For me it’s Diablo II. Granted I’ve played my fair share of D2 since launch, and also recently on a private server with a comrade from hexbear, but I still feel like years later the game didn’t grab me as much as D1 did.
Granted I don’t hate D2, but for a game that I keep coming back to, D1 takes the prize.
Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom. TOTK isn’t a bad game, but it does feel like a 70 dollar add-on to BOTW. It just didn’t capture the magic.
I like TotK but the engineering mechanic is pretty laborious. You have a lot of freedom but only a small percentage of what you try works, and because of the clunky interface it takes a LONG time to make multiple attempts.
Only having 2 of the 3 axes to rotate things on is the worst part of that imo
As much fun as it was building ridiculous vehicles and crucifying Koroks, it got tiresome pretty quickly. It actively dissuades me from going back to it as much as past Zeldas.
That’s one that didn’t really vibe with me, an interesting case of my hype going down the more I actually learned about the game before it came out.
Me, when Hyrule blows up and is reset again
I was feeling it until about half way through and then it fell off for me really hard. I think the building concept was cool as hell but felt like it wasn’t incorporated into the game. I feel if it had to be a Nintendo franchise maybe something like Pilot Wings could have gotten a boost with that idea, PW has usually doubled as a tech demo anyway. Have an open world with stuff you can build with, maybe some light combat for raiding materials or whatever and then make the rest of the game based around those vehicles. Have it be about racing the vehicles you make. You could even fo a multi player that’s like City Whatever from Kirby Air Ride where all the players get dropped into a space and have a certain amount of time to get a vehicle together before a series of races with that vehicle.
For totk once I built a good hover bike I never had to be resourceful again. I didn’t try a second play where I didn’t get the paraglider or auto build and that did make the game better. Just not being able to paraglide makes it so you need to build stuff and no auto build means you have to use what’s around you. There were a fee things I couldn’t so but I manages to do the main quest and most side quests with it
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It’s such a fucking shame that the discourse around TOTK is completely dominated by stupid shortsighted “70$ DLC” arguments. TOTK is one of the most exciting sequels I have ever played. It’s everything people want when they buy a new console generation, except on the same old hardware. The toolset the game gives you to solve puzzles is absolutely insane, ascend and recall alone are genius ideas and they all fit together absolutely perfectly. They could not have made that game had they also made a new map and I am so glad they didn’t.
I love the original Halo trilogy but tbh I don’t care for any of the Halos after ODST
I beat Halo 1 yet to beat 2. Used to play it at parties at my cousins house couch multiplayer.
I’ve played a ton of Sims 4 but I hate almost everything about it except that it has group conversations. 2 and 3 are amazing games.
the saddest, most depressing thing about the sims is that ultimately the community just… laps it up. sims 4 is eternal now because its the most lucrative and popular the sims has ever been.
the upswing is that i like paralives’ artstyle.
Yeah ngl I’m no exception I buy every bit of DLC out of compulsivity. Even though I havent played in over a year. Its bad. Youre totally right though.
To be clear, no judgement there. I spend DLC money on paradox games, when I can. I’m just too poor for sims.
(the dlc can always be pirated if you don’t wanna/can’t spend money on it.)
why not all of it
i like to provide options is all!
I just pirate them lol. fuck EA. I wouldn’t have paid money for this slop anyways.
the dlc is easily pirated! (not to tell you how to live your life, just in case you didn’t know)
Can you pirate the dlc “onto” a legitimate purchase or would i have to pirate everything?
i just nabbed everything but i believe it should work the way you describe as well. searching “cs.rin.ru sims 4” should take you where you need to go.
When the corpos declared “no Sims 5, Sims 4 forever and ever” when that isn’t even the best designed of the Sims sequels by far…
They’re also currently running one of my least favorite thing, a FOMO event. Its all actually like, free. Its not a battlepass (for now, lol). But I still hate the feeling of being FORCED to play a game I dont really feel like playing right now out of fear of missing stuff.
They also had a login bonus event a few months ago but at least all that required me to do was open the launcher like 6 times in the space of a month.
I hate FOMO pressure and I often quit games that push it too hard so I can break the toxic forced habit-forming they’re pressuring me into.
It took me being physically unable to play Destiny 2 for several months due to hip surgery to break the FOMO that game instilled in me. I thought I was stronger but damn do they know how to prey on the neurodivergent
I will always hate the treat defender take that “well this doesn’t bother me and I don’t have a problem with it so it shouldn’t affect anyone else unless they’re weak-willed” or some passive-aggressive lowkey calipers like that.
Hexbear was infested with that during the struggle session against international corporate sports gambling apps.
Warcraft 3 was my absolute favorite game back then, I must have wasted a thousand hours on just custom games through the years.
Needless to say, the followup being the somewhat successful Word of Warcraft made sure there would never be an actual sequel in a genre I actually like lol. And then much later they decided to “reforge” the game and the less is said about that, the better
I must have wasted a thousand hours on just custom games through the years.
yesssssssss there is another
I also. I still have about 5GB of custom Warcraft 3 maps I passively downloaded over so many years. I can’t let go, they were too great. WC3 continues to have been the portal to some of the best TDs to ever exist.
wc3 TD games consumed a large portion of my childhood. i know theres quite a few decent standalone TD games now but its not the same
ugh i sort of wish this were me but i also enjoy those memories and don’t want to taint them.
either way i wanna say there are sites where people upload some of the old maps for redownload, you could always contribute to something like that! (if you wanted)
Fair point, I’ll have a look and see if I can re-share 'em.
Dozens!
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I’d love to buy Reforged just for the fantastic-looking Warcraft 2 mod but I feel dirty paying any sort of money to reward that lousy attempt of a remake (and I don’t think it’s been cracked). Plus, I absolutely despise Battle dot net, so there’s that.
It’s cracked. Tho there were no ql improvements, so it’s somewhat clunky to play. The StarCraft remastered is also cracked. I did not know about the warcraft 2 mod, thanks.
Ah, not sure why I assumed otherwise.
And yeah, Chronicles of the Second War looks like a great modernization of the original, as someone who obsessed over Warcraft 2 back in the day. Human campaign is still under development though.
It did take a long time to get cracked, and the scene is not good right now. AnywY, thanks that looks cool.
I found a YouTube link in your comment. Here are links to the same video on alternative frontends that protect your privacy:
“Get yer finger outta that bunghole”
And the ever popular: “I think I’ll use my human call. I’m so wasted, I’m so wasted”
Does Elden Ring count?
As a follow-up to DS3 (yeah I’m not counting Sekiro in this), enemies move too quickly, boss movesets a little too erratic and the world way too open for my tastes. I’m a grown-ass person with things to do, I don’t wanna waste the two hours I have to myself each day dicking around and getting dicked-down for exploring some corner of the map, only to find loot that doesn’t apply to my build. It doesn’t respect my time.
I also don’t think I’m alone in thinking that replayability is harmed by making progression more of a slog than other Souls games. I need to grind more enemies (that are spread out, mind you) to level up my VIT stat so I don’t get 1-shot by bosses.
Build variety and boss-runs were definitely improved over other entries, I will admit. If these QoL improvements were made in a Bloodborne follow-up (peak souls imo), it might be the best Souls game made. Maybe I’ve outgrown the franchise tho; the tryhard-edgelord culture it invites is not for me.
Agreed. I love the world’s aesthetics and each area is peak game design but I’ve found myself not wanting to replay the game at all just because of how much of a chore it is to get through it all. I’ve played through DS3 about 30 times and I could play 30 more times and have no issue, Elden Ring I’ve only played about 7 times and that’s only to see how hard the NG+ cap is. The balance in difficulty is all over the place and I’m severely disappointed that some major bosses are weaker than others whereas Souls bosses always had a linear difficulty, if that’s the right way to put it.
Like you said about the weapon variety and skills being one of the best parts of the game, it still doesn’t get me to want to keep playing because of how huge it is and for little reward. Miyazaki said they won’t be as ambitious with further projects and I think that’s a good choice, I think they proved they could make an open world and they did but it just has many flaws. I’m kind of in a predicament between enjoying the world itself but also wanting that world to offer more in terms of enemy variety and things to explore and having been rewarded for that exploration because on one hand, you have a stellar game design that just fits perfectly with the lore, that being a world in decay for 5000 years until you reach it. From that level of discovery and detail to architecture they really did a good job. But on the other hand traversing through these areas on a new run just becomes tedious and most of my time is spent using Torrent to rush to a place I need to get to in order to progress the story which is all I want to do.
I think open worlds are a fad and give credit to FS for attempting it, they did a good job imo with every aspect of world building and design. But coming from DS3 where it’s more linear and you actually feel a solid progression I feel Elden Ring was lacking in that feeling of satisfaction. I think playing it for the first time was the best time I’ve had with the game but every other time I’ve played it I’ve just been turned off by how much traversal the game requires especially with how sparse areas are with items that don’t even fit with your build. I think the DLC being more compact helped solve this issue and brought back some of that Dark Souls-esque level design but at the detriment of again, having too many sparse areas with no reward at all. There were too many areas with little to no reward and you’re just left dissatisfied.
But it’s like I said, as a fantasy game taking in every detail and traversing the world is spectacular but when all I want to do is fight things it just becomes much more of a chore and also the difficulty spikes is just over the top. Bosses are too overpowered, weapons, spells, incantations are overpowered too which can sometimes trivialize the game entirely. It just feels like an overall unbalanced tragedy for a game with peak design. But I hope they do learn from it with future titles. I don’t want an open world souls game again but if they’ve learned from Elden Ring then I hope they improve from the mistakes they did the first time around. But all things said, it is genuinely the best open world fantasy RPG you could play right now.
A smaller Elden Ring would have been a less bad game but also a considerably less good one. When I played through that game at release I had absolutely no idea where the edges of that gameworld were, and it allowed me to be lost in it in a way no other game has managed to. I’d not trade that feeling for any amount of replayability.
Dragon Age: Origins was a fantastic game and one I play to this day. Dragon Age 2 was hot trash. Dragon Age Inquisition was also hot trash. Why BioWare couldn’t just leave the formula alone and improve upon it is beyond my comprehension.
At least they follow up with the story, Veilguard will change the game completely and kill your worldstate, meaning all your choices will be ignored, I just give up on Bioware after this.
Veilguard will change the game completely and kill your worldstate, meaning all your choices will be ignored
Could you elaborate on this? I believe you, but I haven’t been following Veilguard’s development at all.
DAO, DA2, DAI are somewhat CRPG with action, and your choices carry over(mostly, they cheat quite a bit actually) to the next game.
DAV will be an Action-RPG with a gameplay similar to the Guardian of the Galaxy game with companion doing shit and they will not carry over any choices, actually they will let you create the protagonist of DAI and let you choose 2 things that affect the antagonist of DAV. They will bring old characters like Morrigan and Varric but whatever happens with their questline in the previous game will be ignored OR they will make a headcanon, is not clear yet. For example, Morrigan has 2 personalities depending on whether she had a son or not, but the game will ignore that choice.
What is most infuriating is that in DAI you have a lot of choices that they seem really important and groundbreaking but don’t directly affect DAI so almost everyone was expecting that these will have a purpose in DAV, but oh well too costly to do that, let’s just do the bare minimum.
Sounds like the Gordian knot cutting that Mass Effect 3 did regarding previous game world decisions. UGH.
Worse, if I recall ME3 had 8 choices or something like that, this game has 3 and 2 just impact the villain.
Edit: And ME3 is a ME, same gameplay, same art direction. Veilguard looks nothing like the others.
WHY?Something something, new public, something something profit
To be fair, I have no interest in that one.
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I didn’t mind it being smaller in scope either. I liked that. The main issue I had was with the gameplay. It was action oriented and really removed the strategy from the game aside from a few minor things. Spawning enemies out of nowhere and constantly using the same map over and over and over again. It was a half-baked game unfortunately.
It was rushed af… it was completely developed in like 16-18 months. Given that, it’s pretty good.
maybe not “came to”, i disliked the old republic when they said it would be an mmo and destroyed all hope of a third single player bioware rpg
does new vegas -> fallout 4 count?
Might be a hot take, but Mass Effect 2.
I love Mass effect, despite its flaws, but Mass Effect 2 was the game that derailed the series and basically forced Mass Effect 3 to have an unsatisfactory ending. So many concepts from Mass Effect 1 like the cipher, visions, Virgil, the Thorian were completely abandoned in favor of one giant video game length side mission. Sure the suicide mission was kind of cool, but at the end of Mass Effect 2 we learned almost nothing about the reapers from the last game.
But Cerberus is by far the worst mistake. From Shepard’s POV, they literally witnessed Cerberus do grotesque, inhumane experiments throughout ME1 only a month before game start but the writers forced us to join these space Nazis. Cerberus is comically evil and is constantly doing cartoon villain experiments. Also, the space Nazis somehow have it in their hearts to spend billions of credits so that Shepard can save humanity.
The main writer of ME dropped off during the writing of ME2 and they abandoned a lot of his ideas.
I loved the ME trilogy, but after ME1 it really wasn’t about the themes and ideas, just the characters.
Also looking back they’re some of the most lib propaganda games ever like jeez
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I cosign this hot take 100%. All these years later ME1 is the only entry in the trilogy I can replay start to finish.
Hotter take: I’ve never even played ME3 because ME2 was such an off putting slog.
Diablo1 had more of the rogue like roots. Diablo2 was more overtly cartoony and loot-grindy. It became no longer a question of “can you clear the game?” but “can you clear bosses quickly for good loot?”. Diablo3 went even farther in this direction. I didn’t play 4.
Diablo1 had more of the rogue like roots. Diablo2 was more overtly cartoony and loot-grindy. It became no longer a question of “can you clear the game?” but “can you clear bosses quickly for good loot?”. Diablo3 went even farther in this direction. I didn’t play 4.
Pretty much nails what I came to get burnt out on in 2.
Magicka 2 is the exception that proves the rule “yes, even pve games need nerfs sometimes.” Being an unrestrained self-endangering idiot-god was fundamental to Magicka’s charm, and reducing the player’s threat to themselves and everything around them ruined that.
KSP. KSP 2 was a cash grab that got abandoned before it even got out of early access.
I was one of the eople who bought into the hype. Not enough to buy the game luckily, but I figured if I just waited 5 years or so it would be great. Sucks what happened, but on the other hand the originial with the vast amount of mods available should be able to keep anyone entertained for a few decades.
Overwatch 2. How they fucked up the maps, the matching, the ranking system are all case studies on how to not make a sequel.
But that’s not the worst fucking part that shocks me.
The worst part that shocks me to this day, is how they got me to actually miss loot boxes.
They fucked up with the prices for skins and hid all the semi valuable stuff behind a season pass that is always 20$.
I’m not paying ~1/4 the price of an entire AAA game for one season pass.
They didn’t even put the coolest skins in the season pass, those are like 10-15$ on their own.
Dead space 1 is perfect and has no flaws and is one of the most visually striking games of the generation that doesn’t feel like it aged a day since it came out.
Dead space 2 was meh and 3 is turbo poo
Dead space 2 was meh
I give them credit for giving Isaac a voice and not thoroughly ruining the game’s atmosphere because of it.
Stomping around yelling FUCK and SHIT as a properly frustrated and traumatized technician was great, as was
spoiler
“FUCK YOU, AND FUCK THE MARKER!”
Yeah his cursing was really cathartic. Particularly after being abused by necromorphs that were unkillable.
Dawn of War 1 & 2 were both great games in their own respective ways, then 3 came out and somehow combined the bad aspects of 1 & 2.
I remember. Relic saw that people generally liked the first game (and expansions) better but could not stick to a direction and came to an unsatisfying compromise between both. And because of that flop, we’re still resorting to modding DC and Soulstorm.
I’ve been holding onto hope for another shot with the successes of Space Marine 2, Darktide and Mechanicus showing that W40K has a future in games, but RTS as a genre has been mired for the past decade. Relic’s less than stellar reception with CoH3 hasn’t helped.
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Personally, I think a campaign interface that’s the Dark Crusade and Soulstorm campaigns combined with aspects of Total War (like unique buildings suited for that province, separate from the main RTS battle buildings) would be ideal. Could expand the scope to be multiple star systems to really get the “grand” scale.
And by guilds, do you mean Avatar Conquest from TW Shogun 2?
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Age of empires 2 is amazing 3 is dogshit.
All total war games since shogun 2 are bad.
Supreme commander 2 is a disappointment.
All total war games since shogun 2 are bad.
TW:Warhammer 2 was good, provided you pirate it and get all the factions. I feel like Total War really shines with a bunch of weird variety and radically different core mechanics for factions instead of the more historically focused titles’ “these guys with spears are 5% better at doing spearman stuff than these other guys with spears because of their brainpans being more optimized for poking people with sticks or something” gamification stuff. It’s just their model of hacking up the game into little pieces to then sell each piece individually on top of the full price of the game sucks.
The dinos are cool. But then you charge at the goblin square and a few of em are sent flying and they are dealt no damage at all, because the algorithm says the dino can only deal damage to like 5 models, and ends up killing like 3 because of how damage is calculated.
There is also very little difference between goby gobos and gunpowder, because all attacks deal at least 1 damage regardless of armour. One you notice that you can’t go back.
The the campaign is very limited, just the Rome 2 mechanics.
Cold Ones are so disappointing, though they’re apparently getting that from the tabletop too. The Skaven and undead pirates were fun, though.
Ratatatata
I don’t play Total War, but I do play tabletop. Cold Ones have “stupidity,” which means the player can lose control of them and they’ll perform a random movement. It’s really, really, really bad when your Cold One Knights decide they’re going to go look for food off in the corner instead of charging that group of Chaos Warriors.
They also have one of the worst movement speeds of any heavy cavalry in the game at only 7 inches, especially with their cost. They do more damage than horses and have more attacks than boars, which is nice. But between Orc WAAAGH! powers giving boars more movement and horses just being faster, that may not matter if they charge you first.
Still, they’re the heavy cavalry unit for both Lizardmen and Dark Elves, so people take them regardless. Especially in 6th. Edition where cavalry was a little too good. You still wanted heavy cavalry units to break through your opponent’s infantry blocks.
I never played the warhammer fantasy tabletop (I did play 40k, though it’s been a long time since that and all the actual games were online through vassal), but I did read the rules and army books back in whatever edition was contemporaneous to 40k’s 5th edition, as well spend a bit of time reading forum threads talking about the meta.
And that’s about what I remember about Cold Ones: they’re a really cool concept and design that just gets overcosted and has too many drawbacks.
In TW:WH2 they’ve got the same issues: too expensive, too slow, too many drawbacks, in a meta that heavily leaned into ranged spam, especially for Dark Elves who had one of the best and most spammable ranged infantry units in the game. Some armies relied on pitting enemies with chaff to slam with a hammer or rain tons of fire down on them, and for a few the chaff they pinned enemies with was also going to grind them down on its own, but others were just “kite and rain fire down on enemies, avoiding getting pitted” and Dark Elves were one of those.
Medieval 2 was the best Total War. I have so many fond memories of trying to break the game in different ways. Making heresy the majority religion, doing opposite colonialism by only sending diplomats to the New World to gift all of Europe to the Aztecs, getting the pope to declare a crusade against himself. It was great.
A new build of eb ii for medieval 2 dropped like a month ago. Haven’t played it but it says it solves many of the stability issues thar were due to lack of ram utilization.
Age of Empires 2 is still so good.
If anything it’s better than ever. My only complaint is the lack of lan in the new version, wich means I can’t play multiplayer.
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All total war games since shogun 2 are bad.
3K isn’t fantastic but damned if I don’t absolutely love it. A good mix of historical themes and over the top gameplay in Romance mode, and the unique diplomacy system only for 3K absolutely rules
But the battles don’t work quite well because it’s the Rome 2 system. So while it’s not as bad as Warhammer or Rome 2, it’s not good. The fish scale formation does not work last time I played
Ooooh, I am gonna fight you over Total War Attila, but I recognize I’m like one of dozens who think that game is good.
That’s the one with the worst optimization. 3 kingdoms, warhammer2 troy all have higher fps in my PC, granted I’m running a potato, but still. Attila is the total war game with worse optimization. Other than that it’s just a reskin of Rome 2 wich is garbage.
Rome 2 was garbage, but it is no mere reskin! have at thee!
All games after Rome 2 are a reskin of Rome 2. If Rome 2 was a reskin of shogun 2, that would be very cool.
