Eh, I didn’t hate it, I just found it rather disappointing. A huge amount of buildup, and even in-game— a lot of effort… Just for very little delivery.

This is a game and a game engine with nearly infinite potential, but once he got into it, once he started playing it, it just falls completely flat. Beyond a few initial and rather novel game mechanics, it just goes nowhere. Immedately

Like, the game devs produced this incredible game engine, and then just expected it to produce the game for them, and it didn’t. You have this incredible, infinitely generated open world, but there’s no game to play. No story.

It’s just… there. that’s not really much of anything to do. that is the major shortcoming. If, in the last 15 years, they bothered to fill this incredible space with anything worthwhile to actually do, it would be amazing

That’s why Star Trek online is still so active. It’s a nonstop universe, full of missions. Also, it runs very well on multiple platforms.

I haven't spent as much time as you did in NMS but I have the same feeling. It feels like I should be loving this game but everytime I try to play it for more than a few hours I end up hating it for the same reasons you listed

This game was so good for a few years. On PS4, I got to play all the OG cut content, it was awesome. I think I played up to Forsaken. I really enjoyed the lore, and I usually skip that stuff. I even have a ghost statue on my bookshelf, one of my only gaming nicknacks (8 bucks at target). I went back to play on PC a few years ago and I didn't have a good time. I was also pissed that I couldn't transfer my PS4 character (or I lost my dlc loot or something).

Good one. This is probably it for me as well. I tried so hard to like it, but the whole thing felt like it was punishing me for not being there day one. A convoluted mess of whatever was leftover from what I assume was all the fun.

Yeah, Destiny 2 pretty much lived in the core gameplay loop. To this day I don't think there's another game that felt as good to play as Destiny. But without refreshing the core gameplay or giving some actually meaningful progression. I remember at one point I was doing a strike and those who have played the game will know what I'm about to talk about. After clearing the second wave of enemies and waiting for the third I realized that I was just going through the motion of threes. I was going to fight the third wave of the encounter so I could get to the second stage of the three stage strike and those strikes I have to do 3 times because that's the weekly goal and that's the entire 3 months of the season. It just started feeling like a treadmill where I'm running just for the sake of running. Just a carrot in front of the treadmill and if you get it then the next season the treadmill resets and the and carrot is put in front.

Once I saw that I could no longer get into Destiny. It just feel like I was there only to go through the motions. No emotion, no engagement, just doing the same thing over and over.

The moment I noticed they were docking xp back in the early days, I quit instantly. I enjoyed the game up to that point, but the way they had done that was just so dishonest that I have just never bothered with anything Bungie since.

Oh my god Destiny 2 is such a good example for me. I never played the first one, because I quit consoles with the PS4/XBox One generation. Got Destiny 2 for free with my video card, and was so excited to play, hearing so much about the first game. I bought the expansion pass and played immediately when it came out. I maxed out all three characters, did the raid, and played for a couple more hours, before realizing there was nothing to strive for.

The fuck is up with “We have a chat in the game, but nonono, you can’t actually use it to TYPE to people like, y’know, EVERY OTHER ONLINE GAME EVER—it doesn’t actually DO anything unless you’re in a party.” Also every weapon drop was exactly the same, no variance, no random rolls. Then they added in text chat, Woo!

…but made it OPT-IN, and nested the toggle in settings. Meaning NOBODY DID IT. Fuckin idiots on Reddit were defending the decision too, like “oh what if you don’t want to have that toxicity” THEN DISABLE IT IN OPT-OUT, don’t make it opt-in in the first place!

Then a few months after it came out, I told my partner “look I bet they put random rolls back in and fix a ton of QoL stuff WIIIITH the first full-priced DLC that isn’t included in the expansion pass so everyone has to buy it.”

Then Forsaken dropped, for full price. I don’t even care about the money, it’s the principle of it all.

I never bought Forsaken, never logged in again. Fuck you Destiny 2, I’m glad you’re dead. I wish you died harder, sooner, and less lucrative.

(Also more Reddit defenders were screaming “YOU DON’T HAVE TO BUY FORSAKEN, YOU CAN STILL PLAY” like fuckin EVERYTHING wasn’t locked behind the paywall now, and like I wanna support that shit by giving them more engagement to log for their investors…)

Iv been wanting to back to no mans, iv read good things about the updates, but yeah. Last couple times i found myself wondering what the fuck i am doing.

It's way worse about that than Minecraft, imo. I find Minecraft to be exceptionally boring, but building is at least passably fun (or was before hytale completely blew it out of the water), but it feels like NMS doesn't even give you a real creative outlet. From what I've seen even starfield is better than NMS for creativity, although i haven't played starfield myself.

Terraria is the Minecraft that's meant to be played. Actually has dungeon crawling and a world to experience. Minecraft is just 3D Microsoft Paint that decides to chase your cursor with a zombie every so often.

Similar experience here. You missed the biggest turd though, flying!

So cool eh, no more need to walk eh!

What happened was that instead of roaming about with everyone else, you flew everywhere all alone (just point the "fly" in the right direction and wait ... Soo funny).

And to alleviate this they tried to make it so you "had" to walk everywhere first, before getting your "fly", but that just made it worse because now you'd be as slow as before but also alone, everyone else were flying.

Then it became a sort of dungeon-run slot machine, argh.

Vanilla was truly amazing though, what a game...

TBC was the worst for that. Modern expansions let you keep your high end gear for most of the leveling process.

WoW is a tough one for me because I played it for years and some of my all-time favorite moments in my life as a gamer are associated with WoW. But also those moments are extremely socially-dependent. Hard to extract from the experience what was the game and what was the joy of hanging out with like-minded friends.

And it's extremely difficult for me to judge now because frankly I think that WoW today is still an incredibly good game, especially as a solo player today, but it is impossible for me when playing it not to get sad longing for the absolute peak moments I've had with the game.

For me it's kind of like if you love cheesecake but can't buy the grocery store frozen kind because every bite makes you think of the perfect $200 gourmet restaurant version you ate once 8 years ago but will never get to have again because the restaurant closed.

This is one of the reasons I liked guild wars (1 and 2). They didn't do the gear grind. They added one tiny equipment tier early on in the game's life, and never again in ten years. They add different stat spreads, but that's it. (Ok, and infusions, which are like a single percentage point of stats.)

As someone who joined late in Vanilla, I think the fact that tier 3 armour became meaningless a few days into Burning Crusade was a great move, and necessary for the game.

In Vanilla, if you were late joining, you could never catch up unless someone was really nice and basically carried you for a few weeks. I spent months hearing tales about all the fun that my friends were having, but I couldn't join them because farming the gear to catch up to them was essentially impossible on my own, and would have taken them a lot of time to level me up.

The game needed a reset so that people who hadn't been playing for over a year could catch up. When BC came out, the Tier 3 stuff helped people for the first 2-3 levels, but by the time everyone hit 70, all the gear was reset and everyone was on the same footing again.

That was really healthy for guilds and for the game. If you already had a bunch of people who you liked playing with, you could start on the harder dungeons and then the raids immediately. Everybody started out in crap gear that kept those initial things challenging, and then everyone slowly got better gear. If you had just joined the game, you could catch up to those groups, and either join them, or form your own new group and you weren't behind.

What killed WoW for me was all the borrowed power stuff, where you got new abilities and learned a new way to play, which they'd then just reset with the next expansion. There was also ridiculous button creep, where in the early days (ignoring downranked spells) you'd have maybe two dozen abilities, half of which could be used in combat, and a third of those were rare and situational. By the time I quit, you might need two full bars worth of abilities in combat, your typical "rotation" would use 8 or more, and so-on. On some characters, I had so many buttons that even with maxed out button bars, there were some that had to remain in the spellbook.

The story also got stupider. In the beginning, your character wasn't the centre of the story. You could earn personal achievements, or group achievements, but it was clear that it was a game being played by millions of people, half of whom had also done those same achievements. In later expansions, they tried to pretend that you were the unique person. You weren't an archdruid, you were the archdruid... and so were the other 100 people on your screen. Or you were the maw-walker, but so were the other 1000 people in the maw. And, of course, the lore got more and more incoherent as they kept trying to find corners of the lore that they hadn't yet exploited.

The other major issue with WoW is that both time and the advance of technology, but also Blizzard's choices, killed the social aspect of the game. In the beginning, there weren't good resources to learn how to play, what kinds of equipment were out there, that sort of thing. That meant that one of the best ways to find that out was chatting with other players. That was great. Even if other players were sometimes obnoxious, the fact that you had to chat with them meant that the game felt alive. The only way to join a group for something was to send messages to other people in the game. And, since servers were isolated, people got reputations. If someone was nice to other people, they'd be known for that. If someone was a jerk, or tried to cheat other people, they'd get known for that too.

These days, people use communications not tied to the game at all. There are amazing resources to learn about the game and optimize how you play outside the game, which means there's no need to chat with people in-game. They added a group finder and raid finder so you could join a group for something without ever talking to anyone, which also killed socialization. They merged servers and made cross-realm events so that there was always someone to play with you... but now everyone was effectively anonymous to everyone they played with, so being nice wasn't something that gave you a good reputation, and being a jerk carried no long-term penalties.

Combine all the technological changes with all the lore / storytelling changes and you get a very good, very polished single-player online game, where other people happen to be there sometimes. These days you can be doing a 25-man raid and feel lonely because you're not actually interacting with any of the other players in any meaningful way.

I really wish another MMO would come out that would add back all the social things that Blizzard broke. But, even if someone did everything right, I don't think you could ever capture the magic of that early Vanilla / BC experience because the world has changed.

I had a similar experience with BC, though I was only in tier 2 armor (our guilds just couldn't must the runs to get much of the tier 3 stuff). I played further than you did, but I realized that I had been really ready to be done with WoW for a while and had held on just for the expansion. It didn't revive my desire to play at all, and honestly I haven't wanted to play an MMO since.

The first few years it slapped so hard, and then somewhere down the line it felt like a chore playing. Weird

I enjoyed it for a while but realised that it was effectively a subscription as the new operator was always very powerful. Then I switched to solely Linux anyway and haven't missed it much

I played a lot of bg3. Every so often I think about playing it again, and then I think about how DND 5e kind of stinks, so I don't.

BG3 was my first Larian game and I absolutely loathed getting into combat situations. It just took too long for the CPU to make decisions, I wish there was a fast-forward button for their turn. Overall, I didn't feel BG3 respected my time and felt I was constantly under leveled on every encounter, even on easy. Even when I returned for a 3rd attempt at the game and tried to save scum my way through, I felt it was way too slow. Never made it past act 1. I don't get the hype for it. I realize I'm in the minority with how well it scored and how much people praise it. I just don't see it nor appreciate it.

My biggest gripe with BG3 was that a major point of praise for it was how polished it was, despite it still being quite buggy and the UI being very annoying very often. Love the voice acting, I think it's good, great even, I just don't think it was God's gift to humanity or that it deserved game if the year.

What do you think makes the combat system of Divinity 2 better? I usually hear the opposite.

People hate to hear it, but dnd is awful. The lore of the main setting sucks and the systems are horrendous. Pathfinder, shadowrun, cyberpunk, an original system altogether, anything else would have been better! Larian also failed the multiplayer, making it feel tacked on rather than improving on divinity.

yeah, I checked my list of games on Steam, and of the ones with 20+ hours playtime, the only I didn't actively enjoy were some idle games, so they don't really count. Everything else I liked. I stick with meh books more than with games :)

Social deduction games have never appealed to me and Among Us is possibly my least favorite iteration of any of them. I doubt people would even be talking about it if it didn't hit big as a streamer game.

Sounds like your friend group should play Eve online

Have you tried Workers and Resources yet? It’s janky as heck but has some unique ideas that no other city builder does (like the real-time building).

Also I feel like Cities: Skylines 2 being a letdown is a pretty common opinion, Colossal Order has really gone downhill.

Then stop fighting Terminids /s

It's a little glitchy at times, but I haven't noticed any major issues since the "terminal stuck in the ground" bug.

My characters arm still occasionally goes stiff on the ship. Some enemies might spaghettify to 100 feet tall. But that's just the beauty of Super Earth engineering.

The utter absurdity of this game makes it fun regardless of the bugs and balance gymnastics. I've never felt as satisfied to reign down absolute madness on friends and foes alike as I have playing this game.

Arrowhead has lost a lot of respect due to the way they run Helldivers 2 and I say it's quite deserved. Every time you get a new piece of kit it comes pre-nerfed. New enemies are often so intensely frustrating to play against that people will simply stop fighting them. Old bugs keep returning CONSTANTLY, telling me that their internal version control and review process is not working. If something is fun, they will stealth nerf it and hope we don't notice.

I have largely stopped playing.

Oh yeah I've had toxic survivor parties on so many occasions. Haven't touched that game in at least 4 years now though

Do you have access to a low-spec PC? There are plenty of great retro games and modern low-spec games that run great on very low-end hardware.

Ever play fallout shelter? There are emulators you can put on android phones to if you like retro stuff.

Every time, I think "oh, this one will be better!"

Sucker.

Definitely not for everyone but Shattered Pixel Dungeon is an incredible game. Available free on f-droid, tons of replayability, 5 classes to play, challenges most long term players can never get. Be warned incredible time sink, but very rewarding. Also a very nice community on Lemmy willing to help.

One mobile game I keep coming back to is Necromerger. Has a paid in ap o purchase to turn off all adverts. Fantastic time killer that doesn't keep me on it all day.

I also could not get through it and gave up. Some roguelites (Everspace) give you enough upgrades to at give you a better chance of making it to the end (and/or to breeze through the beginning), but weapons, upgrades and blessings in Hades seemed rather marginal, and I am not that good.

Bless you!

People are allowed to like it, but it's not really a great game. It's got the razzle dazzle that fooled everybody but underneath it all it's pretty dry