To me right now is the first Red Dead Redemption. Finally I’m able to play it, I’ve wait for over a decade. No spoilers, zero youtube gameplay videos, zero questions about the game to my friends. It gotta be me, and the game, it happened, and I think it sucks.
Maybe you thinking in “well, you shouldn’t play the second first”. I did not. My first Red Dead game was Red Dead Revolver, I was able to play it a few years ago when I could buy a PS2, but I couldn’t get a PS3 nor a Xbox 360 to play RDR1. It grinded my gears because we got the prequel in PC. When RDR1 came to PC it was so freaking expensive, yet today, I think it is expensive. I was able to buy the game some weeks ago while there was a Steam Sale, and well, I regreat it now.
I don’t like its exploration, its missions, its characters, its world, its secondary missions. its wanted system, and nothing but less important: has a lot of bugs.
That’s my experience in a few words.
What’s the game that you wanted to play but it was a total mess?
Starfield. I tried it on a more recent update and it was just boring. There was no point to exploring because outposts were useless and space combat was trivial. Just an overall boring game
I am so glad for game pass (at least before the price hike).
I tried Starfield and found it just so contrived and boring. To being made to touch and gather the weird space magic stuff in the asteroid to just suddenly being given a space ship to the inane combat and awful environments.
And this is someone coming from over 5,000 hours in F04 (and 2000 across Fallout titles, and God knows how much across Morrowwind, Skyrim, Oblivion etc). I am very much used to Bethesda jank.
But jeebus, Starfield is as compelling as wet toast. I read the synopsis of the game and was utterly relieved to have missed wasting countless hours in what has to be one of the worst written and developed games of the past 10 years.
That said it is clear Starfield was a huge pump and dump scheme by Zenimax to sell Bethesda to MS under the idea Starfield was gonna be the next Elder Scroll/fallout block buster. (not to mention populating stories about giving Sony an exclusive on Starfield to make MS jealous)
Little did they know they were buying pure Todd co
kepium that had been cut with a shit tone of sweet’n lowI played it out of morbid curiosity after everyone started talking how bad it was. I went in like “It can’t be THAT bad, can it?” - and indeed, it can. I’m still amazed that menus are fucking .swf files (Adobe Flash for those too young to recognize it)
It’s one of the least credible scifi settings I’ve ever seen. Also, despite the whole “multiverse” the main story tries to paint, it’s much closer to a time loop, given how nothing changes and effectively none of your actions are acknowledged by anyone. City NPCs won’t even react to your
dragon shoutsForce usetotally unique space magic, unless it hits them, then it’s just like being shot. Even Oblivion guards would tell you to holster your weapons, Starfield guards won’t even grunt if you shoot around like a maniac (but hit nobody)Starfield only reinforced my aversion to pre-ordering.
I had about $100 set aside to pre-order the deluxe edition of Starfield when orders went available, but around that same time, a similarly priced, new limited-time premium cosmetic pack was announced for Warframe, and they did one of those things where “and it’s out RIGHT NOW!” (we typically know at least a couple months in advance before something drops), so I, without hesitation, redirected those funds to the Warframe item and did not order Starfield.
Still one of the best decisions I’ve made. Starfield, even had it delivered on all its promises, was just not the game I was looking for. I pledged for a Star Citizen ship two months later.
spoiler
Those last couple sentences are like a short horror story.
- CD Projekt RED’s Cyberpunk 2077:
the trailer showed V riding a crowded monorail train. I bought the game in promotion with Google Stadia. There was no monorail in the game. Or rather, you could look at it, and you could find some stations, but they were teleport points; - Obsidian Entertainment’s The Outer Worlds:
it was marketed as a role-play game, but your possible choices were either bad or good, with no in-between, and they did not influence your story at all. It’s just a shooter game, the SciFi setting is secondary and forgettable; - Blackbird Interactive’s Homeworld 3:
too far from what I loved in Homeworld and Homeworld: Cataclysm. For some reason the developers believed they had to introduce physical people with mental issues in a game about faceless ships blowing up each other. Nevertheless, the story is bland. I would like to pretend that this game did not ever exist.
A game that I’ve been waiting years to play for years is Mobius Digital’s Outer Wilds.
I have only heard praise about it. I can’t find the courage to finally play it and end up disappointed.Outer Wilds (not Worlds) is incredible, I doubt you’ll regret playing it.
Well, you might. Some people do bounce off; usually due to not knowing where to go next, or what to do next. But if you’re the kind of person who doesn’t want your hand holding and are okay to persevere a little, you’ll probably have a good time.
No other game for me has ever matched the feeling of exploration and discovery, and that is only possible because the game gives you a long leash.
Funny! Outer Wilds was exactly the OP question for me.
Utterly frustrating realistic space controls, unguided exploration that leads to reentering the same planet for the 8th time and still not finding anything new, annoyingly specific timing-based puzzles…
Tap for spoiler
And a nihilistic “friends we made along the way” ending that doesn’t solve the initial problem. Fuck that.
I’ve had games in my wishlist now that I see “It’s like Outer Wilds!” and I start to think twice about them.
I too came in here thinking about outer wilds.
The controls are less realistic than you think, because they attempted to have the ship correct itself but it constantly fought me. I program spacecraft for a living, I know how the orbital mechanics and movement in 3D space works, and they made it super frustrating it made me rage quit the game for years. I only finished it because a close friend wanted me to experience the story.
For me, the story >!was the games weakest point. Putting together the history and the question of “what happened” was cool, but the dialogue was insufferable, I hated reading the story walls and having to string together the order things were said. Then to finally put everything together, get a half baked story about being marooned on effectively a desert island and it ends with a shrug and “yup, everyone died, you too”… Man fuck that.!<
Different experience for everyone I suppose :)
I found the space controls and conservation of momentum to be such a fun aspect. I loved getting consistently good at it, and feeling like a competent rocket pilot when I nailed fancy manoeuvres.
Silksong on the other hand, I had to give up because it was way too hard for me!
Uptick for the awesome nickname.
Thanks mate, it’s my wish to live up to that name.
Now, though, read my comment too!Haven’t played any of the RDR series. I have RDR2 but it won’t work in my Linux box.
A game I had high hopes for was Witcher 3, simply based on internet hype. Somehow it doesn’t work for me. Maybe I was expecting a better Skyrim. The main character is too opinionated. The immersion is not there for me.
- CD Projekt RED’s Cyberpunk 2077:
GTA V.
I liked all the previous ones, but this was just more of the same on a bigger generic map and a more convulted and stereotypical story. Online never worked for me either. Too buggy.
Vice City and San Andreas were the best of the series.
Map size/design is just more important than size. Same problem in Just Cause.
I didn’t hate V, but nothing has touched San Andreas’ magic for me.
I had to mention both, because I like them for different reasons.
Initially I didn’t even like Vice City, because it was just an epigon of GTA3 with more lens flare, but the story and not least the music won me over. I know it’s a blatant mockery of Scarface, but that’s what makes it so great and funny.
San Andreas is probably the masterpiece of them all. Maybe it got a little too serious in comparison to previous games, but it managed to portrait a great feeling of freedom and doing whatever in-between the main missions.
GTA V is more like: Follow the arrow through this generic oversized map.
San Andreas just felt like it captured the 90s perfectly. I could almost lump it in as a 90s memory.
There was the “spiritual successor” of L4D announced. Back 4 Blood looked like a very nice and fun L4D clone with some new mechanics thrown in. I have applied for a Beta to try it out and got lucky!
Game was boring AF. Play on medium difficulty and you can’t do it without real players who actually have to be decent shooters including you. Basically, enemies hit you harder and you hit them less. Same as Left 4 Dead, right? Well… In Left 4 dead you’d just shoot special infected til they drop dead. Here, some infected are impeccable unless you shoot weak spots that are so tiny you might aswell just waste all your ammo on plain shooting. And a typical non-boss special infected on medium diffciulty is like tank on expert in L4D. PvP is locked in a small area so no actual campaign pvp like in L4D.
Also, afaik, card mechanics was broken in so many ways that they only kept nerfing it from the release til they closed servers.
Hogwarts. And all the horizon games.
anyone who played Hogwarts Legacy after the huge outcry about boycotting it for trans solidarity deserves to be disappointed
Is Rowling a piece of trash, yes. Does the game include a trans character, also yes. Were people still pissed off at the characters name, also yes.
it was literally SIRona RYAN
this is like naming your only asian character something dangerously close to “ching chong” or having your one black character be named some shit like “Kingsley Shacklebolt” or…
actually, i don’t know why anybody expected anything better from this franchise lmfao
ryan is a gender neutral name though
what country do you live in?
w-what?
compared to all other harry potter games, hogwarts legacy is a masterpiece
that’s really not a high bar to clear, like oh this dogshit is tastier than this cat shit. it’s like… you know it’s all shit right
yeah harry potter games before legacy were absolutely miserable. i watched every angryjoe review he did for harry potter cause he hated them all 😂
I didn’t expect anything from Hogwarts Lefacy so I was positively surprised. I enjoyed my run but would not do another.
Horizon Zero Dawn on the other hand never clicked, I have had it for a while, never finished it.
Elden Ring. Love DS2 and 3 but I HATE the open world aspect. Makes it feel pointless and then sucks to find out my exploring took me somewhere I can’t deal with due to my level.
Came here for the same thing.
Found ER way too easy after the souls trilogy.
The open world and torrent let you run away anything you want, making the open world a very safe and not dangerous at all place.
Paradoxaly, riding 10km in 5min makes the Lands Between feel way smaller than any dark souls area, where you have to fight for you like every meter
Tbf i liked doing malenia and radahn, and all the “big dungeons”. (Damn actually i would prefer the game if it were just the concatenation of all dungons like a souls game.)
Anyway, very sad to enjoy this game as i loved the souls
AND GIVE ME BACK THE HELLISH RUNBACKS, I WANT TO FEEL THE FEAR OF DYING WHEN I FIGHT BOSSES (thank you silksong)
GTA V. Bought it on sale only within the last few years. Played maybe 2 hours and never touched it again.
Oh also RDR2. It’s not my idea of a good game whatsoever. Made it likewise 2 maybe 3 hours before I realized it wasn’t fun. It’s hardly a game. Interactive story, but shitty game.
I’m with you on both.
For RDR2 in particular, I found it so irksome how on-rails the missions were while the rest of the game was so free form. If you’re going to make me follow in the footsteps you planned exactly, don’t tease me with freedom between your set piece sequences. Ride-shoot-ride is also not super interesting to me.
I’ve come to believe that the Rockstar formula just doesn’t work for me after GTA4.
Duke Nukem Forever. As a teen Duke Nukem 3D was one of my most loved gaming experiences. Awesome game, came with easy to use level editor (Never got the original doom level editors to work back then). Played many many hours, made my own levels. Just plain loved the game.
Then the wait for Duke4Ever started and I waited, and waited and waited and (continue for 20 years so) and finaly got to play it.
It wasn’t bad really, it just wasn’t as fun as Duke3D was in my teens. It still had the same kind of humor, but never really hit any high notes. Weapons were limited, instead of having a weapon behind each number on the keyboard, now it was pick one up and drop one off.
Didn’t even try to see how the level editing was.
Maybe I’ll pick it up again if it’s a euro on Steam or GOG, as Duke3D still is loved childhood memory.
I played DNF shortly after release 🏴☠️ , but I was already an adult by then and was aware of the development hell that the game went thru. Started playing not expecting much and I was still disappointed.
“Power armor is for pussies!” - says the guy whose game is almost literally a shitty Halo: only 2 weapons, limited ammo, regenerating
shieldego.
Cyberpunk - great environment but gameplay was boring and certain events were downright horrible, like the one were you watch/examine a past event.
Same! I played it for a while got a nonlethal hacker attack pattern down pretty well, i WAS enjoying the story but its a game that makes you feel like you SHOULD be doing the busy work. Then i just stopped because i didn’t want to.
Also something about the absurdity of just sprinting through town smaking strangers to help the obvisouly corrupt cops felt like a tonally stupid thing to do.
Elden Ring… I’m sorry I just didn’t enjoy It even after beating a few bosses
Arkham Knight was pretty disappointing. The batmobile was forced into several sections. The announced Linux build never materialized.
Yeah I think I got Arkham Knight for free and I played it until the first batmobile puzzle then never played it again. It just was not enjoyable
Mewgenics. I just couldn’t squeeze any fun out of it. Wish there wasn’t 10 minutes of busy work every time I want to start a new run. Wish items were game-changing like in Isaac.
Agreed.
I really wish they had found a way to make their original concept fun. I was so excited for that.
The thing they turned it in to is just sooo not for me. I bounced off it HARD.
I am with you. I really want to like the game, but it just is not fun. I gave it 15 hrs.
Add to your list just how tedious all the bosses and mini bosses are. All of them act with maximum efficiency on every turn. Causes so many battles with them to drag on.
There are game changing items combinations. But it depends also on your traits.
For example, one run, I had a cleric that shared his regeneration with other cats, and an item that gave me +3 regen if I had at least 1 armor point.
So I equipped an armor item and every turn, my cats would heal 4 hp, making them extremely tanky and making the run trivial.
But it’s hard to get a combo going.
Sonic CD.
For years and years it was a mythical sonic game, a rare golden-era game hardly anyone had got to play. And I’d slightly mis-remembered it appearing way more advanced and fluid than a mega drive game.
After being obsessed with Sonic in my youth, after finally getting to play it, it just felt like a less enjoyable Sonic 1.
I’ve never even bothered to finish it.
Agreed, and the level design in Sonic CD is absolutely atrocious. It’s like they put the guy who designed the Spring Yard Zone in Sonic 1 in charge of the entire game. Sonic 2 is vastly superior, and I maintain to this day that anyone who claims Sonic CD is better is either deliberately trolling or is doing some kind of more-hipster-than-thou thing as their shtick.
My personal experience with the Mega Drive Sonic games was always “fun first 2 stages, not so fun afterwards”
I had a really love/hate relationship with the pinball stages in Sonic 2.
Breath Edge. I was looking for a new subnautica-like experience, having given up on any expectations from the sequel currently in development when the new owners got rid of the original devs (imo just pirate the original so they don’t get money from owning that, too).
Maybe I dropped it too soon, but Breath Edge didn’t give that sense of making progress. I was stuck having to go back to the same starting point after every trip. Those trips are longer, but I found progressing and exploring to just be annoying and frustrating rather than fun and rewarding and what you do find underwhelming. I stopped when it looked like it wanted me to set up “path extenders” for kms with effects that frost the helmet to 0 visibility. There’s probably some mechanisms I’m about to unlock that will make those easier but I just don’t want to.
Maybe I’ll try looking at a walkthrough to see what the next steps are and decide if it’s worthwhile (maybe I’m missing something important that makes the rest of it much less of a pain), but there’s plenty of other games to play so I’m not worried.
It does have a certain shift once you reach a certain checkpoint, but it is so long to get to that point. The progression curve is just not right.
Played that for a short time, then lost track of it. Did love the intro.
Wizard of Legend 2 was the biggest sequel let down in my eyes. What the fuck man. Shoulda been in the bag easy.
Got that in a bundle not that long ago. It’s essentially the same game as 1, but worse. Very disappointing.
Its vastly different than 1 by taking everything that waa good and tweaking it to be bad. No dash sorceries, cursed items changed and theres now some weird curse room, enemies are boring, unqiue art is now bland 3d, it is far more sluggish than the original, the persistent rewards lack any feeling of being rewarded. I can just go on and on. Not to mention the original had like 2 DLCs worth of free updates while the devs were still supporting it. All they had to do was rehash the dungeons and make it truly online. They could have released nearly the same game, with the same art, and if they just made it natively online co-op I would have bought it and blown the back out of it too. But its just lesser in every measurable way.
The bland-ing of the art and the sluggishness were the things that hit me most. The snappy action and well-matched visual art/hitboxes were key to my enjoyment of the first one. Also, really hate the voice acting. At no point playing the original did I think, ‘man these generic filler text lines would be so much better if they were being unskippably forced into my ears as audio.’
It just doesn’t make sense. Something happened. Because in 2002 this would easily have been shipped the next year with nearly the same things but “more”. 4 player co-op and more maps\items. Thats it. What happened in the decision department? I know the game sat for a bit after the updates stopped and then changed hands but I cannot fathom how this came to be. Okay, rants over I think the last demon on the subject came out with me on that one.
Seems like an obvious answer. Changing hands. The original creator of a thing is usually obsessed with it. Someone hired by a publisher to milk an IP is usually just there to work. I’m sliding more and more toward just assuming any game that isn’t basically 100% made before publishers get their mitts on it is going to suck.
But wouldnt be easier to basically releass the same game rather than make a new one? Thats what I dont understand unless they had no acces to 1’s source code and only got rights to make 2. Even then it seems it would be harder ro make something new.
Yes and no. I’d be amazed if any code from the original was/could be used for the second. One was unity. Two was unreal. C# vs C++.
The other thing is money. It doesn’t get the second dev team paid as well to spend a figurative 5 minutes polishing an old game when they can milk 5 months of pay out of the publisher by making a de-make. If the publisher is paying they might start from scratch just to have it take longer. I can’t say for sure, but I would bet real-life money the contract on the second was much more beneficial to the publisher vs the devs on the second than the first.
Then there’s marketability. Offer people the same game from 2016 and they’ll want to pay the same price as the game from 2016 and many of them won’t want to buy it at all because they still have the old one. Offer them something that looks like an upgrade (‘Look! It’s 3D now, and higher resolution.’) and milk people’s nostalgia for a game they loved ‘in the before times’ and you can squeeze modern inflated prices out of them.
