I played a trial of WoW, and well, I was bored out my mind.. Don't hate the game, just won't play it.
Can't say I hate any game... even some misguided capitalist arse-fodder like Kane & Lynch... However... stuff I've played that I wish I had the time added back onto my life for:- Any CoD after 2... especially the Treyarch attempts. The new MoH... oooh look I can shoot and say **** at the same time... pukka special forces me. Empire: Total War... loved Shogun, MTW1 and even the bug fest that was MTW2... but just ack, ack, ack. Starcraft 2... sooner or later those guys will be so bitter because it's NOT Company of Heroes. WoW... I think previous posters have illustrated my sentiments... Sand box games... isn't one of the points of a computer game to pit you against the computer and not just how tough you want to make life for yourself? Civ 5 (so flame me)... Sid takes marketing tips from SI Games... meh. The Sims... horrible. Can't really comment on online shooters... my gaming time has never allowed to get good enough to last 10 seconds so I just don't buy them. Man that sounds bitter....
Most hated games I've ever had the misfortune to play (or maybe the least impressive): GTA IV: I can't believe I got sucked in by the hype - best graphics, best game, etc. It was okay in parts and the graphics were good to bad to good but never great. I got sooo bored with it though. Drive here do this. Drive here do that. Drive somewhere else and then back again. Will NOT play the next one. What could of made it better? With all that driving it should of been fun but the cars handled like animal muck - not very nice! Now if it was fun to drive like in Burnout Paradise.. COD MW2: I'm talking about the single player here as I'm not a great online gamer. The story(?) was awful and even a novice like me was finished in 5-6 hours (including cut-scenes). I guess I just don't get the mindless shooting for the sake of it - I want more from a game. The co-op seemed okay and then there is online but leave out the single player next time. Bought for £27, traded in for £35 so all was not lost! Virtual Fighter V: Just was bored to death with it. My fault for buying it! Formula One (PS2): Can't remember which year but awful. I do like the look of the new one, though. It seems like they have learned from the past and made a varied and fun game that captures the essence that is Formula One. Haze (PS3): One of the best trailers I have ever seen. Once viewed in the local game shop I was wowed. Such a pity it was rushed out. If it was developed today it may be an awesome game with an original theme. Such promise.. I don't think I want to play any of the above games ever again - that says it all!
Gotta agree on the Virtual fighter - pretty bland. Much prefer things like (old school) street fighter, or mortal kombat of course.
Totally agree with Haze. I'm not going to get into the GTA IV debate, because IMO I thought it was very meh on Xbox with the crappy graphics and framerate but I really enjoyed it on the PC. The Ballad of Gay Tony has some of the best characters i've seen in a game aswell, loved it. Anyway one from me - I once bought a PC game called "Soldner", and it's easily one of the worst games i've played. Did anyone here manage to buy this by accident? I agree with Civ IV also. I do like Strategy games but this I thought was really crap. The demo didn't exactly help though, it made no attempt to show you what to do or anything.
Funny how way of thinking works sometimes Medieval Total War 2 its the best of the series... and I never had any bug problems with game... never crashed seriously. Empire Total War its just Beatiful man... tho this is indeed full of known bugs everywhere... I still love it... so many little well done details makes the game worth it: the way the artillery works... the sea action... little sea man working around the ships... its awesome
Warcraft III. If ever there was a game that epitomizes the phenomenon known as 'nostalgia goggles', it's this one. It has a fantastically good story strung together by some of the worst non-gameplay ever passed off as gameplay. People looking back tend to remember the awesome story and forget the abysmal gameplay (which at the time seemed less horrible compared to all the other many, many horrible games coming out for the PS1 and dreamcast) and mistakenly recommend people to play it now, not realising how badly it will compare to anything made in the last 8 years.
I know I will get a lot of boo's here. I have recently tried the new Battlefield series again and I just think what a load of trash. Has to be the only game you have stick a whole magazine into someone for them to drop. The game engine with the battlefield games is just total rubbish and I have given each one a go and even left a squad because they went over to the battlefield series. No one can say I never gave it a go that's for sure. AA was also over hyped in my opinion, I just wish someone could use the same gaming engine that novalogic used.
COD (didn't enjoy any after number 1) GTA after GTA2 Halo (All of them. Really, nothing special, maybe it's special for console peeps but PC has had better for years) Grantrourismo (Forza just handles better imo, also feels truer to the real thing, again, imo) Crysis Splinter Cell Fallout 3 (seriously, 1 and 2 were way better than this version of Oblivion) Assassins Creed Civ (just bores me to tears) Sports Games (just go out there and do it for real if you want to play football, don't play on a screen) C&C series. (Imo Starcraft, TA and others were superior) Counterstrike I'm sure I could think of more. The wonderful thing about the games industry though, is that there are so many different games out there and bound to be something you enjoy. Be it the latest multi-million pound supposedly AAAAA**** title or a little Indie game by some unknown or bedroom developer making games in flash, there is something for everyone. And that is why I love games.
For me it has to be Perfect Dark Zero. I couldn't wait for this after playing the original to death. What a massive disappointment. I think I played it for about 2hrs before ditching it. Cod 4: Bought it as a few friends played this on-line as an alternative to BF2. The multi player has to be one of the worst experiences I have ever encountered. The maps were so small that after 5 steps you were back to where you started from. Truly horrific. Not my worst ever purchase as the single player saved it.
Gotta love the people who say they hate a game, then list a bunch of genre traits as the flawed parts of the game. The reasons might be valid, but I can't help but feel it misses the point. Someone saying they dislike WoW because of grindy gameplay is like saying they hate Quake because it involves shooting. Someone saying they hate Baldur's Gate 1 & 2 but love the Dark Alliance games should instead say they hate real RPGs that require thought and tactics and prefer to play brainless, popcorn-hack&slashers. If you don't like turn-based battles or Japanese quirkiness, don't play JRPGs and don't bring up that ridiculous realism argument against turn-based combat. Claiming that turn-based combat in an RPG is unrealistic is a pointless, redundant statement given that it's a game and that it doesn't claim to model reality to begin with. You might as well say it's stupid to take turns in Monopoly just because the property market in reality isn't turn-based. - I think the only things that could make me hate a certain game are the wider negative effect its release and popularity has on the games industry, or having bought a game and feeling I wasted my money because of its low quality or limited replayability. Good games that are missed opportunities are also frustrating, such as Deus Ex: Invisible War. Bioshock : A dumbed-down, Xbox-era rehash of System Shock 2 with about as much claim to spiritual succession as any other game that blatantly ripped off features and plot elements from a previous, unrelated title. Had they not hyped it up as the spiritial successor to the SS series I might have cut it some slack, but it wouldn't change the fact that everything from the story to gameplay elements was copied and pasted from the Shock series to the point of predictability, and badly at that - being heavily dumbed-down for the mass market. Some good production values and not a lot else. I waited until it was €20 in a steam sale and still felt as though I had been ripped off by the time I finished it. That such a philosophically and aesthetically pretentious game ended with a ridiculous boss battle just nailed the coffin lid for me. Halo : The original was a great, enjoyable game in its own right but scarcely anything groundbreaking and certainly not to the degree the press and industry harp on about. Disappointingly shallow and vapid, too; compared to what was promised in the early previews back when it was a Mac/PC title. A modern-day Goldeneye in that it caused the console crowd to rant on and on about how shooters were better on consoles without actually having a clue or experience for comparison and still insisting that their analog sticks are somehow equivalent to (or better than) the mouse & keyboard combination. I think Halo's success at the hands of an ignorant mass market who didn't know any better has been instrumental in the shift towards console-centric shooters in the wider industry and while I enjoy the game when I play it, I resent everything it stands for. If the PC release hadn't been artificially delayed and neutered (by the removal of co-op play) I imagine it would have been more realistically appraised in comparison to its contemporary peers, instead of lauded as being so new and revolutionary when it really, really wasn't. Modern Warfare 2 : Solely on the grounds of selling so well to the (again) ignorant masses who cough up their €60 despite the developers and publishers treating them like the morons they are and cutting features that we've come to expect from a quality title while later releasing content that should have been free with ridiculous price tags. Any game with paid DLC : The worst paradigm shift in the gaming industry's history. These days we're expected to pay through the nose for content that years ago we received as part of the actual game we just bought or later for free from enthusiastic developers who appreciate their fans. They can harp on about piracy or whatever other excuses but we all know the Bobby Koticks of the world want us to pay €60 for the game and another €60 for the must-have DLC regardless of value, all the while putting up with invasive DRM and anti-piracy phone-home systems. Again, I can't help but feel that ignorant consumers and gamers who don't know any better (or don't care) are throwing their money at the publishers and lapping it up while being bent over and wallet-raped; while those of us who experienced the days of getting addons, patches, SDKs and map-packs for free can only watch and cringe as the ignorant ones ruin the industry behind our hobby. Maybe I don't hate any games at all, I just hate the people who buy them without being critical consumers who demand more from their products or pirate the games without regard for the people who worked to create them.
I agree with most of what you said, especially about those games you listed. However I don't agree with the first part. I think people have a valid point when complaining about some stuff. The grindy nature of MMORPG's for example. They don't HAVE to be grindy. It's not like it's unavoidable. A perfect example is the first 20 levels of Age of Conan. It was great, with absolutely no grind at all. The problem is that they can't usually sustain that kind of gameplay for a long time, so after level 20 it became a full on grind fest. Some games fare better than others with this kind of thing, so I think it's a valid complaint. I actually quite liked WoW for the first 30-40 levels or so. It was semi grindy but the progress was so fast, it didn't really feel tedious to me, and I was constantly getting new skills and spells and discovering new locations. Later on though it got really bad, and the worst part was when you reach max level, and all that was left for me to do was grind through the same PVP content for a set of PVP gear, or grind through dungeons for raid/group gear. My friend got stuck in, and would do his "daily quests" like it was just another one of his daily chores. I would never do that. The same goes for farming the materials. I can't even remember what the materials were, but I remember sitting in a little virtual village killing the same creatures over and over, and I got about 2 of the materials in about 2 hours of grinding. Obviously I quit shortly after I realised that.
Agreed. There's certainly limits to how far one can complain, such as having problems with shooting in a first person shooter, but there are genre-based factors which may not be entirely enjoyable and only exist due to tradition and lack of creativity. You chose an excellent example with MMORPGs, particularly for describing tradition. Why do MMORPGs usually come with a grind? Because they always have. But what about the genre says it must have grind to it? The genre is Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Game, as long as the game meets these core features then it is an MMORPG. It's simply a matter of perception of genres, and how many people percieve genres as being a compilation of the previous games that create it, rather than the overarching theme which may or may not include features that just so happen to be common in all of the defining games. Take for example the very common "RPG" genre. What comes to mind? Final Fantasy, Dungeons and Dragons, Neverwinter Nights, Oblivion, Dragon Age? What's a common theme? Defeating monsters to get items, level up, and create gear. But what does that have to do with playing a role? The genre is Role Playing Game. Nothing else is required, the rest is just an easy and commonplace system that goes well with playing a role. Your own examples of RPGs Zurechial, ones which require thought and tactics, what does that have to do with playing a role? God of War is a decent hack n' slash to describe this. Is the gameplay more mindless than some other RPGs? Perhaps. But you're playing the role of Kratos, it's a role playing game. The root problem is a lack of definition as to just what genres are describing. Because of this, multiple genres can be applied to a single game to define various aspects of it. Take God of War again. It's a role playing game by the nature of the storytelling placing the character in the player's hands. It's an action game by its... well, action. And of course, it's also a Hack n' Slash by the nature of its gameplay. This ability to apply multiple genres doesn't sit well with most people, so the genres have cleverly been shifted to become more mutually exclusive. Most Hack n' Slashes are RPGs, so to differentiate the RPG genre is shifted to not include them. Or we get things like the RTS genre born from the broad Strategy describe a more specific gameplay style. JRPGs are created from RPGs to protect their specific playstyle from citicism. Genres can be thrown around and redefined at will in order to suit one's cause. The name is really all that remains final.
I don't disagree with either of you on the points you make, but I think we're approaching the topic from different angles. My point isn't that we shouldn't criticise the established traditions associated with certain genres (such as grinds in MMOs or turn-based combat in JRPGs), more that the very reason genres exist is the purpose of classification. There are plenty of traditions in games design that come from catering to certain genres, some of which we would be better off without; but I think that's more of a broad issue than a complaint that can be levelled against individual games of that genre. On the topic of what an RPG constitutes; I think it's unfortunate that the genre has such a vague name but I also accept that as the way it is for the sake of pragmatism. When I think of an RPG, I think of a game with statistics, tactics, combat that involves rolling dice (either physically, visually or figuratively with a random number generator), character and plot development, equipment gathering. None of those have anything to do with the term 'RolePlaying' in a literal sense, but have come to be associated with the genre due its roots in Pen & Paper RPGs such as Dungeons & Dragons. Many RPGs have only a subset of those traits and some RPGs have none of them (Heavy Rain, for instance is without a doubt a game in which the player assumes certain character roles; but has none of the RPG hallmarks that place it in that genre for most people), and that just means they fit the genre in terms of its literal defintion but maybe not in terms of the practical defintion we've come to associate with it. Genres allow us to decide in advance whether we'll probably like a particular game or not and it just struck me as silly that people would list genre-defining traits as reasons for hating individual games. Despite the vagueness of certain genre definitions, they remain useful in determining personal taste. If I hated hardcore AD&D RPGs I'd know better than to single out Baldur's Gate or Temple of Elemental Evil. If I hated sports games I wouldn't mention FIFA or Madden as a game I hated without having another reason beyond it merely being a type of game I don't enjoy. It's a matter of pedantics and I'm not really trying to tell anyone how they should post (I'm not that much of an ass.. I swear ), I'm just saying that it comes across as being uninformed when someone gives a genre-defining trait as the reason for hating a game. Even though nobody is going to get hurt or offended by anyone else's opinion in a thread like this (hopefully, unless we have the developers of mentioned games reading ), it still strikes me as unfair to the game in question when the person commenting should probably just avoid the genre or style of game in the first place. The argument could be made that every gamer can't be expected to know in advance what a game consitutes before they play it; but then that's one of the things reviews are good for, and who buys something without making themselves informed first? If someone buys a game without making themselves informed and later hates the game then it's their own ignorance at fault. (I was fully informed about Bioshock and knew it had aspects I wouldn't like, but I was determined to give it a fair chance in case it could change my opinion. It didn't.) Maybe nobody else cares how uninformed they come across when they slam a game on the grounds of it being the type of game it is and not to their taste, and that's fine too (I'm not trying to tell anyone how to post, I promise!); but that's just how it reads to me, as one of the resident, longwinded, know-it-all elitists of the forum. My forum title does give fair warning, after all.
Yep. I know that if a game is called "Survival Horror" then I'll hate it. I learned that after buying some game called Condemned. Everyone talks about how it's so amazing, but to me it was just all about running around bonking people on the head with big sticks. And I've seen some other games with that title which weren't any better, so I just avoid them now. Which is a shame because I loved Alone in the Dark in the dos days. RPG's are a weird one though because I hate most of them, which is usually a good sign that it's just not a genre for me. But there are some that happen to be the best gameplay experiences I've ever had with gaming. With FPS's it's similar too. I grew up playing FPS's, so by my mid teens I was bored to death of "run & gun". Wolfenstein, Doom, Quake, etc.. had burned me out. So even today, if I ever play a new FPS, I'm almost instantly bored if it's just-another-FPS. But as soon as they play around with the formula a bit, it can really change things for me. An example being SWAT 4 (pretty damn old now). But that game is so slow and tactical, it was a whole different experience for me. System Shock a better example, it was a FPS but it was far more thoughtful than a run and gun. The premise was basically the same as Doom, but it played completely differently. I could peak around corners, collect lots of weapons with different ammo types, hoard explosive and grenades to use in the most difficult situations, I had read all the logs to find out wtf is going on, and it was really hard to navigate the levels too. You had to pay attention and learn to find your way around. I loved it. But I'm an elitist too, and I'm also super picky, and the older I get, the worse it gets for me. I'm at the point now where I hate 90% of games on the market, and find the next 5% to be just mediocre. It only leaves me with about half a dozen games in an entire year that I really love to play. It's pretty crappy, but I just have to make the most of the ones that I do love.
GTA 4 After this I will never buy another GTA game, loved the rest of the series though. MW2 Nothing to say here that hasn't already been said a hundred times (really looking forward to BO). Any RTS game, but only because I can't play them. I've tried playing Company of Heroes about 20 times and I can't play them.
The other big thing with "Grind" in MMO's is that MMO's by their very nature have to last much, much longer than any other game, most at least last a year (not including APB ) with many going on for multiple years, i know Anarchy online recently celebrated its ninth birthday. It's not really possible to create 9 years worth of gameplay in a reasonable timescale, so some amount of padding (grind) has to be introduced to lengthen the games playtime, and keep people subscribed. I think the reason that WoW is considered (and i agree) more grindy than most, is that there is such little freedom at lower levels (or really any level <80) Duel spec, the good battlegrounds, dungeons that require anything other than brute force, all require high levels. Now that you get your specs "main" spell at level 10, and talents much less frequently, there is even less to look forward to until you get to 80, it just leads to you feeling that the early game exsists purely to get you to 80 with as little fuss as possible, rather than as a fun adventure. Combine this with the fact that blizzard seem to be trying to homogenise all the classes (i want my rogue quests back dammit) making the playstyles similar thus alts less fun, just seems to add to the feel of grind.
