I still feel like ODST/Reach’s core fighting loop is several notches above Destiny 2 though. I picked up Destiny 2 again last year to play through the latest content after it was free. I was told the Reef-oriented expansion (Forsaken I think) was the best one and played through it solo as if it was a Halo game. But I kept fighting off a creeping sense of boredom and didn’t ultimately feel the experience was worth the 10 hours I put into it.
I had a big problem especially with the auto-Light curving they recently introduced that made everything easier than I would like no matter my loadout and my aggressive nongrinding. Making everything too easy undermines the stakes of performing well in the core loop. So possibly it was mainly a function of not playing the expansion when it came out and the balance is now shot with no way to recover the intended experience, though.
(Maybe arguing about the stanning picks isn’t in the spirit of my own thread :). But let’s say that it is because it implies making both good and bad comments and discussing how they balance out.)
The leveling and the lack of difficulty settings really does a number on their single-player content. Destiny only pushes back once player progression slows down enough that they can start to balance it again, at max light level, basically.
Diablo III was the worst case of this I saw, except the path to max level was closer to 30 hours of absolute slog.
Vanilla D3 was amazingly bad for “here is a 50 hour slog to get to Inferno, which is now unplayably difficult without ridiculous grinding or giving us real money”. That was some terrible stuff.
Motoko-chan no Wonder Kitchen is a promotional game about mayonnaise, and also one of the most joyous and whimsical things in the super famicom library. I expected to hate it but it’s wonderful.
I didn’t actually play that much World of Warcraft back in the day because the internet at my college sucked too bad to play it, so I only ever got to play when I went home for breaks. I kind of passively enjoyed my time with it the way you might with a mediocre jrpg.
Now that I’m effectively replaying it with the release of Classic, it’s almost hilarious how far down we’ve fallen. Of course the (accurate) criticism at the time of its release, here as elsewhere, was that the game didn’t respect your time and was an unvaried, flat timesink that eventually expected you to treat it as a job. Well, I wouldn’t call myself a wow classic stan, exactly, but boy, after Zynga, the cellphone game hellscape, and the lifestyle game microtransaction circus that plagues all AAA development, wow classic - the locus of numbers-go-up cynicism at its release - looks downright considerate and ethical in comparison. It’s less of a slog to play than any of the last 8 (or whatever) Assassin’s Creed games. What the fuck is happening?
what happened is that, compared to 15 years ago, we know how to play WoW now
15 years of WoW and its encounter design and mechanical ethos
15 years of its popularity transforming game design across a wide swath of genres and upcoming competitors
we can go in and do things in Classic and it doesn’t feel like a monumental effort because everyone actually gets what the hell is going on and what their job is, nevermind the encounter design being hilariously easier than anything on the market now
This is a true statement of an accurate phenomenon but doesn’t relate to what I was talking about at all, really. I’m not talking about batching and hit cap and pushing glancing blows off the hit table, I’m talking about the fact that: there aren’t sixteen kinds of currency, half of which you can buy with real money; there aren’t in-game advertisements you can interact with for rewards; there aren’t any time-limited repeatable grinds (“daily quests”) that it is inefficient to skip; there’s no energy meter that limits player time or actions that you can alleviate with money (in fact, you have lockouts and instance resets that prevent you from playing and cannot be alleviated by any means, which probably was originally a way to keep you playing longer and paying that $15 a month but now feels downright humane); and etc and etc and etc. It’s just a game. That game’s value on its own merits is debatable, but. It’s just a game.
tell that to someone in a world boss coalition on a layered server
probably Stardew Valley and Nier Automata for me. Nier seemed like one of those janky SB games from an era I had no interest in. Automata is made by platinum, who I don’t like. I knew nothing else about the game until the demo came out, which I played on a whim. I think you’d be hard pressed to play that demo and not come out with an interest in the full game. I played the full game, and the interest never left. I didn’t play Stardew Valley until after everyone else already had. it seemed a bit too tidy to me, but it’s a considered game with a lot of heart and meaningful space to play it how you see fit, without falling into the boring dustbin of ‘sandbox’ player engagement.
also gonna add slay the spire I guess, I wouldn’t say I “stan” it exactly but I sure couldn’t stop playing it for months despite being so ugly and janky
I would say Bloodborne it’s more that I didn’t expect to actually be able to beat it because I suck at video games and typically get gross out by stuff that is too gory
That’s basically what kept me away from the classic Resident Evil games when they were contemporaneous. I used to be way more horror/gore averse, and the survival horror game loop intimidated me — i didn’t like the sound of a game where i could screw myself into a corner. (and i might have bought into some anti tank control propaganda)
I tried the original a few years ago, just out of curiosity since i had never filled that gap in my gaming history, and i had such an incredibly fun time that i ended up playing the whole PSX trilogy. RE2 in particular is now one of my favorite PSX games. I was a little more educated on what survival horror is but even that didn’t prepare me for how smoothly i took to playing those games and how i could map them onto ones ive loved since i was a kid (a little bit of lite adventure game puzzles, a little bit of Metroid/Zelda spatial exploration, a little bit of RPG resource management). If i had taken the chance and played the N64 RE2 when i was a teen and the video store still existed and it was for rent there, i surely would have loved it. Sliding doors man
Yeah my first Resi was the fantastic Gamecube remake. Me and a mate played it together every day for a week the summer it came out. Walking home from school, closing the curtains, turning it up loud and screaming a lot. Great memory.
When I was in early high school, my mom would not buy me M-rated games, but I was able to convince my dad to get me the REmake/RE0 two-pack. I had to hide it under the bed, and I could only play it in secret or when my mom wasn’t home. Playing it so covertly imparted a sort of dark, sleazy feeling to it that really enhanced the experience.
Warframe, tbh. I didn’t really think much of it when I first played it, and that was 6 years ago. Was the first f2p game I played that felt like it didn’t explicitly hate f2p players, and also made plenty of room for solo players and folks who needed to get up from the computer and pause the game while still being f2p.