Think you could take it back a step there.

• Fallout 1 - exceptional world-building, fantastic game, great character writing, superbly replayable RPG. Your build is instrumental to what you can do; decisions affect the world. Held together by jank and bugs, alas, but generally superb.
• Fallout 2 - fixes most of the jank and bugs and has a much bigger and deeper world, but not quite as well-integrated a story. Worthy sequel, though.
• Fallout 3 - "Oblivion with guns", but has a pretty decent story, lots of interesting side quests. Seems like Bethesda misunderstood the point of the setting a bit, but very promising. Has some RPG replayability - different builds and different choices change what's available in the world.
• Fallout New Vegas - best game in the whole series. Good plot, great sidequests, great characters, reactive world. Actually makes it seem like the Creation engine can be used for 'proper' RPGs - everything by Bethesda tended to be a mile wide and an inch deep up till then. Obsidian actually understand the setting, which is not surprising since they had a lot of original Black Isle devs in their team. Held together by jank and bugs, which I'm going to pretend was a callback to Fallout 1.
• Fallout 4 - just what the fuck. Plot that you can barely believe is as stupid as it is. One-note, irritating characters. Dreadful writing. Gives up being an RPG in favour of crafting and base-building. "Talking" interface which was the butt of jokes at the time and an insult to the history of the series. Barely any decision is of consequence, you could save near the "final decision" point, see all the endings, and miss nothing of consequence. All of Bethesda's worst habits, given free rein.

Not going to be spending money with Bethesda again unless the reviews turn up exceptional. After F4, I was expecting nothing from 76, and was not surprised. Was expecting nothing from Starfield, and was not surprised. Am expecting Elder Scrolls 5 to be a bag of shite as well - am whatever the complete opposite of 'hyped' is for it.

Surprised this didn't come up sooner to be honest.

MMOs and live service ruin lore. They'll twist the existing story into knots so that players can fight or recruit every popular character from the series, even if it makes no sense. Even if they're dead. Gotta keep those players engaged, even if it comes at the expense of the integrity of the world and writing that drew them in in the first place!

Cataclysm ruined World of Warcraft.

Everything after 3 is poorly written fan fiction to me. It still is one of my favorite franchises of all time, but it’s never going to be the same again. Halo Wars 2 was all right though.

4 and 5 didn't ruin anything for me. There's stuff I genuinely like about them that got me excited for the next game. Plenty I didn't like about them too.

Then there's Infinite... it feels like the DLC or post-game content to a game we never got. And the multiplayer was unplayable last I saw. It made me no longer excited for the next game.

I still do Halo game nights a couple times a year though.

I have never seen such strong opinion about Puyo puyo WTH?

Was the same for me too. I remember getting DoW2 and being so disappointed. Then 3 came along… I’ve given up them making a decent game again.

Even that DoW remaster isn’t looking good. I’m holding out until I see the reviews but if they’re only going with AI upscaled textures for £30 then no thanks.

You like base building and big armies? Well, too bad!

At least 2 was a fun game still. Not an RTS, but at least fun.

I'm glad I didn't get 3 though…

BF3 was certainly really good but maybe I can show my age by saying 1942 and Vietnam were at the very least the start of the plateau, if not the real peak.

4 felt like such a cash grab to me. No deep lore or story telling like with 1 through reach. Exposition was just spoon fed to us rather than a great mystery. Still, I plugged through, hoping maybe it'd turn around.

Then 5 came out and I gave up all hope on the franchise. Spent more time playing as Locke than we did Chief, story was more compelling than 4 but the storytelling and pacing were clunky, and it was completely disconnected from 4.

Infinite just got worse. "We lost, chief" (but we have no frame of reference, we have no idea what that means , we don't know how the rest of the world has been affected, and then we're put against some no name character when we really just want to know what the hell is happening off world)

It's explained in the game that the Covenant faction you fight is a splinter faction. There's more details in the books, I didn't have problems when I played it.

I played the series in reverse order so I love Jak 2 and 3. TPL is okay, but I do actually like the action-y gameplay of the sequels.

Completely agree. The whole tone and setting changed. SC:BW went for gritty realism. Obviously, there's a suspension of disbelief when you've got psionic aliens, but it felt like three scrappy factions barely surviving in the endless dark of space.

SC2 went full Warcraft. Ancient gods, portals to other worlds, all the same kitschy fantasy elements that are fine in the campy context of WC but really clashed with the established character of the SC universe. I get that they wanted to raise the stakes in the sequel, but I really disagreed with how they went about it.

And Kerrigan should have stayed evil. That's my "Han shot first" of the franchise.

Interestingly, I would say Sacred 2 as a huge fan of Sacred 1.

imagine having never played the original (me, unfortunately, at the time). Then, what are the whispers all about?

I was soooooo excited for Diablo 3. I even loved it when it came out, as horrible difficult and grindy as it was. I would have kept loving it if they just expanded on that.. but nope, they took out trading and economy, the things that made item drops feel exciting for me. Without any sense of value, loot was just… boring.

I didn’t touch Diablo 4 and it sounds like I made the correct decision.

The remaster of Diablo 2 was excellent.

I don't think that's a fair assessment of Guild Wars 2. It was not a true sequel to Guild Wars 1 but it's a decent game in its own right. I can see that if you're playing a great city builder game and they announced a sequel, you would be thrown if that sequel was a 4x instead. But in this analogy, it's a damn good 4x and maybe even the best amongst its contemporaries. Plus the original game is still there in all of its charm and originality, they've kept the servers running this long and seem to plan on keeping on doing so until no one is playing.

Moo2 was so fucking good.

I've tried many many 4x space games, but none have ever matched the joy that one brought.

Why? I loved moo3. Not as good as moo2. But still good.

Either way, Master of Magic was the GOAT!

Oh man, the moment I clicked on this thread, Trails came into mind. Now, I myself haven't played it, but my mother is close to finishing Kevin's game, and we were peeking at the the next few games and the most recent one to be released. And man, I don't even know if I wanna play this series anymore.

The anime tropes we saw and read about from people's reviews are killing us, and me and my mom fucking love anime. Hell, she's a shonen-anime lover through and through. But the way the older characters like Agate get yassified into looking like generic anime guy #1 with red hair and Zin into slightly less generic anime guy #2 kills me, these dudes should not look like college kids 😭

The shitty romance that they're hinting between Agate and Tita is 🤢. I really wish they had kept them as a sibling dynamic, and I thought Tita's mom was freaking out because she thought he was a pervert, not that he actually liked her...

Also found out about the adopted siblings from TS:CS that seem to like each other, which is creepier than Estelle x Joshua because this pair was raised together since they were literal toddlers unlike the original two... God Japan's not-by-blood adopt a son to marry thing kills me. The adopt a son to marry is fine if the girl wasn't raised with him or like, they're 20 years old. But this, "we literally were raised like siblings" thing kills me sometimes.

But yeah the egregious fan service, flanderization, and overall lack of seriousness that we saw from some of the newer games made me be like "maybe I won't pick this game up," which is a shame. I'm really disappointed to hear about the anime gender tropes stuff...

Mass effect had this weird metamorphosis across the series where the character writing and gameplay improved noticeably between each game in the series while the story and mechanics took big steps back. Andromeda had some of the best movement/power sets in the series, not to mention your own build-a-gun workshop, while absolutely failing at everything else it tried to do. "My face is tired" indeed random not-the-citadel lady.