One of my friends hates dancing combat in games, so he turned the difficulty down after having difficulty with the first boss, and it just made the game really boring.
I played Witcher 3 last year, and I thought it was pretty good. It’s definitely not one of my favorite games of all time, and I don’t think it’s the peak of video game writing. Maybe I’m just mad I got the bad ending after playing for an entire fucking month.
I can appreciate that people have learned to appreciate it in recent years and that much of the hate for it back in the day was that it was super different from the first. But for me, I can't get into it at all.
I find it's one of the worst offenders of "sequel syndrome" in how it learns all the WRONG lessons from the first entry and bases itself entirely on said misunderstanding. Furthermore it tries to deconstruct its own franchise in only the second instalment and bites off way more than it can chew narrative my.
Dragon Age: Origins. The world building and character writing is absolutely superb. Everyone and everything is written with impeccable detail; BioWare spent literal years crafting everything and it shows. I can't think of many games that have such a richly detailed world that wasn't already based off pre-existing material. I could spend hours just conversing with my party because they feel like actual people.
I'm curious what you think of Ass Effect. It had just as much work put into its setting (until Mac Walters fucked it up) yet one of the biggest selling points is BIG DECISIONS whose results you can't forsee for sometimes dozens of hours and multiple sequels. The suicide mission in 2 is one of the most tense moments I've ever had in a game. Also curious what you thought of Morrowind, I can't think of a game that tried harder to diverge from the bog standard Tolkien D&D heterodox and do its own fantasy thing with its setting and story.
Horror games with tank controls, like Resident Evil or Silent Hill. I get why people like those games, but controlling those characters is fucking clunky and awful and it completely turns me off them.
Damn, you would hate Pillars of Eternity 2 then. Your companions will actively take potshots at each other if they don't get along and they'll get pissy at you or even leave the party in the worst case scenario if you decide to do something that is really against their code. They can also affect questlines with their commentary for better or worse, which is kinda funny until they cost you a reward.
You should try the first and second Clock Tower games (the naming convention is fucked, don't play "Clock Tower 2: The Struggle Within" AKA "Ghost Head"). They're point-and-click realtime horror games where you're escaping from a serial killer with a big pair of garden shears. What's interesting about it is that point-and-click is the design brilliance of tank controls, only more so. Because your controls are so far removed from your character it amps up the horror by making you feel all the more vulnerable and helpless via the control scheme. You'll either really love it or really hate it.
My biggest complaint about SoulsBorne is not that they're too hard, but that they take forever and require a fuckton of outside research.
I also HATE the "muh indirect storytelling" as an excuse for (I.O.U. one plot). I always have to spoil the game because you are pretty much required to be precognizant of everything important.
I'm curious what you think of Ass Effect. It had just as much work put into its setting (until Mac Walters fucked it up) yet one of the biggest selling points is BIG DECISIONS whose results you can't forsee for sometimes dozens of hours and multiple sequels. The suicide mission in 2 is one of the most tense moments I've ever had in a game.
The first two Mass Effects are some of my favorite RPGs and ones I like to replay every now and then purely because I adore the setting and characters. The story falls apart as soon as 2 begins before imploding completely by 3's final hours, but I love playing them just for the feeling of being in this universe, soaking in the atmosphere and finding out missions and outcomes I had no idea existed previously. It's a series that I discover something new every time I play. The games have some crippling narrative problems, especially when you step back and look at the larger picture, but when I'm in the moment I can forget all of it for just a little bit.
Ironically, it's also the series that exemplifies why I'm so mixed about Dragon Age's party affection system, because for all of its magnificent character writing, your party will almost never object to your actions (there's only like a handful of moments I can think of where they do and even fewer moments where it has any weight). You can basically go out of your way to piss off your teammates and never really face any consequence, while in Dragon Age you have to be more cognizant of what your party will think. It's just that when I actually played Dragon Age I realized how much I really hate having to account for my teammates' feelings.
Also curious what you thought of Morrowind, I can't think of a game that tried harder to diverge from the bog standard Tolkien D&D heterodox and do its own fantasy thing with its setting and story.
Morrowind is the only Elder Scrolls game I got any enjoyment out of, but you know what's funny? It never occurred to me how radically different and alien it is to every other fantasy ever made when I played it all those years ago. Sure, some of it stuck with me, like Vivec City's architecture, but it wasn't until people pointed out how unique it is for fantasy that I realized it too. I really should go back and play it again. I think now that I'm older I can actually appreciate the originality.
Hyper Light Drifter. I love the gameplay, but the story follows an extreme version of "show, don't tell" that even extends to not showing you what numbers will go up when you upgrade stuff, or telling you what a certain upgrade does.
It's fun, it's nice to look at, music's cool, but the plot and upgrade system feels impenetrable because it's all pictures. I like indirect and environmental story telling in my games, but it can go too far.
I can appreciate that people have learned to appreciate it in recent years and that much of the hate for it back in the day was that it was super different from the first. But for me, I can't get into it at all.
I find it's one of the worst offenders of "sequel syndrome" in how it learns all the WRONG lessons from the first entry and bases itself entirely on said misunderstanding. Furthermore it tries to deconstruct its own franchise in only the second instalment and bites off way more than it can chew narrative my.
Not being able to play the main game as Snake was a turn off but MGS2 brought a lot of refinement that was lacking in the first game, specifically the ability to aim down the sights in first person view.
I'm still struggling with trying to understand Persona 1/2 and finding a foothold in the Shin Megami Tensei series as well. Many people talk about how notoriously difficult and good the SMT games are, but I just either don't have the interest to get started, or really know where to start because of how vast it is.
My recommendations to get your feet wet:
Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne: Official third entry, the first one that made it overseas so it's memorable for many
Shin Megami Tensei 4: Streamlined gameplay, story is hit or miss.
Digital Devil Saga: Self contained story, the second to appear overseas.
Devil Survivor: In the event you're in the mood for strategy RPGs.
The ones found on NES and SNES are light on story.
My recommendations to get your feet wet:
Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne: Official third entry, the first one that made it overseas so it's memorable for many
Shin Megami Tensei 4: Streamlined gameplay, story is hit or miss.
Digital Devil Saga: Self contained story, the second to appear overseas.
Devil Survivor: In the event you're in the mood for strategy RPGs.
The ones found on NES and SNES are light on story.
I beat the three Dark sould game but he reflex and parry based combat on Sekiro was not fun for me and i never got it down. Specifically the fight with the dude that throws ligthing arrows at you. At that point in the game i felt it was pointless to keep going. I ended up watching a longplay and i'll never get back to it.
Horror games with tank controls, like Resident Evil or Silent Hill. I get why people like those games, but controlling those characters is fucking clunky and awful and it completely turns me off them.
For the record, I'd like to first remind that REmake and RE0's "remasters" have the option to turn off tank controls for movement, and also point out that Silent Hill 2 and 3 have the option to turn off tank controls as well.
I've been having trouble getting into Cyberpunk 2077. The game is objectively well designed: it has a rich world, a fun combat system, tons of customization options, and maps that are second to none. But for some reason the writing just isn't there for me. I hate all the characters. The dialogue grates on my nerves. It seems like the game was specifically designed to annoy me. Your first companion is this hispanic dude whose dialogue is as authentic as Alexandria Occassio-Cortez (ie, he's basically a vapid white chick's version of a hispanic man). Every time I load up Cyberpunk, I do everything in my power to avoid him, which is a problem, because you need to hang out with him to advance the storyline. I know if I could just get past the writing I could enjoy the game, but the game is an RPG and there is no getting past the writing.
I've been having trouble getting into Cyberpunk 2077. The game is objectively well designed: it has a rich world, a fun combat system, tons of customization options, and maps that are second to none. But for some reason the writing just isn't there for me. I hate all the characters. The dialogue grates on my nerves. It seems like the game was specifically designed to annoy me. Your first companion is this hispanic dude whose dialogue is as authentic as Alexandria Occassio-Cortez (ie, he's basically a vapid white chick's version of a hispanic man). Every time I load up Cyberpunk, I do everything in my power to avoid him, which is a problem, because you need to hang out with him to advance the storyline. I know if I could just get past the writing I could enjoy the game, but the game is an RPG and there is no getting past the writing.
I have a friend who keeps saying how awesome Cyberpunk is and how much I'd love it, and I'm curious but one of the things I'm waiting for is mods, especially for the characters.
And fuck it, one to get rid of all the troon stuff. Might as well.
Animal Crossing. I don't see the appeal and I find it boring. I played New Leaf and New Horizons and found it very... Mundane. Maybe because I was spoiled on Harvest Moon.
Modern Mario games, mainly any 3D games after Mario 64.
Don't Starve [... ] Getting good doesn't just involve learning the game, it also involves learning when you've gotten the right start state, which just makes it more frustrating.
If you don't know where to start in DS, get an inventory expander mod and set the world generator settings to branches : most and loops : always. This turns the map into flyover-countryesque patches of biomes with roads running through them and gives you a lot more wiggleroom to collect resources and figure out how the biome archetypes work before you're forced to commit to basebuilding in a particular location.
Also if you've got Don't Starve Together just find one of the Klei public servers running the Social/Endless archetypes. Half the fun of DS is discovering dumb shit that gets you killed and it's great fun to see other people self-own themselves especially if the penalty for death is a slap on the wrist with no loss of items.
Strategy games like the Hearts of Iron series or those turn based rpg's like final fantasy. Similar to your problem with simcity, they just feel too tedious to really get into. Personally I play games to really get invested in the story & I find the minutia of managing a squad or monitoring your state a little too distracting from whatever story may be taking place. Maybe I'm just not exceptional enough to really manage both without one taking from the other, if that makes any sense.
That makes sense, but let me propose a possible alternate explanation. In turn-based Jgames you the player have almost no agency, and the inherently shallow gameplay means the winning strat is to find a simple loop (attack twice, heal once, etc.) and repeat ad infinitum. Because of the leveling the thought process is "oh I lost this fight guess I didn't grind enough" you're never really being challenged by the game, and never in my experience does the gameplay really intersect with the story. So you're a rat in a cage pushing the cheese button until you get to watch the next page of your animated VN (anime if it's big budget). CRPGs imho usually manage a better marriage of gameplay/story and sense of progression so that tedium feels like it's actually serving something. The kills are also more satisfying.
Morrowind is the only Elder Scrolls game I got any enjoyment out of, but you know what's funny? It never occurred to me how radically different and alien it is to every other fantasy ever made when I played it all those years ago. Sure, some of it stuck with me, like Vivec City's architecture, but it wasn't until people pointed out how unique it is for fantasy that I realized it too. I really should go back and play it again. I think now that I'm older I can actually appreciate the originality.
I have to admit I have a very soft spot for Morrowind, but I have to concede that a lot of the lore of is really deep, in a "too big for its britches" kind of way.
The name of the city "Ald'Ruhn" is taken from Aldmeris, the language and people the Dunmer (Dark Elves) were before they moved to Resdayn (Veloth, Morrowind) and means "old home", a reference to the age of the shell of Skar―the king mudcrab that the central megastructure was built from and also probably the city's former central importance in Chimer(what the Aldmer became when they moved to Veloth)-Dwemer relations during the...first era I think? Looking deeper into that there are tons of interesting nuggets that can be picked apart, such as that "ald" means "old", and "mer" is the catchall word for elf in the same usage as say, "man". "Aldmer" are thus named because they're the oldest race of elves, and the ones that didn't migrate to other territories actually became the modern "Altmer", or high elves. This isn't even one of the more complex examples like say...Michael Kirkbride's peyote-fueled 36 Sermons of Vivec and CHIM, or the way the theme of the entire game is perfectly encapsulated in the opening quote,The positive is that the writers took all the time to put all this together, The negative is that there's SO MUCH of it, that much of it isn't incorporated in dialogue at all. iirc the "aldmer"→"altmer" thing is never mentioned, "Resdayn" and "Veloth" are artifacts that exist only in the ingame literature, and the meaning of "mer" is never explained because it's just assumed knowledge.
There's a lot of fridge realization moments where you have to put the pieces together yourself simply because there wasn't enough time to add all the writing etc. to the game. It "only" has...hundreds of thousands of lines of text? The salient point is that there's going to be a lot of cool stuff you really have to grope to understand because there isn't enough ingame explanation and that can be quite frustrating if you're in it for the world and setting, which it sounds like you would be. A much more brief but egregious example is place names. Every place in the world has its own interesting name, but no one will tell you about them. Like the first quest in the main quest? "Yeah it's right next to the Foyada Mamaea". What the hell's a Foyden Maymay? I think NPCs of the scout class will tell you??? "Go to the Dren Plantation, it's right next to Lake Hairan." Not a single npc in the entire game will tell you about Lake Hairan, or any of the other named lakes in the game. You can still suss it out, but goddamn can it be annoying to just want to ask "WHAT THE HELL IS THIS WORD YOU KEEP USING" and not be able to. You really want to avoid using the uesp wiki as much as you can, it's almost never necessary and will rob you of a lot of the fun of figuring stuff out for yourself, but....
Speaking practically, get OpenMW and if you care about difficulty look into a game and economy rebalance mod such as BTB's game improvements and More Deadly Morrowind Denizens along with their expansion pack addons, you may also want to increase the difficulty slider. If you can just run into the men and click them to death the difficulty is probably too low for the combat to be fun, but if you enjoy it rock on. For bug squashing I think you either want the Morrowind Patch Project or Patch for Purists. Less Generic NPCs is generally recommend and pretty decent but not essential. If you don't enjoy the leveling system there's a nifty OpenMW mod named "ncgdMW". I recommend against any mods that remove the fog because it removes a lot of the sense of exploration and makes the world feel smaller. Morrowind Rebirth isn't bad, but it's overrated and actively incompatible with every other mod ever made. You don't really need any of this except OpenMW, but I highly recommend it and the nice thing is unlike the lather Beth games that are such a clusterfuck they require their own damn package manager, for Morrowind it's as simple as extracting and clicking the checkboxes. hth and all that
P.S. The annoying Dark Brotherhood attacks will stop the first time you visit Mournhold.
I've been having trouble getting into Cyberpunk 2077. The game is objectively well designed: it has a rich world, a fun combat system, tons of customization options, and maps that are second to none. But for some reason the writing just isn't there for me. I hate all the characters. The dialogue grates on my nerves. It seems like the game was specifically designed to annoy me. Your first companion is this hispanic dude whose dialogue is as authentic as Alexandria Occassio-Cortez (ie, he's basically a vapid white chick's version of a hispanic man). Every time I load up Cyberpunk, I do everything in my power to avoid him, which is a problem, because you need to hang out with him to advance the storyline. I know if I could just get past the writing I could enjoy the game, but the game is an RPG and there is no getting past the writing.
Don't worry. he dies at the end of Act 1 and you never, ever hear from him again. Send his body to his mother, do the long, somewhat boring funeral quest, then get yourself the keys to his bike from his ma and his two unique pistols off the table.
DOOM Eternal, I suck ass at FPSes (I think Halo 1 on Normal is hard). There is so little ammo at the beginning of the game, so you have to constantly do glory kills (making you incredibly vulnerable) to get more.
I really enjoyed Doom 2016 because while it does have a similar loop of shoot > run > glory kill > shoot some more, it felt more naturally integrated. With Doom Eternal I felt like I was playing an arcade game, and that I was going through the loop not because it's the natural thing to do but because I know it's what the game wants me to do. It feels like I'm spending more brainpower babysitting cooldown timers than shooting demons. The wall-climb mechanic also feels very tacked-on, the rest of the movement feels very free and intuitive but then you get this wall climb mechanic that locks you into what feels like a really rigid movement grid.
The platforming-heavy level design also 100% was not my thing, at times I felt like I was playing a fucking Mario level. It's especially dumb when combined with an FPS health system, and really jarring to go from demon-killing to falling off a moving platform 5 times in a row because you missed your airdash. Also, while Doom 2016 is far from a "realistic" game, its level design is relatively grounded and I can at least buy that its environments are a real place that exists for a function, and not just a video game level made for my challenge and enjoyment. The platformer level design absolutely fucks with my immersion, because there's literally no way to explain the ridiculous moving platforms and fireball chains as anything other than a gameplay construct.
Doom Eternal's game design really just added too much video-gamey stuff for me. I liked Doom 2016 because it was a really polished-feeling shooter without anything getting in the way of your bullets and some demon skulls. In Doom Eternal, between the platforming, the strictly enforced gameplay loop and the large amount of cutscenes and actual plot, there's just too much shit I have to juggle before I can actually start having fun.
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