I’ve been playing games for as long as I could remember, and I always try to play older games when I get the chance. Even now, I am playing Xbox 360 games from 2006 and on… Most have been really good and I’ve played pretty much every AAA FPS game from 1998 on up to this day… Except Halo and Half Life 2…until now. Graphics don’t mean that much to me, the gameplay and story is what counts.
Since I loved the Original Half Life and its Expansion, Opposing Force since the day they came out so dearly (I even replayed it a couple years ago on PC), I gave Half Life 2 a shot. I played it for about 4 hours and it has to be one of the worst games I’ve ever played. Halo is even worse, I gave it about 3 hours and it is so generic and boring.
The combat in both games is terrible, no iron sights, the floaty controls and stickyness of them just hampers enjoyment, especially the terrible vehicle physics, the story is so slow and does nothing to suck you in at all, the characters are forgettable and while the puzzle aspect in Half Life 2 is somewhat clever, it really is nothing special. Come to think of it, all of the above applies to Halo as well. I really have played some terrible games in my time, so It actually comes as a shock to me that I dislike these, since they were universally lauded. I think maybe I have been spoiled by the features of newer games.
How about you all? Any games that have gotten universal praise, that you just don’t like? What reasons?
World of Warcraft: World of grinding.
Call of Duty: CoD4’s Death from above and All Ghilled up missions were great. Aside from that, singleplayer is Michael Bay stop & pop, multiplayer is grinding and being proud of being 10th level diamond master sergeant major general rank.
Starcraft 2 multiplayer: Too hyper. I suppose it’s great if you’re an ADD teenager on Adderall though.
Counter-strike: Too twitchy, too based on map memorization.
Dark Souls: No so much “get good” as “memorize the map through trial and error”.
Civilization: They’re getting greedy and lazy in much the same way as SimCity. Hopefully, some new developer will do to Civ what Cities Skylines did to SimCity.
MOBA games are pretty niche, I think most gamers don’t like them.
I’m in that camp too. I also don’t like games that are exclusively (or almost exclusively) competitive multiplayer. That includes games like Star Wars: Battlefront, or Overwatch, or Player Unknown Battlegrounds. I don’t mind when there’s a PvP option in a game, and I’ll do PvP now and then, but any game built around it gets old fast. And to me it feels lazy, like the designer was too lazy/cheap to create content and story. They’re like the video game equivalent of reality shows. Dumb, lazy, shallow “entertainment”. No thanks!
I don’t know about niche, perhaps they’re quite popular in milieus which don’t overlap much with ours; I chose Dota 2 as an example because it’s apparently the most played game on Steam: https://www.gamespot.com/articles/steams-most-played-games-of-2016-revealed-report/1100-6446818/
I did quite enjoy Team fortress 2’s multiplayer. Valve did a good job of balancing gameplay. They certainly had enough time to do so. Arma can also apparently be fun if you have the right group. Those are the exceptions rather than the rule, though.
Many multiplayer games are the equivalent of summer blockbuster movies: Meant to be wildly popular for a little while then discarded. That doesn’t reward depth. As you mention, such games are usually built around MP and the singleplayer is either tokenistic or training for MP. They’re aimed at Brogamers. I’d go on about the deleterious influence of consoles over this but I wouldn’t want to steal SenorBeef’s chance to shine.
I’m not sure how to phrase this both accurately and in a way won’t offend anymore but games like Counterstrike, Starcraft 2 MP or Dark Souls seem to be aimed at Asians or males on the autism spectrum; They’re about rote memorization, rapid reflexive repetition and bragging rights over video game achievement.
It’s no surprise if I’m not into a game from a genre I generally don’t care for (competitive shooters, MOBAs, 2hard4u retro-platform-twitch games, etc) but here’s a couple acclaimed games that should have been right in my wheelhouse but left me disappointed:
Witcher 3 - I was trucking along, not quite getting all the love but generally enjoying myself, when I hit the major city. Then the plot turned into a bunch of running back and forth up and down an ill-designed city and the wheels just fell off the game’s pacing. I found myself getting bored and then some other game came out, I went to try that, and never felt inspired to get back into Witcher.
Mass Effect - Another highly praised RPG, I think part of the reason here was that I just finished Dragon Age: Origins and expected more DA:O in space than a shooter. Plus I just like swords and dragons more than lasers and aliens. Didn’t like the UI and hated the chat wheel. Later I tried MA2 and quickly dropped that one as well.
Half Life 2 - I remember playing this and being unimpressed and then starting a thread here asking what people loved about it. The answer seemed to boil down to “Well, you had to be there” where it was a game that did some new and groundbreaking stuff that’s now common. That’s fair but the game itself didn’t stand up for me when played years later. Already filled with bad memories of that terrible boat sequence, I got to another vehicle sequence (dune buggies and ant lions) and called it quits.
Minecraft. I guess I don’t have the imagination for it or something ? I just don’t see the point, and I’m not impressed in the least by people who e.g. recreate Minas Tirith or the whole of the GoT continent in it. Yes, yes, it’s a lot of effort and time… but to me, it’s on par with building replicas of famous monuments with matches. I’d really rather be shooting someone in the face or something.
I do, however, like creative uses of some of the game mechanics - I remember a video of a guy who’d build a functioning hard drive within the game using water flow and switches. That was pretty cool admittedly. Useless, but cool.
The Paradox games (Europa Universalis, Hearts of Iron etc…) - I know they’re pretty niche and grognardy to begin with, but given my tastes and background I should be nuts about them… but nope. Just can’t get in. I think a large part of it is due to the combination of huge amount of things you can do or go for, coupled with zero goal or guidance. I need structure and discipline I guess :).
I’ve had endless arguments with my best friend about this, trying to explain how clever the games and level/enemy designs are at teaching you to play and, well, git gud without a single tutorial ; that it goes waaaay beyond simple pattern or map memorization… the stubborn fool wouldn’t hear any of it. He’d been very soured by the initial port of DS1 and its abysmal controls (also he was angry that he tried to get through the cemetery next to the starting fire, which is impossible at the start as you need a holy weapon, it’s meant to teach you that some walls are not meant to be brute forced…) , for good it seemed…
Until these holidays - he picked up DS2 on a whim, plowed through it over last week and he’s now beyond halfway in DS3 and loving it !
His only complaint left is that some of the mechanics/items/secrets are really obscure and quasi require info from outside the game - which is a fair complaint, but also half of the fun in the few weeks after release when everybody’s figuring shit out.
Absolutely THIS! I beat the mass effect games and thought there was more to be desired. The Witcher 3 seems to be fun but I cannot get past how it is just a big fat cutscene simulator/interactive movie. This is exactly why I quit playing Half Life 2. The boat sequence wasn’t too difficult, it was just so clunky and silly. The game supposedly revolutionized gaming physics but didn’t take into account that friction would have stopped that airboat on half of those jumps.
As for the other posts, I couldn’t do World Of Warcraft either, everybody loved it! I thought it was a pointless grindfest filled with neckbeards who played 24/7. Dark Souls was alright, but it really is just a game of trial and error to memorize a map. The aesthetic was pleasing, that is about it.
My least favourite game in the Mass Effect series (not counting Andromeda) was Mass Effect 2, which seems to be other people’s favourite.
They simplified a bunch of gameplay things that I didn’t think need simplifying, but what really disappointed me was the plot. Since they wanted to stretch the story out into a trilogy, you’re not allowed to fight the real bad guys; instead, you fight some random dudes, and 80% of the story involves recruiting some random dudes to fight the other random dudes. Oh, and you volunteer to work for a terrorist for no reason.
**Doom **- the new one. I like shooters, and I loved the original, but it was just too much for me. Scary things kept on coming at me and I was constantly almost dying or dying. I quit after a few hours, on the grounds of being too old for this shit.
I didn’t even like the original Half-Life. The series gimmick of having no cutscenes and never taking you out of the first person view of the protagonist was praised, but for me, it made it impossible to follow the story. I remember playing Half Life 1, continuing to think way too late that all I was trying to do was escape the Black Mesa compound, wondering why every time I made it above ground I kept going back under, and eventually getting to the alien world and thinking “why did I just travel to an alien world, I thought all I was trying to do was escape the Black Mesa compound!”
I’d like to think that Gordon was thinking that all along. “How did I get underground again? What is this now, an alien world? I’m totally going to miss my dental appointment.”
Any first person shooter. Part of it is because they don’t seem to have much of a plot/story. But I also have some sort of thing where the movement makes me nauseous. It’s horrible.
I beta-tested a game called “Heretic,” which was like a medieval “Doom” because a friend’s brother was one of the programmers. Between that and “Goldeneye” for the N64, I damn-near threw up my entire body weight.
Recent innovations in gaming haven’t helped me, either.
My best friend was absolutely determined to get me to love this game, and I finally agreed to get it and play it with him. I was baffled. It was just stupid.
I cannot imagine what you think is lazy about Civilization VI. Or V. Both had a hell of a lot of thought and work pout into them.
I agree they are not nearly as compelling as the original, but it’s not for a lack of effort.
Basically…everything popular. If it’s an FPS, I don’t like it. If it’s a MOBA, I don’t like it. If it’s MMO, I don’t like it. I don’t even like the big sprawling western RPGs like Skyrim that “everyone” likes.
