really just can’t ever get into Rockstar games, I hate the controls, they really just feel bad, so much that it makes it unplayable to me. Having watched a playthrough, I can kind of understand the hype behind it, but haven’t found any enjoyment in it myself.
Heaven’s Vault.
I gave the game multiple tries, because I love the idea of a language puzzle game where you have to figure out the language bit by bit, based on context, environmental clues, and similarities between words. I also like the story and lore I’ve seen so far, and would like to see more.
But I just can’t get past how the gameplay is built. It feels like the game is trying to do multiple things at once and failing at all of them. Every part of the gameplay is slow, with long animations and slow cutscenes everywhere.
While playing you get dialogue opportunities with your robot, but taking them means you need to either stop what you’re doing or risk missing things, or even interrupt them through an arbitrarily placed cutscene/dialogue trigger. And if you don’t take them, you don’t know what you’ll miss.
Traveling between locations in your ship looks fun, but it’s also slow, while also having dialogues happen during it. It also has the option to have your robot take over steering, skipping the navigation sending you to your destination… An option that shows up according to the developers’ whims, so you don’t know how long it might take to show up.
On my last playthrough I decided to try using a mod, I think it was called RuinVault, which speeds up animations and dialogue, lets you skip navigation immediately, and even has a button to straight up speed up time - and what killed that playthrough was when I was leaving a location and my character went “Hmmm, I think I have some of my translations wrong”, and straight up forced me to pick a different option for some of my translations. It made me realize the game is basically forcing me to get the puzzles done “on time”, instead of letting me actually figure them out. I thought I was playing a puzzle game, but if the game decides you’re having trouble with a puzzle, it slowly forces you into the correct solution?
In the meanwhile Chants of Sennaar came out, and while it seemed simplistic compared to Heaven’s Vault’s language, it also felt like an actual puzzle that the game let me solve, and it could still tell a story through both environments and the text I had to translate.
I reckon I might just need to find a playthrough video to watch because playing the damn game is just endlessly frustrating.
Super Metroid. It’s supposed to be a classic but I can’t stand it. I just hate the way the physics feels so slow. Jumping and left/right acceleration just made the game feel terrible to play.
The Metroid prime series were great though.
Terraria. Hate me.
I am not the fan of looking up guides and other info out of the game, and I also kiiiinda suck in full sandbox due to, generally, not being good at setting my own targets.
Like give me some final task and I am happy to work towards it, but with no target whatsoever I am kinda lost.
However, last I played Terraria was decade ago so stuff may have changed. xD
Well, hollow knight. It should be great for me.
But the whole signaling of the world and characters doesn’t work for me. So I am constantly poking in the dark and not really having fun feeling incapable of even finding where I should be going.
XCOM 2. I love enemy unknown/enemy within, but bounced right off 2. There were so many little details that just made me quit after about an hour. In comparison, I’ve run through the other dozens of times.
For starters, Skyrim. I genuinely wanted to like it since the PS3 era, but it just wasn’t my kind of RPG.
Assassin’s Creed: Black Flag. I loved the first AC games, but there was something about AC:BF that just made me dislike the series from this game on. I just couldn’t get into it. After a few missions, I turned it off and never went back to it.
As a huge survival horror fan i have tried getting into Alan wake 3 times over the course of 10 years and i just can’t. Game just feels janky and the enemies and game mechanics feel more annoying than scary.
Deponia just has such an unlikeable protagonist, that I bounced off, even though I’m a fan of point & click adventures.
Reus is too complex and grindy. I liked the premise, but in practice it wasn’t fun to play.
Sims 3 I kept returning to every few years, but each time I quickly got bored of the daily life management gameplay. I like to experience stories other people wrote, not come up with my own.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
I don’t find my weapon breaking every 10 minutes fun, nor do I find the endless wandering with no context clues very engaging. I swear 90% of the stuff you have to stumble onto by dumb luck. It took me months to accidentally bump into that stupid maraca tree thing and expand my inventory. That’s just dumb design.
In a mandatory cut scene, a character tells you “Head toward the dueling peaks, then, follow the road to Kakariko village.” Hestu, the inventory expanding broccoli homonculus, is standing on the side of that road in a conspicuous location.
It’s a game about free exploration, it’s silly to expect the player to directly follow these instructions. Just make him part of the mandatory tutorial area or have him come to you after collecting your first 10 seeds or something.
I only found out about the guy after finishing the game.
I love these games, but I totally agree with you. I missed hestu and didn’t find him for probably the first 15 hours of the game. Basically it took someone having pity on me and saying “just go here”, Very frustrating.
It’s not just the tree guy. The whole game’s like that.
Here, let me give you another example of the counter-intuitive gameplay I encountered:
The volcano. It’s hot. I need to travel up it.
First attempt: Check my available tools for something. Bombs, no. Timestop, no. Ice pillar, maybe? no. Swords, Shields, Bows… no.
Second attempt: Explore the area, see a hotspring. Try to map out a route using hotsprings as a cooling source. No dice.
Third attempt: Visit all the major cities for info, nothing found other than the volcano is hot. No vendors selling any items that can help.
Fourth attempt: Circle around and try to find a tunnel, putting on all my desert gear to reduce heat damage. Catch fire regardless, no cave found.
Fifth attempt: Load up all my food and make meals, brute force my way to the base camp. No assistance there, have to teleport out.
Sixth attempt: Doing a completely unrelated hunt for a shrine, bump into the NPC selling fire resist potions at a horse stable. A horse stable I mostly ignore because the game lets you teleport everywhere!
Do I feel accomplished, finally finding this only way up the volcano? No! I feel like Nintendo just wasted my time!
Even worse, when I finally make it to the Goron city and buy the fireproof armor, I bump into a Goron who gives me half the recipe to make the fire resist potion. Not even the whole recipe. And he was far far beyond the base camp I brute forced to. If he had been in all the other cities, and with the full recipe, maybe this wouldn’t have been such a challenge of dumb luck.
Wow. Seems like your approach must have been really off the beaten path.
From memory, I think I was offered a fireproof elixir by an NPC at the nearest stable, and by a traveling vendor further up that road, and was given the flamebreaker armor for helping an NPC about halfway to Goron City. (That last one caught my interest because the help needed was in catching fireproof lizards, which seemed relevant to my immediate needs.) Any one of those would have been enough.
Your experience must have been frustrating. Were you avoiding roads and NPCs, by any chance?
Nope, I talked to every NPC at all the towns, and on the roads. But, I didn’t stop at any of the horse stables since I never had need of a horse. It’s all cliffs and teleportation!
Edit: The fireproof armor NPC was only one part of the armor needed to make yourself fireproof, and of course he was at the base camp I had to teleport away from since I was on fire.
I think you only need one piece of the flamebreaker set to
be fireproofsurvive in Goron City. You would need a second piece (or one piece and an elixir) to get closer to the caldera, but by that time you can buy a second piece in the city. You never need the third piece.I went to the stables just to check out what was there, and discovered that they have quest information, quest triggers, rumors about the world, vendors that don’t show up elsewhere, mini-game challenges with rewards, hints at the locations of Link’s lost memory photos, etc. It never occurred to me that someone might miss out on all that stuff if they weren’t given a reason to visit a stable. (Maybe the game gives a hint to go there? I don’t remember.)
Sorry you drew the short straw.
I think you only need one piece of the flamebreaker set to be fireproof in Goron City.
whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat.
I don’t think I ever found a potion before clearing the area. I remember stocking up on food, like you, and eventually stumbling into the merchant selling me fire resistant armour.
The only reason I didn’t brute force the whole way was I ran out of food.
Talking to NPCs to find out things about the immediate area is a major part of the game.
If you do what the King says, you’ll encounter NPCs that have some early world building dialog, an easily climbed tower to start filling in the map and get the shrine sensor, four convenient shrines, one of which has the climbing bandana in it, great time to get that because you don’t have a hat at all yet so the extra armor plus the climbing speed buff is excellent to have, there’s a stable with a sidequest that teaches you how to catch horses, you’ll find Hestu along the path up to Kakariko and likely increase your inventory (or learn that koroks exist), and then in Kakariko the shrine there is a combat tutorial, there’s a fairy fountain nearby, plus Impa sets you on the main quest of the game. Having done four shrines, you can add a heart or stamina wheel sector. Pikango is here, and there are several sidequests in Kakariko to get stuck into.
Impa sends you to Hateno to get the memories sidequest going. Major location in the game with some adventuring and side questing to do, more expository dialog and world building, you get the camera and shiekah sensor, get sent back to Impa, and then you’re kicking around in Kakariko with no immediate goal. You look out one of the exits of town you haven’t taken yet and you see a wide open area with two visible shrines and a tower. Course charted, you get sucked into the Zora plot. Once that’s done, you’ll have Mipha’s Grace, an additional heart, some more armor, and then the training wheels are off and now it’s up to you to pick a direction to explore.
“I didn’t do what the NPC said and didn’t find something important the whole game” gives big “why don’t my kids ever call” energy.
Wow dude, you go straight to insinuating we’re abuser who’s family abandoned them because we accomplished a goal without follow instructions to the letter in a video game?
It does remind me strongly of the people I’ve cut off, yes.
no reflection at all on how 0 to 11 that reaction is? Huh… Well, another to add to the block list I guess.
Ignoring your uncalled for insult, that’s just not how I play games.
Once I was free of the tutorial area, I set off in a random direction and did my thing. I completed multiple divine beats before ever setting foot in Kakariko.
If I wanted to follow the direct path as described by NPCs, I might as well go play a linear game. I got to the destinations eventually, but almost never on the beated path.
Having tried and failed to get into it some 8 or 9 times, I have to agree. Maybe it’s different if you grew up playing The Legend of Zelda, but I just found the visuals drab, the combat overly simple and yet slow, and above all like it was trying to be deliberately aggravating to play.
Not at all what one expects from one of the most acclaimed video games of all time, I do wonder how it would have performed had an unknown studio released it as their first game.
BotW and its sequel are so unlike any other Zelda game, I doubt having played or grown up with other Zelda games would be helpful.
How unlike are they though? I haven’t played any of the other games, but from what I’ve seen the chief difference is the open world setting, the gameplay loop is mostly the same.
It didn’t seem like a particularly well executed open world to me, either - while it did give the option to stray from the most direct route to the next dungeon, what you found if you did was mostly emptiness. It even had you climb honest to god Ubisoft towers to uncover the map.
Regardless, I felt like I was missing a frame of reference from the very start. It’s just as well there was no sense of urgency to the central conflict, because I was given no reason to care about the stoic mute elf child or his damsel in the castle.
You’ve got a really good point. The fact that they don’t gatekeep you using the previous dungeon’s item is completely different than what Zelda games do as a tradition… BUT wandering around an open world and getting a lucky find that is critical to beating the game is so very Zelda 1.
I’m really curious about your idea of a well-executed open world. Can you give an example? Also about the caring about the plot. I could argue your point about not caring about the fate of the central characters for any game.
This turned into a long un. Short version: These are both fair points, but ones you would expect a game heralded as the best of all time to do better.
Long version: That’s a fair question, to me there’s very few good examples and so many bad ones, which is why I largely avoid games described as such. For an open world setting to draw me in it must employ the aspect of exploration to reward the player with more than just gameplay resources - worldbuilding lore, storytelling or knowledge that impacts the main story.
The better parts of Fallout 4 did it well I thought, while trekking towards your destination you could come across an interesting looking building which can be explored to learn why it’s full of super-irradiated ghouls or an extremely predatory deathclaw. The world is also dotted with little nuggets of environmental storytelling that have no bearing on anything but serves to add texture and context to the world, to make it seem as though it’s somewhere people live - or at least lived.
I found nothing of the sort in Breath of the Wild. If you followed the most direct path to the giant glowing pillars the game invited you to use for navigating you may come across another goblin camp or fairy hiding under a rock, none of which compels you to keep exploring further save for the fact that you need a steady supply of weapons to replace the papier-mâché ones that are apparently in vogue. Other than the towers, the identical dungeon entrances and the occasional settlement the terrain is virtually featureless.
To your second point, it’s absolutely true that no game can force you to care about the motivations of the protagonist, but most of them at least try. Link wakes up to a voice in his head, grabs a tablet and off he goes saving the princess. Why does any of this matter to him?
With the context of growing up playing The Legend of Zelda, you already know this - bees sting, birds fly and Link rescues Zelda. For someone new to the franchise it just seems gratuitous, and it’s never expanded upon either. Link is as blank a slate at the conclusion of the story as when he woke, ready, presumably, to be put on ice till the next time Zelda needs rescuing.
Both of these criticisms can be applied fairly to any game, it’s true. But Breath of the Wild and it’s sequel are constantly highlighted as exemplars not just of the genre, but of the whole medium. It’s fair then to expect something that’s excellent in every aspect, which is absolutely not what I’ve found through many attempts to play them.
Loved BotW but I played it with a 400% durability mod, at 1440p/144fps with graphical mods to make it even more beautiful hahaha
FWIW, I think they did a much better job in Tears of the Kindgom. Your weapons still break, but you can carry around a basically endless supply of monster parts that you “fuse” to whatever base weapon you happen to come across and it makes them powerful again. Sometimes all you need is a stick to make a good weapon. Still annoying, but waaaaaay less of an inventory management sim IMO.
They also added a mechanic to fix broken weapons with the rock octorock but they didn’t really make it obvious and its still weird they didn’t let you repair weapons any other way.
I thought TOTK was worse cause now you’re also managing the parts inventory. It was so frustrating to get to certain places and find out you didn’t have the necessary parts (like a glider) to do certain things.
I even ended up using duplication glitches to skip resource scavgening and I still felt like I ended up wasting half the game managing my inventory.
I’ll admit i rarely used the machine fusing, I was just talking about the weapon inventory system. I’d just pick up sticks or whatever was around and slam the first “good enough” damage monster part I had to it and kept going. It’s a lot better IMO than having to hang onto all the good stuff and constantly be underpowered because “what if i need it for a boss?”
Witcher 3.
I’ve started it 4 times and I never make it past 6 hours in, it’s just painfully slow and feels like a chore to my brain.
Yeah, same for me. I never understood the hype…
It was sort of like the Bethesda formula except that every quest was actually interesting and well-written. Plus there’s the part where taking down tougher monsters on harder difficulties requires appropriate prep, which made those fights more interesting.
I played that game for about 30 minutes. I got to one of the first areas, picked up some “fetch quests” where I had to kill some type of creature and return their pelts for a prize and some exp or whatever and I was like “Oh… A mid 2000’s MMO with no other players. No thanks!”
I also remember feeling that all of the movement, animations, and actions were really jerky. Like nothing felt like it flowed correctly. Things were kind of “snap to grid”. Not sure how else to explain it.
I also remember feeling that all of the movement, animations, and actions were really jerky. Like nothing felt like it flowed correctly. Things were kind of “snap to grid”. Not sure how else to explain it.
I like witcher 3 but i fully agree on the movement. It’s better now that they changed it for the next gen upgrade but still really weird.
I’m similar. I did manage better after installing a bunch of mods. Lots were to mitigate/nullify systems I didn’t want to interact with.
Mods to make equipment scale with level, autoloot, remove inventory weight, remove durability, and I’m sure I’m missing some.
It’s still a slow game with floaty combat, and not my favorite, but I was able to see at least some of what others rave about.
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For me it was specifically the Blood and Wine DLC. I was really engrossed in the story and when it concluded, I lost my motivation to keep playing.
