for me it feels like they don’t respect me as an adult. i need to be able to pause and save games. sometimes i get phone calls. sometimes the power goes out. sometimes i spill my drink. but no, it’s all just “get gud”.

also i just can’t handle the aesthetics .

Yeah. Heard so much about Elden Ring, and watched the kids play it, so I thought I’d give it a shot.

After about 45 minutes of wandering aimlessly and nearly as many deaths, I decided I wasn’t having a good time.

I feel similar. After having tons of people tell me for years I need to get into them, I finally played Bloodborne, which multiple people have told me is their favorite.

I pushed through it on my own first. I actually didn’t die quite as much as I expected, though I definitely had to spend time watching YouTube videos and reading 3 different fan-made wiki’s to figure everything out. I managed to finish it, but I didn’t think it was worth it and would not have finished it if not for wanting to be able to talk about it with my friends.

Then I did another playthrough with a friend doing co-op. When it worked (ugh) it was a way better experience. Partly because of my previous experience - I had a better feel for how to build my character, I remembered most of the environments and enemy placement, and still had that muscle memory from my first run. Partly because it’s better as a cooperative experience. Having an ally makes the world feel less desolate. Having another player to take aggro so you can heal is huge- some bosses almost feel like they were designed for multiplayer. And it’s fun just cracking jokes and hanging out, making fun of how ridiculous some of the stuff is.

I still don’t have the love for it that other people do though. I agree 100% on the aesthetic: everything in Bloodborne is just dark and wet and looks the same. FromSoft makes a LOT of game design decisions that are different from most other developers in terms of what they prioritize. Which is fine, but there are aspects of design where they clearly cut corners and the fanbae seems to laud it as a desirable artistic choice. I shouldn’t need to spend hours watching YouTube and researching fan sites to learn how to play the game, and I would argue I shouldn’t have to do that to appreciate the story. They simply do not respect my time.

The multiplayer barely works. It’s restricted to bosses and the areas leading up to them, and costs Insight (a valuable and kind-of finite resource) to use. Simply connecting is a tedious pain. You can only play either completely online or offline, so if you want to play with a friend you have to accept your whole world cluttered with annoying and distracting messages from random players and the specters where other players died. And that also opens you up to having hostile players gank you. Like… Why can’t my friend and I just pair up and play through the whole game together without inviting the rest of the internet too? Why does it cost Insight? Why are the caps for stats never communicated to the player? Why does the Hunter’s Axe do primarily Blunt damage while the KirkHAMMER does almost no Blunt damage, and for that matter why aren’t the damage types explained anywhere? I’m still not sure why some gems increase Attack, others increase Physical Attack, and others increase Blunt or Thrust, plus there are hidden damage types.

The game feels like it was designed to really get good on your second playthrough and beyond. Especially NG+, although even starting a fresh file again is much better than the first playthrough. Kinda reminds me of how some MMO fans like to say “it gets good after the first 100 hours”. For most developers, the player onboarding experience is one of the most important parts to be developed, but FromSoft basically skills over that and outsources it to their community of hardcore fans.

Soulslikes are fucking boring. I did that beat my head against the too-hard boss fight 289348923x when I was a kid because that was the only option and I had all the time in the world. Neither of those is still true.

Try Jedi Fallen Order. It’s got a lot of the ingredients, but a lot shallower learning curve.

Same for me!

If you’re talking about bouncing of the first one, that’s completely understandable. It is absolutely not an objectively well made game, and I will die on that hill. Witcher 2 does hold up well enough though, in my opinion, and is a much better place to start. Just watch a summary video of the first one and avoid a bunch of antiquated jank.

Same actually, I got Witcher 3 as part of a console bundle and played it for a short period, not sure exactly how long but I got to the first of I’m sure many fights with a dragon. Found it really unintuitive, by the time I got frustrated enough to bother doing a web search I’d lost interest. Tried a couple of times after and just got the cbf’s every time.

Same. I tried 3 times to get into Witcher 3. No success.

Doesn’t matter, there’s tons of other fun stuff out there.

Thank God, I am not alone. I thought something was wrong with me for having exactly your experience.

I had to push very hard to get through the clunky controls but I do admit it was worth it eventually.

Me too. The control scheme is just awful.

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My personal theory is that a lot of the love for The Witcher 3 in particular stems from the fact that very early on it has a sex scene with full nudity, with a female character who is supernaturally hot according to the lore. There’s several women Geralt can seduce, and I suspect a lot of people who mostly play hentai games were in shock to play something with more exciting gameplay than match-3 grids or a jigsaw puzzle.

The Witcher 3 doesn’t seem like a bad game, but I’m similar to you in that I’ve bounced off it a couple times after a few hours. There’s nothing particularly bad about it, but nothing that really grabbed me and made me want to keep playing more either. I still plan on giving it another shot eventually.

The legend of Zelda - played Tears and the story and puzzles were a bit too kid friendly

It’s actually a kid friendly franchise, all of it. The only surprisingly mature themed zelda game is Majora’s Mask, it deal with death and loses and hopelessness way more than BOTW is comfortably touch, and it’s made in a year.

Couldn’t agree more with Skyrim, Oblivion was the same when I tried that too I just can’t stand it. Easily some of the most over rated games IMO.

Also agree with Zelda but I think the same about all of the Nintendo IPs, they are just boring and the fan base makes me dislike them even more!

Modern DooMs are… strange. The legendary status of Doom is granted by Doom 1 and 2. And those games are very different from Doom 3-5.

Original gameplay is quite saved by GZDoom and similar projects. Add there something like BrutalDoom add-on and you’ll get the best from both worlds: old Doom gameplay and more modern graphics.

Pokemon - having to watch animations and not being able to speed anything up killed my interest

That’s why I play on emulator most of the time, especially for games I’ve already beaten

In general I don’t think I can do story games anymore

Wow, that’s the complete wrong take if you ask me! It sounds like your problems with these games are mostly in the gameplay, not the story? Have you ever played Outer Wilds or The Talos Principle? Unique puzzle games with a great story.

the combat in Skyrim always felt so stiff so i get you, just didn’t feel enjoyable to me

i think you can disable the animations in the console games for pokemon, unless they changed it for the new games.

Yeah, I have a friend who develops video games and has given some good recommendations who kept trying to convince me to play the series. I’ve dipped in a couple times and just walked away unimpressed.

I did enjoy World though it involved a lot of interacting with bad UI and walking to a monster. Can’t really complain about grind, as you don’t have to fight the same monster too much. The story cutscenes and missions were painfully bad.

What I did like was fighting one big enemy rather that hordes of small ones, having to be close and it being risky, exotic weapon movesets. It is great that you can and do use the environment to your advantage all the time.

I would like to see a game that does the fighting big enemies in terrain but with more physics based attacks. The hitbox-based combat where you can put your hammer inside the beast and then swing feels silly.

I didn’t like the equipment upgrades much as they only get interesting late in the game and all weapons of the same base type are essentially the same.

They are. I tried them too and was surprised they aren’t free. Boring mechanics, scripts that are too long.

Can’t stand the building. I’ll build in Minecraft and shoot in cs. No need to mashup!

There’s gotta be a mod for that, right?

Up until whatever came after Black Flag I was a die hard AC fan. Midnight releases and everything. And I’ll admit, the modern day sections are bad and jarring and completely unnecessary. At some point you’re a game developer wandering around an office and it’s obvious they had no idea what to do with those sections, because at that point the modern day story had been told. There was a brief cameo from some of the people you would remember from earlier games but it never got to the level of intrigue from 1-3.

Though an assassin’s creed game set in like modern day Manhattan could be fun. Watchdogs got kinda close to that before going completely off the rails.

Come on,the second game was decent!

Victoria 2 scratches the itch pretty well for me.

I’m not sure I’d count Outer Wilds as a space game (assuming you mean something in the vein of Elite Dangerous), despite it objectively including a lot of space travel. It’s a detective game, the point is to unravel a mystery

Frostpunk

I get it. I like city builders too and the idea of a game that’s constantly threatening your city with crisis seemed interesting, but every run seems to be the same.

Outer Wilds

Alright, you and I are gonna fight now.

Some of those can be explained by bad expectations.

Frostpunk is not a city builder, more like a puzzle game.

Outer wilds is not a space game, it’s a time loop mystery.

Fantasy sword and sorcery is hardly the most important side of souls games. They’re technical performance games.

They all technically include those elements you like, but were more about something else.

While I like Bethesda games quite a bit, I do agree on the in-game lorebook stuff. I can’t see the appeal of the stuff. It’s a collection of extremely short, in my opinion not-very-impressive stories. I just can’t see someone sitting there and reading them and enjoying the things — if I’m going to read fantasy, I’d far rather spend the time on an actual novel. Yet I’ve seen people obsess online about how much they like the in-game lorebooks.

I’ve wondered before whether maybe people who are talking about how much they like them haven’t gone out and read full-length fantasy books, and so they’re getting a tiny taste of reading fantasy fiction and they like that, but it’s the only fantasy that they’ve read.

Curious to know why.

Mass effect for me feels like it’s generic scifi, so I can’t get into it and appreciate the writing but KOTR has a star wars flair at least.

That decayed aestethic is immemsely popular and it works fine in making you feel like a survivor.

That said, i like jolly things and grimdark stories, and I tend to like the bizarre. Maybe grimdark games lack the bizarre and the occasional bit of fun. I personally say this is the byprpduct of the success of a specific subgenre of games in the 2020’s.

For me, soulslikes are pretty weird. I’ve loved the art direction and gameplay of Dark Souls and especially Elden Ring, and I get why people like them and I appreciate what they’re trying to do, but something in them doesn’t click the addiction button. It’s not even the core gameplay that is the problem - I get flattened by some enemy and I’m like “oh I’ll get you one day”. But I booted up Elden Ring last time months ago. I’ll be done with the game in 10 years I guess. It’ll happen though!

I can understand, but heartily disagree! For me, the firey hope in the face of a dark bleak world inspires me, and the way the games tend to have you earn your victories makes victory so, so much sweeter.

Plenty of Soulslikes that don’t have that bleak look to them. I think many of them do because the genre takes place in apocalyptic settings.

I was lucky that we just had friends that loved making them. So we wouldn’t have books or such, and we just made our player cards on paper with knowledge of what can grow and when. Then the world’s would grow crazy if we wanted them to, or not. Hell we had one game we played specifically when we were drunk. We would close the bar down, pick up a 12 pack a piece and cigarettes. Then we would sit out on the porch from 2am and play till sunrise every weekend, sometimes both Friday and Saturday night. In that game we’d note our cards on our phones so we’d remember and the DM would have us send them to him at the beginning and end of the night so he could reference/ make sure they weren’t all fucked up before the next play session. It gave us crazy things to talk about at the bar; what we wish we did differently, what we would want do aim to do, where we might want to go, and that just all fed content to the DM and they would draw up ways to integrate possibilities for the next week or so. Even had a couple side characters so if someone else happened to be in town or wanted to join us we could auto scale the character by doing a quick percentage off of some of main characters current stats. 1 or 2 people spend 5 mins to bring the person up to speed with what their character story is and where/what is going on or maybe overall goals while another one of us just writes down their updated stats for them and sends it to them.

So we’d spend nothing on the game itself. We had a blast

I love Into the Odd so much for a single-book game. It just hits me right.

But yeah 100% there are so many better games to play than modern D&D.

I really enjoy D&D-based video games, but actual pen and paper is just frustratingly slow. I think if I could change my mindset to consider it a social activity first and a game second, I might find it more enjoyable. But that is also really dependent on the group dynamic and seems more likely attainable for playing in-person rather than with an online group.

Min maxing is so irritating to me. DnD is bad about it but I find that seasoned players will find a way with just about any but the most basic systems.

unstoppable forces of nature aren’t necessary, and are especially unnecessary when the GM refuses to build a force of nature to counter them.

Idk. I like the people I play with, but the gameplay isn’t why I come back to the table every week.