Honestly? Escape from Tarkov.
I understand what it’s going for on paper. The tension, the risk, the realism. But every time I watch someone play it looks like 45 minutes of cautious walking followed by dying to someone they never saw in a direction they couldn’t predict.
Maybe I’m just not built for it.
Outer Wilds.
An indie developer that had never made a game before thinks they can just show up and drop the best game ever made like it’s no big deal?
And then you actually start playing the game and there’s no annoying partner character constantly holding your hand and feeding you hints with corny quippy voice lines? You mean to say I have to figure out how to play on my own?
And don’t even get me started on the community. I’ve never seen a group of people more concerned with spoilers to maintain the mystery for new players.
And it’s a game you can only play once and then that’s it? How does the developer expect to make any money selling microtransactions if their players only get to experience the greatest thing ever published once and then never come back but are compelled to talk about it given any opportunity until the end of time?
Counter Strike.
Nothing interesting ever fucking happens, it’s just shooting guys in corridors and around corners, first who gets an accidental headshot thanks to random spread wins…
The time-to-kill and the rounds are just too short for any sort of interesting macro-game to arise, it’s all micro all the time.
Any game that’s “best with a controller”. I’ve never liked a controller, and I’ve tried those of the SNES, Sega Genesis, GameCube, PS1, PS2, XBox, XBox360, XBox1, Wii, & PS5. They’re all trash.
Chess. Fuckin’ a, no new characters for like a thousand years now. One map. Small children can beat me. Shit’s trash.
UMM ACKSHUALLY the queen was added in the 15th century, replacing the weaker vizier.
In my first language we still call the chess queen a vizier!
Last gameplay patch was in the 70s, when they fixed the vertical castling exploit.
Whoa, they had vertical castling?
Whoa, I’d never heard of that. Thanks!
What the hell are you on about, they added a new piece just last month.
I thought this was going to be about the nook :(
An LRR reference in the wild? Absolutely mythical.
Second time you’ve spotted me doing it!
Ah damn I’m so sorry I didn’t pick up on your name! I’m terrible at that, I really should be more mindful. Actually I’m going to tag you “LRR Enjoyer” now. There!
Also I have to confess I haven’t kept up with them lately. I used to watch a ton of it years ago, both their sketches and some of their stream stuff. And Desert Bus of course. I really should get back into it, I don’t know why I stopped.
Jesus.
According to Star Trek: The Original Series, in around 2 centuries, chess will have a new mainstream map consisting of 3 planes instead of 1. We won’t have to wait long! So exciting!
Just wait until they have 8 separate cubes each consisting of 8 planes with an 8x8 grid each: true 4D chess.
Now it would only take 8 arrays of 8 of these cubes to advance to 5D chess!
Fuckin’ a, I had to share that with !anarchychess@sopuli.xyz
I saw your repost before I saw this. Then I read his comment and thought “did he just steal that quote from the meme I just read?“
no new characters for like a thousand years now. One map.
I’m sorry, what…!?
Football games. I don’t see any gameplay difference between one made in 2007 and the latest football game, so why people still decide to drop 60$ for the very same game every year is something i don’t get.
Two reasons:
- Active multiplayer: Yes this is kind of a chicken and egg situation, but people who play online multiplayer want to play the version of the game with the largest community of active players.
- Roster updates: If you’re a fan of a sports team, you probably want to play using their current active roster. Yes, fan updates are sometimes available for older titles but the latest release will have updated face scans etc.
Its also important to note that a lot of sports game fans are just into that style of video game and buy consoles 6ust to play them. They aren’t playing videogames just sports games.
This is the big thing.
I know many people who have had games consoles that have never played anything other than FIFA/EAFC
If any sports games where made for the first time today they’d probably just go the subscription model. You buy the base game and need to pay for annual subscription updates and access to multiplayer.
Essentially releasing a game every year is this but the ideal of the subscription model wasn’t around back in 1995 when the first 3D sports games where releasing.
Actually, PES and FIFA used to get really good gameplay updates back in the 2000s. Like, the difference between FIFA 2002 and FIFA 2003 was massive, for example.
Then they realized they’re too big to waste money on actual development and went all in on licenses and marketing. It’s been shit ever since.
FOMO, mainly.
Bro, if you haven’t played FOMO26 yet, you’re really missing out
What’s the point anymore, FOMO27 is coming out in 3 months
Theres actually quite a huge difference. The animations are much better, the detail in ball control, unique player moves, real time stat updates and the multiplayer. Plus there is the collection aspect.
The last football game i played was in like 2002. The otger day i saw a friend of mine playing the new fifa (we probably talk about a different kind of football) and i asked him to stream it, because i was waiting for a download or something. The game looked obviously better, but damn these are some low effort games that make billions. BILLIONS. they are the reason that there wasn’t a skate 4. Skate was the better game in every way possible. It even outsold fifa. But fifa made that microtransactions money. They don’t fix bugs, you can still make the same cheap goals as you could do when i played it last. Glitchgoals they call it now i think, so you can win 20-0 every game. The announcers are just as bad as back then. They repeat the same catchphrases over and over. I asked him not 10min in if that is all they have to say.
Everyone can enjoy what they want, but in my honest opinion you have to be a special kimd of idiot if you support these games. They literally laugh at anyone’s face dumb enough to buy their slop. Fifa 2026 sait fifa 2025 in the main menu at launch, that’s how much they care.
I think skate 4 and Fifa are the exact same game. They are sports games with a high level of control for the ball and skateboard. Neither are better it depends on which sport you like.
If there was a fan game that ran on donations, like stardew valley but on donations, one game could rule them all.
Or like, just make it a free commercial game but don’t put any real players in it. Let the community do that, just intentionally make it moddable. The fans will do the rest.
People love to shit on the yearly FIFA releases, but if you genuinely can’t see any gameplay differences between one released in 2007 and 2026 then you’re either being disingenuous or haven’t actually played them.
I own PES 2008 on my PS3, and never felt the need to upgrade throughout its many yearly upgrades. It was just a game to play with my brother if we wanted to play together.
Have tried EA 2026 football game on a playstation cafe with friends a few months ago and I did not think there was anything new compared to what i played as a kid. Sure, you can play the game at 4K, but I don’t even own a 4K TV, and certainly not getting one when all the tv brands keep putting smart tv crap with ads on them.
Football like PES or FIFA? Or Madden?
Because PES was a whole different beast: like, a proper VG with actual meaningful gameplay changes (for the most part) between versions, and FIFA used to be like that in the 2000s.
IDK about Madden though; I only played a couple and they were fine, but I can’t vouch for their quality or pinpoint when they stopped being fun.
PES on Wii was peak. You control one player with the nunchuk and with the remote you could tell your other players where to go. That was so, so refreshing, but unfortunately never went anywhere 😭. It was the only time I enjoyed some sports game, as I felt for the first time that I had some agency about what’s going on.
Tribe
Tribe was a great game at its time though
That must be why they installed it in all those football stadiums.
Cyberball on the Genesis was peak football gameplay. And probably the last one I ever played.
Any gacha.
“Oh I got so lucky! It only took 20 pulls to get Boobina!”
Yeah man, bet that felt a lot better than just unlocking her by doing her story quests like any normal game. Maybe you need to be a gambling addict or something.
Any game with grinding where microtransactions can invalidate weeks of grind.
It’s already a big ask to make players find fun in a grind, but some C-level dipshits found a way to stamp that fun out too.
IMO, that method is valid, but it is HIGHLY dependent on the gameplay loop and the game company.
Take Warframe for example, one of the grindiest games in existence:
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The game is mainly PvE (and the PVP stuff has near to no impact on the raw skill needed), so someone buying their way to power doesn’t feel so bad.
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The ingame premium currency (Platinum) is fully tradable by all players. Getting extras of stuff is also common. Grinds often reach the ‘unfun’ level. So EVERYONE is encouraged to skip grind once it gets too much.
TLDR: Microtransactions are encouraged and available for free for ALL players, once you’ve reached your grind tolerance level.
Nope, I hated the freemium grind crap in Warframe. Killed my enjoyment of the game and uninstalled.
Fair. To each their own.
They’ve gotten better about that with Rebecca in charge now. Many of the new grinds have pity shops built in, or mercy systems in place.
Some of the old pity shops need a rebalance though (eg Citrine)
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Any game where just grinding is the main thing you do
I would generally agree, but some games have massive grinds and can be totally fun to play without participating in most of the grind.
Take war thunder or world of tanks. If you just want to drive a Panzer IV all day you can unlock that in a few days or so, then never care about unlocking anything again. Just keep driving your panzer and having fun.
*coughs ORS", so much gatekeeper and fans defending such a grindy game. why drag the rs3 into it too, complained enough to get rid of MTX, in a fit rs decided to eliminate almost every single thing that gives some afkable skilling, because they got mad they lost 10% revenue from removing the entire mtx systems. funny ORS players got mad recently because, no surprise they RAISED prices again for membership, what did you expect if you suddenly lost 10% of your revenue. with no extra benefits for rs3 members now, people dint see the worth it maintaining one anymore. they couldve just eliminate all the xp boosting instead, which was the main problem form the MTX.
Heya, quick question: WTF is ORS?
Old School RuneScape
Because you already have the other answers: OSRS. He just misspelled it ;)
Original RuneScape maybe?
I’m generally fine with microtransactions replacing some grind, just because I’ve finally reached a point in my life where I don’t want to dedicate 20 hours a week to a game for months. It mostly boils down to whether the game is wasting players’ lives to drive money from them. SOME games make the grind fun and worth playing, and thus I don’t really care. If the game’s fun isn’t locked behind a gate that requires significant time investment, then you’re not really harming players by having a grind. If the game isn’t fun in the meantime, and the cost is too much (and basically anything more than a dollar or two is), then I can go find another game.
Most souls likes. The marketing on those games is pure genius. No budget for an actual story? No problem! Let’s hide some nebulous lore in item descriptions so youtubers can sell their head cannon as “the story”. Oh there’s only enough money for 8 hours of gameplay? I have a solution! Let’s remove the save system everyone got used to these past 20 years so the player has to constantly redo our content just to get to the boss he’s trying to beat. We’ll sell that unecessary tedium as “difficulty”. And people are gobbling that stupid mechanic up because it allows them to flaunt their e-peen, although it just shows they have more time time than skills.
I heard them called rollslop
That’s brutal
I think fromsoft shot themselves in the foot there. I really enjoyed dark souls 2 because there were a lot of enemies that your positioning and movement were more important than spamming dodge at the exact right time. Then 3 and elden ring came out, and it’s just ocarina of time, except instead of across hyrule field it’s across the anime glowing lines.
iframing the haters >>>
Let’s hide some nebulous lore in item descriptions so youtubers can sell their head cannon as “the story”
Don’t you know, every item comes with a little laminated card to give you some mostly-irrelevant quote!
Hey those quotes are like catnip to a generation who grew up playing JRPGs that could go 10 hours in between meeting any speaking character!
I love building my own worlds, and sometimes I catch myself building head canon around unexplained or poorly explained aspects of games I play, but sometimes I get the sneaking suspicion the fans put way more thought and effort into their fanon than the devs did to the official canon.
I do enjoy Soulslikes, but I honestly do so despite those things and not because of them. I do think you have a general point.
Not saying anyone’s wrong, but I’m not sure I would like them as much unless they had those things.
I’m sure improvements could be made, but I feel like reducing the friction too much would rob the games of a certain flow that only arises from being forced to really get familiar with a run.
I don’t have the time for it anymore so can’t play these games anymore, but when I did…
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I adore soulslikes and totally disagree with you but I won’t argue people who flaunt how good they are for beating them are really annoying.
I like Soulslikes NOT made by FromSoftware. Those people don’t get The GitGud Apologist System® for any flaws, so they actually have to design well.
My favorite is Another Crab’s Treasure ; mostly because far from being a meme, it literally has the best story and character writing - both humorous and serious - of any Soulslike I’ve played. Fuck vague item description lore driven by fanfic.
Another Crab’s Treasure
That ending hit me way harder than it had any right to.
If you haven’t played it, try hollow knight. It also doesn’t do those things. It’s relatively clear about the story that you need to know and why you’re doing things.
I’ve played Hollow Knight all the way through to the end, and I don’t think I remember anything about the story; just some generic “spreading rot” vibe.
That’s fine for me because it’s not a high point of the game.
Elden Ring did fix some of runbacks with the stake of Marika before the boss room. Yet, some still exist and are annoying asf.
Don’t agree with 8h of gameplay though. Even if runbacks were fixed, that wouldn’t go under 100.
Do you mean Elden Ring wouldn’t go under 100?
My save file is legit ~650 hours. And I’ve never restarted.
It’s the nebulous lore part that really gets me. Other games have done the items=lore part before, but weren’t so fart-sniffing about it.
Not during the time DemS, DaS became big. This was the days of EA/Ubisoft frictionless vomit. BG2 was 10+ years old, Diablo 3 had it’s “exceptional” storytelling.
Demon’s Souls, 2009. Tales of series had at least three entries before that with lore on items found in game that I know of. I would bet the others out of the 8 released between the first one I played and 2009 also had something similar. And that’s just one series. You mentioned baldur’s gate 2, which did it, and don’t forget to add its spiritual ancestor of icewind dale along with the original.
I’m sure if you went and looked through a great many games, since there are more than any person can realistically experience/play, there were hordes of them that had world lore from items. None of them that I remember were ‘nebulous.’
Obligatory:
I mean… a little bit of that is a good game design. I’d rather have some things that are just ‘characters living their own lives in universe’ rather than everything revolving around the character’s effect on the world. Fromsoft just goes overboard with some of it.
To me, a good Souls games make you feel an exhilarating level of thrill and satisfaction from beating a tough boss that no other game does.
Beating the final boss of Sekiro, Nine Sols, Lies of P, and Silksong was a feeling no other game could provide. I am constantly looking forward to the next big Souls games that create that level of challenge that both feels impossibly hard, but yet you know you can do it and can see the path to winning if you keep trying.
Nine Sols is a damn masterpiece.
The skill ceiling for that game is so incredibly high, and the floor is high enough to make sure you really understand the combat system.
I only discovered it a few weeks ago and I can’t seem to stop playing even as my ass gets cut off and handed to me.
It’s just so satisfying that it’s hard to put into words.
The “You earn every defeat” concept of Soulslikes is part of their appeal. I haven’t beaten many (Hollow Knight, Tunic, and if you care to count it Metroid Dread) but the feeling after fighting a boss, walking away, wondering if I should just quit altogether, then coming back a few days later to beat it is amazing.
The genre could absolutely use a shot in the arm regarding setting and tone. You’re always always wandering around the bleak ruins of a fallen civilization on a possibly hopeless quest. Tunic adds some interesting stuff with its use of knowledge-based progression (I both love and hate that writing system).
I think the final boss of Metroid Dread feels like a proper Souls boss, but a much easier one than most Souls bosses. Which is fine, it was fun and well designed.
mobas.
i remember not enjoying warcraft 3 due to its focus on hero characters, then someone modded all of the non-unique units out???
and everyone who plays them seems genuinely miserable.
Lol I actually like the idea of controlling one hero a lot more than focusing on commanding a whole army.
My only problem is how fucking toxic MOBA communities are.
I never played any moba, but i know how toxic they are. I watched some league tutorials, to figure out what is even going on, and every tutorial i watched started with: first off all, turn off voice chat.
Now valve is cooking deadlock, which is a moba as far as i know, and it’s probably the best game i have ever played. But you can smell the moba player base, by the way a lot of them behave. I play online games since counterstrike 1.4, and i have never been shittalked as much and as bad as in deadlock since i play that. It’s usually your own team too, you can be winning and someone tells you to kill yourself and hopes that my family gets raped, because you did somethimg they didn’t like. A shitton of russians too, which is probably the big overlap of toxic shitbags and mobas.
That sucks, I’ve heard so much good about Deadlock’s gameplay, but that playerbase is exactly what I expected.
I want to be a single unit in a massively multiplayer Age of Empires II. Like, get in the unit queue hoping you get drafted as a Hussar or something cool. Get sent in as villager with an axe every time but still do your best chopping the most wood for your team to win.
sounds like battlefield
That’s basically what happens when you join the auto-fill queue and get assinged Support in League of Legends.
And then your team flames you for not chipping enough wood.
I played League for many years when it came out. I think the genre is fun to play, requires lots if skill, but I am only willing to take so much verbal abuse for what is supposed to be time I spend for fun.
Every person I’ve ever disliked had one thing in common, League addiction. Shits so bad for you it’s crazy.
I hate the RTS+hero game in all its forms. It started with WC3, but so many are doing it now.
But I love RTS, and I quite enjoy moba-like games. It’s just that I absolutely fucking hate the community.
I don’t think that RTS+hero started with warcraft, there were hero units in warlords series (better implemented I think) before warcraft.
Yeah, but in WC3, especially in multiplayer, it was a super hard requirement. 80% of your time would be hero micro
Only if you rank. Play the other game modes, those are stupid-fun.
I enjoyed Warcraft 3 because of its focus on Heroes. And I dont really know about other rts games with focus on Heroes. Maybe Age of Mythology or Starcraft 2 campaign but not PvP. Are there some other good ones? I’m in a mood.
Check Godsworn and I agree that there isn’t that many Warcraft 3 like games.
I really don’t understand it. I’ve played a little of both Dota & LoL and it’s the same group of miserable pricks. Is there a moba that doesn’t have a lethally toxic player base?
Put 10 random people in a competitive cage where errors on minute 5 can snowball to a loss on minute 50 and you will get this all the time.
Bonus: give them access to a keyboard and a game speed to slack off.
Heroes of the storm wasn’t too bad, but I never got into the competitive aspects, and that’s usually where things get bad.
Play League. Can confirm.
i played the custom games which were very fun, because new one appear frequently, so theres plenty of content, eventually i got tired of the game and moved onto something else.
Addiction
As a counter example MonsterSSS has a lot of fun.
Work simulators and games which gameplay loops turn out to be work simulators in disguise.
They aren’t even good work simulators either. People play them just for the jankiness.
I love sim games. “Run your own business” games supermarket, vending machine business, pot shop business, coffee shop empire. I love unwinding with a game like those after a full day of work.
I like playing Civilization and feel attacked haha
League of fucking legends. Why… The repetitiveness and toxic community especially… Just dont get it.
Kingdom Hearts. Goofy and Sephiroth in the same room together breaks my brain, and not in a fun way. I played the first game when it came out on PS2 and decided it wasn’t for me.
I’ve seen story breakdowns of the other games on YouTube and figured I’m not missing anything. Lots of setups and plot hooks that don’t go anywhere or go somewhere stupid.
That mobile game where you slowly build up a city, train lots of troops, launch attacks on other players’ cities, form alliances and so on, before getting soundly thumped by the Koreans.
From a personal perspective. Those have such a low investment requirement for the basic gaming loop.
Over the course of the day there will be small unavoidable breaks, 5-15 minutes long during which there isn’t much to do. Cant really boot up a PC for more serious gaming session with such a small time even if I’m near a PC at that time, usually not.
But there’s always a smartphone within reach. So this sort of random town building games are perfect to kill few minutes, pretty much same as killing some time doomscrolling or watching some YT videos.
I just keep mindustry paused on my phone and build bits of factory when I have time.
That’s a good approach too. I’ll try that one out as well.
Reversed Front? Jk - I know Korea isn’t part of China yet
Roblox
Ong. I See the potential and some stuff is fun but overall its mostly low quality slop riddled with microtransactions, grind and pedophiles tryna grind themselves on kids
I wanted to test it, but my computer at the time had a small C drive, and Roblox couldn’t install on other drives.
Later I learned that I’m probably far too old for it.
Lego should sue their balls off over the attempt for just trying to look like Lego.
