I’ve been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don’t mind so much the fact that it’s different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I’m bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
I played this Gameboy advance game as a kid where you adopted a puppy and cared for it and all that and then after a certain amount of time your parents in-game made you get rid of it.
I’ve never felt so fucking betrayed in all my days. I was so mad that I threw the game cartridge out of the car window and my parents weren’t even mad because the ending to the game was so fucked lmao
Blue Prince. After reaching room 46 and realising that the game was just getting started, I immediately gave up. This is probably the game that respects the player’s time the least that I ever played.
It has amazing lore and overall feeling but is ruined by the RNG. It’s somewhat bearable in the first part but becomes extremely annoying when you know what to do but can’t because of unlucky draws or not enough steps left.
Solitaire. I found out later that the deck only had 51 cards.
Rocket League and Rust have each taken thousands and thousands of hours.
I fell in love with RL the very first weekend and bought all the DLC as it came out because I wanted to support an indie developer. I was rewarded by having the thing I loved sold to a corporation who systematically used my love against me until I could no longer tolerate it.
Rust of course decided that I wasn’t worth having as a customer anymore and cut me off along with every other Linux user.
FFXVI
I saw the trailer years ago and seemed good, so I wanted to give it a try. I of course looked for online reviews and game journalists were praising it so I bought it.
It’s horrible. The only reason I played a lot of hours is because there’s an endless stream of cinematics.
The strong point is supposed to be the story. But the story is so fucking stupid. The lore and world building is good, but the story is shit.
I don’t know how game journalists are even allowed to exist.
EDIT: mistakenly wrote XIV instead of XVI
Counter-Strike Global Offensive. Too many cheaters and the skins just ruin the game. I still play 1.6 and Source sometimes. CS2 I don’t even bother, because my pc is potato.
I know I am late to the party here but the Final Fantasy 7 Remake Trilogy just didn’t work for me. I played the first game and suddenly my guard was up. Some of the combat is cool, and of course the graphics are better. But every story change from the original was worse, all of the new characters were boring and clearly shoe horned in, and the general game seemed to lack direction despite having solid rails to coast on.
Still, I finished Remake and bought Rebirth and just couldn’t. In the first town all the flaws of the remake trilogy were on display. Uninstalled, sold the game, and have zero plans to buy Revolutions (is that the last one?)
I do not see SE capturing the spirit of FF again, which is such a loss.
Cities Skylines 2. I’ve got thousands of hours in the SimCity franchise. Over 500 hours in the original Cities Skylines. CS2 is a fucking mess of a game. It actually ran pretty decently on my PC when it first came out but you could tell it was an incomplete mess right away. The simulation was non-existent. The game looked like dog shit. The only way to get it to run decently was to turn everything down to low and medium. Somehow I squeaked out 75 hours in that first 3 month release window. For a working adult with responsibilities, that’s a lot of time for me now. I install it occasionally and see if it’s any better. It’s not. I did this last week and it actually runs worse on the same PC than it did at launch which is counter to what most people are experiencing.
Mods through the Paradox launcher is a necessary evil for the game to function. I can barely get it to run stable without mods, I don’t think tricking out the game is gonna help the situation. It’s such a sad case of a game killing a whole genre. Especially when it’s my genre. I love city building games and no game has hurt more than Sim City 2013. I didn’t even play SC2013. I watched my favorite franchise die and made probably the smartest decision of my gaming life by saying fuck no to that mess. Fucking Cities Skylines 2 is right there with it, but I made the opposite choice. I gave it a chance and it stings all the time.
What’s even worse is how such a staple of my childhood has turned into an almost impossible task to recreate. I’ll never understand how gaming went from being able to produce 4 generational city building titles in ~10 years to not being able to get one to function at the same level at all in 20. You can count CS1 sure, but even that game was missing something compared to SC4. CS1 is not even close to the same level of SC4. Even now when the game is hard to run on modern hardware.
What’s even more killer is we see other examples of Maxis era staples getting second life in new franchises all the time. Planet Zoo 1 and 2. Transport Fever for Transport Tycoon. Planet Coaster taking it’s place next to Roller Coaster Tycoon. Hell even the Jurassic World Evolution series fills a gap from the old Jurassic Park Genesis game. But the modern city building attempts are all backwards attempts.
They all focus on the wrong thing. Agents. They all want to be able to simulate every living being and everything they do. It never works. It’s why the newest Citystate is such an intriguing project. They’re not doing every individual agent. And the dev finally decided to focus on modernizing the engine to work with fully 3d spaces. There’s a couple contenders out there that are a year or two away. Citystate, Metro 1998 even though that’s more of a throwback. City Masterplan. If just one of these games hit, we’re back in business. Until then I’ve watched my favorite genre die twice. Hopefully the third time is the charm in terms of longevity.
Warframe. 3500 hours in about 5 years.
I watched it develop from just a fun little “be a magic space murderhobo” into a game with some actual story behind it (and some kinda cool cinematic story missions… that went a bit off the rails when they made time canonically non linear)
The unfortunate part for me was the reputation gating and crafting materials grind. Every new update brought another new material and another new hub world with another dozen or so NPC’s to increase your popularity with by running the same missions ad nauseam, just to get another weapon you were going to level up for the Mastery Rank exp and never use again.
I started in the days before Mastery Rank 30 was anywhere near possible, after hitting L1 (30+1) and realising there was no appreciable difference to gameplay I completely lost any reason to play.
I had hopes that there would be something big once you hit the original “max rank”, even if there was intent for the devs to continue adding more after that. I had thought there would be some change in the way the game played, like they would reduce the crafting times from 4 days (a new warframe requires 4 blueprints, a head, systems and torso, all 12h crafts, then a 24 hour craft to stitch them all together, all 4 steps requiring blueprints and materials which are RNG drops from different specific enemies on specific map types/planets/hub world areas gated behind reputation)
The GRIND was unreal. They had to roll back their crafting quantities on Railjack after each individual component, of which there were 6, took 1 million credits and 4 sets of 4 figues worth of materials. I nolifed that game hard enough at the time that I spent an entire week (including wait times for the crafting itself) just to build a ship that was advertised as a ‘dropship for you and your mates to use both in space and as air support on the open world areas’ but that became a “use in very specific missions and one big gamewide event that’s never coming back”
Don’t even get me started on trying to earn platinum (RMT currency to instantly complete a blueprint that’s crafting or buy a new cosmetic/weapon/frame without the crafting steps)
Saying all that, it was a good way to spend time during covid.
Almost every MMORPG. They start off fun and then the fun becomes grind - tedious quests, upkeep, travel time, hp recovery, crafting, rare spawns, penalties & debuffs for death.
My first experience of all this was Everquest. I quit because Verant screwed up a series of expansion launches leading to crashes and downtime and I questioned why I was playing this thing and realised it hadn’t been fun for a long time. But pretty much every MMO is the same.
GTA 5, meh story, boring combat, no real progression. Don’t really get the hype
Hades - I haven’t seen anyone list this one yet. It was the first roguelike/roguelite I ever played and it taught me that I don’t like roguelikes/roguelites. It tried to like it, but it’s just not for me. Luckily, son boy loves it so it’s not a total waste.
Every single mobile game.
Rogue Legagy. after a while it suddenly occurred to me that if my characters were slowly getting more powerful as a result of how long i played the game, the game wasn’t challenging me to beat it, it was challenging me to invest my time until i’d customized the experience to be easy enough for me. so i switched back to playing more traditional roguelikes and roguelikelikes (which is what we called roguelites at the time) where you reset to 0 each play
No Man’s Sky. Close to 300 hours across pc and ps4. I sunk a lot of hours into it when it was relatively new and still very sparse (well before the nexus). I end up playing every 4-5 updates, just to see what they added. Everything is a slog. I have been trying to hatch my living ship for what feels like literal years now. I always seem to be one resource shy of whatever tasks I chose for myself, yet I have billions and billions of spacedollars. I have half-finished bases across the galaxy. I never feel like I accomplish anything in this game, and feel like my time is always wasted playing it. According to steam I haven’t played in over a year.
Eh, I didn’t hate it, I just found it rather disappointing. A huge amount of buildup, and even in-game— a lot of effort… Just for very little delivery.
This is a game and a game engine with nearly infinite potential, but once he got into it, once he started playing it, it just falls completely flat. Beyond a few initial and rather novel game mechanics, it just goes nowhere. Immedately
Like, the game devs produced this incredible game engine, and then just expected it to produce the game for them, and it didn’t. You have this incredible, infinitely generated open world, but there’s no game to play. No story.
It’s just… there. that’s not really much of anything to do. that is the major shortcoming. If, in the last 15 years, they bothered to fill this incredible space with anything worthwhile to actually do, it would be amazing
That’s why Star Trek online is still so active. It’s a nonstop universe, full of missions. Also, it runs very well on multiple platforms.
I don’t like Star Trek online because it’s got too much combat. Star Trek is about philosophy and science, not phasers and proton torpedoes.
It’s easier to create a game around combat than science and philosophy though
Then I guess I’ll have to keep playing Fallen London instead
Oh wow a fallen London reference in the wild. I played that like ten years ago, and picked it up fresh this year as something to do during the workday.
The current festival is interesting. I missed the “hell is missing” story when it was new. Turns out climbing into the furnace is a bad idea, even in a dream!
Currently annoyed that I didn’t bring the right thing into the waswood to get a particular item, and I can’t draw the dream card to get one of those pearls. But it’s a very interesting game.
It could also descend into total “pay for power” nonsense, but I have resisted.
Here, I have a present for you!
The following items can be spent in Estival Waswood Runs to acquire equipment: **GCO** -one of a variety of T8s - A Reverie of Heroism + Singed and Stained Work Gloves -free - Sturdy Pick, Prelapsarian Speaking-Tube, that book with all the Underscores, Polythreme Drinking-Vessel, Poisoned Pen, Wax-Hardened Boots **Starved War** -3 Parabolan Orange-Apples - London Horticultural Society -free - Strange Aeronaut, Hard-Earned Knack for Repair -an Oneiric Pearl - Rank of Flight-Captain **Coilheart Games** -a Parabolan Parable - Distinction of Waking Fire -Vital Intelligence and 2 Blackmail Material - Huffam's Good Graces -an Oneiromantic Revelation - Coilbreaker's Prints -free - A Fierce and Terrible Warmth **Museum** -a Vitreous Almanac, 75 Sightings of Parabolan Landmarks and 10 Memories of Light - Miniature Museum -a Viric-Filled Mirrorcatch Box, 3 Emetic Revelations and 250 Venom-Rubies - Perfumer's Arts -another Oneiric Pearl - Gebrandt's Address Book **Hell is Missing** **Presumably this is all, possibly not though:** -1 Searing Enigma + 1 Oneiromantic Revelation - Gang of Outlaws -Climbing into the Law-Furnace when offered - Dream of Law-Glass -Oneiric Pearl + Baited Riddle - Urchin formerly known as Mister Dinners -Free - Elephant to be Refuted
I’m relatively late to no man sky, the original scandal burnt the bridge and I didn’t bother trying to fix it until about 5 years ago when it came up as an option for a space game to play with my brother. He ended up a bigger fanboy space engineer and NMS stayed the only unplayed game in my library until last year.
I genuinely feel like it’s a great sandbox. That is to say, the fun comes more from the people you play with and your imagination than the sand itself. I genuinely feel that it would be my favorite game if I still had 2 or 3 friends to play it with. RPing as the haywired droid pilot of the Vagabond Moon as it smuggles goods to and from free space just doesn’t hit without a captain and crew.
See, I like my own private world. I can just build it and run around and discover stuff. That’s why I loved fallout 4 so much. No man’s sky is great for that because it’s infinitely generative. But that’s kind of all there is in that game. It’s just a big open world. There’s no real “game” to that game beyond the first 30 or 40 hours of gameplay.
Unlike you, however, the one thing I hate the most in any game is other people. I wanna be alone and do my own thing. I never ever encountered another game player who has done anything than just fuck up my gameplay experience. maybe I’ve just had bad luck, I don’t know. But co-op playing has never been anything other than an extremely negative experience for me. other people are assholes.
So, when left on my own in no man’s sky, it’s fine in small doses, but it’s easy to get bored. Because there are no Ongoing gameplay objectives. It really wouldn’t be difficult to build into the game, constant ongoing objectives and achievements that a single person could achieve on their own. Repetitive missions, etc. Star Trek online managers to do it. And it doesn’t have to be combat (although, combat in no man’s sky is actually very well done and quite fun). No man sky has ongoing rewards for discovery and exploration stuff, but it isn’t really structured very well and the rewards are really rather small.
No man’s sky feels like a really fancy version of Second Life, but in space, where you can have a bunch of your own planets and build bases and whatever. And have entire fleets of ships. But to what ultimate end? It doesn’t seem like there’s any purpose to any of it. That’s what’s missing from the game.
I think the key distinction is that you have to know and like the people outside the game. I used to have about 8 other people that regularly played Minecraft together and we did some impressively large scale things for a hand full of people with jobs and lives. It was honestly fun to just chat while we’re collectively digging a massive tunnel to build a functional rail network. Crack open a cold one with the gang but the cold one is actually a 4 month civil engineering project requiring us to terraform a continent.
I haven’t spent as much time as you did in NMS but I have the same feeling. It feels like I should be loving this game but everytime I try to play it for more than a few hours I end up hating it for the same reasons you listed
I heard all about how bad NMS was. Also overwatch. Then I went to university and one of the first friends I made was like “Those are my favourite games!” And I practically bit my lips to avoid blurting out “…um aren’t they crap??”
Obviously it’s not a big deal. I squeeze enjoyment out of shitty games myself. I found it jarring at the time because there was so much Internet discourse about both those games being not worthwhile.
