Games That I Hate And Everyone Tells Me I'm Wrong

Ah yes, fond memories of having other players repeatedly doing rock-paper-scissors emotes and pinging me to stand in some spot so they could launch me into the air or whatever, and then just quitting out as soon as they got what they wanted

i wanted to love Monster Hunter World, but i agree that the systems are very obtuse. i thought i was doing well, but then i got to this boss you had to capture and like…it just makes no sense why what i was doing wasn’t working and i was given zero hints, so eventually, i just stopped playing it. whoops, $$$

also, having no friends to play with added to it

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Yeah, I can’t stress enough how much the enjoyment of MH games as a whole is tied to either having people to talk to directly about MH or being able/willing to dig around a lot on the internet. People talk about Dark Souls as being a playground rumor/discussion game, but MH as a whole is much more that.

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as much as i disagree with this take i totally love it, because that’s how i feel about most video games anymore and Monster Hunter World just happened to be an exception that grabbed my attention.

Modern video games make me feel like my grandpa contemplating a game boy.

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Capturing a monster is just like hunting it except instead of giving it the sweet release of death, you put it in bondage and prolong its suffering off screen in exchange for more parts

You monster

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I am sad y’all didn’t get into MHW, but I feel you.

I think taking MHW less seriously and also getting advice from other folks is 100% the experience. Min/maxing, figuring out “combos”, and doing perfectly isn’t the best way to Mon hunt. For me it’s about not knowing exactly what’s up, still making it, and slowly figuring it out for next time.

For me it took two tries to get into MHW. Just got back to it this month in fact, and now I like it a lot. For me it wasn’t trying out new weapons - I stuck with the heavy bowgun from the start because it’s got spread ammunition and I like shotguns in videogames - I just had to let the concept of it simmer in the back of my mind a little bit. It’s still not a game I can get addicted to but I like it

Everything about undertale is garbage. I dont reget nearly any game purchase except this one. From like 5 mins in I knew it was feels and reveals bullshit. its like fan fiction of the idea of fan fiction. STOP WINKING AT ME. Memes suck.

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Something something maybe the best experience worsted by exposure

the issue was i kept incapacitating it and when i’d deploy the trap nothing would happen. this was the stone t-rex thing

the traps (in world, anyway) as far as I could figure out worked along the lines of “deploy one, then you have to deplete the monster’s HP within like 30 seconds of it touching the thing” so it was actually just a weird way of figuring out how good you were at estimating how close to dead they were

You just throw tranqs or whatever they are at it after you trap them, and they fall asleep for good if you have weakened them up ahead of time (basically, if they have run away and tried to sleep on their own).

MH never explains this well.

the game seemed to imply that when the monster is huffin and puffin and looking like it’s gonna die, that would mean it’s time, and that’s what happened in the practice mission, but i guess…that…changes??? the trap would have no effect. idk, it was super frustrating because of how long it took to get to that point in the battle for me to try over and over.

They’re trying to preserve a certain amount of ambiguity; they’re always careful to not give you too much info about the monster’s health, status, or fatigue, and they’ve never been able to square that intentional misdirection with a specific sequence: get monster to low health, trap them, throw tranquilizers.

That’s simple, right? Based on the Pokemon loop that everyone knows?

But there’s a stack of very small confounding factors:

  • involves two items
  • has choice in items (stun or net trap?)
  • has a deep item list to create red herrings (do poisons matter? poisoned meat?)
  • has strongly limited item counts (2 traps per level only)
  • is realtime
  • puts the player in danger

Well! Add all that up and combine it with their poor tutorialization and they lose people on that system forever

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i usually just beat up on the monster until they run away to take a nap and then i sneak up and basically drop a trap under their ass and wake them up. Works ok!

feel like theres a conversation to be had about good tutorialization in games, how/when games can hook/lose their players, etc.
i read a thread like this and it’s always a bummer when someone talks about trying to play a game i love, and bouncing off of it hard, and when i go to give a response it’s like “Yeah but you gotta play it for X hours to unlock Y system before it gets to the Real Shit” and that’s such a shitty response to give or receive. So many games i think are genuinely great and worth the investment simply put their worst foot forward.

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Tutorials and teaching game skills are just about the hardest and worst part of game design, almost everyone is terrible at doing them. It gives me anxiety to think about doing them so everyone tries to back away from it

Best practices have been known for decades but continue to not be implemented because, well, games are a lot more complicated than they used to be and doing it right really requires a holistic view which is extremely difficult to get when you’re just trying to make it good in the first place

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Well as an uninformed rube who knows fuck-all about game development, i feel as though the beginning hours of a game should be designed last, and should have the most attention lavished on them, for the same exact reason you do that with the first scene of a movie or chapter of a book or episode of a TV show etc. – that’s the audience’s very first impression and is gonna make or break whether they stick with it.

Games and TV shows are alike both in requiring an unusually large amount of time investment, and in totally wanging this kind of onboarding more often than not. i can respect that in both cases it can be blamed on the chaotic development process (like i know with TV, pilots are sometimes aired despite being inherently unfinished, series-definining details tend to fall into place over the course of a production season, etc.) but also i’m a cranky and demanding media consumer and as far as I’M concerned they should know better by now, and also i think games are especially garbage shit about it.

Like we talk a lot about 1-1 of Super Mario Bros being the most holistically perfect tutorial level but no one talks enough about goombas being the last enemy they designed, because Miyamoto and Tezuka & co. recognized at the last minute that they filled an important niche

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No, that’s all correct.

I’m just whining because it’s really, really hard.

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fair do’s

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oh i just remembered

Yooka-Laylee - an utterly worthless piece of shit. one of the worst games i’ve ever played. the only value this game contains is showing how decent BK and BT are in comparison. even the music is only passable despite kirkhope’s best attempt

Golden Sun - what a miserable slog. a bad RPG with a bad plot and terrible pacing. the music sucks too, which is unforgivable for a JRPG

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