Honestly for me it's Life is Strange: True Colors. Love that game to death, an incredible story and soundtrack, but it seems like a story that just doesn't vibe well with a lot of people. Listen to the soundtrack though, absolutely increible.
Its crazy how different destiny was from when it launched to. Whencit was wrapping up. I never played it after the first dlc so I have no clue how better it got I just know Peter Dinklage got replaced by Nolan North
Destiny (one and 2) kinda had a pattern of having a meh release one year, and a comparatively phenomenal release the next year. Not exactly every other year, but it sure felt like it š as annoying as it was , the constant feeling of "it's so over" made every "we're so back" that much more exciting
Yeah. Honestly, D2 might be in one of the best states right now that it ever has been, despite it all, but I still canāt recommend anyone get into it.
DBD was super duper fun when it first came out and no one knew what anyone was doing.
Running around with friends screaming your head off with friends while the killer chases the group while they themselves also not knowing what they were doing led to many intense "near miss" moments (or what felt like it since even the killer swinging the weapon was like a scary visual back then); and funny moments where either your friend or the killer would get stuck on a corner somewhere.
Once the game matured and the min maxers came into play - then everything just became solely about winning instead of the experience itself; and those who were just there for a good time also slowly left, leaving all the sweats in the community.
I also experienced this with Marvel Rivals.
It's just unfortunate that all competitive games see this kind of trajectory. The wild west when a game first comes out is always the most fun.
Sadly meta destroys pvp gameplay. That and exploit abusers. I guess now survivors are abusing glitches where blinding the killer mid-hook forces disconnect. At this point, DBD is best if you got a group of friends to play custom matches with
Meta is such a bad thing to any kind of pvp. Creativity goes out the window because optimized solutions exist. And if you're in ranked, that mentality trickles down to the lowest levels. I tend towards the lower tiers in pvp games and saw people trashing one another for picking off meta options all the time. Everytime I thought "Who in their right mind thinks the meta is relevant at this level."
Despite that every single class and spec can do a majority of the content, people just want to copy the top 1% without realizing WHY the top 1% runs the combinations they do
Same with early LoL. I loved playing Taric and being able to swap to AP carry if needed or playing top lane Udyr and the opponents being confused that you weren't using standard active abilities. A few of my buddies liked doing mid lane bruisers and just bullying the lane out. The classic 5mogs Mundo was one of the silliest builds. Singed being a guy you can't really ignore but if you chase him you'll never catch him and you'll die in the process.
Hell, you can make the same argument for MTG or WH40K. The meta ruins any game or at least reduces it to rock paper scissors.
Dude yes! Siege and OW were both released closely and it was when my buddy and I both had our 4ās hooked up in college and god damn it was so fun. Then two years later and I donāt think either of us were playing overwatch and siege was strictly casual lol
In all fairness, this is roughly how the VGC is anyway. You have seasonal formats that restrict usage, and in that ecosystem the top 10 teams are usually copy/paste of each other. 30 years and almost 10 generations of iteration, all for a sort of stagnation
It becomes so incredibly easy, I'm sober years now, since before Sadako, sometimes I think about the game then have this euphoric feeling of saying fuck no ill be happy instead
Still play daily and hate every minute of it. Such a wonderfully terrible game everyone should avoid. Its so unique and satisfying when it runs good tho it's hard to stop.
After playing Palworld you can really see where Ark falls short.
The big thing for me though is that Ark requires you to go cave diving, but doesn't do anything to tell you where they are or what to expect in them. So you you're stuck having the wiki open somewhere else to find them.
For better or worse the game is meant to be played with a massive squad, not as a solo. So chances are having a few dozen people scouring the landscape for resources would find that stuff.
It's just awful for solo, which is what I always played, and it always ended in disaster.
Yeah. It's so sad. I have 6k hours in it (rookie numbers, I know) and I haven't touched ASA. Just looking at the DLC list for ASA is depressing. I pretend it doesn't exist.
The worst part isn't even that studio wildcard swindled the fans with that """remaster""" the worst part to me was the amount of people who were excited to be swindled.
Spent a whole weekend grinding levels and taming a group of four raptors, only to be killed in seconds by a Therizinosaurus. Total wipe, raptors and all. Oh and once a Spinosaurus just spawned on the beach by my newbie house. Fuck Ark.
Yeah ark was made to make you feel like a literal caveman, but the abysmal learning curve combined with the horrendously bad resource gathering and slow transport makes for a challange that isn't catered for a normal person.
With tweaked game settings and a lot of know-how it's absolutely delicious though.
My issue with ark is that I want to play solo offline bc I just wanna collect dinos and other cool creatures but its hard to adjust the settings to be a more chill casual single player experience.
Fear and hunger. Open the game, waste 10 min chosing Initial traits and reading for the lore, start the run, look for loot outside, a dog attacks you. You die. Absolute peak.
The guards have giant dongs and can give you the Bleeding Anus status. If that sounds like a problem.... avoid Funger, because that's level 1 and it gets so much worse.
At least itās slightly less immediate in Termina. Shitās still kinda fucked, but thereās less anal bleeding and more random rituals and human sacrificing going on
I'm quite happy to enjoy Funger from afar thank all of you very much. 4 person squad fights turn based monsters is one of my fave genres, but I recognize a time sink when I see one and I'm just not ready to commit to that.
I have never played a game before where every information about everything is wrong in just about every possible source. Complete garbage of a game whose code was probably written by 100 monkeys with typewriters.
I love it very much and it still holds up as my favorite survival horror experience since Resident Evil 1. It's the best cock and ball torture simulator ever.
The "code" was written by a very depressed Finnish (so I guess just a Finnish?) on RPG maker as a university thesis about "What makes horror games scary?"
So it's worse than 100 monkeys, it was (possibly/jokingly) written by a dude mixing antidepressants with room temperature vodka, no actual training on the software and the alpha for the university was probably crunched adding sleep deprivation to the mix.
I'm sure you know it already but I wanted to give a context to the uninitiated.
P.s. if someone is curious about the game but taken back by bugs, you can go straight into Fear and Hunger 2: Termina, it's objectively a better game and you don't necessarily need to play the first, you can revisit it later
Me seeing a mammoth and giant take on a dragon my first playthrough with me hiding behind a bush in awe at lvl 10 or something is my core memory from Skyrim.
Itās weird how in older Fallout 4 you can make pretty large settlements that get close to feeling like an actual new town, whereas in Starfield your outpost has like 3 people max that canāt do anything besides chill.
Yeah this is what got me. And having some items locked behind perks. I'm not gonna grind to build. Instead, I shut it off, turned on Fallout 4, and never went back
And yet it's still one of the easiest Paradox's games to learn. Don't get me wrong, it's still has a great learning curve, but I've tried CK3 or HoI4 and never managed to learn it but in Stellaris I became king of the galaxy.
It helps that Stellaris introduces complexity more gradually. You start with a single system - more like Civ in that respect. Whereas in EU, for example, you start with a whole country with pre-existing borders and relationships.
This game is literally the definition of the, "best worst game." So many people use the phrase wrong. They use it for games with awesome, interesting mechanics. Or games that do everything perfectly except respect your time.
But Shadow the Hedgehog? It does nothing good, like at all. It's over the top edginess is even terribly done, but holy shit does the amalgamation of bad somehow make a fucked up orchestral masterpiece of, "I just have to keep playing."
(I played through the game like 4 times at completely different points in my life and I both do and don't regret it )
No mans sky. Fucking 10/10 game. But if you are ANYTHING like 90% of us, the moment youre given the freedom, the main quest is suddenly 75 star systems away and you didnt build a base nearby.
Yep. Day one player of NMS, loved it immediately even when it was very far from the gem it is now. I've recommended it to 2 people, they both hated it! I don't recommend it anymore š¤£
i relapsed in 22 for a season, was 2 years sober before that and since the end of that season. but fuck, man, i'm having cravings and i might relapse again.
it also doesn't help that youtube has been recommending the old league channels to me again
Which version of The Binding of Isaac? Rebirth is a very fair and evenhanded experience compared to some roguelikes I've played like Noita, Enter the Gungeon, and Spelunky 2. Those games are beyond maddening.
I've had way less trouble with Enter the Gungeon than I do Binding of Isaac, mostly because I can actually reasonably interpret what most items will do for me.
It also doesn't toss 15 different status effects my way like TBOI does while expecting me to know what all of them do off rip.
TBOI really isn't that bad. It just requires learning some basic resource management and the risk/reward aspect is what keeps things interesting. You can get some hilariously broken builds.
DayZ is probably the most frustratingly depressing game I canāt stop playing. I didnāt get a handle of the mechanics for like 200 hours, and then it took like 800 hours to not die 15 times every time I spawn fresh. At about 1500 hours, I consider myself to be āsomewhat competentā in what passes for the āeasyā servers (typically vanilla) lmfao
But youāre damn right I still play and fail the hardcore servers.
I've been playing it long enough to know all the workarounds, and I know all the shortcuts to get around all of the unnecessary time-wasters the devs built into the game, so when I do jump on during one of the better patch cycles I can have an enjoyable time.
But at the end of the day it's a poorly developed, poorly coded, poorly managed, and poorly envisioned flaming pile of hot shit that I wouldn't recommend to my worst enemy.
I had fun, and seamless space to planetary transitions? Chef kiss
But when "let's meet up and do some missions together" often takes an hour (plus) to get everyone ready, the wait time on getting the ship you want, where you want it, having to run all over the place to find the equipment you want in multiple shops on multiple planets or stations. The terrible performance, the number of broken missions, or infrastructure (lifts especially) every patch...
I fucking love the game when it works, inject it directly into my veins.
When it doesnt work, the whole patch is a wash and its time to log off until the next one to see if it works.
Either an amazing experience you wont get anywhere else or growing grey hair out of frustration.
No patch is "good" either, you just go from a 1% good experience chance to 99% bad chance on a bad patch to a 30% good experience and 70% bad experience chance on a decent patch.
2.8K hours, since first months of alpha.
I would have never recommended EFT.
Now with PVE?
Oh yes, please do.
And do try PVP, and quit alltogether š
Death Stranding.
We could have almost the exact same interests, likes, dislikes, whatever. There's no way I can predict if a person is going to love or hate that game.
I love the setting. I think the movement is really quite involved. I get hooked on the gameplay loop. I like the weird quirky touches that Kojima always includes. But more than that I genuinely love the theme of human connection and how it explores it in various ways. By the end I found it moving and thought provoking. I like to say it's one of the best gameplay experiences I've ever had and I can't recommend anyone ever play it.
You just gotta kinda find it yourself and then hopefully you pick up what it's putting down.
Came looking for this one, 13 was my first FF and i wear that "first title nostalgia" badge with pride. i don't care what anyone has to say, i love those games
I might be one of the few long time FF fans that enjoyed XIII. The critique of its linearity rings hollow if you enjoyed X, which is my favourite. I enjoy the story, the characters, and I find the worlds of Cocoon and Gran Pulse fascinating
I love the FFXIII trilogy, each one is different from the others but still feel like the same universe. It's the story of increasingly powerful gods trying to use Lightning and her going "fuck you, I am going to use the power you gave me to kick your ass."
I remember rawdogging Xcom 2 war of the chosen on what I believe was the hardest difficulty, first try. Without ever having played this game genre before.
as a day-one f2p player, I never thought about this, but it's not horrible if you only care about the lore ig, but yeah good luck with the meta if you're a new player
Deadly Preminition. I can't really put into words why I like it so much because it's weirdly-designed, it's janky, there's pretty long stretches of just driving around and not much else, but it's weird in a way that feels natural and not like they were trying to make it weird. Also Francis York Morgan is a legend.
It's definitely not for everyone but plenty of people love it so it definitely appealed to a specific demographic (Twin Peaks fans, for one).
I definitely recommend it to friends... but the ones I recommend it to are weirdo degenerate engineers who desperately want to solve hard puzzles, and are susceptible to gambling addictions...
Oh defiantly The amount of money I have wasted in war thunder when I was playing it religiously in collage is stupid. Itās a sunk cost fallacy now weāre I feel like I have to play it to justify all the money I spent on it
Probably the first Nioh. Itās one of my all time favorites , maybe my absolute number one favorite game ever
But it is such a difficult, obtuse game that is profoundly unwelcoming to new players and has a degree of challenge and brutality that could potentially turn off even people who consider themselves hardcore action game fans or even soulslike fans
As much as I love it I just know itās not a game that the majority of people will enjoy so itās not one Iām frequently recommending
Oldschool Runescape. It's easily my favorite game, but I would never recommend it to a friend. The best way to describe OSRS is it's like if someone took your favorite meal, encased it in a meter-thick box made of titanium, and gave you nothing but a butter knife to open it.
There's basically none of the "onboarding" that MMOs designed this century have. You get a tutorial that teaches you the absolute basics and then get thrown into a sandbox in which you need an advanced degree to have any amount of fun. It's like if you took your grandma who doesn't even know what a video game is, sat her down with a heavily modded Minecraft, told her that she can punch trees to gather wood, and then expect her to create a functioning nuclear power plant.
You basically have to follow a guide to accomplish anything in a reasonable time-frame. Oh and that "reasonable time-frame" business? You better be prepared to really stretch your understanding of what you consider reasonable, because everything in OSRS takes forever.
You basically need weapons-grade autism and the ability to find joy in rolling a boulder up a hill for all eternity with the only rewards being a point counter that increments by 1 every time you reach the top and the ability to trade a ludicrous amount of points for cool stickers to decorate the boulder.
I don't recommend OSRS to people because 99 times out of 100, if someone has what it takes to enjoy OSRS then they already play it. And if you're the 1 in 100 exception, you'll inevitably be drawn in like a moth to a flame.
Iām surprised you wasted exp to type this out. Description is good though, accurate. Quick 3 week detour to grind something out just so this other specific thing is 13 seconds faster. Hard to explain to people hahaha
Second this entirely, game is grindy, however the key element is no grind is ever a waste, if you did a grind 8 years ago for something, that same thing is still usable right now.
I'm currently working on Agility 96-99 should get that done by the end of the month.
Dead by Daylight. Love the game, almost always have fun with it. But would never recommend someone starting the game. Low "rank" toxicity aside there's a steep learning curve full of 10 years worth of perks, add-ons, maps, killers etc that it'd take at least 1000 hours before you've experienced playing against everything at least once
I typically say that its an adventure focused around a boy trying to save his friends against Darkness, getting help from Donald and goofy and sometimes Mickey is there
Ark. Without a doubt. What a fantastic, terrible, ridiculously fun, awful game. I've sunken thousands of hours into it, I have regretenjoyed them all. I love it. Don't play it. Fuck Ark, you wonderful atrocity.
AOE2. One of the best games ever made, but so complicated and frustrating beyond the absolute most casual level of play. I have played off and on since it came out in 1998, and I am barely above average in ranked. Sometimes I stop for months at a time because it's bad for my anxiety.
Elite Dangerous - it's everything I want from a space sandbox but at its heart the main gameplay loop hasn't really changed in 40 years, and by modern standards it's dry as a hell with a ton of friction (hush at the back).
I would never recommend it to anyone who doesn't already have history with at least FE2 or FFE.
The beauty of Elite Dangerous is that, once you get over the learning curve, it becomes a sort of meditative experience more than a game. Look at pretty space scenery while you scan plants or haul cargo.
I love it. Played over 2000+ hours and still going. But I can't honestly say it's not a repetitive and slow grind.
This is 100% Yugioh. I absolutely love the game and I play it a few times a year, but wow I cannot recommend it to someone who has never played a TCG before and even people who have I have to really test the waters
Oh you want to follow the story. Make sure you play every game across multiple systems. Yeah they made the unplayable ones a cut scene movie like the mobile game and did rerelease them in to a package mostly. Dont forget to watch the movie.
Once you finish all of it. Go watch a YouTube video of a deep dive of the story because youll have missed things for sure.
League of legends. GL learning what 1000 champions do as a new player.
Barony. You need a 2 year degree to barely play the game. A university probably has a master program for it somewhere so you can actually acomplish something in it.
Ark. I really enjoyed the first game. Everything ive heard about it since then? Just dont.
I personally love it and grew up with it, but I only hear criticisms for it. I do admit that the game is pretty clunky and hasn't aged that well, so I wouldn't recommend it to anyone.
But the story is mid, the combat is boring, the quests are so mediocre they make ESO look like a masterpiece, the map is way too big, the characters are forgettable...
I love the character building and the progression, but the game in itself is so mid I would recommend just playing older AC games like Black Flag
I also loved it. The gameplay loop was fun, there was no assassin shit, just like sneaky Spartan, and Spartan with a bow. Stealth is option you just break in and nest people with a hammer on fire. You had that awesome kick move and this one aoe that just exploded you on fire and pretty much the whole town can burn down because it doesn't care if you kill pedestrians, it just just releases bosses after you that all have cool shit and chase you around the entire map of Greece.
I don't know what's not to love about that game. Felt like Ubisoft tried to do a prequel to God of war. They kinda did in the dlc.
Space engineers. The learning curve is hella steep, and theres like a ton of DLCs now for new content.
I play with a lotta mods and honestly its just not gonna be everyone's bag. Ita about building cool spaceships and using them to solve mining problems in apace.
For me Persona 5 Royal and Baldurs Gate 3, for the same reasons.
Great soundtrack, visuals, gameplay, story, and characters. However, both of them are around 150+ hours. It is hard to recommend anything that has the time commitment of a full month of full time work.
On the flip side though, most people who would like it already know if they would.
This is one of the most genuine answers that isn't just "lol tough game or lol it's kinda lame I know" Pathologic is absolute misery.
For me? Dwarf Fortress (pre-Steam version)
Such an absolute onion of a game, that requires butting through terrible graphics, a clunky UI, and an absolute fucking spiderweb of mechanics and commands (that are never explained).. but when it clicks? Nothing like it. By far.
I've been playing this game since, like, 2008 and it's only gotten more confusing than ever. Just so many variables, events, mechanics one has to know of and the new UI has made it much easier to manage but it's still a slog. Beyond the new one, the only reason I got familiar with the old one was good ol' fashioned practice until everything became muscle memory.
Even then there's still always something I don't know or understand going on in the game. It's cheesable and "winnable" in the sense it's eventually easy to make sure you never die.. but to truly master the game?
The entire Metal Gear Series. If you follow the entire thing, it's maybe the only true "one-of-one" experience in all of entertainment media. But if you jump in at any random point, you're missing most of what makes it so beloved. BUT if you start at the beginning, you're so late to the party and have so much game ahead of you, it's exhausting to even consider.
The series is also a victim of being so accessible. Some of the magic came from seeing the hype, behind bamboozled by the Raiden swap, then also being blown away by new Raiden later, etc. So just being able to grab two collections and play through the whole series with none of the context of anticipation... You literally just had to be there.
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u/AbroadCalm2085 Sep 04 '26
For me it was destiny 2. Sad.