Games

I have tried on multiple occasions to get into 4x games and my brain is just too simple.

The 4x elements have to be secondary and not the primary focus. Age of wonders planetfall and Warhammer 2? Great. Imperator Rome and europa universalis? Might as well look at a fucking spreadsheet lol.

Wish I could get into the micro and efficiency of numbers but it doesn't do anything for me. Even with an interest in Rome.

Deep Rock Galactic.

Yeah I said it.

I wanted to like it, but the gun play was underwhelming and gameplay kind of boring.

Worst of all was the progression. Upgrades were tiered in ways that made 1 a clear best choice. Perks were uninteresting passives or actives with bizarre activation requirements. No way to upgrade flares or pickaxes. And I’m not a guy that cares about cosmetics, so it just didn’t work for me.

I’m happy for everyone else that got a GOAT experience though.

I'm a souls hater. They are just slow and boring games.

anything with turn-based combat as a core mechanic is an instant skip, nothing else about the game matters

I share your opinion on both of those games. I also was not a huge fan of Monster Hunter or GTA,

Zelda breath of the wild - it's one of the worst Zelda games I've ever played and I've played so many. There were so many bad decisions made with this game from weapons breaking to getting rid of traditional dungeons. It's a great open world game but a terrible Zelda game.

The Horizon series by Guerilla Games - These games are good for the most part, however they suffer from long stretches of boring open world where you have to fight robot dinosaurs with underpowered weapons. The whole point of the combat is to find weaknesses with the enemies and exploit/attack those weaknesses, but the game never at any point explicitly explains that concept or focuses on that concept. It expects you to just understand what to do. Not to mention the absolutely stupid grinding for mats to make new weapons and armor. Melee combat is terrible, the story for the most part is pretty good but man does it take forever to pick up, it overstays it's welcome. They are technical powerhouses but just so grindy and boring.

Almost Anything Open World tbh

Every open world game has turned into the same “do this x times to get y reward that has no relevance whatsoever to the game”

I miss the days of games on rails. I could sit down, enjoy a game and play it through to the end in 10-20 hours. Now it seems like every game is trying to milk 100+ hours of gameplay time out of even the most basic of stories and mechanics.

I realize this is an overgeneralization I'm making.

every game made since the ps2 was officially retired. I don't hate them because they're hard and I'm just not getting the handle of gameplay. I hate them for specific reasons:

1. the reliance on online modes. games used to be a singular affair between the player and the game. since 2008 online modes have become increasingly necessary to a requirement. with online modes comes a need for a server dedicated to that game. so what happens when the company shuts that server down? you're sol. and piggybacking on that
2. games are released buggy out of the box. before a game wasn't published until it was done. now it's released on a target date and patches get released along the way. so if you happen to be in a position where you have the physical media but no internet you could have a broken game and not be able to do anything about it. I just think about that situation with the tony hawk game where the manus didn't ship the game on the disc and players had to download the entire game as an "update". and what's going to happen when that server shuts down?
3. games are moving to downloads instead of on physical media. I'm a full believer in you buy a game you own it. some game publisher just said recently that players shouldn't own their games anymore. gaming is going to move to a streaming model where you own a service (console/platform) and games will move on and off it when a licensing deal expires. sorry I don't want any part of that.
4. games made that don't require you to be online to have any kind of gameplay are becoming rare. I'm the game player that plays the game just to play the game and doesn't want to play against another human player online. my competitive juices don't flow that way. I'm perfectly fine playing against the game's ai.

tldr the internet killed gaming for me.

Third-person is objectively superior to first-person.

Nier Automata, I thought it was a bad pretentious story with a bad gameplay
The music is good tho

Sports games.

I know people who like them exist given the sales. But not only do I not play or like sports games - no one that plays games in my social circle does either.

It's like the Venn diagram for people who play RPGs and those who play sports games is just two circles.

Fortnite and every souls-like

Dark Souls 3 and only Dark Souls 3. I love Dark Souls 1 and 2, Elden Ring, Bloodborne is my favorite game, and Sekiro. But Dark Souls 3 is just so boring and unfun. Even the ingame world feels uninterested in this game, (because it kinda is over the whole age of fire thing.) Everything is gross and brown it just makes exploring kind of icky. DS1 had a good balance of gross and majestic locations and enemies. DS2 suffered from too few monsters and too many generic armored knights, and locations felt too clean and empty.

It feel like this game does not like you to diversify your build. Armor is basically cosmetic, and offers very slight damage protection. Poise sucks, and is basically removed, so making a tank build kind of sucks. Its so damn fast and doesn't give you a ton of options like Elden Ring does. DS3 is certainly the most actiony of the action rpgs, and idk, I'd like more rpg. I remember watching a video about how playing these games at level 1 is the intended and best way to play. I can kind of see that, I think that discredits a lot of the rpg elements in these games. I always saw permadeath runs as the more fun way to play, especially in DS2, that game was like designed to be run as an arcade game.

The game also feels like it rides on nostalgia pretty hard. Anor Londo? Thats here. Andre? He's here. Firelink Shrine? Thats here, too. Artorias? There's a whole cult trying to cosplay as him. I actually think DS2 handled this sort of thing better, it being so far it the future from DS1 that most characters and places from 1 are only legend or ancient history. I think it gave 2 a sense of discovery, even if DS2 certainly has much less coherent lore lol.

There are good things in this game. The dlc is fantastic. Certain areas look downright stunning, often helped by the muted color palette. A lot of the bosses are fun when you use the correct play style for them. Pontiff Sullivan or Champion Gundyr is my favorite boss on my most recent playthrough, but I haven't gotten to Gale, the Twin Princes or Midir yet.

3D Grand Theft Auto games (GTA 3, 4, 5) Some video essay (I can't recall which one) compared GTA's attitude to that of the protagonist of "Catcher in the Rye". Its comedy is very cynical, just pointing fingers at everything and saying "they are phony", "they suck, don't they" and "we are too cool to even admit we're cool". The tone always rubbed me the wrong way and felt like these white gangsta rappers - Vanilla Ice and the kind. Rampant fanboyism does not help, either. I dared critisize GTA6 trailer somewhere (by saying "this is not for me, I will pass") to be downvoted to oblivion and I shit you not, receive threats in DMs.

No Man's Sky When it came out, NMS was a broken, buggy mess of a game with inventory management as a central mechanic. Punch trees got replaced with laser plants, but it's basically the same loop of gather, combine, refine, build better tools. After a decade, NMS is a game chock-full of various content, with inventory management as a central mechanic. Not for me.

Souls-likes and Metroidvanias I have plenty of rewarding challenges in my real live and consider myself lucky enough to have work that's fulfilling and gratifying. I don't seek validation in games - I seek relaxation and escapism. I play most games on easy and don't feel like proving my skills in the game is the right use of my time. I can appreciate skilled players - often watching speedruns, 100% attempts or professional tournaments, but when it comes to playing - I rather pick fun, easy, light entertainment. (Death Stranding is one of my all-time favorites)

on a flip note, a game that everyone seems to hate and I quite enjoy is Forspoken Sure, the dialog is cringe and there's way too much of the same barks repeating (I need to look through menus, I think they added some slider to adjust the rate if I recall), but the traversal is fun, I love the UI design (gold and purple), I think costumes are freaking fantastic and combat is easy enough (on easy) to happily zone out to and play an hour here or there.

Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Elden Ring, any "Soulsborne" game really. I get why people like them, and I tried multiple times, but it just isn't working on me.

I'm going to have to tar and feather and entire genre I'm afraid.

It's the weird intersection of visual novel and dating simulators.

They are truly horrible derivative fantasy, written by severely emotionally stunted incels with less sexual/world experience and writing skill than the average grade 7 student.

The 2 that you mentioned and God of War 2018.

I honestly don't get what people love so much about that game, the combat is simple and kinda sloppy, boss and enemy variety is non-existent and traversal is a joke.

I get that the story is good but it's not so good that I can look past everything else, it even has a few big issues like the amount of times the game throws a dumb obstacle in your way to justify some fetch quest like the black mist.