To me right now is the first Red Dead Redemption. Finally I’m able to play it, I’ve wait for over a decade. No spoilers, zero youtube gameplay videos, zero questions about the game to my friends. It gotta be me, and the game, it happened, and I think it sucks.
Maybe you thinking in “well, you shouldn’t play the second first”. I did not. My first Red Dead game was Red Dead Revolver, I was able to play it a few years ago when I could buy a PS2, but I couldn’t get a PS3 nor a Xbox 360 to play RDR1. It grinded my gears because we got the prequel in PC. When RDR1 came to PC it was so freaking expensive, yet today, I think it is expensive. I was able to buy the game some weeks ago while there was a Steam Sale, and well, I regreat it now.
I don’t like its exploration, its missions, its characters, its world, its secondary missions. its wanted system, and nothing but less important: has a lot of bugs.
That’s my experience in a few words.
What’s the game that you wanted to play but it was a total mess?
Dragon Quest Builders 2 kind of fits the bill for me here. I wanted to play it from the moment I learned about it. I had zero experience with 1, or any other dragon quest games. My biggest issue, and im still quite angry about it, is that the game I wanted to play, and the game the trailers promised actually does exist. Its all functional. The only way to play it though is the campaign, and its so frustratingly hand-holding and text-heavy it actually hurt to play.
“we need to build the BRONZE ROOM. So we’ll need some BRONZE. Theres some BRONZE in the cave nearby.” [Camera pans over to where the bronze is.] “Okay! We’ll go and get the BRONZE!” “I think 3 pieces OF BRONZE should do it.”
Head over towards the cave.
Hey! We’re near the BRONZE cave! Isn’t this where they said we could get the BRONZE that we need to complete the BRONZE ROOM? Let’s get the BRONZE!
Head towards the bronze.
Hey! It’s the BRONZE that we need to make the BRONZE ROOM! Lets mine some quick so we can make the BRONZE ROOM! You can do this! Let’s go!
Mine the bronze
[BRONZE acquired!]
Hey! Thats it! We just mined the first piece of BRONZE that we need! Didn’t the quest-giver say we needed 3 pieces? What are we waiting for? Lets mine 2 MORE!
Mine 2 more
Thats it! Weve got all the BRONZE that we need to make the BRONZE ROOM! lets Head back to the base as quickly as we can to make the BRONZE ROOM.
Head back to the base, get talked to by the quest giver for a solid minute about the importance of the bronze room. Then the concept of the silver room comes up. You think 'that was a really really really long-winded tutorial, but they’ll leave me alone to do the silver and gold now that I know what to do. No. Go back to the top of that list but replace BRONZE with SILVER. Then gold. Then do it again and again and again until the credits roll and you realise the game never actually happens and you just wasted a bunch of your life and you’ll never ever get it back and they could have made an excellent game, and they actually did, they just wouldn’t let you play it.
Im still pretty bitter about that whole experience.
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Sonic CD.
For years and years it was a mythical sonic game, a rare golden-era game hardly anyone had got to play. And I’d slightly miss remembered it appearing way more advanced and fluid than a mega drive game.
After being obsessed with Sonic in my youth, after finally getting to play it, it just felt like a less enjoyable Sonic 1.
I’ve never even bothered to finish it.
My personal experience with the Mega Drive Sonic games was always “fun first 2 stages, not so fun afterwards”
I had a really love/hate relationship with the pinball stages in Sonic 2.
Agreed, and the level design in Sonic CD is absolutely atrocious. It’s like they put the guy who designed the Spring Yard Zone in Sonic 1 in charge of the entire game. Sonic 2 is vastly superior, and I maintain to this day that anyone who claims Sonic CD is better is either deliberately trolling or is doing some kind of more-hipster-than-thou thing as their shtick.
Strike vector. Liked the switching from flight to hover in combat. Bought it, 2 months later the servers shut down and strike vector 2 was announced for some console no one probably cares about now.
Something similar happened to me with F.E.A.R. Online. I don’t know if are servers now, but back then I only was able to play like to weeks.
Dang, I wish you had played the second one first. Still might not be your thing, but it was a much better story and much better gameplay.
One of the things that make me feel in alone in the RDR’s world is that you can’t interact with any NPC properly, like you does in Fallout 3 or Skyrim. The only times you talk with NPCs is in cinnematics, and is not like you can choose multiple options to interact. In RDR are the NPCs the ones who interact with you by challenging you to a duel, looking for help, ambusshing you, etc. I’m not aware, but I can bet that it’s the same in RDR2.
Yes, that detail is exactly the same in 2.
I’m completely the other way. Loved the first one and can’t get to grips with RDR2. There’s too much stuff to do and not enough riding around gunning down bad guys
It’s set in the 1800s! Everyone’s a racist or sexist, so everyone’s a bad guy. Fire away!
I basically completely agree with this comment here https://lemmy.world/comment/22443131
I wanted to play Cuphead because I really liked the concept and the aesthetic. I got it not knowing its reputation for being hard as absolute fuck. Played it for several days with increasing frustration, started watching walkthroughs, those didn’t help, still tried to stubbornly stick with it, and eventually got to the point where my heart just wasn’t in it anymore.
Yeah, I loved the concept, hated the gameplay. There’s a TV show that’s way better than playing the game.
If it helps, ive felt this way about a few games throughout my life and after beating my head against them for a while i would gice up and take a break. However, when returning later, i found things weren’t quite as hard for me, and i was able to make progress.
Don’t [permanently] give up!
…Or do. Gaming doesn’t have to be that deep. There are plenty of other experiences to enjoy, anyway!
Sekiro. I do not think its a bad game, I think it’s excellent. But it is not for me. It requires rhythm and excellent reaction time, and I have neither. I have zero timing abilities, unless its like RE4 QTEs because i just need to do it a few times in a row at most, but the reactions being so constant and fast, I can not do it, i just cant, its frustrating and makes me feel stupid when I die to normal enemies. And its not like a Souls game, where I can make a build different, or summon someone for help. Again, its just not for me, I do not think its a bad game.
I feel similarly. I can do the rhythm and timing stuff, but I just kept wanting to do something different each time and there’s just no room for that in Sekiro. You play Sekiro’s way and that’s kind of it.
That and the grappling hook parkour kept giving me light vertigo.
Robocraft 2. I loved the original, but they messed up its monetization really bad over time, when a sequel got announced i was expecting the game to return to its roots with a rewrite. Instead, it felt more of a downgrade compared to the original.
Til that there is a second one now. Loved the first one, especially before they removed tiers, kinda stopped playing about when they did that
Ho boy! Don’t buy RDR2 in that case. Worst (and last) full price game I’ve bought. Goddamn disappointing
Right know for me is Baldur’s Gates, it really don’t scratch my hitch. I have to play it in baby difficulty because I’m no tactician and I’m not a min maxer playing DnD so this game is really not for me
Don’t worry about the difficulty level and just play for the story.
If that isn’t for you, then definitely throw in the towel. I am truly biased though as I have played D&D for a good deal of my life.
F5 and F8 for quicksave and quickload. As my son tells me: “Don’t tell me how to play my $60 game.”
I like to go back to old games that were well regarded in their time but I missed. It’s neat to see what holds up and what doesn’t, but the biggest disappointment to me has to be Secret of Mana. So many people love that game, so I went in with high expectations. I instead found the combat way too simple when it even lets me play, far too often, it takes control away from your characters through annoying status effects. I could not stand it and dropped it fairly quick.
Trials of Mana is a far better game than Secret of Mana in my opinion but the combat is a slog still. It’s especially bad being real time with move cool downs but what really kills me is the game pausing every time a magic spell is cast or opening the item wheel, which is constantly. Idk how anyone playing co-op could put up with that lol it’s so tedious already without adding 1 or 2 friends to the mix.
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smash bros melee. i was sooooo hyped. but the game felt way too fast for me compared to n64 smash, and the litany of clone characters was a massive letdown.
Skulls and bones. Sailing in black flag is probably my favorite gaming experience ever. Ubisoft announced a sailing game right after. All they had to do was add some upgrade paths so people could set up their ships for different playstyles. Like 10 years later, the game finally came out. It’s the only game I’ve ever refunded. Everything about it was terrible.
I have a friend who defines his gaming existence by black flag. He’s bought it, multiple times on multiple consoles out of sheer love for the game.
Skull and bones came out, I expected that to define the next 6 months of my life. Not a peep. Mentioned it and he just shrugs and goes: they had something good, and ubisofted it (this is after they’ve lost all consumer goodwill). I can’t help but agree
Wizard of Legend 2 was the biggest sequel let down in my eyes. What the fuck man. Shoulda been in the bag easy.
Got that in a bundle not that long ago. It’s essentially the same game as 1, but worse. Very disappointing.
Its vastly different than 1 by taking everything that waa good and tweaking it to be bad. No dash sorceries, cursed items changed and theres now some weird curse room, enemies are boring, unqiue art is now bland 3d, it is far more sluggish than the original, the persistent rewards lack any feeling of being rewarded. I can just go on and on. Not to mention the original had like 2 DLCs worth of free updates while the devs were still supporting it. All they had to do was rehash the dungeons and make it truly online. They could have released nearly the same game, with the same art, and if they just made it natively online co-op I would have bought it and blown the back out of it too. But its just lesser in every measurable way.
The bland-ing of the art and the sluggishness were the things that hit me most. The snappy action and well-matched visual art/hitboxes were key to my enjoyment of the first one. Also, really hate the voice acting. At no point playing the original did I think, ‘man these generic filler text lines would be so much better if they were being unskippably forced into my ears as audio.’
It just doesn’t make sense. Something happened. Because in 2002 this would easily have been shipped the next year with nearly the same things but “more”. 4 player co-op and more maps\items. Thats it. What happened in the decision department? I know the game sat for a bit after the updates stopped and then changed hands but I cannot fathom how this came to be. Okay, rants over I think the last demon on the subject came out with me on that one.
Seems like an obvious answer. Changing hands. The original creator of a thing is usually obsessed with it. Someone hired by a publisher to milk an IP is usually just there to work. I’m sliding more and more toward just assuming any game that isn’t basically 100% made before publishers get their mitts on it is going to suck.
But wouldnt be easier to basically releass the same game rather than make a new one? Thats what I dont understand unless they had no acces to 1’s source code and only got rights to make 2. Even then it seems it would be harder ro make something new.
Yes and no. I’d be amazed if any code from the original was/could be used for the second. One was unity. Two was unreal. C# vs C++.
The other thing is money. It doesn’t get the second dev team paid as well to spend a figurative 5 minutes polishing an old game when they can milk 5 months of pay out of the publisher by making a de-make. If the publisher is paying they might start from scratch just to have it take longer. I can’t say for sure, but I would bet real-life money the contract on the second was much more beneficial to the publisher vs the devs on the second than the first.
Then there’s marketability. Offer people the same game from 2016 and they’ll want to pay the same price as the game from 2016 and many of them won’t want to buy it at all because they still have the old one. Offer them something that looks like an upgrade (‘Look! It’s 3D now, and higher resolution.’) and milk people’s nostalgia for a game they loved ‘in the before times’ and you can squeeze modern inflated prices out of them.
Super Smash Bros Ultimate. The final smashes are all the same. I miss the final smashes of Super Smash Bros Brawl.
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Monster Hunter(World & Rise). I have played over 1k hours of Dark Souls 1&2 and my mate has 5k+ hours in the MH series. I gave it multiple tries but I can’t get into the combat mechanics. It feels too slow, while being pretty complex. And then there’s also quite some cutscenes, which is something that quickly turns my dumb brain off. :(
The hardest part for some people is getting through the story because MH games are notorious for “story? There’s a story here?” They try, but it’s never really that engaging. Definitely don’t try Wilds if you don’t like story stuff because that game they actually tried to push the story front an center. I really enjoyed it though, but I just love all Monster Hunter games lol
After the story (basically a long tutorial) it’s all just hunt hunt hunt hunt, there are no more cutscenes to worry about. If you can power through the story, or just chip away at it a little at a time, you might enjoy it more.
As for the combat, maybe you haven’t found the right weapon. Dual blades are really fast, the insect glaive is fairly fast and you can dart around in the air, sword and shield can be decently quick as well.
I think the closest to a disappointment is Skyrim, but it’s not the game’s fault. I was always looking forward to it. I love the non-linear role-play experience in a rich open world. I watched plenty of Let’s Plays. For some reason it took me a long time to get to it. But when I finally got to play it, I realized that the first-person 3D movement in this game made me dizzy and unwell to the point I couldn’t continue. I had this problem with some other games, too, but not to this extent. I might give it another try at some point. But maybe something like World of Anterra scratches that itch better.
An honorable mention is Planescape: Torment. I liked it, but having played Disco Elysium first, the writing and story in this game felt over-hyped.
I have the same nausea issue. Once you clear Skyrim’s tutorial level, you can switch to over the shoulder camera. But I didn’t know that on my first try. Ended up putting the game down & uninstalling it. Only came back to it years later after seeing some videos.
For what it’s worth, there are mods that let you skip the introduction entirely. “Live Another Life” used to be the go-to, but I think it’s been depreciated. Still would be a good starting point to search.
Pretty sure you can go 3rd person as soon as your hands are untied, when you enter the first building after either the Imperial or Stormcloak soldier
I didn’t want to do that at my first attempt for some reason (probably because it felt wrong/unauthentic to play Skyrim without first-person…). But after reading this, I tried it. It’s certainly a weird 3rd person perspective, yet I had so much more fun. So many many thanks for your suggestion!
