Games

No Man's Sky. Close to 300 hours across pc and ps4. I sunk a lot of hours into it when it was relatively new and still very sparse (well before the nexus). I end up playing every 4-5 updates, just to see what they added. Everything is a slog. I have been trying to hatch my living ship for what feels like literal years now. I always seem to be one resource shy of whatever tasks I chose for myself, yet I have billions and billions of spacedollars. I have half-finished bases across the galaxy. I never feel like I accomplish anything in this game, and feel like my time is always wasted playing it. According to steam I haven't played in over a year.

WoW. I sank hundreds of hours in vanilla. Spent forever getting tier 3 armor completed and most end game content completed and then Burning Crusade was launched. I was so excited that myself and about 15 guildmates road tripped from across the country to meet up and play in person for launch.

I remember crossing the portal and within 15 minutes a common mob dropped an item that was better than one of my tier 3 armor pieces. Pieces I had spent weeks farming for. I was so frustrated that I couldn't enjoy the next 2 days playing, even with everyone there. I got home, played a few more days, and had already replaced half my armor. I quit WoW cold turkey and since then have only logged in once in all these years.

I wasn't even that mad that my armor was replaced, I was mad that it was replaced so quickly, and not even at boss fights. It was normal mobs dropping rares.

Destiny 2. Beat platform shooter I’ve ever seen. Worst everything else: monetization+FOMO, some really shitty loot tables, locking away paid content/sunsetting.
Kept going back because the core gameplay loop is solid. Kept leaving bc it inevitably got boring quickly.

As much as I hate to say it, No Mans Sky probably. Has that same problem I get with playing Minecraft. Everything feels too empty and aimless for me.

Lego: The Hobbit

I give this answer in every one of these threads to raise awareness. My wife and I used to get a little drunk and play Lego games. It's a lot of fun, and a decent couch co-op.

We get into the Mountain, start screwing around with Smaug, and he flies off to burn Laketown. Roll credits. Game over. The 3rd movie flopped so hard they never finished the game. They don't say it's 2/3 of the story, and at that point it's way too late to return it.

Fun game, terrible experience.

Helldivers 2 is a blast but somehow still so bug-ridden that I've quit like 3 separate times.

Breath of the Wild and moreso Tears of the Kingdom.

Not bad games. But not Zelda games.

BoTW did not play into the metroidvania that I felt defined a Zelda game. Plus it lent on the “sim rpg” style of eating, cooking, durability, etc.

Then ToTK just felt like a gimmicky cash grab. Copy paste terrain, “gadget building” straight out of some steam early access game.

Ultimately, both games felt like a hodgepodge of stolen concepts, slapped together. And the adoration that they received just makes me hate them more.

Expedition 33. I’m not a huge turn based fan anymore but gave it a shot because of the rave reviews. And initially I liked it a lot actually. It had the UE5 default realistic look I loathe but the combat was fun.
And then it became unfun. Severely so. I started to dread every major combat encounter.
But the reviews were so positive so I pushed thru, I hated playing the game but told myself I’ll see it through to the end, and I did.
I regret that. Having to keep playing despite disliking it probably soured my experience way more than if I had just stopped playing. On the other hand I now have the full picture of the game and know it doesn’t get better and it’s not worth finishing.
The worst combat encounters were the fights where the attack itself is a minute long cutscene, then without warning you get 150ms to time your party perfectly, or you die and restart. Unforgivable.

Elden Ring can't stand it

Rainbow Six Siege.

It was a combination of things. There was definitely hackers, some funky seasons, the grind, and toxic players, but at some point I went to launch and I was dreading playing it and thought maybe I'd feel better if I just uninstalled this? And sure enough, I did feel better.

Elden Ring - Beautiful game, but without the context of other FromSoft Titles, I'm not sure how you are supposed to enjoy it. Most people would say "well you're not supposed to enjoy it!" but it feels a bit like one of those restaurants where the gimmick is they are rude to you. The story is impenetrable, the "tutorial" pop ups lie, and quests are hidden behind specific actions that 90% of players would not organically try. That said, I completed it.

No Mans Sky. At a certain point it all becomes meaningless.

Hollow Knight is an tremendous game, but it is also a terrible game, and while I true ending'ed it, looking back I spent more than half my playtime annoyed and ultimately don't think the game is good when considered in full.

Literally any open world survival game.

ARK

Valheim

Rust

No Man's Sky

Grounded

The entire fucking genre is tired and tedious. Exploration is the best part of the game, but you spend 90% of the time base building, researching upgrades to your base, gathering more stone/wood/BS to improve your base, optimising the layout of your base, crafting automation to produce MORE stone/wood/BS to further improve your base. And all this with a cumbersome inventory or weight management system.

And they always look like absolute crap. It's either clean sci-fi structures that stick out like a sore thumb, or shoddy ramshackle buildings that look like they were slapped together by an ambitious crack head. So you spend hours placing decorations (that you also have to research and gather materials for) just for it to look kind of ok.

I fucking hate base building.

Dead by Daylight.

I stopped playing when The Walking Dead stream "Incident" happened. The worst thing about the game is the players.

I don't mean that they are not skilled at the game. I mean, they aren't, and quit matches at every minor inconvenience. But the way players treat each other out of the game is horrendous. Players will go out of their way to verbally assault you for no reason in particular other than you are playing the same game as them. If youre a streamer they will go to your stream, if you're a Steam player they will leave negative comments on your profile, or complain in the end match chat if you have a private account. They report you for just playing the game.

I have been called more names, slurs (none of which applied), received more death threats, rape threats, and whatever else in Dead by Daylight than any other game I have ever played online. Including League of Legends, Call of Duty, Halo, CounterStrike, and many more.

I don't play it anymore. Not because I care about what other people say in an online game (words don't change my mood because I don't let them), but because the developers just straight up ignore when Killer Main players complain or ask for stuff. The Survivors get stuff all the time, but if youre a Killer Main the game feels like the developers hate you personally. And I was done with that. Its easy to get into High MMR as Killer, and then literally every game becomes a sweatfest. Also, multiple Killer characters have been gutted and left like that for years while Survivors just keep getting buffed. I dont need any of that.

The gameplay is genuinely fun, when you don't get a 4 man SWF or Bully Squad, but the times the game is like that when you get to High MMR as Killer is basically zero. So the tradeoff isn't worth it.

Didn't hate it, but I just sort of slid off Baldur's Gate 3.

I love Larian's other games and even pre-ordered bg3 to play on vacation, but the combat just isn't as fun as Divinity 2. I kept trying to avoid combat but then I walked into a new area and combat started automatically and I just groaned and turned off the game.

I got to act 2, which isn't a lot of time, but it felt like it

I played this Gameboy advance game as a kid where you adopted a puppy and cared for it and all that and then after a certain amount of time your parents in-game made you get rid of it.

I've never felt so fucking betrayed in all my days. I was so mad that I threw the game cartridge out of the car window and my parents weren't even mad because the ending to the game was so fucked lmao

Every single mobile game.

Cities Skylines 2. I've got thousands of hours in the SimCity franchise. Over 500 hours in the original Cities Skylines. CS2 is a fucking mess of a game. It actually ran pretty decently on my PC when it first came out but you could tell it was an incomplete mess right away. The simulation was non-existent. The game looked like dog shit. The only way to get it to run decently was to turn everything down to low and medium. Somehow I squeaked out 75 hours in that first 3 month release window. For a working adult with responsibilities, that's a lot of time for me now. I install it occasionally and see if it's any better. It's not. I did this last week and it actually runs worse on the same PC than it did at launch which is counter to what most people are experiencing.

Mods through the Paradox launcher is a necessary evil for the game to function. I can barely get it to run stable without mods, I don't think tricking out the game is gonna help the situation. It's such a sad case of a game killing a whole genre. Especially when it's my genre. I love city building games and no game has hurt more than Sim City 2013. I didn't even play SC2013. I watched my favorite franchise die and made probably the smartest decision of my gaming life by saying fuck no to that mess. Fucking Cities Skylines 2 is right there with it, but I made the opposite choice. I gave it a chance and it stings all the time.

What's even worse is how such a staple of my childhood has turned into an almost impossible task to recreate. I'll never understand how gaming went from being able to produce 4 generational city building titles in ~10 years to not being able to get one to function at the same level at all in 20. You can count CS1 sure, but even that game was missing something compared to SC4. CS1 is not even close to the same level of SC4. Even now when the game is hard to run on modern hardware.

What's even more killer is we see other examples of Maxis era staples getting second life in new franchises all the time. Planet Zoo 1 and 2. Transport Fever for Transport Tycoon. Planet Coaster taking it's place next to Roller Coaster Tycoon. Hell even the Jurassic World Evolution series fills a gap from the old Jurassic Park Genesis game. But the modern city building attempts are all backwards attempts.

They all focus on the wrong thing. Agents. They all want to be able to simulate every living being and everything they do. It never works. It's why the newest Citystate is such an intriguing project. They're not doing every individual agent. And the dev finally decided to focus on modernizing the engine to work with fully 3d spaces. There's a couple contenders out there that are a year or two away. Citystate, Metro 1998 even though that's more of a throwback. City Masterplan. If just one of these games hit, we're back in business. Until then I've watched my favorite genre die twice. Hopefully the third time is the charm in terms of longevity.

Pretty much any moba. cs, r6, overwatch, lol, dota

Among Us.

My friends kept suggesting it for game nights, but the social demands are just not compatible with actually hanging out with your friends.

When everyone's out and about, doing their tasks and getting murdered, we're all discouraged from actually talking with one another, for fear of revealing a dead body or whatever. Whenever there's a meeting going on, sure, we're "free" to talk again, but there's not enough time to talk about anything but the game. When you're dead, and thus finally relieved from the pressures of completing tasks or getting kills... there's still no chit-chat allowed, because ghosts "can't" talk.

It's worse whenever random players are involved; having to coordinate between voice chat with friends, and text chat with randoms, or worse, when the randoms are in a voice chat of their own, coordinating to be assholes.

The moment that finally made me say "I don't enjoy this game", was a round with two random players in it: one of them spent the whole round watching security cameras, and the other was blocking the one doorway into the room, both players working with each other and refusing to do their tasks. No way for the lone impostor that round to kill them both. When we started calling them out on this, they flat-out said "we're going to keep doing this just to spite you". Timer ran out with unfinished tasks. Crewmates lost.

Hades - I haven't seen anyone list this one yet. It was the first roguelike/roguelite I ever played and it taught me that I don't like roguelikes/roguelites. It tried to like it, but it's just not for me. Luckily, son boy loves it so it's not a total waste.

Dark Souls.

Got Dark Souls II to see what the hype was about, and 100%-ed it cuz I was post-surgery with nothing better to do.

Fast forward, and a friend gifted me Elden Ring, so, here we go again.

It's famous difficulty was just a combo of clunky controls and obnoxious health pools, which made mastering that type of difficulty really unsatisfying.

I gitted gud, but Dark Souls never gitted fun.

Same applies to Souls-likes.

I really wanted to believe. Fucking love the aesthetic, but that's about the only positive I can recall.

Since I cant afford a console or gaming PC, im stuck with mobile games. With that said Star Trek Fleet Command is a game I quit after sinking a year into it. I was an active member of a group the whole time.

This was several years ago when it became abundantly clear they were starting an even more aggressive push for microtransactions. It also became clear that the updates to the game were only for the benefit of the "whales" (big spenders).

I made the announcement to my group, parled my ship in a graveyard that most of the server respected, let those around my level harvest my ship, said goodbye, then deleted my account.

It was weird almost going through withdrawals and the sadness of no longer playing with my group.

I can't think of a single one. I stop playing games I don't like.

Blue Prince. After reaching room 46 and realising that the game was just getting started, I immediately gave up. This is probably the game that respects the player's time the least that I ever played.

It has amazing lore and overall feeling but is ruined by the RNG. It's somewhat bearable in the first part but becomes extremely annoying when you know what to do but can't because of unlucky draws or not enough steps left.

Town of Salem would be another one for me. It's a game like "murderer," the party game, with a harmless innocent fsction and a dangerous mafia faction. The game devolved into foregone conclusions every match because everyone devised a formula for town to win 100% of the time.

GTA 5, meh story, boring combat, no real progression. Don't really get the hype

Fallout 4

Nms

The entire elder scrolls series now that I think about it, except maybe Morrowind but also Morrowind

Fallout 3 and NV were worth it, as were 1 and 2

Honorable mention to GTA5 tho I played the story to completion in the first few weeks after release and haven't touched it since, so not really the same but similar vibe

Marvel's Midnight Suns.

Supposed to be a tactics based card battler. I played 10 hours and I think I did 3 or 4 battles. So much talking and relationship stuff where saying just the right things out of 3 random options will help advance your status. Just really not what I wanted but too late to refund once I realized that the real game wasn't coming.

Oh yeah and so much running through the forest looking for shiny things.

Warframe. 3500 hours in about 5 years.

I watched it develop from just a fun little "be a magic space murderhobo" into a game with some actual story behind it (and some kinda cool cinematic story missions... that went a bit off the rails when they made time canonically non linear)

The unfortunate part for me was the reputation gating and crafting materials grind. Every new update brought another new material and another new hub world with another dozen or so NPC's to increase your popularity with by running the same missions ad nauseam, just to get another weapon you were going to level up for the Mastery Rank exp and never use again.

I started in the days before Mastery Rank 30 was anywhere near possible, after hitting L1 (30+1) and realising there was no appreciable difference to gameplay I completely lost any reason to play.

I had hopes that there would be something big once you hit the original "max rank", even if there was intent for the devs to continue adding more after that. I had thought there would be some change in the way the game played, like they would reduce the crafting times from 4 days (a new warframe requires 4 blueprints, a head, systems and torso, all 12h crafts, then a 24 hour craft to stitch them all together, all 4 steps requiring blueprints and materials which are RNG drops from different specific enemies on specific map types/planets/hub world areas gated behind reputation)

The GRIND was unreal. They had to roll back their crafting quantities on Railjack after each individual component, of which there were 6, took 1 million credits and 4 sets of 4 figues worth of materials. I nolifed that game hard enough at the time that I spent an entire week (including wait times for the crafting itself) just to build a ship that was advertised as a 'dropship for you and your mates to use both in space and as air support on the open world areas' but that became a "use in very specific missions and one big gamewide event that's never coming back"

Don't even get me started on trying to earn platinum (RMT currency to instantly complete a blueprint that's crafting or buy a new cosmetic/weapon/frame without the crafting steps)

Saying all that, it was a good way to spend time during covid.

Elite Dangerous. The early game up is brutal and you don't get much help. Mid game is very long and a grind. I'm only on a few engineering trees and still haven't left the bubble.

I haven't even gotten to end game.

I can't even do PvP because I get gonked too fast.

Fucking don't starve together. It's just ragebait and I'll not hear otherwise.

I always dislike The Witcher 3. As many times as I tried to like it as many reviews as I read that it was amazing. Dear God the controls sucked and I hated that game. No matter how many times I try it.