Personally there are a few games which left me very dissappointed, after hyping myself up for years in certain cases.
Divinity Original Sin: turns out I prefer more streamlined, less packed games (love Pillars of Eternity) and that coop play in a CRPG stresses me out.
Wasteland 2: I actually managed to finish this one but secretly I admit I was hoping for a better Fallout which I didn’t really get. New Vegas did the cowboy theme much better.
INSIDE: while the design was cool, it was just a ton of boring, easy puzzles in comparison to LIMBO, its predecessor.
New World.
Started off as a PvP mmo with a focus on territory control with some survival elements. Not a traditonal mmo to be sure, but definitely an interesting concept.
Turned into a generic themepark PvE mmo but with none on the features one would expect from a modern mmo.
Its gotten better since, but AGS tends to drop the ball just a little more with each update.
I peaced out about 3 months after release, tried it again a year later and even with improvements it still couldn’t snag me. I just found myself longing for the original concept.
I’m gonna preface this comment by saying none of the games I mention below are bad games, in fact I think they’re very good games… they just weren’t for me.
The Outer Wilds:
I’m probably gonna take some flack for this one! I was SO looking forward to this game, I’d heard such great things about it.
I played it for around 10-15 hours, all the while thinking to myself ‘any time now this game will open up and I’ll get to the main meat of the game.’ I slowly came to the realisation that this wasn’t going to happen and that the game wasn’t going to change gear or anything. Ultimately I found the game boring.
The game is about exploration and piecing together a story, unfortunately I found the story dull and consequently didn’t care about piecing it together. Im also one of those gamers that often quick clicks through dialogue, I just want the gist of what’s being said. I want to ‘play’ a game, I don’t want to ‘read’ a game. I have books for that.
I also didn’t enjoy the exploration, I found it tedious. Now that’s strange for me… I love exploration games. I’ve wondered about this and I think the reason I didn’t enjoy exploration in the out wilds is the art style. The ‘cutesy’ art style just left me cold. None of the locations filled me with awe or wonder. I never got that feeling of ‘I wonder what’s over there!’ like I do in other exploration games.
Red Dead Redemption:
I’ve tried to play this game 3 times now. Each time I get so far and just stop…. It just bores me!
On paper this should be exactly the type of game I love, but for some reason I just don’t. I’ve thought long and hard about this game, why does it fail to keep me engaged? I’ve come up with a couple of potential reasons.
Colours. This game can be very mono chromatic. It’s often all dull greys and browns and I genuinely think that does play a part in me finding my time in the game dull also.
Getting around. Travel is tedious in this game and there’s a lot of it. It’s walking or horses.
The map. The map is large, but a lot of it is empty and looks the same.
Missions. I often found them a chore and quite repetitive.
I’m kind of still on the fence about this game, I still wonder if there’s a hump to get over and then the game opens up…. But I fear there isn’t.
Control:
This one is my fault. I don’t like fps games and didn’t realise that’s what this game was. I thought it was more puzzle solving and exploration.
I like the story and I like the art style but ultimately it’s a ‘pew pew pew’ game, which isn’t fun for me.
Yeah, I just played through outer wilds and I completely disagree. I thought each planet was pretty wonder-inducing. The story is pretty standard, I think, but the way it’s presented, non-linearly and requiring some degree of actually putting the pieces together, and the way the story serves new exploration hints to you at the same time it’s giving you clues about the history is pretty masterfully done, o think. And I DON’T usually like exploration games, I thought outer wilds would be a mid experience overall for me. But there’s no such thing as perfect, so I get it.
(don’t hurt me)
So far it’s been Baldurs Gate 3. I’ve found it clunky to play and it doesn’t run well on my machine despite far surpassing the recommended hardware.
I’m definitely going to do some trouble shooting and give it a much more in depth try, but it’s way easier to just play another game than figure out why this one is broken lol.
Ark. I have shitty rural internet so no online multiplayer for me. When I heard they were coming out with a single player I was SO excited. I could RIDE DINOSAURS. I could live on dinosaur island with my dinosaur friends!
Turns out it was less dinosaur island and more dying of dehydration and getting my dinosaur friends killed in new and exciting ways. Rest in peace, Tuber, Izzy and No Name, you will be missed.
Ah, seconding ark. I wanted a couple weeks after my friends jumped aboard the hype train, which lasted only a short couple weeks. A few years later and it’s free on EGS, a friend of mine owns a steam copy, and we cannot for our lives manage to connect a private game server between the two platforms. Basically first and one of the very few games I’ve ever refunded on steam, and not even worth playing for free from EGS.
Dead Cells. I played for ~60 hours, but could not get the final boss down. It’s a tiny stage with a huge boss that has very quick combos that can 2 shot you. I tried a dozen times to figure him out in the training area (where you can practice boss fights) and I still couldn’t get it. It’s probably me though, my reflexes aren’t quite what they used to be.
Honestly my biggest problem with Dead Cells is that in Boss Cells 0 (BC for short) the game feels fun and fast but once you go to 2 and above it really feels like a slog to play for me.
Call it a skill issue but I have more fun on lower BC/difficulties than on the higher ones
