Gaming

The Souls games.

I can see the appeal of the story and stuff, but they're just impossible for me to get into cause of their difficulty

DOTA, or any MOBA. I'm an old-school RTS fan and for whatever reason these games slide off me like water off a duck's back, despite being told multiple times from different folks that I'd probably like them.

Honestly, Animal Crossing (new & old). What's sad is it really is a fun game if you have a good attention span and no depression. I have a hard time keeping basic routines so logging into a game regularly was really challenging for me. By the time I'm reminded of the game it'd be weeks or months since I touched it. In the old game this meant everything you worked on has been undone and you have roaches. The newer one is better about overgrowing weeds and I haven't got roaches yet, but the neighbors notice your disappearance and have some things to say about it. Last time I logged on one of the characters was so personally slighted by my disappearance I just logged out after the conversation. I haven't logged on since. When I can keep up with it, it's fun and cute. When I can't I'm made to feel guilty for hurting the feelings of an unsympathetic AI. At least my friends in real life understand depression and it's ability to steal my motivation. I do miss Sherb tho.

Breath of the wild. As an avod Zelda fun I really really tried to like it but just can't do it.

Fallout mostly. It's all just so grey and boring and not fun at all. If I want to see a wasteland I can just go outside /s

This should be in unpopular opinion lol. For me it is control. The combat feel tiring after 2 to 3 hours and the story didn't caught on for me.

Fallout: NV and Skyrim. People kept recommending them to me but neither really clicked. I put about 20 hours into each before just kinda dropping them and not looking back. Even tried mods since everyone says they're better modded, but just found I was spending more time modding the games than playing them. Maybe Bethesda games just aren't my thing.

Uncharted 1. A lot of people told me that I have to play the uncharted games, they’re groundbreaking. I can understand that the early games were ahead of their time when they released, but they aged badly. The physics, the story, the gameplay - everything feels just like trash.

If you don’t have any nostalgic memories of the game and you play it for the first time today, you’ll think it sucks.

Breath of the Wild probably tops my list, largely for the same reason as others. But in the particular, it's the emptiness. I get that it's part of the story, but I still hate the emptiness of it. What good is an open world if it's largely devoid of content and interaction? That criticism probably encompasses many open world games. Subsquently. I don't play a whole lot of them.

Path of Exile is another. While I enjoyed Diablo 1, 2, and 3, any maybe will eventually get Diablo 4, I've never been a hardcore player of any entries in the series. I think what annoys me the most with PoE is that it seems like you can't have an organic experience in that game. Whenever I asked how I should be speccing out my character or even just some general advice, I just got the answer -- from multiple people -- "Oh just find a build guide online." OK...but I don't know any of the builds. Or anything about the game. So what am I supposed to do, just sit there and research build guides, reading about things I don't even understand, before I even really get into the game? When I said I'd just wing it for a bit like I do in every other game, I kept hearing, "Oh you'll have a bad time then..." OK well then forget it. I just won't play. I'm really not a fan of min-maxing. Also, the trade system and lack of actual currency sounded horrendous to me. There's a reason we have currency in real life.

There's two, and both pretty controversial.

1. Horizon Zero Dawn - I love open world games, I love exploring, I love grind, this is someone who has played every Assassins Creed, the Tomb Raider Series, Ghost Recon series, God of War, Ghost of Tsushima, Death Stranding, and goodness knows what else. I did about 10-12 hours of Zero Dawn and it just bored me. I think the worst thing for was the character acting, I found everyone very wooden, or just had really silly voices (like Aloy's father or whoever he was, sounded so well spoken). I found it grating. And the landscape, maybe I needed to open up more of the world, but I just didn't find it very interesting. Sure, Robot's are fun, but, even they were kinda dull.

2. The Last of Us - Just couldnt get into it. I just found it very tedious (played about 8 hours). I dont know why it just didn't resonate with me at all. I think where AC, Tsushima etc offer escapism, TLOU being set in a regular city didnt really excite me to go out an explore. When the tv show started I thought i would give that a go hoping it would get me into playing the game, but i got bored with that about 40 minutes into episode 1 as well :(

I finished Fallout New Vegas but never really enjoyed my time with it. Was a boring open world with emotionless NPCs and a forgettable storyline. Tried Fallout 76 recently and it was still the same type of thing. I played the hell out of Skyrim though and loved it the whole time. Maybe I just don’t like an apocalyptic open world? People always seem to love Fallout but it’s just not for me.

Monster Hunter. I don't understand any of it. I tried rise and generations and I just... I just don't get it.

Don’t crucify me but I’ve tried HZD and did not like it. I also tried God of War (2018) and I didn’t get very far. Maybe I was not in the right headspace but both of them felt the same to me like a game forcefully trying to make me feel something but I could not connect to either.

Oblivion, Morrowind and probably Skyrim too. The open world didn't captivate me, it just felt too big, too sparse and ultimately not interesting.

Same goes for Breath of the Wild. The world is just too barren. It doesn't help that I feel like the weapon breaking is extremely stressful.

Red Dead Redemption 2 is too slow and clunky. The skinning animation made me uninstall. It does not respect my time.

Kinda funny, because I don't mind grinding in arpgs. Maybe because they are faster-paced when the combat happens, and then you start wracking your brain with the theorycrafting side of builds.

Couldn't agree more about Tears of the Kingdom however I'd go one step further and say I can't stand Zelda. I've played a fair few including BotW. Thought they were complete garbage.

The other for me is any game made by FromSoftware, and to that any "soulslike". The game design and gameplay of these types of games are atrocious imo. It has always bewildered me how much love they get. I can't comprehend it.

The Assassins Creed series. It’s got all the things I love from the Uncharted and Tomb Raider games, I could just never get into it. Maybe I should have started from the beginning, I dunno. Arkham games were the same way, totally my preferred style of game and gameplay, but it just never grabbed me.

Destiny...friend tried to up sell the mmo aspect of it, because I am a long time WoW player. But I find it in both mmo and shooter aspects quite lacking for me.

Horizon Zero Dawn/Forbidden West. Game is so empty and has an open world for having an open world’s sake. Couldn’t stand it for longer than 3 hours.

ToTK I havent played, but persona 5 even with its weird moments I enjoyed. It made me root for the characters, not for everyone ig.

Counterstrike. I was raised on Unreal Tournament and Battlefield 1942/Vietnam, every iteration of CS I've tried is just slow and boring comparatively. Doesn't help that the maps and guns never change either. I'll probably give it a go again with CS2 but I'm not expecting anything different.

Lol, I've put 120 hrs into TotK and I love it, and still haven't finished all the side quests or shrines. I can't get my wife to play past the tutorial, she's disappointed that it doesn't foster creativity like Garry's mod

For me Skyrim, The Witcher 3, botw and all souls games.

Skyrim never clicked, it just felt buggy and empty and punishing. Trying to climb that mountain just so a yeti can beat you up? Great, here is your save spot form 15 min earlyer, please try again. I know that's why it's fun for so many, I just hated it.

The Witcher 3 was too... much dialogue. Most of the time I can play 1-3 hours every couple of days. And in the Witcher you walk 15min through beautiful but otherwise empty forest, killing 1-15 something, walk back and talk like another 15min with the guy who gave you the quest. It's really deep worldbuilding, but when you don't have a lot of time it's more "damn, what happend last?" 5min walking "ah, that happened" takes new quest, so much talking..."ah damn, my hour is gone, so I finish the quest another time." PC off.

Botw cause the world felt empty and everything broke in an instant and I'm the player ending with 50 healing potions, 10 big scrolls and so on cause MaYbE I'll need it another time. Doesn't match with botw. TotK is so much better handling this, cause you can craft any good item in an instant.

And Souls Games are just a broken mess. They're not hard by default, they're hard cause of all the buggy and mushy controls. It never feels crisp, it's just a big blob and maybe your character rolls or maybe it feels like an invisible wall, who knows. Games like Jedi Fallen Order in hard mode or Hollow Knight were so much more fun, cause the controls were crisp and everytime I lost, it was because of me. I did wrong and not some squishi spaghetti code.

Do not care for open world crafting games. Minecraft, Day Z, fuck even the new Zelda looks to have some kind of crafting system. That just feels like endless fucking grinding to me.

A Way Out - go anywhere and ask for a good co-op game and this will be recommended to you. It took me and my girlfriend about 3 hours to beat it. It didn't feel like a game as much as an interactive movie and it has zero replayability value.

I'm with you on Persona 5. My favourite in the series is Persona 2. Plays like complete ass but some of the best writing I've seen in a videogame. So it balances out. Then Persona 3 came out and they changed direction with the games, and... Well, I guess it makes more money and being told you're the best is a lot more fun than the weirdness of early persona.

Weirdly enough, I could never get into Stardew Valley. Whenever I play it, the path to complete optimisation is just so annoyingly clear. Something ALWAYS needs to be done to be optimal. So I always feel like I'm not doing it right or I'm falling behind. My personality just does not work with Stardew Valley even if I really truly want it to.

I was thinking about that with TotK too, but kept on with it.. the exploration of the Chasms added a lot for me, and I think the shrines are better.

To answer your poll, I find Mario Odyssey to be overhyped. Not saying its a bad game, but the collecting gets tiresome and the levels are nowhere near as interesting as the Galaxy games

Disagree, but won’t kill you don’t worry.

Personally, I don’t see much appeal in online fps games.

Dark souls, castlevania, smash bros, FIFA (I dont mind a game or two with a friend but it's the same game every team reskinned year but worse).

Final fantasy games past 10

The new cod games, last one I liked was the original mw2

RDR2. I tried like five times. I could never play it for more than about two hours before being bored and falling asleep at my desk.

1. The Witcher series. Around 15 years ago I've picked up Sapkowski's books. I made through one and a half. Can't stand his writing.

2. Horizon series - I watched my partner play through it and I can't think of a more bland, unimaginative world.