I’ve just uninstalled and removed Balatro after yet a near, very close 8/8 ante finish. I have been failing and failing, I’ve only ever seen and gotten to 8/8 ante twice, this being the second time. Every other run has been just insulting me to where no strategy has ever worked, I feel like a lot of it is RNG and pre-determined outcomes based on seeded runs.
And I hate that way of playing. It always feels like I’m getting smacked down by a troll bully who I can never overcome. They’d kick me down every failed run I’d have, then they give me a false sense of security the further I get. “Awwww, getting tired of being owned? Here, let me help you by giving you a few seemingly lucky breaks. SMACK Oh! OWNED YOU AGAIN! FUCK YOU! LOLLOLOL! I BANGED YOUR MOTHER, GIT GUD, NOOB!1”
I just don’t understand why these kinds of games are around, even when I have a good idea who it is for.
The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild. As a die hard Zelda fan, I was beyond hyped for this one. Probably my biggest letdown in all of gaming.
- No real story to follow
- No cast of interesting characters outside of optional collectible flashbacks
- Repetitive, lifeless gameplay. No real dungeons or temples, every “mini dungeon” that does exist is the same copy pasted theme.
- No score of memorable unique music, just the MiNiMaLiSm of some understated occasional piano.
- Atrocious lack of enemy variety.
- a focus on exploration that rewards you with precious little given that any weapons your find will just break, and there are no unique combat or traversal items to unlock.
Came back to my save a couple times to push through, but the entire game is just the same 4 activities copy pasted 300 times with no variation or progression that makes your 50th hour unique from your first. It’s like. Soulless kowtow to Ubisoft game design in a once beautiful and innovative game series. Makes me mad just thinking about it lol.
PvP in any context. I find going against other players very stressful, and even when I’m winning, I know I just made the day of other players a little bit worse, and that just sours the experience.
The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
I don’t find my weapon breaking every 10 minutes fun, nor do I find the endless wandering with no context clues very engaging. I swear 90% of the stuff you have to stumble onto by dumb luck. It took me months to accidentally bump into that stupid maraca tree thing and expand my inventory. That’s just dumb design.
In a mandatory cut scene, a character tells you “Head toward the dueling peaks, then, follow the road to Kakariko village.” Hestu, the inventory expanding broccoli homonculus, is standing on the side of that road in a conspicuous location.
It’s a game about free exploration, it’s silly to expect the player to directly follow these instructions. Just make him part of the mandatory tutorial area or have him come to you after collecting your first 10 seeds or something.
I only found out about the guy after finishing the game.
It’s not just the tree guy. The whole game’s like that.
Here, let me give you another example of the counter-intuitive gameplay I encountered:
The volcano. It’s hot. I need to travel up it.
First attempt: Check my available tools for something. Bombs, no. Timestop, no. Ice pillar, maybe? no. Swords, Shields, Bows… no.
Second attempt: Explore the area, see a hotspring. Try to map out a route using hotsprings as a cooling source. No dice.
Third attempt: Visit all the major cities for info, nothing found other than the volcano is hot. No vendors selling any items that can help.
Fourth attempt: Circle around and try to find a tunnel, putting on all my desert gear to reduce heat damage. Catch fire regardless, no cave found.
Fifth attempt: Load up all my food and make meals, brute force my way to the base camp. No assistance there, have to teleport out.
Sixth attempt: Doing a completely unrelated hunt for a shrine, bump into the NPC selling fire resist potions at a horse stable. A horse stable I mostly ignore because the game lets you teleport everywhere!
Do I feel accomplished, finally finding this only way up the volcano? No! I feel like Nintendo just wasted my time!
Even worse, when I finally make it to the Goron city and buy the fireproof armor, I bump into a Goron who gives me half the recipe to make the fire resist potion. Not even the whole recipe. And he was far far beyond the base camp I brute forced to. If he had been in all the other cities, and with the full recipe, maybe this wouldn’t have been such a challenge of dumb luck.
Wow. Seems like your approach must have been really off the beaten path.
From memory, I think I was offered a fireproof elixir by an NPC at the nearest stable, and by a traveling vendor further up that road, and was given the flamebreaker armor for helping an NPC about halfway to Goron City. (That last one caught my interest because the help needed was in catching fireproof lizards, which seemed relevant to my immediate needs.) Any one of those would have been enough.
Your experience must have been frustrating. Were you avoiding roads and NPCs, by any chance?
Nope, I talked to every NPC at all the towns, and on the roads. But, I didn’t stop at any of the horse stables since I never had need of a horse. It’s all cliffs and teleportation!
Edit: The fireproof armor NPC was only one part of the armor needed to make yourself fireproof, and of course he was at the base camp I had to teleport away from since I was on fire.
I think you only need one piece of the flamebreaker set to
be fireproofsurvive in Goron City. You would need a second piece (or one piece and an elixir) to get closer to the caldera, but by that time you can buy a second piece in the city. You never need the third piece.I went to the stables just to check out what was there, and discovered that they have quest information, quest triggers, rumors about the world, vendors that don’t show up elsewhere, mini-game challenges with rewards, hints at the locations of Link’s lost memory photos, etc. It never occurred to me that someone might miss out on all that stuff if they weren’t given a reason to visit a stable. (Maybe the game gives a hint to go there? I don’t remember.)
Sorry you drew the short straw.
I think you only need one piece of the flamebreaker set to be fireproof in Goron City.
whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat.
I don’t think I ever found a potion before clearing the area. I remember stocking up on food, like you, and eventually stumbling into the merchant selling me fire resistant armour.
The only reason I didn’t brute force the whole way was I ran out of food.
I love these games, but I totally agree with you. I missed hestu and didn’t find him for probably the first 15 hours of the game. Basically it took someone having pity on me and saying “just go here”, Very frustrating.
Talking to NPCs to find out things about the immediate area is a major part of the game.
If you do what the King says, you’ll encounter NPCs that have some early world building dialog, an easily climbed tower to start filling in the map and get the shrine sensor, four convenient shrines, one of which has the climbing bandana in it, great time to get that because you don’t have a hat at all yet so the extra armor plus the climbing speed buff is excellent to have, there’s a stable with a sidequest that teaches you how to catch horses, you’ll find Hestu along the path up to Kakariko and likely increase your inventory (or learn that koroks exist), and then in Kakariko the shrine there is a combat tutorial, there’s a fairy fountain nearby, plus Impa sets you on the main quest of the game. Having done four shrines, you can add a heart or stamina wheel sector. Pikango is here, and there are several sidequests in Kakariko to get stuck into.
Impa sends you to Hateno to get the memories sidequest going. Major location in the game with some adventuring and side questing to do, more expository dialog and world building, you get the camera and shiekah sensor, get sent back to Impa, and then you’re kicking around in Kakariko with no immediate goal. You look out one of the exits of town you haven’t taken yet and you see a wide open area with two visible shrines and a tower. Course charted, you get sucked into the Zora plot. Once that’s done, you’ll have Mipha’s Grace, an additional heart, some more armor, and then the training wheels are off and now it’s up to you to pick a direction to explore.
“I didn’t do what the NPC said and didn’t find something important the whole game” gives big “why don’t my kids ever call” energy.
Wow dude, you go straight to insinuating we’re abuser who’s family abandoned them because we accomplished a goal without follow instructions to the letter in a video game?
It does remind me strongly of the people I’ve cut off, yes.
no reflection at all on how 0 to 11 that reaction is? Huh… Well, another to add to the block list I guess.
Ignoring your uncalled for insult, that’s just not how I play games.
Once I was free of the tutorial area, I set off in a random direction and did my thing. I completed multiple divine beats before ever setting foot in Kakariko.
If I wanted to follow the direct path as described by NPCs, I might as well go play a linear game. I got to the destinations eventually, but almost never on the beated path.
Having tried and failed to get into it some 8 or 9 times, I have to agree. Maybe it’s different if you grew up playing The Legend of Zelda, but I just found the visuals drab, the combat overly simple and yet slow, and above all like it was trying to be deliberately aggravating to play.
Not at all what one expects from one of the most acclaimed video games of all time, I do wonder how it would have performed had an unknown studio released it as their first game.
BotW and its sequel are so unlike any other Zelda game, I doubt having played or grown up with other Zelda games would be helpful.
How unlike are they though? I haven’t played any of the other games, but from what I’ve seen the chief difference is the open world setting, the gameplay loop is mostly the same.
It didn’t seem like a particularly well executed open world to me, either - while it did give the option to stray from the most direct route to the next dungeon, what you found if you did was mostly emptiness. It even had you climb honest to god Ubisoft towers to uncover the map.
Regardless, I felt like I was missing a frame of reference from the very start. It’s just as well there was no sense of urgency to the central conflict, because I was given no reason to care about the stoic mute elf child or his damsel in the castle.
I’m really curious about your idea of a well-executed open world. Can you give an example? Also about the caring about the plot. I could argue your point about not caring about the fate of the central characters for any game.
This turned into a long un. Short version: These are both fair points, but ones you would expect a game heralded as the best of all time to do better.
Long version: That’s a fair question, to me there’s very few good examples and so many bad ones, which is why I largely avoid games described as such. For an open world setting to draw me in it must employ the aspect of exploration to reward the player with more than just gameplay resources - worldbuilding lore, storytelling or knowledge that impacts the main story.
The better parts of Fallout 4 did it well I thought, while trekking towards your destination you could come across an interesting looking building which can be explored to learn why it’s full of super-irradiated ghouls or an extremely predatory deathclaw. The world is also dotted with little nuggets of environmental storytelling that have no bearing on anything but serves to add texture and context to the world, to make it seem as though it’s somewhere people live - or at least lived.
I found nothing of the sort in Breath of the Wild. If you followed the most direct path to the giant glowing pillars the game invited you to use for navigating you may come across another goblin camp or fairy hiding under a rock, none of which compels you to keep exploring further save for the fact that you need a steady supply of weapons to replace the papier-mâché ones that are apparently in vogue. Other than the towers, the identical dungeon entrances and the occasional settlement the terrain is virtually featureless.
To your second point, it’s absolutely true that no game can force you to care about the motivations of the protagonist, but most of them at least try. Link wakes up to a voice in his head, grabs a tablet and off he goes saving the princess. Why does any of this matter to him?
With the context of growing up playing The Legend of Zelda, you already know this - bees sting, birds fly and Link rescues Zelda. For someone new to the franchise it just seems gratuitous, and it’s never expanded upon either. Link is as blank a slate at the conclusion of the story as when he woke, ready, presumably, to be put on ice till the next time Zelda needs rescuing.
Both of these criticisms can be applied fairly to any game, it’s true. But Breath of the Wild and it’s sequel are constantly highlighted as exemplars not just of the genre, but of the whole medium. It’s fair then to expect something that’s excellent in every aspect, which is absolutely not what I’ve found through many attempts to play them.
You’ve got a really good point. The fact that they don’t gatekeep you using the previous dungeon’s item is completely different than what Zelda games do as a tradition… BUT wandering around an open world and getting a lucky find that is critical to beating the game is so very Zelda 1.
Loved BotW but I played it with a 400% durability mod, at 1440p/144fps with graphical mods to make it even more beautiful hahaha
FWIW, I think they did a much better job in Tears of the Kindgom. Your weapons still break, but you can carry around a basically endless supply of monster parts that you “fuse” to whatever base weapon you happen to come across and it makes them powerful again. Sometimes all you need is a stick to make a good weapon. Still annoying, but waaaaaay less of an inventory management sim IMO.
They also added a mechanic to fix broken weapons with the rock octorock but they didn’t really make it obvious and its still weird they didn’t let you repair weapons any other way.
I thought TOTK was worse cause now you’re also managing the parts inventory. It was so frustrating to get to certain places and find out you didn’t have the necessary parts (like a glider) to do certain things.
I even ended up using duplication glitches to skip resource scavgening and I still felt like I ended up wasting half the game managing my inventory.
I’ll admit i rarely used the machine fusing, I was just talking about the weapon inventory system. I’d just pick up sticks or whatever was around and slam the first “good enough” damage monster part I had to it and kept going. It’s a lot better IMO than having to hang onto all the good stuff and constantly be underpowered because “what if i need it for a boss?”
I hate Battle Royale shooters, all of them.
There is nothing I find more unpleasant than inventory management under pressure. I don’t even have time to look at what I just picked up and figure out what it does before people are shooting at me. I say just pick a lane, you can be a competitive shooter, but skip the loot. Or go maximum inventory management, like borderlands or stalker, but not in a competitive multiplayer game.
The whole souls universe. It’'s not difficult it’s tedious. I get why people like it, it;'s got great atmosphere and design and ideas. just not for me.
Breath of the Wild. I just don’t see the hype. The weapon durability system really turned me off from the game.
Monster hunter. You need to hit the monsters like 1000x and they don’t even have a health bar. Its like using a mixer: boring and takes long.
LoZ: The wind waker. I thought it would be like that one world in Paper Mario: TOK where you get a fast ship, but instead you get an extremely slow nutshell.
I have tried to play Hollow Knight multiple times and I just can’t get into it. I find the art style clashes with the gameplay, it’s difficult for me to tell what is and isn’t a platform to stand on, what will and won’t hurt me. I also just don’t think the Souls-like system really works for me in a side scroller, I had the same issue with Salt and Sanctuary, it just wasn’t how I want to play one of those games.
Souls like games. I tried, I’m just not built for them.
Same, and I’m both happy and sad about that. Happy because I don’t need that stress and anger, sad because I like the worlds in most of them and many of my friends absolutely love them and it’d be nice to share that.
Red dead redemption 2. I really just can’t ever get into Rockstar games, I hate the controls, they really just feel bad, so much that it makes it unplayable to me. Having watched a playthrough, I can kind of understand the hype behind it, but haven’t found any enjoyment in it myself.
Honestly? Witcher 3. Heard so much good about it. Started it like 10 times. I hated the combat method. Made me hate the game.
Witcher 3.
I’ve started it 4 times and I never make it past 6 hours in, it’s just painfully slow and feels like a chore to my brain.
Yeah, same for me. I never understood the hype…
It was sort of like the Bethesda formula except that every quest was actually interesting and well-written. Plus there’s the part where taking down tougher monsters on harder difficulties requires appropriate prep, which made those fights more interesting.
I played that game for about 30 minutes. I got to one of the first areas, picked up some “fetch quests” where I had to kill some type of creature and return their pelts for a prize and some exp or whatever and I was like “Oh… A mid 2000’s MMO with no other players. No thanks!”
I also remember feeling that all of the movement, animations, and actions were really jerky. Like nothing felt like it flowed correctly. Things were kind of “snap to grid”. Not sure how else to explain it.
I also remember feeling that all of the movement, animations, and actions were really jerky. Like nothing felt like it flowed correctly. Things were kind of “snap to grid”. Not sure how else to explain it.
I like witcher 3 but i fully agree on the movement. It’s better now that they changed it for the next gen upgrade but still really weird.
I’m similar. I did manage better after installing a bunch of mods. Lots were to mitigate/nullify systems I didn’t want to interact with.
Mods to make equipment scale with level, autoloot, remove inventory weight, remove durability, and I’m sure I’m missing some.
It’s still a slow game with floaty combat, and not my favorite, but I was able to see at least some of what others rave about.
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For me it was specifically the Blood and Wine DLC. I was really engrossed in the story and when it concluded, I lost my motivation to keep playing.
Any Soulslike anything. I have gotten my ass beaten by enemy NPCs in Smash Bros, and I have gotten my ass beaten by enemy players in Battlefield, and I stuck around with both until I got quite good (Smash Bros more than Battlefield, but still).
But Dark Souls, Demon Souls, Elden Ring… I’ve actually owned all of them and played none of them for more than a few hours at most. I got the furthest with Elden Ring but it’s just not fun, it’s harder than Smash Bros but about as fun as Ghost of Tsushima combat - which is to say, not very fun.
Oh also, Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla or whatever the viking themed one was. I’m not a picky AC player, I loved the originals and I loved Origins and I loved many (though not all) in between those. But the viking one just had the slowest, least satisfying combat in the world. Which sucked since I’m Danish American, can’t even live out digital viking fantasies, but pirate fantasies are a decent second I guess.
On the flip side, the Stanley Parable is so good that I haven’t finished it because it makes my brain feel like it’s tripping but in a disorienting and uncomfortable way. It’s so good but I cant handle it for too long.
Red Dead Redemption 2. The cutscenes are too long and boring.
Eeeh, the length of the cutscenes wasn’t really what put me off but rather the fact that I didn’t care about most of the people in them. I fact, I never got invested in any of the characters, including Arthur.
Their world building and dedication to creating complex systems are fantastic but Rockstar Games makes their characters so repulsive that I don’t enjoy being around them or advancing whatever agenda they have. Same with GTA V (and presumably VI as well).
I agree. Rockstar makes truly impressive games, but I can’t get into them. The characters and stories have no redeeming qualities from what I could tell.
Any game with unskippable cutscenes instantly drops dead for me. It’s padding I don’t want to wade through.
I gave up after accidentally doing things too many times. The hotkeys felt like an ever shifting mess and I got tired of constantly reloading after pressing the wrong one. It was a bummer because I loved the setting and overall feel of the game, just ran out of patience after so many times not knowing how to do the thing I wanted to do and half the time ending up doing something unintentionally violent.
Elite Dangerous has a zillion hotkeys as well but that feels more like gameplay and learning to operate a complicated ship. Accidentally wasting a heat sink with a wrong keypress is different from accidentally starting a fistfight with a random person when I meant to wave and say howdy partner
And some of them are unskippable.
This is the one for me as well. The gameplay is simply horrendous. Just getting on and off the horse was a chore in of itself.
Don’t forget to clean your horse off every few hours by brushing it in the same spot 3 times. Just… Why
So. Much. Exposition…
I found nearly all of Disco Elysium’s characters so unlikable, (especially?) including the player character, that I could not enjoy it at all. I think I like the systems in it, and I’m happy when an RPG exposes its dice rolls; the voice performances were all very good; I just couldn’t stand it after 5 hours of trying.
You’re definitely not supposed to like Harry as a person. He is at best insane and at worst a racist, mysognistic, alcohic drug abusing piece of human garbage. It is also very easy to be put off by even the good people because Harry has already wronged most of them and they have already had enough of his shit by the time you take control.
I don’t know, maybe it’s just because I relate to him but I do kind of like Harry. Yes, he’s not a regular “good person”, but he’s also much more complex than just a “bad guy”. He’s flawed, tragic and ultimately incredibly human. I think he’s a fantastic character, just like most characters in Disco Elysium.
My heart welped for Harry in the dreaming sequence. Despite his best effort, Dolores wouldn’t stay. Nothing he could do or say. The powerlessness made him incredibly vulnerable and human. Very realistic depiction of a broken love.
The final dream is my favourite moment in all of gaming. Complete heart wrenching and beautifully written, and really kind of pulling the whole game into focus and making all the pieces click into place at once. I still can’t believe they made it so easily missable too, as it’s kind of the fulcrum the whole game is balanced on.
It also never ceases to amaze me how Robert Kurvitz managed to distill the entire pathos of the whole game into three words to close it out, too.
spoiler
See you tomorrow.
I don’t think I necessarily like Harry, but I sure as fuck empathize with him. Playing him as someone seeking redemption or trying to put his life back together (and SO OFTEN failing) was incredibly meaningful. You put it very well.
I get that. But I consume a lot of crime fiction. The Wire, Guy Ritchie movies, etc. These stories are full of terrible people, but they don’t make me feel like I’m trudging through a story with a bunch of assholes.
The main theme of the game basically centers around failure. How it manifests, how people react to it, how it affects them in the long run. Bitterness, apathy, delusion. Most of the characters are some kind of fuckup (except Kim, my beloved). Some of them are failures because they’re fucked up, some of them are fucked up because they failed again and again, but either way it’s an exploration of what that does to a person, what that does to a people, what that does to a town.
Some people just disassociate, some people give up and abandon their values to go with the flow, some people fight back impotently against forces they’ll never overcome. Above all, I think it’s basically about perseverance, one way or another, in the face of failure.
It’s very raw, very bleak, very human. It’s easy to feel vindicated when you strive and succeed, when you’re a virtuous hero, but who among us is just a virtuous hero? It’s much more complex and real to fail over and over and still get back on that horse, because what else can you do? The characters are supposed to be flawed, they’re supposed to be unlikeable. The game is about exploring what it is that made them unlikeable: how much of it is forces beyond their control, how much of it is their own stubbornness and maladaptive reactions, how much of it is just trauma.
If you don’t like exploring those ideas, you probably won’t like the game.
I would like exploring those ideas, but it doesn’t change what I said above.
The characters are supposed to be flawed, they’re supposed to be unlikeable. The game is about exploring what it is that made them unlikeable: how much of it is forces beyond their control, how much of it is their own stubbornness and maladaptive reactions, how much of it is just trauma.
It’s kind of a necessary aspect. You can’t really effectively explore what persistent failure does to a town without feeling like you’re trudging through a story full of assholes. If the characters weren’t so abrasive and broken, it wouldn’t really be the same kind of thing.
But I wasn’t exploring failure. I was just annoyed every time I had to talk to Kuno or anyone else.
And if you keep playing you learn the tragic reasons why Cuno is such a little shit and, I won’t post spoilers, but depending on your choices you can help him become way less of a little shit. It’s roughly the same for most of the asshole characters: they’re assholes at first, you find out why they’re assholes and develop a lot of sympathy for them, and sometimes you facilitate their redemption.
Could be, but I didn’t have the patience to see it. If that’s what they wanted me to see, I certainly felt it could have been paced better. You mostly only hear good things about this game, but my friends list on Steam has about a dozen people who stopped playing it around the same time I did. I can’t say why they put it down, as I didn’t poll them, but someone I follow on Giant Bomb had a pretty similar reaction to the front-loaded negativity of this game very recently, so I know it’s not just me.
Sure, but again that’s the point. I can get why someone might not have the patience for it, but you can’t really change the front-loaded negativity or pacing without sacrificing the whole message. It’s a crucial aspect of the storytelling.
Honestly, people who give up on it kinda validate the themes. You and your dozen friends didn’t persevere, like many of the characters. Giving up is one response to bleakness. That’s not a value judgement, like I said it isn’t for everyone, but it is kinda poignant that by checking-out you demonstrate exactly what it’s saying, to some degree.
I finished it recently and I also didn’t get what all the hype was about, but for me it was more the fact that none of the quests, main or side, were satisfying in the least.
I am a socialist and dont get offended at all if called a communist and finally I get why people may hate us, after playing this game.
Also, having to change clothes every 3 minutes brings me out of immersion.
It is very “snobbish” in its design despite beautiful art département stuff and voice acting.
