The only one that really sticks out is Starfield. Most other games I played I knew what I was getting into. For some reason Starfield surprised me, probably because it was on Gamepass (so effectively free) and because I trusted Bethesda. Oh well.
Considering the number of great games this year, that's not too bad.
Agreed and Starfield wasn’t even that bad. I just don’t have any time to play a mediocre game when BG3 is sitting right there.
Maybe it's just me getting older, but since Skyrim, Bethesda games have failed to capture that magic for me. They've been leaning on the creation engine for too long, to the point that so many of the features, not the least of which being the goddamn shouts, are all carbon copies of one another, the base building is literally just a fucking resource sink, the gunplay sucks and the enemies are all bullet sponges unless you dip into late game planets and filch a late game gun, the jobs are 90% basic bitch fetch quests, and the core gameplay loop of "go place --> grab shit --> sell shit" has not evolved since Morrowind.
I stop playing games when they start feeling like a second job, and for me that point in Starfield was about three hours in when I was trying to complete survey data for the homesteading program and I was wandering around this deserted planet, looking for samples of flora and fauna, and I scoot back from my desk as I realize, for 20 minutes, I have done absolutely nothing meaningful or engaging. The closest I've come is, I've pointed a scanner at a bunch of procedurally generated animals hoping they don't land a hit on me because they're too spongy for me to kill, so I can fill a meter, so that when I'm done filling meters I can go back to BDG and tell him this place is suitable for people to live. That's not fun. It barely qualifies as gameplay, and it is an aggressive waste of time.
Maybe it’s just me getting older, but since Skyrim, Bethesda games have failed to capture that magic for me.
It is not you. Standards for the genre have been raised since at least 2015, and Bethesda has not kept up, for all the reasons you stated.
I had a really solid year, all things considered:
Honorable Mention: TF2 -- Definitely not a "new" game to me, I own TF2, I bought it with money! Even so... this year marked my return after a looong hiatus. Coming back was a total revelation -- I thought I'd grown to hate FPS games -- as it turns out, what I'd actually grown to hate was the modern antisocial MMR grindset. Game developers: I beseech thee... abandon matchmaking and return to 2007. Return the slab or suffer my curse
I treat Deep Rock the same way I treat rogueli*es and arcade-style games -- I can just hop on when I'm in the "dwarf mood", play one or two missions and be done with it for the day. It's very good for short sessions like that. Also, you can play solo no problem -- you get a drone instead that can mine and shoot things.
Also, TF2 community servers FTW
Ayy someone else who's been enjoying Against the Storm.
I played over 140 hours now! I'm currently trying to climb the difficulty up to P20.
Goodness gracious you're far further along than me! I haven't touched it for a bit because I've been busy with other games, but I'll get back to it eventually because it's super fun. (Also GL on P20 I believe in you.)
I gave into peer pressure earlier this year and tried League.
God that shit was boring.
I have PlayStation Plus. Most of what I play are stinkers.
One: Starfield.
Not much I can say about it that hasn't already been said, it was just so bland.
Intraveneous. Game got a lot of love and as a huge stealth fan I was really into the idea. Got it and hated every second of it. It's tedious and punishing even by stealth game standards and the story wasn't great either. Mechanics were poorly explained and it felt like the keymapping was made by a person who had never played a keyboard game before. ugh. I was really disappointed too because it was marketed as a stealth game that didn't punish you for failing stealth which is true but the issue is that it's so damn easy to fail stealth that you might as well just go in guns blazing anyway. It wasn't like MGSV where both options make sense depending on the circumstance. It was more like "stealth is nigh impossible so we made guns-blazing a fail safe for people who aren't nuts at this game"
Atomic Heart. Yes I bought this game and I am ashamed of it. No it wasn't for the robot porn. I thought it looked like an interesting Bioshock / Wolfenstein mashup and both of those are my favorites. Game was just... slow. Combat, stealth, everything felt like you were moving through syrup. The character's english voice acting is also horrifically cringe. Like, just awful in every sense. Made me hate the MC more than the villains.
Dying Light 2. I loved the first so I was seriously disappointed by this. Main issue was really with the movement. Gave me motion sickness dozens of times with how the camera is set up, and I was expecting something like Mirror's Edge (Catalyst) but it felt just awfully floaty. The game also did... fuck all... in terms of explaining what you... do? so I just was super confused. Uninstalled after like 10 hours in frustration.
Ghostrunner. Played this in December of 2022 but I wanted to add it in as a hot take. Overall great but the boss fights are pretty terribly designed after the first one and pretty much ruined the game for me. Plus there's useless parkour sections that added nothing. Surprisingly little time spent being a ninja badass for a cyberpunk ninja badass game.
Starfield was pretty much it for me.
I wanted to like it, but there is just nothing to like about it aside from the gun design and the spaceship builder.
It's weird that as I continue to want to play more of it, I'm annoyed by just about every design decision they made along the way. I want to get into the gun design thing even, but the perk tree system puts a roadblock in my way.
The skill tree stuff makes me feel like Bethesda finally listened to all those players who bitched about it being too easy to become "overpowered" and blamed it on how easy it was to level up and not the poor balancing with how level scaling works. So now, all the actually good, fun and useful shit is all the way at the top (or rather the bottom) of the tree, with a bunch of "milestones" you have to hit in addition to simply being the right level and/or having the previous skills in the tree.
I don't even think it's that. Lots of RPGs have had "do X more to level up X", including old Bethesda games, but it's riddled with problems, which is why most games don't do it anymore. As for level scaling, at least they finally got rid of that, but the way they guide you through the galaxy in line with your level involves basically being equally far along in each faction quest line at the same time instead of having low level factions and high level factions.
I can't actually think of anything off the top of my head. After I stopped buying AAA titles from the obvious scummy companies, pretty much everything has been at least as good as expected.
Not "bad" but disappointing: No Man's Sky. There's a lot to be liked here but as someone who has played Elite Dangerous everything is just so incredibly dumbed down.
Fighting is trivially easy, just hold S, shoot and grab a snack while doing it.
There's absolutely no consequences for anything. It doesn't matter how much fuel I have because I can just find new fuel anywhere or teleport somewhere completely different. Doesn't matter where I log out because the game will just throw me to the same system as my coop partner anyway.
Doesn't matter if the authorities want me, just fly into a station and all is forgotten. Got contraband? Just tell them to get lost and fly away casually. No bounty on my head, no nothing.
Don't get me wrong, Elite is definitely way too hardcore for casual play but at the same time the only thing No Man's Sky has done is make me want to play Elite again.
Same here -- I've been doing exploration exclusively in Elite, and it got kinda samey and boring. Yet, somehow playing Elite was so mentally taxing, it quite often felt like having a second job. So, I decided to try out NMS, after hearing about its redemption so much.
The story of NMS was kinda neat, even though it was presented in a very dry way. The visuals were also not bad. Looking at planetary landscapes sometimes felt like stepping into the world of The Sand Sea and the Plateaux of Mirrors, which is a very good thing imo.
The actual gameplay just wasn't engaging enough, though, and super janky (making gas/mineral farms sucks). Like, it's very hard to find meaning in whatever you're doing in that game. In contrast, doing exploration in Outer Wilds was very fun, because it felt like you were exploring an actual living world. In NMS, you get the same prefab randomly generated building and a sliver of lore. No environmental storytelling, no anything. So, it's very difficult to connect to NMS's world.
If you're talking video (not board) games, I think most the games I played were kind of a mix of good and bad. I mean they usually start out pretty well but then end up being repetitive and boring. If I ever have to play another farm sim where I'm required to craft things in some convoluted way that makes no sense, I'll chuck my game system out the nearest window. Why does "Stardew Valley" get it totally right, and the rest not get it right at all? OK yes I play mostly casual games, but the real "gems" are few and far between. Still waiting for another good sim that isn't more work than it is fun.
OK yes I play mostly casual games...
You say that like it's something to be ashamed of. "Casual" is an underrated genre, because sometimes, it's nice to just take your time and enjoy the experience. Life has enough complexities that escaping to a world of simplicity and calm can be truly rewarding.
Why does “Stardew Valley” get it totally right, and the rest not get it right at all?
I think it's because Stardew has a lot of RPG elements. Developing relationships with the townspeople (romantic and friendship), figuring out the lore, etc. Lots of games that try to replicate Stardew do the farming / labor stuff and call it quits. I know there are probably some people that go into that game only doing farming, but most people I've met who are fans of it like the lore stuff.
If you don't want gaming to feel like work, maybe stop playing labor simulators. Like, isn't the point of those games to make you feel like your working whatever job they're "simulating"?
Clearly there are some games that do it better.
this is such a mood. i’m still waiting for the next stardew valley.
I played a lot of great games this year, but also many that didn't click with me.
There's a huge spikes of games that I played this year, because I decided to start tackling my backlog by streaming them, these include games I've bought on sale, and those that are on PS+ Extre.
Can't finish because of difficulty spikes
Dropped it because of technical issues
Dropped it because it's not clicking
Finished it, but it's kinda not good
I don't think I played any truly bad games, but I do have a list of games that I bounced off of for one reason or another. Maybe I ran out of steam to play them, maybe life got in the way and I couldn't come back to it, or I just didn't want to "git gud" with the limited time I have. I basically deemed them not worth my time when I did manage to sink a ton of hours into Spider-Man, Cyberpunk, and Talos Principle.
So that abandoned graveyard consists of...
To jump in on Hunt Showdown, the initial learning curve of the game does require a little time to get used to compared to other shooters. However the biggest call out I would have is to not try playing the game solo. Hunt is very much a game that is made or broken by the company you keep while you play it and it takes a very special kind of player (a masochist) to enjoy playing it solo. Either way, definitely understandable to bounce off it, it's a great game but not for everyone.
Totally could see that being the case. I think it was a combination of seeing the difficulty curve and not having a consistent group to play with that probably did me in. I’m happy to lose and learn, but not maybe as much as it seemed like I would playing solo!
Given more time, definitely something I’d want to get into more.
Hard for me to call any game a "stinker" because I am simply not into a lot of very popular games.
We finally got around to playing Gotham Knights this year since it was a few bucks on sale for a coop adventure. Certified stinker for sure.
Oh yeah, I forgot about this one. Good call, definite stinker. Shame, would have loved an Arkham spiritual successor.
Zero. The only new games I purchased this year were BG3 and Lethal Company, both of which are goated for completely different reasons.
Beyond that I've just been sticking to games I've been playing for years. No stinkers there, probably.
For me it'd be Starfield and Diablo 4. I do have faith that Blizzard will turn the ship around and reel me back in to D4 later down the line. I have zero hope for Starfield ever being good, though. It is a fundamentally broken game I have no hope Bethesda will be able to fix, ever.
I personally really disliked the latest Far cry. Graphics where nice, story was ok-ish but the outlandish aspects of the gameplay (supremo's.. pets..) made it a snoozefest without any challenge. Setting the enemies to bulletsponge made it even more unbearable. I'll be waiting for the bargain bin for the next installment.
The only game that was kinda a bummer was Tears of the kingdom. The sky world was just copy/pastes with nothing but some robots. I wanted the hot bird people up there or something.
The underground was dead and had a few POIs but was basically just those same annoying ninjas from the first game who disguise themselves as civilians. I liked the story and characters in botw2 better. The map was largely unchanged from the first game. Some of the missions were better. Gannon actually getting a plot was cool. The enemies were better this go around. The gmod bits were cool, but caused the game to run like shit. The game also ran at like, 22 fps the entire time anyways. The shrines were as meh as the first game, which were already so dull I'd look up guides just to get more hearts/stamina.
...it should have been a $25 DLC instead of a $70 game.
It was a solid 4.5/10 for me, mostly just on the amount of rehashed stuff for a $70 game, which should have blown my balls off for waiting six years and $70 later. I hope the next Zelda game is more like Twilight Princess.
I was going to contest, but I actually emulated the game and didn't have the framerate issues. Everything else held up for me though. In terms of the civiskyzation, it has been thousands of years. They all dead. I don't disagree with the underground being empty, but it is an unknown underground. It made sense for the POI's to mostly match up with the overworld elements.
I think these are fair lore reasons when it's like this because of the hardware the game runs on. Maybe there could have been more underground but it affected the performance.
Disagree on the DLC though. It was a pretty fully fledged game. I also agree that it shouldn't have been $70, though lol.
Starfield, Diablo 4, and Tears of the Kingdom for me.
Starfield was a hard pass at 30FPS on my Series X. But also, the gameplay and story just didn’t interest me at all.
Diablo 4 was monotonous. Grinding for hours to get a percentage of a percentage increase on gear was not fun. I’ve played every other Diablo game along with numerous other action RPGs of that style, but D4 is a snorefest. It’s frustrating being chain stunned by all the crowd control, it’s frustrating that a lot of enemies have a lot of health for no reason, and it’s bland when you face the same few bosses over and over again. It wasn’t so bad in the other Diablo games because you could just nuke the bosses, but in D4 each one is a straight up chore to kill.
Tears of the Kingdom… it’s a fun action adventure game, but if it has The Legend of Zelda on it, it needs to be held to The Legend of Zelda standards. And it, just like Breath of the Wild, is an awful Zelda game. If it didn’t have LoZ on it, I’d probably rate it much higher.
Not many. The obligatory 50% of all mobile games that I played for 5 minutes and went "I hate this", obviously. But PC games? Hmmm. Probably "Lost Ember", I guess. What really puzzles me about this is I played "Spirit of the North" and was utterly in love with it, to the point that it's in my top 5, and "Lost Ember" is very similar in many respects. I ought to have loved it, and I cannot put my finger on what I didn't like about it. I just didn't like it.
I played a few games that were just really mediocre.
I picked up Red Steel on the Wii for £1. It has not aged well.
Dunno if I'd call it a stinker, but my excitement for Starfield waned very quickly as I played. 20 hours in, it was still fun. 30-40 hours, I'm like, eh. Past about 60 hours I was completely disillusioned with it. The perk system is a nightmare, leveling up gets really difficult really quickly. Making money (especially after they hid all the vendor chests), getting materials, etc. is a tedious slog. The UI/UX for ship building and settlement building is painful. Settlement building in general is a pointless waste of time and takes way too long to get the perks enough to make it even remotely worthwhile.
It also doesn't help that there's not a native version for the Xbox One, and Cloud Play is miserable. Constant disconnects, jitters, long load times, long wait times.
SPOILER BITS
The main quest is completely pointless. It has no effect on anything. Outside of Constellation and the other Starborn, no one even knows anything is happening. Your choices don't have any impact on anything. Side with the Hunter? Side with the Emissary? Outside of the number of dupes you fight at the end, it literally doesn't matter. And getting to the end does absolutely nothing. Now you have to start over with a shittier ship you can't upgrade, some armor that's mostly fine, and literally nothing else. Nothing's different. Sure, after enough times through, silly things start happening at Constellation. But what else? It's not worth it.
The faction quests are fun, but then again, have basically no bearing on anything.
The companions are disappointing: ostensibly you have two lovable rogues, a religious zealot, and the most Lawful Good character who will judge you for even the slightest non-Squeaky Clean choices you make, though they all end up being basically the same.
Otherwise, you just keep running the treadmill: get all 10 upgrades to your Space Shouts, ship, and armor? And then what? Just keep going. Do it again. And again. And you still don't have enough perk points.
On second thought, maybe I would call it a stinker. So fucking disappointing. It had so much potential.
I got a lot of games with AMD hardware or other give aways, games I normally would not buy anyway. Imo Forspoken, Starfield, Redfall, Dead Island 2, Callisto protocol, AC Mirage and Harry Potter I did not like.
Glad there have been a lot of games I did enjoy recently, Dave the Diver, my time at Sandrock, Thalos Principle 2, Stray. I did like AAA Jedi Survivor although some technical glitches occurred.
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