Farthest Frontier.
I love city building games. They’re my genre of choice. This one is hyped up to 11 as this great agent based logistics chain focused city sim. It’s not. Like at all. The numbers are obfuscated to hell and back. It’s got the slowest tier one to tier 2 transition I’ve ever played in a game like this. Very little does what it’s reported to do. They added a useless tech tree to lock stuff up to get a sense of progression, when in reality it just adds a second layer of requirements and time to progress to the next stage of your city. They have a really frustrating combat system which is cool in thought, but poorly executed. The economy is fucked and barely makes any sense.
The most frustrating thing that’s the biggest deal breaker is that pops don’t move into the city upon building housing. You need extra people to fulfill basic laborer roles. I can fill up every job I’ve plopped and have 20 extra workers doing basic labor or nothing. Or I can have two extra workers and build more houses to increase the pop count. Problem is nobody moves in. One of the requirements to get to tier 3 is 200 pop. I can’t break the 64 barrier let alone 100 because for some awful reason the dev decided to use a desirability score and not move pops in upon building a house. I have a population cap of 140 people and there’s vacant houses everywhere. Yet shit don’t change. I don’t think peasants in the fucking 1400s gave a shit about market prices and luxury amenities when fucking bears and wolves attack every 5 minutes. Just move people in the houses when I build them.
The game is a looker. I’ll give it that. Everything else is frustratingly bad.
Just played through Doom: Eternal cause it was on sale for 4€ a bit back. The entire time I was wishing I was playing Doom 2016…
The new Doom games are all very different from each other. I liked what Doom 2016 was doing (even if it got repetitive) but really didn’t enjoy Eternal because the constant juggling didn’t sit with me. I haven’t tried Dark Ages but it seems like it’s doing something between 2016 and Eternal (not quite use what you want and not quite always juggle) while also adding its own dimension with the mix of melee and guns.
I would never recommend each Doom title based on the last title. But it doesn’t mean I don’t like what they’re doing. I think it’s brave to do its own thing instead of doing what is expected.
Skyrim, it’s so damn mundane.
I have the opposite opinion. I avoided it for years because of the hype (and not having proper hardware to run it).
Now I have almost 900 hours in it, and sometimes I jump in just to walk around and revisit some places.
That’s because you’re playing it wrong. You see, at it’s core Skyrim is actually a puzzle game you play on the Nexus Mods website. You spend 30+ hours carefully researching, building, and tweaking the perfect pack of mods, only to immediately run out of interest in playing Skyrim once you’re finally done. The actual Skyrim installation only exists to check if you solved the puzzle correctly and it runs.
Actually. I tried Skyrim so many times and never got into it, then I decided to give it the best shot and play with a cavalcade of QoL mods. I went from a hater to a true Skyrim enjoyer. At this point, with how pessimistic I was about the game, I think with the right setup ANYONE can enjoy it.
The end-game lasts about 30 seconds after boot.
“Oooh, pretty sky. Ooh, wavy plants. Ooh, god rays. Alt+F4.”
Damn. I feel so seen suddenly.
You know, one man’s trash is another man’s treasure. I’d say Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 is worth playing for a lot of reasons, but I think it’s got huge fundamental issues in both its combat and narrative design; it’s still on the short list for most outlets’ game of the year awards this year. Hades just got a sequel, and I didn’t even care for the first one. For many people, those two games are just about the only roguelikes or -lites they’ve ever played, but I don’t think they’re even good ones of those; the level generation is so limited that you’ll have seen all their permutations quite quickly, and the bonuses from boons just about all feel superfluous and interchangeable. Hollow Knight holds this legendary status among metroidvanias, and Silksong followed suit. I thought Hollow Knight was just fine, but I was surprised to find that this was the game with that sort of following. When facing the possibility of playing Silksong this year or about 5 other video games that came out this year, I don’t think Silksong is making the cut.
But your mileage will absolutely vary. These games have hype for a reason: a lot of people love them. You might, too.
A big part of the appeal of Hollow Knight and Hades are their respective art styles. They are both genuinely gorgeous games, and it really improves the experience. I would rather open up Hades again instead of, say, TBoI for exactly that reason, despite my thinking that TBoI is the better roguelike.
Admittedly I can’t bring myself to enjoy Hollow Knight at all, but that’s just an issue of me disliking metroidvanias.
hades’ strength is its narrative; hk’s strength is its worldbuilding.
it’s very difficult to stand out on pure gameplay in the 21st century.
I played E33 for about 4 hours. The combat system is atrocious. It feels like I’m playing a turn based RPG but with elements of Dark Souls? The almost necessity of dodging in combat made me give the game up.
I’d go for CO:E33 too. Its a decent enough game but I don’t understand the absolute hype it receives. Probably a 5/10 game for me.
Dungeons and Dragons 5e is less fun than 3.5e IMO.
There was more of a sense of character progression, and ability differentiation in 3.5e.
5e achieves balance by flattening the power curve.
For example, the attack bonus for a level 20 Fighter in 5e is just 4 points higher than it was at level 1 - same as a 5e Wizard. Both get +2 at lvl 1 and +6 at lvl 20
In 3.5e, a level 20 fighter’s attack bonus is 19 points higher than it was at level 1 (+1 to +20), but a wizard only gains half that much fighting prowess as they level up (+0 to +10).
All 5e characters are pretty much the same statistically & mechanically. Differentiation comes from role play, which is the least interesting part of the game for me.
I think this is one of the reasons why Pathfinder 2e has been doing so well.
It’s a middle ish ground and it feels good to progress.
My current issues with it are how underpowered the items are. So boring.
3.5e being the best is an opinion I’ve heard for my entire life. I would say preferring 5e is a more unpopular opinion.
I haven’t played any 3.5e proper, but I understand Pillars of Eternity 1 is largely based on it, and I’ve played a handful of the 2e games. I dig a lot of the changes in 5e. I wouldn’t say the power is so flat that the differentiation only comes down to role play; I’d say a lot of it comes from the apples and oranges comparisons between classes, like things beyond to-hit roles. Your fighter has no AoE attacks like the wizard has but has Second Wind and Action Surge, for instance. The advantage to flattening the differences a bit more is that your character’s role is less preordained (“you are playing class X, so you must be responsible for Y”) and that you are less hamstrung by the absence of one particular role, which scales better to small parties.
I liked 4e the best.
All the souls games. I don’t get it, they’re just no fun 🤷♂️
Also, never finished doom eternal, far too busy. Dark ages was great tho
There was a time when I could not have imagined liking those kinds of games. My partner got me Dark Souls Prepare to Die Edition and I hated it. Hate may be too kind a word for how I felt. I’ve always loved metroidvanias and the style seemed right up my gothy, witchy alley, but I couldn’t get past the first basic zombie.
Then we watched a bunch of videos and realized that the game was designed to be played slowly and deliberately. There were no “junk” enemies and paying careful attention at all times was the game. When it clicked, it clicked, and now From Software games are my favorite.
Souls games didn’t make sense to me until I saw Giant Bomb play through Demon’s Souls. Mechanics that I didn’t know were there were explained in plain English, and then I could better understand where I went wrong when I died.
I often stay away of new games because that exactly, the hype. If you play a new game and you say it sucks, everybody yells at you, but if you let past the time, it’s the time the one who gives reason to people.
I always think it’s fascinating to see how the discourse around games evolves. It’s always most telling when people stop talking about a game at all. Remember Starfield? No one even talks about Starfield anymore, not even about how bad it may or may not have been. Just kinda flopped a bit and passed from memory.
I had to search “Bethesda space game” just now to even remember its generic name …
In a lot of cases, the people who enjoyed it will have already said what they wanted to say about it, and then the detractors can just yell out the loudest. There’s a perception that BioShock Infinite was only praised because of release hype, and a lot of people look back at it unkindly for one reason or another, but I’ve seen a number of people experience it for the first time in just the past couple of years, unaware of any reputation it might have, and they loved it like we all did at launch.
This happened to me with Resident Evil 3 Remake, I didn’t knew that had so many haters behind but I really enjoyed the game. One thing to hate, they say, is the short duration of the game. I mean, you could beat the original game in 2 hours, if you didn’t knew nothing about the game, could take you like 7 or 8 hours
Yeah, I liked that one more than its reputation as well. In some ways, I liked it better than the 2 remake.
Elden Ring. It is good for what it is, probably the best in its genre, but after so many Soulsbornes, it just feels like more of the same. Formulaic. I’ve tried it three separate times and it never grabbed me.
To me, the Souls combat does best in a tightly knit and highly curated environment. I really enjoyed Elden Ring but I do not think it was a step forward for the series. Open World worked to the detriment of the game IMO.
Dark Souls.
I played Demons Souls and it was awesome, but Dark Souls is so confuse, I couldn’t understand shit about the story, and it’s not that hard, harder than Demons Souls but no that hard.
Not sure how recent we’re talking but within the last year or so my 2 biggest disappointments have been once human and nightingale. I can usually work around jank and weird creative decisions, but unfortunately neither of these two were worth any of the time I’ve spent playing em since they felt like they didn’t seem to want you to progress.
Played once human for about 3 days, nightingale for around 3 hours and then refunded.
