I’m going to get absolutely roasted for this, but Elden Ring. I put about 10 hours in trying to like it, but it just made me angry and miserable. And it was kinda boring.
I also don’t care for Souls games, but I think ‘angry and miserable’ is the intended experience.
I’m a fan of the Soulsborne games but gave up on Elden Ring because I wasn’t a fan of the empty open world gameplay.
I really tried, maybe 20-30 hours, but didn’t enjoy it much.
Playing as a spellcaster was maybe a mistake.
I recognize it’s a quality game though. I might try again with a melee character. Maybe modded?Dex/arcane bleed builds. Beautiful.
Genshin Impact
The characters look like sex dolls with uncanny valley face
“Mom, can we have Zelda BOTW?”
“We have that at home.”
Zelda BOTW at home: …
Apart from the endless EA, Ubisoft and similar AAA copy/paste titles I never understood the hype around MOBA games.
I don’t get it. Its not real time strategy, but not an ARPG either, you dont create a character, instead have an insane pool of unique characters with a few abilities each. Its just feels like someone wrote down some random game mechanics and choose 5 at random.
All levels are basically the same with mild variations and the whole gameplay loop boils down to optimised fast clicking on abilities and to get strong asap.
Its super boring for me and couldn’t spend more than a couple hours with the games from the genre. Same goes for watching other people play.
Its just a cherry on top to have the biggest tournaments and cash prices, while the top players are celebrated as superstars. Also somehow the biggest MOBA communities are infamous for toxicity.
Definitely not my cup of tea.
MOBA started as RTS mods for people who liked micro and didn’t like resource management. Add hypermonetization of everything for 20 years and here we are. I don’t get it, either, but to each his own.
I liked the old WC3 mods because of RPG-like level progression. Gave a little hit of dopamine to see a build come together and steamroll the other side. This was well before there was a competitive scene.
The genre got hyper-monetized, and I noped out of that shit.
Everything you wrote is true, and I gotta respect that you’ve at least given mobas a try. It’s not your cup of tea and that’s alright.
One thing that you didn’t mention is the team work. While there are toxic people out there, mobas tend to be games that a group of friends can play together for free. You are correct that the abilities can feel limiting - along that vein finding ways to chain spells together with your team mates was one of the most fun ways to get creative.
This is what makes watching pros play a lot of fun. There are people out there constantly experimenting with mixing items and spells to create hilarious strategies to gain an edge. There are all kinds of spells that can come off as overly subtle and dumb sounding, but you pair it up with something else and all of a sudden you have a wombo combo.
Mobas came out of War Craft 3, so any of the millions of people with a blizzard rts background will have skills that will transfer. The single hero format means you can focus all your attention in one place instead of keeping track of your army and your economy at all times. Starting with an established and automated base means that the game isn’t on a knife’s edge like RTSs. There’s a lot of stability and simplicity here over RTSs.
The games tend to be simple in concept to understand but very difficult to master. I had a lot of fun picking a handful of heroes and learning how to best use them. They all have their own quirks and limitations that may not be obvious at first. Conversely, it was rewarding to learn how to shut down heroes that had stomped me in the past.
It is very difficult to get established in these games. It can feel like one of those tv shows that you have to get to the third season before things get better. And I can completely understand people wanting games that don’t start off as rough. The high skill cap can keep people coming back for years though.
I hope this helps 😊
All of the Monster Hunter games. The gameplay is awful and the story drags on. I thought it was just that I picked the first one, but after trying the others it feels like a $5 game series.
And trying to play with your friends? Fuck you, do 30 minutes of boring solo stuff before we even think about letting you have fun.
And did you want to just connect and go? Fuck you get online and search up a guide how to do coop missions with your friends
FIFA and other sport team manager; Farming Simulator; Call of Duty; Fortnite and other battle royals (its just not my game mode.
Any games that have gatcha mechanics.
No Man’s Sky: I’ve tried playing it and just end up getting bored. Every once in a while I’ll go back and check it out again, feeling like I somehow didn’t give it a fair shake, but remain underwhelmed.
Maybe next time…
This was the game that made me realize I prefer story over infinite sandbox games.
Even after it started getting praise due to all the updates, it just felt… empty every time I went back.
I really like sandbox games, but this one just didn’t grab me (at least not yet).
FIFA and Madden NFL
Call of Duty. Yeah I liked the original modern warfare games but not enough to like the hype.
It seems like all of the answers are “I personally didn’t enjoy this game therefore I can not conceive of anyone else enjoying it.”
I find that interesting.
How else would you interpret OP’s question?
Something that is popular (or sells well) despite having no apparent appeal to anyone the commenter can think of.
I don’t enjoy Bloodborne. I think I can figure out why there is a lot of hype for it.
While I’d interpret it this way, too, “can’t understand the hype of” usually translates to simply “dislike”, but with a stronger emphasis on invalidating the opinions of the people who do like it.
Sports games.
Gacha.
For most anything else, I can simply chalk it up as a difference in tastes when I don’t like the gameplay, or art style, or whatever. Even those shitty horror games for babies I despise are perhaps fun if you dive into the lore at the right age, who knows. I certainly have obsessed for less than mediocre games.
But no one likes gacha, or at least should like it. It’s gambling marketed to kids, preying on the people without impulse control. No “you can spend 2 hours of your life every day on this and save up 2$ in currency” is changing that, in fact that is even worse.
And yet they give hoyoverse a pass for their series, because everything around it is so high quality. Open your fucking eyes! Games are not supposed to punish you for not playing!
But of course, no accusation without confession, I am quite fond of the yugioh simulator, and used to defend it the same way. I try to resolve this double standard by doing what I feel they should do: Never gush about it, only mention it in shame, and always warn people to not pick it up.
Gacha has gotten out of hand. I played one for a year or two a long time ago and don’t regret it, but it was far more generous than anything today. It used to be a fun genre to download a game and play for a day or two with all the free stuff, but even that hasn’t been true for a while with all the dark patterns they use in these games now.
Hollow Knight.
There’s a couple of things the devs could have done to make things way more tolerable, like not putting the fucking shades in the middle of platforming challenges and giving health bars to bosses so you can tell when you should go somewhere else instead of face-tanking them for 3 hours.
But god forbid anyone says anything even remotely disparaging against the game, as they’re quickly mobbed by fanboys and told to “git gud” because they treat masochistic games like HK as some perverse dick-measuring contest.
And unfortunately I can’t away from hearing about it with everyone sperging out over the upcoming sequel.
For me its Metroid, and really the whole Metroidvania genre. I can never tell when a challenge is supposed to be possible, or if I’m supposed to come back later, and and up wasting hours trying to do something only for it to be trivial later. I don’t find this at all rewarding.
That said Tunic was a fantastic game, and I love the concept of the ‘Metroid-Brainia’, purely because of the concept that every challenge is theoretically possible from the start, you just need to learn how to do it.
Souls. I’ve tried em and find them repetitive and cheesy in their lack of little details that make games fun for me.
I tried Elden ring and thought it was the ugliest, most repetitive game I’ve ever played. I don’t get the hype for the souls series, it’s just making a game repetitive and difficult to justify its lack of substance
