Doom: The Dark Ages.

Yes, it’s a pretty game. Sure, they hit their design goals, but it’s the design itself that I hate. It’s geared entirely towards close combat to the point where half the weapons are redundant or otherwise stupidly useless compared to others. It’s geared towards close combat to the point that the player’s projectiles disappear after a certain distance, while the enemies’ shots can travel much further. Sure, there’s plenty of ‘nice’ things they added to make it easy to churn around a bunch of groups of enemies up close, but it’s insanely dumb how it’s 100% of the game design. Especially because many of the maps are trying to show off large vistas and open areas, where it becomes VERY obvious that the player’s shots disappear while you’re being pelted by enemy fire just fine.

The extra game modes of flying and being in the mech are neat in concept, but so insanely underbaked they feel more like a waste of time task to push through than a cool extra part of the game to enjoy. They’re not mixed in with the on foot parts well at all and feel more like basic transitionary moments they attempted to add some gameplay to.

The attention to detail sucks, especially in the UI. A couple easy points demonstrate it: The most obvious is how their UI triggers work. You can click a button, and it plays the activate sound, but it’s not activating if you click it before the mouseover/highlight animation is done. In a similar vein, most affirmative interactions are a stupid wait for it long-press while going back to the mian menu from between levels is as simple as an escape key press. A purposefully slow forward with an instant back is just… pointlessly dumb. In a similar vein, while the game is showing you all the crap you did and found in the level, your only options are to sit there and get annoyed with the obnoxious, slow, and loud tallying of everything, or skip ahead to other pages and go back. Escape and space don’t skip or do anything there. Basically, there seems to only be one poorly thought out path to get to anywhere in the UI, with no convenient or standard alternatives implemented: Half baked.

The story and character designs were made by edgy teenagers. It’s infinitely worse than Doom Eternal or 2016. Old Ones are C’thulu ripoffs, most of the styling of Hell/etc are now just generic scifi with a bit more red, and many of the new designs are somehow more generic ripoffs of older doom. They pull inspiration from tons of other spooky things instead of rolling with the Hell themes or other established lore. So much of the added lore is just ripoffs of greek mythology and other things, too, like a boat to ferry souls and a bunch of other crap I don’t care to remember because it’s just not memorable, intersting, nor do they fit the usual themes of Doom.

In a similar vein, so much of the story is lackluster and uninspired. There is some interesting sounding writing hidden in the lore book, like why the slayer’s mount is half mech, but it’s simply stated in the lore instead of being a potentially cool way to introduce the mount or other things. So much of the game is ONE game loop (close combat) with few dynamic options and a bunch of extra half-baked fluff tacked on.

It’s frustratingly narrow sighted and underbaked to deserve to follow Eternal or 2016. It feels like it’s in some parallel universe from the other games, even from 2016 and Eternal.

I want to play the DOOM Slayer rampaging through a Hell inspired by 90’s metal, not some parallel universe written by edgy teenagers where he’s some glorified Master Chief ripoff with anger issues for a personality who’s just following orders.

you seem to spend a long time playing games you don’t like 😅

for an explanation of why people love botw: https://youtu.be/CZzcVs8tNfE

I completely agree about rdr2, but I didn’t play it that long before I just installed mods to let me duck around more and explore the beautiful world.

games i don’t like that everyone seems to love: games that waste my time with levelling systems that draw the game out way longer than it’s fun, which is most modern AAA games. I hate how people say things like “you get your moneys worth playing WoW because you’ll spend hours playing it” and “i liked portal but it was too short”, portal was good partly because it was short…

deleted by creator

Grand Theft Auto.

All of them, but especially V. I have tried a few times to play them but never get more than a few missions in before losing interest in the story. I think I have to like or identify with a protagonist to enjoy a game, and most GTA characters are pretty unlikable.

Team Fortress 2. Too different in contrast with TFC, which I feel like I played for ten years straight.

Elden Ring for me. The kids have all played the shit out of it and killed literally everything in the game. I hopped on for about two hours, wandered around aimlessly, died a few times, avoided everything to prevent dying, died a few more times and decided I never needed to do that again.

Minecraft. It desperately needs some QoL improvements for it to be anything but tedious.

Outer Wilds. I think it’s a fine game with a pretty cool gimmick (time loop) and a neat story. The gameplay itself isn’t that fun. I think what ultimately ruined it for me was the online discourse about the game; every time it gets mentioned, hundreds of people flock to the comments to extol the philosophical storyline, and throw around hyperbolic descriptions like “life-changing”. Again, the story is pretty neat, but I was left underwhelmed after having been built up by fans of the game.

Checkers. You start with only one piece type and they go to the trouble to make all those squares and you only use half of 'em.

Deep Rock Galactic.

Yeah I said it.

I wanted to like it, but the gun play was underwhelming and gameplay kind of boring.

Worst of all was the progression. Upgrades were tiered in ways that made 1 a clear best choice. Perks were uninteresting passives or actives with bizarre activation requirements. No way to upgrade flares or pickaxes. And I’m not a guy that cares about cosmetics, so it just didn’t work for me.

I’m happy for everyone else that got a GOAT experience though.

Pokemon. It’s just a franchise of watered-down jrpgs imo.

Ocarina of Time. It’s one of the few Zelda games that I just didn’t enjoy. I’ve had a lot more fun playing Twilight Princess and Wind Waker more than Ocarina. I’d play Adventure of Link more than Ocarina.

Skyrim. Mostly all the RPGs like that. Never understood the hype. I did try to like it, but it wasn’t fun for me at all.

Skyrim never “clicked” for me. I remember hearing awesome things about it: a vast open world full of things to discover, the ability to create my own character and build it however I wanted, the option to influence the world around me with my choices…

In practice, I found myself in a very big but mostly empty world, full of copy-pasted uninspired dungeons with randomized loot, and no matter what character I chose to build, the combat system sucks and the AI never tries to do anything more than mindlessly walk towards you (and get stuck on the scenery). I was never able to immerse myself in the world because everything was so drab and insipid: generic characters living in generic cities talking about generic things with a very bad dub.

Choices never matter because the game insists on spoon-feeding you everything it has to offer. You can roleplay as a barbarian and still become the headmaster of Hogwarts; you can side with the romans or the vikings but the world doesn’t change aside from the uniform of the guards patrolling the cities you visit; you can ignore the dragons roaming the land and they never do anything, because they are just random encounters in the world without any kind of personality or goal aside from turning up and being a minor annoyance to the player.

The modding community is great, but even after spending a few hours installing a dozen or so mods, I was never able to escape the jankiness of the original game: it was still Skyrim, just with a different coat of paint (and a few less bugs and horrible UI decisions).

Reading about the overall reception of Starfield, I felt like I was going crazy, because everything the people say about that game, I already felt about Skyrim fifteen years ago. On the one hand, I felt like my feelings were being legitimized; on the other hand, I still don’t understand why people forgive Skyrim (and still play it to this day) but hate the new Bethesda game so much.

[removed]

In this thread: People who don’t like a genre of game, criticizing games for being that genre