Skyrim, it’s so damn mundane.
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.
Actually. I tried Skyrim so many times and never got into it, then I decided to give it the best shot and play with a cavalcade of QoL mods. I went from a hater to a true Skyrim enjoyer. At this point, with how pessimistic I was about the game, I think with the right setup ANYONE can enjoy it.
If you manage to install the mods
Damn. I feel so seen suddenly.
Skyrim came out 14 years ago.
Thanks for the tip
The title of this post was, “What’s a recent game you’ve tried playing that isn’t worth the hype?”
14 years is hardly ‘recent’
Depends entirely on how you interpret the question. It could be read as “What’s a recent game you’ve tried…” (as in, a recently released game that you tried), as you’ve done, or “What’s a recent game you’ve tried…” (as in, a game you’ve tried recently) as the person you’re responding to did.
I think either interpretation is fine since the title doesn’t actually clarify either way.
ah fuck you’re absolutely right, it’s ambiguous 🤦
Being on the patient side of things, two games I’ve played in recent years and didn’t enjoy were:
God of War (2018) - it just felt like AAA slop to me. Meaningles upgrades, tons of obvious puzzles at any corner - never throwing in even a single brain teaser, boring combat - the best option was almost always to throw the axe, that thing were you start walking at a snails pace to mask loading and/or play a cutscene and on top of that your god powers being mostly cutscene exclusive. Just your bog standard AAA game with no ‘friction’ - boring.
Factorio - it just feels like work to me. On top of that, going in blind, I just didn’t enjoy building something up just to tear it down again because I’ve unlocked something new changing the requirements. Once again, feels like a job in IT. Also, resource patches being limited just gave me the weirdest kind of anxiety despite never actually seeing one run out.
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’m curious how you play factorio because when I played there was very little refactoring, just adding more and more onto the assembly line.
That being said, that genre of game is absolutely not for everyone.
Factorio sucks for perfectionists. You have to be able to embrace the spaghetti, and not everyone can
Yeah I’ve seen people try to balance things perfectly in factorio, but my strat is always to overproduce and let belts getting backed up balance out the throughput.
Deep Rock Galactic. I was really excited to play it and I tried to like it. The colors and graphics were 10/10 awesome, I just found it to be extremely boring and repetitive.
Man I LOVE drg. A good team on a call made this the most fun I’ve had playing in recent years. Unfortunately, the population is lower and one may have trouble finding new players. Veterans are usually happy to help, but you’d need a patient one.
For me, deep rock really shines when you’re playing the higher hazard levels. Seeing a wall of the cave move because it’s covered in enemies, and then hitting them with a fat boy gave me happy chemicals.
Very fair, I had a lot of fun with it as a casual game to relax with. Not so easy it’s trivial, not so hard it needs a lot of thinking.
Dungeons and Dragons 5e is less fun than 3.5e IMO.
There was more of a sense of character progression, and ability differentiation in 3.5e.
5e achieves balance by flattening the power curve.
For example, the attack bonus for a level 20 Fighter in 5e is just 4 points higher than it was at level 1 - same as a 5e Wizard. Both get +2 at lvl 1 and +6 at lvl 20
In 3.5e, a level 20 fighter’s attack bonus is 19 points higher than it was at level 1 (+1 to +20), but a wizard only gains half that much fighting prowess as they level up (+0 to +10).
All 5e characters are pretty much the same statistically & mechanically. Differentiation comes from role play, which is the least interesting part of the game for me.
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.
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.
Horizon: Zero Dawn. I have yet to finish it but apart from robot dinosaurs, it feels so generically open world… Admitedly, a very pretty-looking open world. Can‘t really get into the story so far either since it takes itself so seriously while I‘m having a hard time not thinking too much about how ridiculous its world is. So apart from sight-seeing, there hasn‘t been much in this game for me thus far.
Edit: This comment section is a treasure trove of hot takes, so many of my beloved games mentioned making me go „What the fuck…,“ I love it
I picked up Vampire Survivors, played one round, and was like yeah I think I’m done here.
I love everything about ‘Disco Elysium’ in isolation. Art style? Gorgeous. Grimy noiry mood, right up my alley. I love isometric RPGs, though it’s been a while since I played any. Writing is great, from what I’ve heard. Novel mechanics, probably beautiful.
Only, I get into a couple dialogs and realize I need a second computer on the desk, to type up notes. Ain’t no way I’m remembering any of that, especially since I tend to take long breaks in a playthrough. And I just decided in recent years that I need to pay closer attention to stories in games, which I neglected to do back in my youth.
I’ve put twenty notes into the phone (with swipe-typing, thankfully), and that ended my initial experience.
You’re playing a middle aged detective (though he looks older, or at least more worn down) who just woke up from an alcoholic coma after taking all the drugs, unable to remember anything about himself or the world he lives in, except for the fact that there might have been a woman, which was somehow both the best and the worst, and possibly some trivia about disco.
I don’t think you’re supposed to be able to remember or understand everything the game throws at you, at least on a first playthrough. That’s what Kim is for.
Just go with the flow, and remember that in this game failure often leads to more enjoyable outcomes than success.
Doom dark ages. Just upgraded my computer, and I thought ‘hey, I really liked 2016 and eternal, this’ll be great, and it’s got great reviews’. Nah, the whole game just felt…okay. I might try it again at some point and mess with the difficulty settings, but I felt like I was forcing myself to play it the whole way through.
I’m grinding through this one now. The graphics are great, and the game does feel like a modern doom, but the fun does seem to be lacking.
I’ll finish it, but don’t think I’d replay it.
All the souls games. I don’t get it, they’re just no fun 🤷♂️
Also, never finished doom eternal, far too busy. Dark ages was great tho
There was a time when I could not have imagined liking those kinds of games. My partner got me Dark Souls Prepare to Die Edition and I hated it. Hate may be too kind a word for how I felt. I’ve always loved metroidvanias and the style seemed right up my gothy, witchy alley, but I couldn’t get past the first basic zombie.
Then we watched a bunch of videos and realized that the game was designed to be played slowly and deliberately. There were no “junk” enemies and paying careful attention at all times was the game. When it clicked, it clicked, and now From Software games are my favorite.
I had a similar experience. Went the wrong way in DS1, headed straight for the catacombs, went “oh. This isn’t hard. This is punishing.” And dropped off. Later a friend gave me some guidance and some pointers on what the game did/didn’t expect of me and I’ve been a giant fan ever since.
Sekiro took me a little time to figure out what it expected from me, too, but now I absolutely adore that game. That’s more of a mechanical “what should I be doing in combat” statement of the fact that the game expects you to act aggressively while focusing on defense. Though
I’ve enjoyed a lot of Soulslikes, but none of the ones made by FromSoft. Their style of providing poor explanations of mechanisms just makes no sense to me, even if you want to give players those moments of self-driven discovery.
Now I’m wondering, which non-From Soulslikes did you enjoy?
I often stay away of new games because that exactly, the hype. If you play a new game and you say it sucks, everybody yells at you, but if you let past the time, it’s the time the one who gives reason to people.
I always think it’s fascinating to see how the discourse around games evolves. It’s always most telling when people stop talking about a game at all. Remember Starfield? No one even talks about Starfield anymore, not even about how bad it may or may not have been. Just kinda flopped a bit and passed from memory.
I had to search “Bethesda space game” just now to even remember its generic name …
