• It’s a momentum from early 2000s. Rockstar (or was it Take 2 by that time?) set a lower moral line in the gaming industry and published games like Man Hunt and GTA III, where you can commit crime without much consequences. The gaming experience was nouveau and a thrill.

      • HobbitFoot  ( HobbitFoot@thelemmy.club ) 
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        11 months ago

        The game series also mixed in a lot of mafia movie vibes and satire.

        Then Rockstar realized you can release a lot less content by pushing online gameplay, stopping the release of single player content.

    • warm ( warm@kbin.earth ) 
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      11 months ago

      I can see that, if the style of humor doesnt click with you, then it’s got a pretty repetitive mission formula which can get boring.

      I think GTA 6 is (and will be) very overhyped. I dont see it living up to the previous titles at all.

    • Fleur_ ( Fleur_@aussie.zone ) 
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      11 months ago

      Actually spent hundreds to thousands of hours playing gta5 with my friends after school. Getting thrown into a city with your 5 best friends and finding your place amongst the total anarchy of 30 players all fucking around was so much fun. Add on to that the various mini games, heists, vehicles, attire, weapons and customisations for all of those things and yeah. Pretty good game.

      • dil ( dil@lemmy.zip ) 
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        11 months ago

        Gta online was peak, we played for like 4 years straight, you make your own fun, it’s a sandbox, if you dont find a sandbox with vehicles, weapons, planes, and murder fun, we wouldn’t be friends, it was emergent gameplay up the ass, ider the games wed make up there were so many, wed all play with aim assist off and get ppl playing with us to do it, made it more fun on console

        Balancing kinda killed it for us over time

  • I am fully ready to be down voted for, but Cyberpunk 2077.

    I finally got around to trying it out a little after Phantom Liberty came out and the game itself had all of the updates, so I thought it would be the best time to try it out.

    I just couldn’t get into it. I got so tired of the constant stopping my progress for dialogue and that God forsaken fast forwarding mechanic that I feel they just put there to mock me.

    The game itself is just fine, but I don’t understand why everyone is now calling it one of the greatest games of recent times.

    • It’s my favorite game, but that’s because it does a very good job of immersing me in the world, characters, and story. I can see how if you just want to get to the next bit of gameplay it would be annoying, but I really like to soak up a game and feel like I’m living another life in it, so it’s perfect for me.

    • youngalfred ( youngalfred@lemmy.zip ) 
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      11 months ago

      Spoilers?: My biggest gripe too…I finished it, and the ending I chose felt like a 20 min long unskippable cut scene. Never mind the actual 20min long unskippable cut scene in the middle.

    • warm ( warm@kbin.earth ) 
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      Most overrated game of the last 5 years. Technical failure, sold on lies, bugs upon bugs, illusion of choice, horrible combat and an empty world.

    • Absolutely. Got it for Xmas one year, played until there was a god awful fuck scene that was…really something, and unexpected. Like, ok, I get that there are people that this is their only sexual outlet but can you fucking warn a guy?

      It really reminded me of an updated Perfect Dark (360 version), which was…just stupid.

    • stray ( stray@pawb.social ) 
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      I’m told I didn’t even get out of the tutorial even though I played it for a good while. A lot of the dialog between the player character and whatever the first guy’s name is felt like they were written by people who had only a vague idea of what the other person was saying.

      “We have to keep moving! Let’s stop here.” :|

  • Arkhive ( Arkhive@piefed.blahaj.zone ) 
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    11 months ago

    Balatro. It becomes a spreadsheet sim very quickly, in my opinion. I think part of the reason Binding of Isaac and Hades feel much more timeless to me is that every run has this sort of intuitive randomness vs this just full rng you have to counter with math. Balatro feels solved, and while I guess you could count Hades max heat run as “solving” the game, the replayability of it feels much higher because builds feels more dynamic than “make number go up faster”.

    • Sas [she/her] ( Sas@beehaw.org ) 
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      Thank you, this really describes my feelings towards that game well. The first few runs were great with experimenting and stuff but then you try for higher stakes and quickly fall into the optimal strat flow where it’s kinda boring unless you get ridiculous runs but i don’t wanna wade through meh to get that one god run that’s actually fun.

    • warm ( warm@kbin.earth ) 
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      Not that quickly that you dont get your money’s worth though. Balatro is a good mobile game honestly, for a quick run when you have time to kill, but I wouldnt find myself sat at my PC playing it.

      • tomiant ( tomiant@piefed.social ) BannedBanned from community
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        11 months ago

        That quickly, I can’t with this utilitarian consumerist take, like, you didn’t buy a game, you bought a minimum specified undetermined quantum of enjoyment. It’s so sterile. It’s like saying, yeah the first part of the movie was great, but then it turned to shit, so you got your money’s worth of enjoyment points so you’re overall on plus. Sorry for sounding harsh, it’s a pet peeve of mine, I don’t like to consider games some sort of staple commodity to wring out enjoyment stats out of and then discard, it’s more to the experience than that. It’s like watching half a painting, you get some enjoyment out of it, not all of it, but halfway there, so that makes it worth it.

        I don’t think so.

        • warm ( warm@kbin.earth ) 
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          You determine your own worth of something. But thats literally what paying for something or a service is. Balatro is worth its price to me, I can play it for hours now, not touch it an play it for hours in a year, two, whatever. Someone made a nice game, I buy it and play it, it’s about as simple as capitalism gets in games.

          Not everything has to have infinite value forever, I will get bored of a game and will never play it again, does that mean I should have never bought it and enjoyed the experience it gave me??? Am I missing your point here or is that just a wild take?

          • tomiant ( tomiant@piefed.social ) BannedBanned from community
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            11 months ago

            You don’t, entirely, and saying that is like saying “well love is just biochemistry. It’s all just molecules interacting.”

            And yeah. That’s ONE way of seeing it, a very materialistic and wholly insufficient and even trite way of looking at it devoid of human soul and the actualities of living that experience.

            It’s basically a resignation to what capitalism is trying to sell you- units of something, you become a statistic, it’s not the enjoyment of the food, it’s about a sterile transaction between patron and chef, where you get so and so filled to such and such a degree, and that has some specific arbitrary value in money.

            It’s just such a consumer zombie way of perceiving the world, I just can’t.

            • warm ( warm@kbin.earth ) 
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              11 months ago

              I’d like to live in that idealistic world you have in your head, but we don’t live in that, humans are selfish by nature, so we have capitalism. Doesn’t mean we cannot control it, keep it fair. One person makes a cool piece of art? Sure, I’ll pay them. You are looking far too deep into it, I’m sorry. You’re going to stress yourself out.

              • tomiant ( tomiant@piefed.social ) BannedBanned from community
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                11 months ago

                No, capitalism is selfish by nature, it makes and promotes people to be selfish. People are genetically altruistic and cooperative. Things, and ownership, and selfishness, is what makes society bad.

                You are looking far too shallow into it, and you will stay a slave to that paradigm.

    • saigot ( saigot@lemmy.ca ) 
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      Interesting that you say hades has that intuitive randomness, one of my biggest complaints for hades 1 is that you can basically force whatever run you want every single run. It felt like a roguelike for people who hate roguelikes. Isaac otoh I totally agree, its my most played game by far really love it.

      • Arkhive ( Arkhive@piefed.blahaj.zone ) 
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        11 months ago

        I agree with the person that said you can spreadsheet-ify any game really, and in that way I know how you feel with Hades. I’ve been playing on a relatively young save lately before digging into Hades 2 and it’s been very refreshing not having all the trinkets and rerolls to really get exactly the build I want. Though even then I feel like there will always be some deviation from your plan, but you’re still given tools to tune your build to what you wanted, and you can still overcome the rng with skill expression. With Balatro I often felt I was just loosing a run because I didn’t get a necessary card or something that felt much more out of my control.

        Totally agree with Isaac showing this the best. I’ve got friends that have thousands of hours in that game and still come across combos and interactions between items they haven’t found before.

  • Elden Ring. It’s like they just glued inconsistent creature ideas next to each other. Every couple of hundred ingame meters you come across a different biome with different creatures that appear nowhere else and has a boss that visually and equipment-wise completely out of place. It feels like fighting your way through dozens of puzzle-pieces forced next to each other without any explanation why. You have to try to make your own story as to why things are the way they are and any criticism of the game is shot down by the worst stereotypes of gamers.

    • nfreak ( nfreak@lemmy.ml ) 
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      11 months ago

      I legitimately feel like ER is one of FromSoft’s weakest titles. It doesn’t come close to the DS trilogy for me, and unironically I feel like Nightreign is a better game in the same vein, as the faster paced sandbox works far better for the fast, clusterfuck bosses ER is known for.

    • mrgoosmoos ( mrgoosmoos@lemmy.ca ) 
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      11 months ago

      I thought that was just the point of the game? that it’s a fighting game with some minor open world aspect to it between “levels”

      honestly I know fuck all look about dark souls and the videos of gameplay that I see give me this impression

  • 4PHEUS ( 4PHEUS@beehaw.org ) 
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    Undertale. I’m sure it’s a great game, but after a decade of hearing everyone and their mothers shout about it, I’ve oddly been put off by it.

  • Wahots ( Wahots@pawb.social ) 
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    GTA. Games 3 and 4 were good, 5 was kinda fun, but I’m not really at all excited for the same formula over and over again. Even battlefield feels a bit samey. Only indie games are really taking risks these days. And some of them are fantastic.

    • I don’t care about the story, but when I played it when it was free on PS Plus, the gameplay is bad to me as I constantly get lost in the building. The protagonist has superpower but in the game it really doesn’t feel like so. I can throw stuff at enemies, then what? There is a fight where in the beginning I fight two or three enemies with guns, and it sucked because I don’t know where they are when I’m hiding behind cover. And taking two or three shots I’m dead. It’s a shitty FPS game in disguise of a Sci-Fi action game.

  • Anything Soulslike

    I had to work all through COVID-19 because of my job status. So while I understand people had time to sit around and play video games and “git gud”… I ain’t got the time.

    I much more appreciate Animal Crossing. Also a pandemic game (the one on Switch) but it respects your time. Sort of. I mean you can just pick it up for an hour and run around catching bugs or fishing (I’d only do this in handheld mode, the lag with any controller and the HDMI connection make it impossible to catch 3/4/5-star rarity fish), so it’s a fun little chill game. And it’s not like you have to start over if you miss a fish on your lure. Or even if you get jumped by a scorpion or tarantula or wasp (yes you can “die” in Animal Crossing, but really, you just get knocked out and you return to your house and lose nothing except the chance to catch the bug and sell it to the little raccoons in the shop).

    Do I “suck at games”? Eh, maybe. I got no excuse, I’ve been gaming since the 80s. I played NES games. I played computer and Atari games before that (and many computer games since). I’ve really got no excuse for sucking at hard games except I have a full time job, but the truth is… I just don’t care. I can beat Bethesda games. I can beat Cyberpunk. There are games I can play and I enjoy them. I haven’t beaten Blue Prince yet (that one is also very hard, but not punishing… you just aren’t advancing without a lot of luck and/or a very specific strategy… but a “losing” run is still fun and can still teach you something… a thing I think Soulslike games could learn from. They don’t have to be easy if a losing run is still fun. The difference is, the Soulslike is repetitive because you have to do repetitive things very well (blind QTEs to parry and dodge, for example), whereas Blue Prince is a highly randomised puzzle game you’re not going to win unless a very specific order of cards (blueprints) are drawn for you. You CAN manipulate the pool, but not enough to guarantee a win.