Asia ALSO makes up the majority of the world’s population, thereby making them, ipso facto, the “general public”
Platformers. I was terrible at Pitfall! and Mario Bros. when I was a kid and I never got any better at them as I got older. The only one I’ve ever been any good at was Braid, and only because you could reverse time whenever you fucked up.
I hate platformers, too, but I don’t wish I was better at them. I wish platforming would stay in its own damn genre. Don’t incorporate jumping puzzles into my RPGs, one of these days I will hunt you down and put you in front of an impossible jumping game and make you play it forever. Don’t make me adjust the awkward view over and over and try to complete your stupid little jumping puzzle cause you were too damn uncreative to think of a better one.
This. This. 1000x This.
I haaaaate it when I’m playing an RPG and it takes me 30 tries to get past a damn jump (Kingdom Hearts) or a balance act (God of War), or worse, a combination of both (Devil May Cry)
I just wanna fight people and call it a day. I don’t mind puzzles, those can be fun in their own right, but make it about switches or building or something and not so much jumping
God of War was an RPG?
So was Devil May Cry! 
I don’t hate platformers. In fact, I love them. I spent a lot of quality time with Donkey Kong, Mario and Rayman growing up and I’m currently enjoying “Ori and the Blind Forest” even though I’m not very good at it (yet).
All that said, I agree about shoehorning platforming into 3rd person RPGs. Primarily I’m thinking about “Dragon Age: Inquisition”. GAWD, the jumping mechanics in that game are awkward. Esp. the kitchen in the ballroom mission where you can jump on top of some barrels and then walk along some roof beams to collect an item (can’t remember what it was). I think I took several dozen tries to get to that blasted thing and I don’t even think it was a necessary item. That and all of those pain in the ass shard hunts combined the worst aspects of fetch quests and platforming combined.
So, I guess “DA:I” is my entry for this thread. My enjoyment of the gorgeous open-world, engrossing story and compelling characters was severely undercut by the mediocre platforming, tedious fetch quests and shallow combat.
Hah, I made asimilar observation recently.
So I’m assuming these aren’t actually RPGs given your responses (I can never tell video game categories), but my complaint still stands. I want to walk around and kill things, not balance on scaffolding and jump from platform to platform while avoiding crazy saw things/cavernous drops
Which led to the wonderful line buried in Pluto Nash, where he’s told he has to execute this long string of daring athletic maneuvers down a bottomless elevator shaft: “And Plan B…?”
I think my problem with cut-scened dialogue is that 95% of the time, it’s totally inconsequential stuff that has little bearing on anything. The other 5% of the time, you can totally botch dozens of hours of playtime by glossing over it, or misunderstanding the question.
Cut-scenes without actual dialogue are fine- they give developers and designers a way to show some epic stuff without necessarily having to make the game engine actually do it.
Most of the big Blizzard games: Diablo II, Starcraft, World of Warcraft, Hearthstone
There’s such a thing as too much polish, I believe. The big appeal of games to me is the sense of experimentation and discovery. When I play a Blizzard game, I feel like they’ve meticulously removed any and all possibility of venturing off the beaten path, that they’ve created a set few number of viable options and anything that doesn’t conform to those needs to be sanded down. But, they’re so popular that I want to like them more to hang out with my friends who are into them.
On the RPG front, Pathfinder. I played a lot of D&D 3.5 back in the day and enjoyed it in spite of it’s often wonky balance. Pathfinder should have been right up my alley. But while I could come up with dozens of neat and interesting character builds I’d love to try in 3.5, I struggle to find even one class that holds my interest in PF. They’re all just so… dull.
Heartstone is one that I kinda liked at first (you know, as a throwaway “I got 20 minutes to waste” kind of game) but is getting on my tits these days. The design for the successive expansion screams “boss, boss, we have a problem - it seems people who actually understand how to play the game can consistently beat stupid 14 year olds” “That is a concern. Add moar random stuff that’s completely overpowered if the RNG falls right ! Random is good, whacky fun, right ?”.
Sunless Sea. I’m a huge fan of Fallen London and I was excited to play another game set in the same universe, but I just couldn’t get into it.
I also agree about Crusader Kings II and other Paradox games. When I was younger I played a lot of the original Europa Universalis, but I just don’t have time to learn complicated games anymore.
Assassin’s Creed
I have started it twice…but it is so boring! I’ve heard the series improved with its sequels, but I have not yet tried any of them.
The game seemed right up my alley. I was disappointed.
The first one was very, very much flawed. Basically the game is/was only worth it for the assassination themselves (which are genuinely interesting and well-designed), but they’re few and far between and the devs crammed hours of repetitively faffing about in-between.
The second one is much, much better paced ; and features much less pointless dicking about (well, it does still feature a lot of it if I’m being honest, but the overwhelming majority is optional :)). Brotherhood is also good, although less architecturally interesting than II. Revelations… eh. I honestly don’t remember much of it. It felt extremely samey after 2 games with Ezio already. III is utter shite. Black Flag’s good, but it’s not really an assassin game, more of a pirate game with some assassin bullshit tacked on :D. Unity was very meh, I still haven’t bothered finishing it now that I think about it.
Anno 2070. Gorgeous game, absolute pain in the ass to play. The snotty leader in the first mission demands that you pick something up for him but then there’s no way to deliver it to him. Put your buildings a square too far apart and the mission won’t progress even though it looks like everything is up and running. Endlessly frustrating game.
Supreme Commander. It’s like C&C on a massive scale right? No, just massive pain in the ass. I couldn’t get past the computer spamming units at me in the second mission.
Act of War (both of them): another RTS similar to C&C but with a difficulty curve that just goes up by 90 degrees at an arbitrary point.
GTA IV: beautiful open world in which you must go bowling with your girlfriend. The girlfriend you didn’t ask for and don’t want. And you get to drive your loser cousin around a lot while he gets beat up by everyone in the city for being such a deadbeat. And you get to drive some angry Irish dudes for ten minutes straight while they constantly bitch at each other only to lather, rinse, repeat when they are immediately gunned down by the cops in the mission that follows. And you get to spend lots of time with a Jamaican guy who only seems to know the word “bombaclot” to the point where even other characters in the game want to kill him for saying it over and over.
A long time ago I picked up X3: Terran Conflict. I hadn’t ever played any of the previous games. It looked great and it sounded like a great game, and I’m sure it probably was, but I never really got to find out. There was no tutorial. The controls/command list was like 30 pages of tiny text with little to no context. The only “guidance” provided was a garbled radio communication telling you to dock or something with some ship among literally hundreds of ships floating around in the area. I floated around for a few hours just pushing buttons to no avail, then gave up
Dead or Alive Xtreme/Paradise.
I don’t give a damn about the “objectification” of polygonal figures. I don’t give a damn about astoundingly accurate volleyball physics. I thought all that horrible drivel about one-handed controllers was old the moment it was born. I like beautiful women (or reasonable depictions thereof), I like beautiful scenery, I like sexy clothes, I really like easy-to-understand, no-pressure minigames. I don’t have anything against lots of cutscenes so long as they serve a purpose.
I am not and have never been “hardcore”. I am not and have never been homophobic. I have not and never will give one subatomic damn about “realism” in any medium with pop-up menus and a reset button.
I was all set to love this from day one. So what do I get?
Byzantine relationship/mood/time of day headaches that make it impossible to give a freaking gift half the time. Making any real money hinging on pure dumb luck, and you get absolutely creamed if you lose. No way to practice events, meaning tons of time wasted trying to get past That One Section or simply getting the hang of the controls. Needing a goddam spreadsheet to keep track of who has what swimsuits, and still barely being able to fill a fifth of anyone’s ledger. Needing another spreadsheet to keep track of who likes what gifts. The insanity-inducing randomness of EVERYTHING, including “watch” events. Did I mention that the minigames are incredibly freaking hard (if I ever have to do another damn jetski race, it’ll be too soon)?
Just more proof that video games is completely the wrong medium for sexy or adult anything. Those idiots just don’t have a clue.
Oh, forgot to add: Tekken.
An absolutely gorgeous, tight, perfectly balanced, breathtaking, deep, immense, colorful, glorious, epic, transcendental…
…freaking impossible to learn fighting game.
If Project Diva or Little Big Planet was made with the same skill and care as Tekken, it’d be my favorite console game of all time, full stop.