this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2023
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Gaming

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From video gaming to card games and stuff in between, if it's gaming you can probably discuss it here!

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Most of the video games I’ve played were pretty good. The only one I can think of that I didn’t like was MySims Kingdom for the Nintendo DS. Dropped that pretty quickly. It was a long while ago, but I’ll guess it was because there were too many fetch quests and annoying controls.

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[–] [email protected] 100 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (23 children)

I’m gonna come out swinging: not even a game, but two entire fucking genres:

  1. Battle royales. I am like 90% convinced that gamers have been tricked by some dark psychology that has somehow convinced them that these games are worth playing. I don’t know whether it’s because the quality of FPS games has been so low for so long that today’s gamers have never really played a properly fun shooter or what. Battle royales are 75% downtime. You spend so long fucking around parachuting in to the map, walking around, collecting stuff, bla bla bla, interspersed by just a few moments of action, and when you get killed it usually doesn’t feel fair, it’s because a whole other team showed up right as you were already fighting someone else and put you in a nearly impossible situation.

  2. MOBA games are just RTS games with the best bits taken out.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (1 children)

For me it's pretty much any competitive multiplayer game. I don't dislike the games, I usually dislike the communities. That was one of the big things that turned me away from Overwatch (the first one) for example, the gameplay was fun but I just wish I could choose who I was playing with.

Needless to say, I stick with singleplayer games these days, or at least less competitive multiplayer games. Games with good local multiplayer, like SSBU, are also pretty fun when I can get a group together.

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[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

Battle royal's taught me what it would feel like to be gaslighted. Surely nobody thinks they are fun. The only sane answer is all my friends have conspired to induce paranoia in me.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Battle Royals - for me, it's about how the consequences heighten the tension, and how the threat of getting unceremoniously smashed back to the lobby heightens the victories.

Playing with friends makes the the whole experience fun. If you drop and have some downtime 'just' gearing up, you can chat and hang out and goof around. Then when shit kicks off, it's just so much more impactful (imo) than a game where you've just died and respawned a bunch already and you can do the same again. The teamwork and communication has to be next level and it feels so damn good to win a round, especially when you've been on the back foot and had to claw your way out of tough fights.

No mind tricks, not fussed about loot boxes and skins, just awesome memories from when we where playing enough to get almost half decent at it.

....and now I'm missing Apex Legends, might reinstall and remember that my friends don't play it any more

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[–] [email protected] 43 points 1 year ago (9 children)

papers please. i thought i was doing pretty well in the beginning, but i guess it's built in to the narrative of the game that no matter how hard you work, your family will still get sick and die, and the story progresses by you unknowingly screwing up and letting in a terrorist. not only are you responsible for paying for your own mistakes, it only gets harder and more unforgiving with each level. i realized pretty quickly that it's not fun at all to spend my precious free time playing an extremely punishing game about working.

[–] [email protected] 39 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's more of a tragic story than a game. The misery is kind of the point. If you don't see that point or can't enjoy that, then yeah, it'll be terrible.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago

Fwiw, it is absolutely possible to save your whole family in Papers Please. First time players aren't necessarily expected to manage it, though, so you're not wrong about losing family members being the intended experience. It's definitely a game that tries to be "engaging" rather than " fun". I enjoyed it a lot back in college, but who knows how I'd feel now that I have a full-time job.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago

The game is more of a short story. Which means the gameplay is intentionally grinding because the job is grinding. Which honestly IS bad gameplay, but delivers the message it's going for. If reading depressing alt history dystopia is not how you want to spend your time, then I don't blame you one little inch. ♥

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

While i agree that it's rather punishing, but to me it feels like that's how it works under a dictatorship. I like how i need to work toward some of the ending by breaking the law

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (2 children)

For me, my “misery is the point” game was This War of Mine. I got it just before Ukraine, but still couldn’t stomach it. My first character had a kid that was constantly crying and whimpering and I just couldn’t do it. I was bad at it—if you can be good. I couldn’t help others in the ways that I wanted to. I couldn’t stop the whimpering. Then I went out as someone else and came back and the dad and kid left. And I had to stop there for a bit.

I set it down to come back later, then Ukraine happened. Where it was hard to stomach while I knew this was hypothetical and the Euro-setting was pretty abstracted from the current reality there—though still very present elsewhere—knowing that people on the ground were looking and sounding similar to what was happening in game and seeing that in news daily just cut off any desire I had to play. It’s powerful and DEEPLY empathetic, but that spiral of misery and failure was the point and it made it in spades.

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I wouldn't necessarily say unfun, but "not for me". Stardew Valley. I went in ready to relax and farm, but oh God, time moves quickly! And I only have limited energy per day. That wombo combo when I was starting out just stressed me out and I didn't get into it immediately.

I know there are mods for it or that it's a good game even with the time, but out of all possible farming type games there were plenty more my speed than Stardew.

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Myst. I know, I know. One of the hallmarks of video games. I hated it. I like games that give you a path and let you figure it out. I've hundreds of hours into Factorio and it's kin. Portal! A puzzle game, Portal gives you A and Z and lets you figure out how to get there. Myst doesn't do ANYTHING. Nothing was obvious to me. I didn't understand where the A to Z was. I couldn't find A, Z, or any of the other steps. None of it clicked. Years ago, I watched some parts of walk throughs and I did not understand how I was supposed to know the things they were doing. None of it made any sense to me.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

I don’t remember if it was like this with the game Myst specifically, but generally speaking: Some hardly solvable riddles were put into many point and click adventure in the pre-internet era, because they usually came with an expensive help hotline that they wanted you to call.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 year ago

I have never ever heard of a game coming with a help hotline. And I played a lot of games in that time. TIL that

one classic example is the game "The Legend of Zelda" for the NES. The game contained cryptic puzzles and secrets that were not easily solvable. Nintendo provided a hotline, called the Nintendo Power Line, where players could call in for tips, tricks, and solutions. Calls to the hotline were not free, creating an additional revenue source for the company.

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[–] [email protected] 30 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Destiny 2. I played THE HELL out of Destiny 1, then 2 rolls around and it was like they forgot everything that people liked about 1.

You couldn't access the story missions from the map, and you couldn't replay them on demand, you could only play them off a playlist. There was a weekly heroic story mission that gave a powerful engram reward, then they removed the reward and people stopped playing even that. Eventually they removed the story missions entirely "because nobody was playing them". Big brain move there!

In Destiny 1, each series of missions on a planet ended with a higher level "strike". So you'd pick the missions off the map based on your light level, then level up to hit the strike, then move on to the missions on the next planet.

In D2, not only could you not see the missions, or what level you were supposed to be, the strikes weren't present on the map at all, you could only play them on a play list and the play list was randomized. It was also bugged, often delivering the same strike over and over and others not at all, leaving gaps in the storyline and player experience.

They did patch things, like being able to play strikes on demand, then about 1/2 way through the life cycle Bungie decided to just delete 1/2 of the content in the game. New players would come in, have no access to the original story missions, no idea what was going on, and no idea how to proceed without watching a bunch of youtube videos showing the content removed from the game.

For existing players, they decided that people had spent too much time, in some cases hundreds of hours, curating their perfect weapon and armor sets. Rather than create better gear to replace what people loved, they artificially capped old gear to sunset it and force people to "upgrade" to crappier gear that replaced it. They intentionally didn't make better gear because they were afraid of "power creep" and legitimately "explained" that they no longer knew how to design the game around the old gear. Funny, they didn't have that problem when it was the ONLY gear.

Maybe it's better now? I dunno, the way Bungie totally disrespected the time I spent playing and money I spent on expansions, they'll never get another dime from me.

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[–] [email protected] 28 points 1 year ago (2 children)

"Competitive" multiplayer games in general. I miss it when multiplayer games were just fun and not streamlined misery simulators where the attitude is everyone is an idiot except yourself.

I know it's popular to fart on Overwatch 2, but even when the original came out I thought it was so fucking dull. The No Man Sky quote "Wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle" can very well explain the hero roster of that game.

I'd rather do a barefoot pilgrimage to Jerusalem than play CS:GO, League of Legends, Overwatch, Fartnite, Valorant, etc.

Team Fortress 2 is unbalanced and janky, and it's 1000x more fun than any of those games. It even proved that the competitive crowd could do their own thing that suit their needs, instead of ruining a game to the ground with "balance" and unfun gameplay.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I'll list a few.

  • MLB: The Show. I used to really enjoy these games because they felt like a sports game that actually cared about making a very realistic simulation while still keeping it fun. Now everything is about Diamond Dynasty, the fantasy baseball mode. All the other modes only reward you by giving you packs and giving you a gentle shove into Diamond Dynasty. One of my favorite modes was "March to October" where you play select innings in select games over the course of a whole season. Each game's outcome determines your team's general ability over the season. The better you do, the better you win rate and the higher chance of making it into the post season. Your rewards? Card packs. SMH.

  • Ghostrunner. The levels were fun and had big Hotline Miami vibes but the boss fights were far too difficult and just utterly boring. Yeah, I really liked wall running in circles for minutes on end because the floor was lava. That was great.

  • Atomic Heart. Bought it on a whim while high. I liked the bioshock influence and the level design is really cool. It just suffers from being a "survival horror" without the survival or the horror, so most of the gameplay involves you scrounging around for bullets and then dealing ultra light blows to enemies because you ran out of your 3 bullets. Pretty much none of the combat was fun and the stealth was a relentless ultra punishing slog. As a lover of stealth games, please if you're considering making a stealth game do not take any notes from this game. It did it all wrong.

  • Dying Light 2. I loved the first game but this game just sorta felt overwhelming in a way? I really don't know how else to put it. I like open world games but developers just need to calm the fuck down. I don't need 10 map markers.

  • The Quarry. I get that it's supposed to be a rip on teen slasher movies but that still didn't make it very fun to me. I loved Until Dawn and played it probably 5 times so I was super hyped for this but just really let down. I hated the way the game ended and I hated pretty much every second that I played it.

  • The Hunter: Call of the Wild. It was just boring. I guess that's what hunting is like in real life, but so is truck driving and I like truck simulator games...

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[–] [email protected] 24 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Ubisoft style open world games. I honestly know I'm not built to enjoy them but I convinced myself to try and finish Horizon Zero Dawn and it was a huge mistake.

For a single player game, it vigorously wastes your time. The entire game is based around crafting but each time you need to gather something you need to come to a full stop, and spend a second watching the interact meter fill before you can gather each thing you see in the overworld.

The talent trees either contain things that are not meaningfully impactful on the core experience, ie tons of talents are slightly dressed up raw damage increases. Or they are things that are meaningful, but not surprising such as silent takedowns or bullet time. Overall it feels like Aloy was designed to be kind of fun and then they hamstrung her in a bunch of different ways to give a reason for the talent system to exist, and it takes the runtime of the whole game to undo this.

Many quests do not have anything to say about the lore or characterization of the world, whether it be for individual characters or the world overall.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Superman 64 is the only game I tried to return to Blockbuster before the rental window was done. They wouldn't let me so I had to keep it for the rest of the week.

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[–] [email protected] 23 points 1 year ago (6 children)

For me it was Cyberpunk 2077. Yes there were all those bugs at launch but I did not have too many issues. My main complaint was the story and the characters. The protagonist V was without any compassion, just a loud asshole. I couldn't empathize at all. I felt like I wasn't able to make any decisions were I was happy with the outcome. Additionally the gameplay was mediocre at best. A lot of places in the world felt completely rushed and unfinished. Combined with the lies from marketing, I wasn't hooked at all and felt betrayed.

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (7 children)

No Man's Sky. (boring Sandbox exploration without a soul and very unfun crafting)

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[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Elite Dangerous is the most un-fun game I've spent 1500+ hours on. I want to love it but the developers' actions, or lack thereof, makes it difficult. The game has so much potential the devs won't or can't take advantage of for some reason.

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Minecraft. I'll play it if my friends ask me to but I found it incredibly frustrating and boring. The combat feels super weird and hard to execute, most of the discoveries are repetitive, and I didn't really like the building mechanic. I know, I'm in the minority for not enjoying it, but I guess voxel-style games just aren't my jam.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (5 children)

Terraria, it's a hot take I think but I just dislike it so much.

I dislike the controls, the appearance, the sorta jank, I just find it to be a more boring Minecraft and Minecraft can already be boring. I don't understand the love for it and I think it ruined a friendship with a group that really only wanted to play that and league of legends

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Octopath Traveler. The UI was terrible, the loot was nothing but stat sticks, and most of the dungeons, of which there were too many, were just long tree walk with potions at the leaves. Genuinely the worst game I've ever played. The three-directional sprites were also extremely lazy. I think I lost my mind right at the start when the lazy script response saw one of the characters' childhood friend suddenly develop amnesia and treat him like a stranger because everyone needs generic dialogue.

The music and cast of thousands worldbuilding was fantastic, but otherwise, I hated almost every single of the 80 hours I put into it trying to give ti a fair shake.

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[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago (2 children)

12 Minutes. It sucks because I was really looking forward to it - it's published by Annapurna which has an amazing track record, and the trailer and concept looked really interesting. But it just kind of devolves into a really basic point and click game with one location where you just have to try every combination of things until something works. And the story itself is just a trainwreck. I wasn't left satisfied or with any interesting thoughts, I was mostly just confused as to what the hell I was supposed to get out of it.

If you want a good time loop game published by Annapurna, just play Outer Wilds.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (5 children)

I'm gonna piss a lot of people off, and say that I really, really cannot stand Halo - the whole franchise, not just the 343 stuff.

The way I see it, my problem with the series is twofold: storytelling and gunplay. The storytelling is weak at best: whilst I'm usually a huge fan of environmental storytelling, there's just so little information in game for me to go off! It wasn't until I read the Reach novel that I figured out who the Covenant were beyond just "evil aliens". I questioned this issue on the site we don't talk about and was told to read the books, but put simply, if I have to read a book to understand your plot, then you haven't told your plot well enough. Chief is presented in the game as this incredible figure (as are the Spartans), but the games never really tell you why, and as such I never really care about Chief or his bullshit.

Regarding the gunplay, I find it (and movement) simply too floaty to be enjoyable. There isn't enough recoil from a lot of the weapons, and the SFX on most of the guns don't give a great sense of power.

I understand that it's a massive series of nostalgia for a massive number of people. I understand that it redefined FPSes, and I respect the games for this. They deserve every bit of praise people give them. They aren't bad games, but I just do not enjoy them.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Vampire Survivor.

I began playing it after so much praise from all over the place and it just uses predatory tactics to hook the gamer. I only had fun with the game for maybe a day or so but overall clocked in many more hours of hate-playing. The only good thing is that the developer (who's background is developing gambling games) does not use those tactics for microtransactions.

Once I deleted the game, I was never even tempted to go back.

[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Here's a big question though

What's the difference between predatory tactics to hook people into a game, and "normal" gameplay, whatever that is? If neither cost any money or have microtransactions in any way?

Is Diablo 2 using predatory mechanics? Is Counter Strike? Is Factorio?

Games are artificial constructs. If you deconstruct them entirely, unless they got some story to tell as the center point of the game, their mechanics and goals are entirely artificial and constructed to get you to keep playing, be engaged, and have fun, whatever that means and implies.

Because, well, in the end, games do not have a grand purpose. Their purpose is entertainment(or be art, but not all games have that goal). And so if vampire survivors keep you engaged and enjoy the game... Is that really that much different to other games? Another example to this are idle/incremental games, as a pure distillation of what games are. Are they predatory? Is there really much difference from the very core of other, more "proper", games?

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[–] [email protected] 20 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Really? I guess you could consider the game's visual flair to be predatory that way but I always felt that stuff was a joke because it doesn't have microtransactions

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'm not seeing how anything in the game could be considered predatory in the slightest...super confused on this.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I tried Dark Souls once, I think it was DS3. I can't figure out what would make it fun for anyone.

[–] [email protected] 21 points 1 year ago (1 children)

The thing about the From Software games is that they’re (mostly) fair. Most action games give the player a huge leg up compared to the enemies - the boss has a glowing weakpoint that can be revealed with the item you found in the dungeon - or you’re a badass cyborg assassin vs rank and file goons.

In Dark Souls, you’re just a stubborn dude with a sword - and even the lowliest enemy can take you out if you get careless. But everyone is playing by the same rules, it sucks when an enemy staggers you and hits you while you can’t move - but you can figure out how to do the same to them. And the bosses really are doing everything in their power to make you dead.

The satisfaction of Dark Souls comes from meeting those challenges head on and beating them at their own game - or being clever enough to bypass or weaken the obstacle. It’s not for everybody, and it’s certainly not for anybody all the time - but it’s pretty awesome when you get to be David finally taking down Goliath.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (4 children)

most multiplayer shooters to me, they're typically filled with the most vile shit you'll ever hear coming from an 8 year old, and the adults are just as bad and should know better.

competitive shooters like Rainbow Six Siege or Counter Strike are also really bad in casual modes, especially if you're a new or lackluster player. You'll be flamed, team killed, and your teammates will try their absolute best to ruin your entire day over a hobby

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (14 children)

That's a hard question, but the first two games that came to mind were Final Fantasy XV and Snowrunner.

FFXV is just... There's no nice way of saying it, it's garbage. A huge open world with nothing interesting in it, the story is pure nonsense and it's all full of holes, the characters are generic jrpg fodder, the shallow combat literally plays itself and you don't even get to drive the damn car yourself. I was never a fan of the series, but after that one I swore off it completely.

And Snowrunner is just utterly disappointing, for a game that describes itself as a "driving sim" the physics are horrendous, the trucks squid all over the place and they have no traction whatsoever, the entire game revolves around you driving from point A to B through the most sadist maps imaginable, if you get stuck or flip over you have to start everything from start and it's such a slow game, I can't stress this enough it's glacial slow. It's just incredibly frustrating and stressful, coming from Euro Truck Simulator 2 (a game that I consider zen like) this was just torturous.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (3 children)

I bought ARK because dinosaurs. That is the only thing it has going for it. The core gameplay loop is watching a progress bar fill up.

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[–] [email protected] 17 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Deeprock Galactic.

On paper it's everything I like in games. But when my friends invite me to play, I get bored so much, that I have microsleep episodes. It's so incredibly boring I can not understand the hype at all.

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[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I've got one - Hotline Miami 2.

Hotline Miami 1 was such a fantastic game. Frantic, high energy, fun, good art style, a confusing at best story but that's not why you played it. HM2 was full of off-screen instant kill bullshit that you literally could not prepare for in any way other than to die to it a handful of times before you memorized enemy positions off-screen. In the first game, you could always see threats before they could kill you. Not the case in the sequel. "You died and there's nothing you could have done to prevent it" is a bullshit mechanic in any game.

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (3 children)

The one I still remember is Donkey Kong 64. Just a boring collectathon with too much retreading. And it missed the funny writing of previous Rare platformers. Also it had a cringe rap song like every piece of pop media had in the late 90’s even my eleven year old self hated it.

I loved Rare games before that. After that game I stopped buying any Rare games. Probably because Dk64 was the first game I bought with my own money that I saved for a long time. I didn’t even buy Perfect Dark

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[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I'd say Dark Souls 2.

When you get to the area with the bazillion spitting statues that respawn when you do, it became very clear that Fromsoft was out of ideas for making the game both interesting AND challenging.

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Pretty much all the new AAA games. Kind of lost interested the moment games stopped being innovative. It's nice to have super dooper realistic looking game and millions of small details but I still haven't seen a game that would really improve on the game play in the last 20 years. They are still full of simple rules and mechanics. For example, 20 years ago it was common to have the "enemy spotted you but just hide and don't move for 3 seconds and they will move on" rule in games and it pisses me off when new AAA games do it. Modern games are full of this shit. "If you do A in situation B, C will happen". Just learn the rules and beat the game. There are more rules, more details, animations are nicer but I still find it boring. It's still just a bunch of fixed rules, NPCs still move like robots, you can still see the algorithms behind everything. I prefer to play an small indie game that actually tries something new than AAA game that tries to build 'realistic' world and fails at it.

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[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

Final Fantasy 15. I've never been a fan of the modern (post FF7) games but fell for the hype around 15, purchased it, played it, actually finished it constantly wondering when the game would suck me in, and was left wondering what all that hype was about. The game had literally nothing I wanted in a JRPG as I found the story bog standard and the combat and traversal piss poor. That game officially made me give up on Final Fantasy since the only recent-ish game I've liked is FF Tactics. Make a sequel to that and I'll reconsider.

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