Which games do you dislike, but the rest of the world loves them?

I miss server browsers and community servers. Just people playing casually and the teams could shuffle every round. It was competitive, but not sweaty plam bs and being too toxic would get you banned.

Ok first of all, online gaming communities especially around the most popular “serious” competitive gaming scenes are usually awful, terribly toxic places dominated by toxic masculinity.

It is a major problem in my opinion, both from the toxic people it breeds but also from the gatekeeping that keeps out a more diverse player base than just insecure men who hurl around insults and call shit “gay” when they don’t like it.

That being said, I do really like competitive multiplayer games like apex, battlebit, rocket league (car soccer game), halo infinite etc. I am not an especially competitive person though, I don’t HAVE to win and I don’t get super angry when I lose.

I enjoy competitive games because of the rich experience of playing a game against another human who is focused and motivated to win. I especially like playing with a team of humans against another team of humans. Humans are just so much more interesting and dynamic to compete against and generally a blast to cooperate with, singleplayer games often feel stale and like they are trying to forcefully induce a fabricated experience in me in comparison. Why do I want to play a singleplayer call of duty campaign that tries to make me “feel” like I am in a big battle when I can just play battlebit and actually be in a virtual battle with 200 other humans?

Another human competing against you for fun brings a great gift to the table from the perspective of game design and it takes an immense amount of effort to create a singleplayer experience anywhere near as engaging and dynamic. Likewise goes for a human teammate vs an AI one. Drive around in a gun truck in a singleplayer game and get an AI to gun for you and you have a slightly interesting experience where the AI just dumbly shoots at targets when you drive up to them… get a HUMAN to gun for you and all of a sudden you and that person are in an action movie together where your collective survival depends on how efficiently you work together and help each other out. Maybe you never talk to your gunner over a mic, it doesn’t matter really, the connection is still there. It never gets old to me because everything I do impacts other humans who then react and adapt which causes me to have to do the same.

Singleplayer games have to do a massive amount of work to make me fee like I am in a living breathing world that responds to me. Multiplayer games “just” have to setup an arena and let players loose. The experience of trying to outsmart another human who wants to win as bad as I do is perennially rewarding. Every moment I play a competitive multiplayer game I am working on integrating knowledge, skill, and emotional regulation and always learning and adapting. It makes my brain feel alive and stimulated in a way most single player games don’t (don’t get me wrong, I love good singleplayer games too).

I hate the toxicity and I always report it when I see it though.

So, like you I don't enjoy most competitive games. I like to dabble occasionally and enjoy an FPS here or there(I enjoyed the Finals for a bit, and occasionally a CoD, last one was Modern Warfare), but mostly play single player or co-op games because I find them far more enjoyable.

There is one genre that is an exception, fighting games. I fucking love them. I used to enjoy them as a kid, then had a long hiatus, dabbled when Street Fighter 4 launched, but didn't "git gud". Then Dragonball Fighter Z and the Arcade Edition for Street Fighter 5 launched and I think they were the gateway drug for me. Street Fighter 5 was tough, I couldn't find a character I liked, so kinda bounced off it, but DBFZ kept me in. It wasn't until Blanka in SF5 came out that it all clicked for me.

The genre starts of like a little puddle, you don't really need to know a lot going in, but you definitely need to want to improve. And the more you improve the more you realise how deep the puddle is, cause it is actually an ocean. When you play against another human, at the lower ranks it is quite random and spammy. But as you get past them, you get to where you can condition people, you can learn their habits and combo choices. Then you take that knowledge and adjust your gameplay and see if they can counter it, and it can be come a big back and forth of trying to get the other person to make a mistake and exploiting their habits.

It is also a genre where nothing else really transfers across. All that time in FPS or RTS games isn't going to help, so learning to do the technical inputs can be rewarding, or labbing out a combo and how to implement it in your gameplay.

I also really enjoy the ranking climb in most fighting games. SF6 has kinda perfected it, you play 10 games and it gives you a placement from Rookie upto Diamond 1, then you match against someone typically within +-1 rank(Gold 1 would be matched with Silver 5, Gold 1 or Gold 2)and rack up points. At the top of the ranking you hit Master, then it turns into Elo points and a proper distribution of skill, cause the difference between a professional and good player that just hit Master is massive. And for SF6 it is done on a per character basis, which allows you to sink time into every character and be playing with people your skill level.

I am 417 hours into SF6, 3 characters at master rank and a few in diamond/platinum. I still feel like I am bad, and I am definitely not using all the systems effectively in the game. But I sure as hell am excited to sink another several thousand hours into this game over the life of it.

Tekken 8 also just came out, which also seems incredible, but 3D fighters are basically an entire new genre to learn.

Fighting Games are fucking cool.

I only like competitive games that are just as much cooperative as they are competitive. Team-based shooters like Overwatch or R6 Siege, for example, are always fun with a group of friends.

Shit like CoD or Fortnite though? Nah, I could never get into them. I don't really hate them or anything, but I always get bored of them very quickly so I don't bother buying them.

I’m just competitive. Nothing beats absolutely decimating an opponent to the point they quit.

I also get 0 satisfaction from beating a computer. I do that every day as a software developer, so I’d much rather play against other people.

Also competitive games are great because you can play hundreds or thousands of hours and almost always get new experiences. Some team is going to throw something at you that you haven’t seen before, and it keeps the gameplay interesting and dynamic.

I don't play competitive games unless the community is generally decent or I have the option to just turn off voice and text chat for people I don't know.

Hunt Showdown is the one arguably competitive game (in that its PvP) that I still play ... the community there is generally great. There is the occasional trash talk but mostly it's just people having fun.

Sometimes people on enemy teams will be willing to negotiate and you both walk away from the fight.

Sometimes they'll just have fun with it and make sound effects. One guy just the other night I was in a shoot out with was making sound effects "agghhh my leg!!! You got me you got me, it's over!!" Only to come back a few seconds later with a bomb thrown at me and my buddies.

Occasionally there are toxic people but it's really fun when you shoot them, take their stuff, and burn their characters bodies ... then report them. Taking the extra time to be inflammatory or make noise to trash talk on an extraction shooter can easily get you killed and make you lose a fair amount of stuff.

If being a toxic egomaniac is your jam, extraction shooters are a bad fit.

I like competitive games where I feel like I outplayed my opponent, the feeling I get from winning against an actual human is so much superior to winning against a system that was designed to not be too hard. Here I know I had to surpass myself to win
Plus having ratings and that kind of stuff is always a nice reward for winning. I play a lot of competitive tetris, Trackmania, CS2, The Finals and recently started learning Tekken 8 for this specific reason
Om the other hand, I don't like souls like because they're just a single goal I need to spend hours to beat with no progression afterwards. I want my solo games to be challenging sure but not requiring me to learn like my multiplayer games can get

Pokemon is about the universe it was created in. It was the perfect on the go game when we were children and it even had a great anime to go with it. When you were home, you watched Ash and Pikachu take on the world of pokemon. Everything looked so vibrant and cool. Then when it was time for you to go with your parents to a house party, you could play Pokemon on your Gameboy.

It's just a nostalgia franchise now, but that's okay. Most people are unhappy with how Game Freak is handling the role of building these games, but maybe one day they'll make a turn.

I don't play Pokemon expecting a good turn-based RPG, I just like collecting cool little monsters and making them grow. Similar games like Cassette Beasts, Monster Sanctuary, and now Palworld appeal to me for the same reason.

Also this, but because it's got the quality of an Indie game. Before people jump down my throat, compare the animations, sound effects, graphical fidelity, and voice acting to any other AAA game. Even the combat, which people usually extoll as the best thing about them, is just dodge->attack over and over again. Don't even get me started on the pathetic "storytelling" in those games.

Edit: y'all mad huh

I quite enjoy Doom Eternal, but it's true it's a very different game from Doom (2016). You either vibe with the combat flow the game enforces or you don't. There is exactly one way to play it, by rotating between all the abilities as they go off their cooldowns, so you can keep restoring your ammo, HP and armor respectively.

Yeah I also couldn't get the hang on Doom Eternal. Loved the first one but the second one cramped so many unnecessary elements into it and made it too complicated. The first one was a simple but highly effective shooter, but the second one was just bloated with stuff nobody asked for.

Yeah, Doom 2016 is easily one of my favorite singleplayer fps games. Doom Eternal is just worse in every way, and I couldn't get through more than a few hours.

It completely breaks the combat flow state that made the original great

Instead of having the freedom to prioritize enemies and weapons, it wants you to do things a very specific way

Instead of the minimal but interesting story from the 2016, we get a convoluted mess, with random characters that we have no reason to care about.

Also, despite 2016 looking quite good, they decided to make Eternal garish and cartoony for some reason??

I could go on, but anyway I hope we get a proper 2016 sequel some day.

A complete downgrade from Doom 2016 in every way. Combat was complete madness, there's no such thing as planning ahead. You can only endlessly dash away while insta-swapping weapons ad infinitum.

Doom 2016 made you think. Is this glory kill to risky? Is the gap wide enough to make it through, who do I have to kill first? Doom Eternal reduced that to a single repetitive four button loop.

Have you considered using your chainsaw to "rip and tear"? It can help you with the ammo issue.

I didn't even like Doom (2016). It was ugly, dull and I hated the finisher system. Really disappointed because I'm old enough to have played the other Doom games as a kid and I mostly enjoyed the new wave of boomer shooters. Great soundtrack though.

I'm replaying Doom Eternal right now and I feel this so hard. Even with ammo upgrades and judicious chainsaw use I'm constantly out of ammo. Really makes me wish for a melee weapon that doesn't have limited fuel or whatever.

I get it. I’m the only one of my D&D/RPG friends who likes sports, and the only one of my sports friends who likes D&D :-/

Pyre is an interesting sports game IMO because it doesn't try to look like any real sport.

I do find it kind of odd that some people only play the latest sports games and nothing else. Also NFL Blitz on the Dreamcast is one of the best games and I've never watch a game irl.

In my experience, sports games are for sports fans, and I've met very few "gamers" that are into sports.

Yet it could be made to work. Imagine you make your own RPG party, but it's a football team. Want that ball ? better cast turn undead on the ref

Shit, I forgot about GTA games in my reply...

I'm with you on this one. I can see the appeal, but for me it ends up being a cycle of: do a mission or two, get bored of the larger than life characters, do some open world stuff, get my wanted level up too high, die, repeat until I quickly get bored and shut it off.

Which is odd because I do that exact same thing in other games I love (BotW, WoW (long since quit) or Destiny) and its all golden... but in a game like GTA? Yawn.

I've found games like that too filled with super serious gamers. DoTA is the same but the community is a bit friendlier.

I have ZERO patience so I'll just storm ahead into battle and try to fuck things up but that's not a great way to play cos you keep dying and lose time on the board. I tried to get into Heroes of the Storm when it started and the more casual players were a lot more fun but over time it developed the usual crowd of hardcore addicts that ruined it.

I tried it once... would not spend 3 hours having no idea what to do while getting cussed out again.

Heroes of the Storm is the only good MOBA and I hope Microsoft brings it back

Elden ring is the hardest of the soulslikes imo. A company that treasures not telling you shit and loves to kill you for mistakes also giving you too much freedom to make them imo.

Not really a critique on it, just ruminating on why i think it's the toughest one of the souls games I've played.

Same exact experience. Then someone from Reddit messaged me some non spoiler wary game tips and I went back in and played 130 hours. It was my first souls game since PS3 Demon’s Souls. I ended up loving it. But I fucking hated it at first, and I don’t blame anyone for being turned off.

I feel like, at this point, any enjoyment I still derive from Bethesda games is really just leftover nostalgia for Morrowind that will likely never come close again to how 14yo me was able to enjoy them, when they were still something new.

There's travel and discovery in Skyrim, which imho makes up a bit for its many flaws. Starfield on the other hand was stripped of that, in the sense that you always land directly on points of interest, so there's never a process of "getting there", or even "getting around", which to me was the whole point of Morrowind, Oblivion and Skyrim. Also the landscape is almost never handmade, but procedurally generated, so it has very little appeal. That sense of discovery I had in Morrowind was still there in Skyrim,... but completely gone in Starfield

I audibly gasped at seeing this, I think it's the best game I've ever played, I really do

Outer Wilds gave me super anxiety when playing it. Something about the time loop aspect and having to redo a bunch of stuff.

I also gave Outer Wilds a try and don’t think it stood up to the hype. Got through probably 95% of the story and then gave up on it, there were two “puzzles” that I just couldn’t figure out. Ended up reading a walkthrough and was not sad at all that I put it down.

Several hours in, I couldn't even make it to a point where the story started rewarding me. Which was part of the problem. I "cleared" one of the planets (Brittle Hollow), with its platforming elements (something I don't like in 3D), and my "reward" was a small piece of a puzzle. I needed a lot more than that.

Even before that point, the game hadn't made a good first impression. There was nothing about the intro section on the starting planet that particularly interested me. And then the ship controls drove me a bit nuts. The loop was the only interesting part about the game for me then.

Felt like the writing was on the wall for me after exploring that first planet, so I dropped it.

I haven't quite finished it yet, my feeling is that it slightly overstays it's welcome.

I've also noticed that most of the time I do a thing or two in the game then realise there's not quite enough time in the loop to do another thing, but just enough time to make me want to not waste the loop, since I find starting a new loop a bit tedious.

I agree in general, although I think Subnautica is still great despite being heavily crafting based.

That trend of shoving crafting into literally everything for a while was really irritating. Even with the great big empty MMO world, Dragon Age Inquisition would have been much more fun if I didn't spend a good half hour after every expedition looking through the giant mountain of crafting-based loot I inevitably acquired.

I fully agree with you. I feel like 99% of open world games sacrificed the story and gameplay in the process.

I tend to agree but then I also have moments where I get lost in the world for a few hours and it's great. Death Stranding is probably my favourite where I walk everywhere and I spend an hour doing one delivery!

I found the three newish Tomb Raider games to be a great mix of a sort of open world feel at times where you have things to explore, while being very much on rails. Each arc in the story gives you an area to explore and your actions in that area progress the story. You get some weapon and ability upgrades throughout. I came in not expecting much and couldn’t put the first one down. I think I finished Tomb Raider 2013 to 100% in about 20-25 hours and it was excellent. Will probably do another playthrough at some point, still haven’t played the third.

Yep you said it perfectly.

I also miss story driven games such as Uncharted games, playing several open world games in a row can be exhausting, I kinda feel it for game reviewers and such.

I really enjoyed it, and will return to it. But I put it down because it felt like doing chores. I will try again and try to focus on the scenery and story, which I do like a lot

Yeah, I never once felt that any scenes in Near A Tomato actually connected to one another. In a good mystery game, you make a discovery rife with questions, and then slowly answer more questions that lead to other questions. Nier is just about constant random shit involving attacks from the machine life forms - which are all promptly forgotten.

I don’t know how we’re supposed to care and worry so much about 2B and 9S dying when it literally happens once in the prologue, and the very first lines of the game are about how annoying it is to keep dying and being reborn.

I know a lot of nier automata fans irl and sometimes it's hard to argue with them about the game
I think that the worst part about nier automata is that it tries to be all philosophical and deep while saying absolutely nothing. By being so mysterious about its world, the whole game builds up to some kind of reveal that creates a gigantic twist... But then you realize that the twist doesn't really exist and that yeah all the shit is just random stuff.

Such a huge disappointment. And the combat is terrible imo

Suprisingly, while Omori had much MUCH more of a "random shit happening" feeling because of its setting, it had an extremely good story and I had never been that attached to characters before. So I don't even think Nier's problem is the fever dream feeling

maybe this is because I’ve never played a Zelda game

Definitely not it. BotW is a great game, but it’s not a Zelda game. That’s my beef with it and TotK.

Maybe this is because I’ve never played a Zelda game before so I have no nostalgia attached to it?

Don't know about that, because I very much grew up with Zelda for the Gameboy, SNES and of course N64 and I loved them all. Maybe it's just Breath of the Wild...

Respect. They're some of my faves, always love to hear different opinions.

Have you tried bloodborne or sekiro?

What's your favorite game and genre?

Played all of them and I agree fully.

They are extremely tedious, needlessly arduous games.

I think that is in part why I loved them all. It brought me into a different mental state where I wasn't going to be able to rush. I enjoyed that aspect.

My mind can often wander on to various subjects as well, so there was this perverse meditative aspect because of the tension of knowing that I had to constantly focus on the game or it would just kill me in one of its various, unfair ways.

Perhaps I could interest you in some Palworld then? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=buRSN13jH3E

I'd like to hear a bit more about your thoughts on souls-likes. What makes them lazy and silly?

For rock.... And... Stone... ⛏️🥹

This one hurts deep. But to each their own ofc.

that and any other single player game with a multi player option, where the single player part is clearly balanced around having multiple teammates.

Definitely disagree with the clear best choice one. Our group regularly switches things around. Of course to each their own.

My IrL table top group will meet online to game every now and then. Half of us really dig DRG, the other half do not. You are certainly not alone.

I only ever play it in a group, and even then after 4 missions I’m a bit over it. It’s just such a lonely slog solo…

That said, I really like the dumb cosmetics, goofy built in antics, and group play.

The map is actually really small, you just walk insanely slowly at realistic speeds at lower levels

When wandering around, there's always a cave or tomb around to explore. But yeah, there aren't a lot of people out in the wilderness. Just the occasional naked nord or plantation.

Surprised this hasn't been said more in this thread, to be honest. All it seems to be is Breath of the Wild and Soulslikes.

I've tried 3 different Monster Hunter games, I've really tried to see what people enjoy about them. But the controls are so awful, the loop is tedious, and I could never find anything good to say about them. This series truly confuses me.

Installed it. Spent two hours in unskippable tutorials and dialogues learning about a million different mechanics. Sent out into wild; collecting mucous for 45 minutes. Find monster, hit it a bunch. Monster runs away. I chase it for 10 more minutes, then Quit and uninstall.

I so wish I could like Monster Hunter. I mean there are huge monsters, what's not to like about it. But the rest just isn't fun or enough to me so I get bored really fast. It's a bummer.

Agree. This was exactly my experience too.

I was never a fan either. Doki Doki Literature Club was good though.

Tbhey are, quite literally, the campy romance novels of the videogame world.

I’m not far enough into paltopialand to really say, but at the beginning and five hours in, it runs at 142FPS and never drops *at max settings. Its performance is really remarkable for an early game.

I’ve never played Rust or Ark.

Curious: what about it, do you know?

Did you play any of the Dragon Age games? I've heard the combat is pretty similar, which is a bummer because that was the thing that kept me from continuing DA:O. I feel like I'd enjoy the story of both but can't get past the actual gameplay.

Same but I'm just not into RPGs or D&D generally.

So I got on that game and it was kind of fun up until the first town when my friends were like "we need to talk to people to figure out what to do."

I don't mind games having a bit of lore and story but ... I want to be doing (read: typically fighting) stuff in my games not just talking to a bunch of people... And when I don't even know what people I need to talk to, to most quickly get back to the action, I'm out.

The one exception to that is possibly RuneScape because I've been playing that game for ages. However, even there I use quest guides and sometimes just spam through all the dialogue.

I think you don't like competing actually. And it's fine.

That's what mods are for, most of the game's popularity is built around the community and not the vanilla game itself

Fromsoft had to fix a security vulnerability in all their games that got advertised in the final months before release. All Fromsoft games went offline for like a year and it really short circuited how Elden Ring got finished.

Souls games are particularly crafted series of levels. That kind of gameplay has to either be condensed in between stretches of empty, or spread out thinly over a large area.

Elden Ring has some condensed areas with good classic Souls level feel, but they're often quite short. There is also a lot of very empty areas with little to no significance. A lot of the game feels like placeholder content that had cancelled plans.