Games that you hate but everyone else seems to ape-shit about it?

[Oroboros]

-Dragon Age 2-onwards: The retcons, gameplay and tonal shifts that the Dragon Age series has undergone makes my complaints about the Mass Effect series has undergone pale in comparison. I have always had an iffy relationship with the Original Dragon Age- It was distressingly derivative of a number of other IPs, and the MMO-lite game mechanics never sat well with me for a supposed 'spiritual successor' to Baldur's Gate. But I think The solid plot (best one from Bioware in a long time), considerable side quests, different prologues (origins) and a considerable feeling that your actions mattered. The sequels threw pretty much everything of value about the series out the window as far as I'm concerned. the Dragon Age of the first game has almost nothing to do with that of the later games IMO, which is HUGE check against it in my book.

Out of curiosity, what retcons are you talking about? And when you say it has almost nothing to do with the later games, do you mean gameplay-wise, story-wise, something else?

I'm not sure what a gameplay-wise retcon would be... perhaps the removal of certain enemies from the game like the desire demons?

But I have noticed quite a few lore/setting-wise and story-wise wise to be found.

Lore/setting wise, the introduction of qunari with horns would be an obvious one, which weren't even alluded to in the first game. The drastic redesign of the Darkspawn in DA 2 would be another highly visible one. In the story, there are characters who come back from the dead, numerous seemingly momentous decisions to be made that ultimately amount to nothing as soon as the next game comes around, no matter what your epilogue said-the boons you can ask of the ruler of Thedas at the end-for instance. And of course lots of nonsense changes for no particular reason or for cheap drama (anything related to elves, pretty much).

The setting itself has shifted rather dramatically aesthetically and tonally to the point where it really doesn't much resemble the Dark fantasy pastiche of Game of Thrones, Wheel of Time, Warhammer Fantasy and LoTR set in Medieval Europe that was the first game. Overall it felt like being railroaded (to use an rpg term) Not explicitly, but it got pretty noticeable when nudging up against the boundaries Bioware set up. And at the same time from game to game the setting was becoming less like the one that attracted me to the series in the first place. I have a lot of the same complaints about the Mass Effect series, actually. But the transition was much faster and drastic in DA for, me which made it worse.

Hope that helps explain my position on my dislike, a little bit.

 

[Joccaren]

Mass Effect 2. Goddamn boring gameplay, irrelevant story, and all-round inferior to 1 IMO. Where it gets points? Unique environments, best characters in the series, and really good atmosphere. Everything else was just... Bad. Like, not even entertaining bad, just bad, bland and stupidly boring.
Mass Effect 3. Whilst kind of disqualified as everyone hated the ending so much, I'm talking about without the ending. Ignore the ending, and the game was still shit. PROBABLY the best shooting in the series. Still rather limited and too focused on the low health shitty cover based shooting from 2, than the more interesting if clunkier RPG/TPS crossover in 1. However, outside that, the story was an utter mess. A lot of things were thrown in for the Michael Bay crowd, or Shamalamala... Don't know how to spell =P crowd. This was the one area they really couldn't fuck up... But they did. Cerberus taking centre stage over the Reapers, forced conflicts that had been all but avoided in previous games [Convincing Quarians to go to peace, killing the Rachni - ect.]. It had some good moments, but most of it just fell flat, and it lost ALL of the atmosphere 2 was so masterful at building. Dialogue also took a huge hit, by forcing Shepard to talk as Bioware's Shepard for 3/4s of the story, except where a "big" choice needed making. Was just a shit game alround, not just the ending, but so many people seem to love it.

Skyrim, though I think that there is a LOT of people disappointed with it, and who have been since the start. Its faults are well documented.

There are probably a bunch more, but in general I just don't play them as I can see I'm not going to enjoy them. People go ape shit over a lot of games, and I look at them like "How could that be at all fun?".

The combat was poorly paced, poorly balanced and utterly uninspired. Large parts of the story were a mess... The difficulty level had no logic whatsoever to it with one fight being a total pushover and the next being utterly impossible. Much of the design was flat and uninteresting. Its sole saving grace was that some of the characters were interesting.

Compared to the far superior Dragon Age 2 I really cannot see what makes people like the first game so much.

I can understand not enjoying the much slower pacing of DA:O, and the greater focus on slower tactics than faster player-skill gameplay... But I cannot understand making these complaints, and then saying DA2 did it better.
Combat in DA2 was TERRIBLY paced and balanced, and was the most uninspired crap I've ever played. It had some flashy animations, but beyond that it was pathetic, focused too much on 'push button, something awesome happens' over actual gameplay, and padding its 'difficulty' by spamming high health ministun enemies at you to permastun your whole party... after locking you into a room so that you couldn't tactically position yourself to stop them.
It is also terribly uninspired. Wave based combat. Generic mooks that have no real abilities except ministuns. 3 ranks of enemies with just more health padding. Wave based boss fights with mini mooks rather than the boss. Have we gone through the whole list of boring and overused combat tropes yet?
Difficulty, as said, had no logic. Most fights were a joke... At least if you were a mage and had AoE attacks, otherwise they were a bit harder just because it spammed enemies. However, then you'd get a random sidequest with a boss fight full of high-rank ministun health tanks that wouldn't die, couldn't be tactically positioned against, and permastunned your whole party. And then you got to the end of the game where, if you weren't a mage you got your mage sister back, and suddenly your party are undying gods who cannot be scratched. To paraphrase Yahtzee its difficulty level wavers up and down like the knickers of an indecisive whore before taking a dive down easy street, where the final boss battle is basically you vs a wheelchair-bound, cross-eyed midget, and you're armed with the BFG 9000.
DA2 didn't even really have interesting characters to help it, just hugely exaggerated tropes that I wanted to roll my eyes at constantly.

I can understand not liking Origins. Hell, I love it and struggle to replay it a lot of the time just because the Mage Tower and Deep Roads take so fucking long, I can only imagine how annoying it'd be if you didn't like the slower style of combat. Those complaints though... They are exacerbated in 2, not fixed. God, if I could I'd include 2 in this list, but there are a lot of people who hate it so that'd be unfair.
I do wonder when Bioware will actually make a great Dragon Age though. Inquisition was an alright attempt, but lacked depth and focus in a lot of areas. The next one has a potentially interesting plot premise, and if they can make the mechanics work, and write party members like the ME team did in 2, then it could turn out the best yet. I hold out no hope for that though.

 

[joest01]

To those of you citing Borderlands I realize it's an acquired taste. I would be interested if you guys have played any of the DLC and specifically the Tiny Tina DLC. I thought it was the best riff on the *.souls theme since Demon's

 

[A.K.B.]

Grand Theft Auto....
I just can't get into it no matter what...
Although I can't disregard or dismiss the reasons why it is so popular, all I could say that It just doesn't tickle my fancy.

 

[Eddie the head]

To those of you citing Borderlands I realize it's an acquired taste. I would be interested if you guys have played any of the DLC and specifically the Tiny Tina DLC. I thought it was the best riff on the *.souls theme since Demon's

Dose it significantly change the game play? Like not everything is a bullet sponge? And the guns don't feel like they're made by NERF? A better art style? If it did that maybe I could enjoy it.

But based on that last sentence, witch is a little confusing, I'm guessing you mean the writing or something will sustain it? If that's the case I'm going to go with an emphatic no. That's not going to help me like it any more. The few hours I did play I turned off the dialogue sound. The jokes don't land and the voices are annoying. Unless it somehow turns into Farscape I'm not interested.

 

[Zen Bard]

Any MMORPG. If I wanted to play a role playing game and get bullied by self-righteous geeks, I'd play AD&D with my friends!

Half Life - I get its historical significance, but the convoluted level design, jump scares and first person platforming just bugged me. I quit playing about half way through.

 

[ecoho]

the Qunari are basically a cult that's sole purpose is to make everyone the same, think communism but with refusing to chose that system means immediate execution or brain washing. so he couldn't leave since he didn't have the book which was his mission, and he couldn't stand the way the people of Kirkwall behaved as it was like being insulted every second, so he took his sizable force(you know the one that took up HALF the harbor) and assaulted the city and pretty much would have won if hawk hadn't been there.

Took up half the harbor? Because I don't remember that, I remember a 50 square foot compound with no more than 10 soldiers in it.
Yeah he would have won if Hawke hadn't been there. But Isabella would still have fled the city with the book he was after. He still jepordised his mission with his pointless and poorly explained assault.

as for orsino he was chatting with mr necro man in the second act, and was pretty much a big idiot to begin with so that kinda made a bit more sense(still not much). also im pretty sure the default ending they wanted was for mage hawk to side with the Templars which would make more sense how things turned out.

A background role as an extra doesn't count as a character introduction. If Bioware weren't able to both write a decent story and have a branching storyline then they shouldn't have tried. Of course Origins proves they are capable of such a feat, they just didn't give two shits about the plot in DA2.

also random spawns happened in origins you just didn't notice them because you were too buisy fighting the camra or had already put it on auto and went and made a sandwich.

This is just outright incorrect. Even if I take you at your word, two or three incidences of spawning enemies, designed in such a manner that you don't actually notice them, is a hell of a lot more preferable to the constantly spawning enemies in DA2. Who act as nothing but an annoying grind seeing as combat is way too easy, and the system way too simple to be engaging at all.

they don't think like that, its more he needed to do something if he stayed and in order to gain the trail to find the thief he needed to stay in the free marches so why move outside a city he can easily take and then defend? it is tacitly sound as from there he can proceed to track the thief and the other city states will gladly offer up Isabella to keep the qunari from invading them.

no excuses for orsino but you know like to see you do better in that time frame

go back play origins, the game did not age well and you will notice were the enemies pop up out of nowhere. yes DA2 could have done better to hide it but at least when it happened I didn't feel like it was going to take 15 mins to finish unlike origins.

 

[Lightknight]

Heavy Rain, more like heavy yawn. That's the one for me.

 

[Odbarc]

FPS: Mainly because the only selling point is the Deathmatch where every game seems to have the same guns and mechanics and physics and there's nothing interesting happening ever. Fallout 3 and Deus Ex are notable exceptions because they are story driven and fun. Quake 2 had it's novelty because it was one of the few games 'everyone played' and Local Area Networking was a fun pre-internet way to play with each other in which very few games allowed.

Racing/driving games also fall into the category of being samey with scenery and graphics being the major selling point.

Dark Souls (which I've never played) but mostly games where the major amount of time spent is getting killed by little mistakes. Dark Souls might be a lot better with the rewards. When you see Rooster Teeth's Rage Quit playing those indie frustration games - they don't look fun. Watching a TAS/time attack of these games isn't even interesting.

I play Starcraft 2, Diablo 3, Borderlands by majority. Smaller titles are Minecraft (because my nephews play it and demand that I do too with them), Space Pirates and Zombies and Castle Crashers.

 

[Valok]

- Most survival games.
- Call of Duty.
- Hearthstone.
- World of Tanks and its variations
- Elite Dangerous (Also as a side note; for a not so big userbase when compared to other titles mentioned here, it would also be worth to point that I just don't get some of its fanatic fanbase that you see everywhere that will keep sucking, swallowing and defending anything Frontier does and will keep praising this shallow, grindy, repetitive and devoid of meaningful content space game. Sorry, had to be said and I regret nothing.)
- Sonic/Mario (and Nintendo in general) games.
- Borderlands
- Destiny.
- Assassin's Creed
- Racing/Sports games.

 

[Atmos Duality]

The entire MMO genre.
It's like playing a regular game, only with watered down mechanics, shitty pacing and random assholes.

 

[Lightspeaker]

I can understand not enjoying the much slower pacing of DA:O, and the greater focus on slower tactics than faster player-skill gameplay... But I cannot understand making these complaints, and then saying DA2 did it better.

Etc etc

In your opinion.

In my experience through both games frankly I had zero problems with the difficulty curve in DA2. DAO forced most fights to be fundamentally unfair and over in seconds before you could react, one way or another. Either my mage main character (because pretty much all the other characters in the party were useless for anything other than being a distraction and soaking up damage) blew every enemy up instantly and near-simultaneously with huge AoE attacks or my entire party was downed in three and a half seconds tops. DA2 was massively better paced and much fairer, with my rogue being able to systematically work through a battle and fights actually taking time to play out.

It had its downsides. The "wave" based system was very silly for one. But compared to the dull, poorly balanced mess that was DAO I'm absolutely mindblown that you don't think its an improvement. The fact that you say its a "slower style of combat" is outright laughable to me, because in DAO for me fights ended quicker than most Counter Strike pistol rounds one way or the other. Either I'd be dead or the enemy would. I've always been a huge fan of slow-paced games, especially down to the turn based level and DAO is NOT a slow game by any stretch of the imagination, it just pretends to be because you can pause. If anything its all about "setting up a trap" before the fight, which then gets finished in three or four seconds. But doesn't have anything like the fun of something like Deception IV which is the same idea of preparing a trap and executing it, because it lacks THAT game's intricacy and humour.

Frankly I don't know what game you're describing in your post because that was NOT how DAO played out to me.

 

[ClockworkAngel]

I'm sure the games I'm about to list have already been named, but here goes.
Halo. I've played some of the games co-op with friends, and I can't remember a single moment of any of them.
God of War 3. I loved the first God of War, and the second was a fun follow-up. But I kept feeling like I was beating a dead horse when I played the third game.
Gears of War. Honestly, I don't hate the games. Mostly, I hate the trailers that try to make the series seem deeper and more emotional than it is.
MOBAs. Watching MOBA gameplay bores me to tears. I thought actually playing a MOBA would be different. But, no. Still boring.

Honorable mention goes to Final Fantasy XII, which I love and hate. I put about fifty hours into it before I gave up. There were moments when the game clicked for me, and those moments were pure joy. But at other times, playing it just felt like a chore. (For better or worse, I'll give FFXII another shot if it ever gets the HD treatment.)

 

[Sheo_Dagana]

World of Warcraft - if you're going to get so deep into an MMORPG that you're willing to let your marriage and time with your children go by the wayside, I've never understood why some people chose it to be this particular game. It's not especially bad but neither is it especially great - I've always just viewed it as that entry level MMO that everyone plays because that's what their friends play, like Call of Duty.

Also, I hate to say it, but I have no idea why critics are raving over the disjointed experience that is Metal Gear Solid V. I've always loved the series but this particular entry feels very underwhelming. The core gameplay is just fine, but the 'open world' is just a lot of empty space and the story is one that not only didn't need to be told, but could be bothered with at least being interesting.

Other than that, I'll have to say 'any MOBA game' like everyone else. How anyone can stand such toxic communities is beyond me.

 

[Callate]

This War of Mine. "Hate" is far too strong a word; I just realized after I finally finished it successfully that I was probably never going to play it again.

Why? Well, I cheated... Hear me out.

A large part of the game's raison d' etre is the idea that your decisions have consequences. That's the justification for auto-saving your game every morning so that the crap you pulled last night that effectively got the one person who can properly use a gun killed is now permanently etched into your experience, thirty-odd "days" in.

War is hell, war makes monsters of us all, yatta yatta flambé.

Except that in finding a way to back up a save file, I discovered just how much random number tinkering is going on in the background.

Roll-roll-roll ANNNNNND... The handy trader shows up at your door with a passel of canned food to trade for your moonshine, just before one of your household starves to death.

Roll-roll-roll ANNNNND... The day before the cease-fire, one of your people freezes to death despite the fact that the radio said the weather was getting warmer and all evidence thus far suggested that that was an accurate assessment.

There's also the fact that the game clearly wants you to think that violence is horrible and a last-ditch decision and should make you question whether you're any better than the... Except that you're far more likely to have everyone survive the game if you selectively and carefully use violence at particular times.

War is hell. Yesterday I slit a man's throat from behind, hearing him gurgle and his warm life flow out over my hands. But he had an assault rifle that I was able to trade for a bunch of lumber, so, winning!

And the combat system is clumsy, and doesn't explain things like line-of-sight very well, so the first time you try it you're quite likely to get someone killed. And then again when you try to fight someone who has a halfway decent weapon, or a friend just out of sight.

And the game doesn't do a very good job at explaining when homicide is justifiable (or even morale-raising!), versus when "stealing" a can of food from a house devoid of life is going to cause someone to slip into a suicidal depression.

Or why the old couple in the unlocked house remains unmolested when the (to all evidence barbaric and ravening) military has passed through their area, just so you get another chance to face that particular moral dilemma.

In short, I don't so much mind being punished for bad decisions, or having to face consequences for difficult ones. But I find I very much mind being punished for the machinations of bad, contrived, and/or random systems over which I have little to no control, especially when they're going to cost me two hours of hard-won "success" and lie to me that it was my decisions that brought things to a head.

 

[Strazdas]

basically everything made by nintendo. i tried playing mario, i tried playing zelda. didnt like it. got beat up for not liking "the best games". fuck that id rather play games i enjoy.

Tell tales games. i just dont like these choose your own adventure books masquarading as games. apperently im evil for not liking "games" that have no gameplay.

I guesss MOBAs are popular too. tried them, got bored. at least thats the one where i didnt get called evil for not liking, so apperently MOBA fans are better than nintendo fans. who would have though.