How many and which bad games did you play this year?

  • Domi@lemmy.secnd.me
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    11 months ago

    Not “bad” but disappointing: No Man’s Sky. There’s a lot to be liked here but as someone who has played Elite Dangerous everything is just so incredibly dumbed down.

    Fighting is trivially easy, just hold S, shoot and grab a snack while doing it.

    There’s absolutely no consequences for anything. It doesn’t matter how much fuel I have because I can just find new fuel anywhere or teleport somewhere completely different. Doesn’t matter where I log out because the game will just throw me to the same system as my coop partner anyway.

    Doesn’t matter if the authorities want me, just fly into a station and all is forgotten. Got contraband? Just tell them to get lost and fly away casually. No bounty on my head, no nothing.

    Don’t get me wrong, Elite is definitely way too hardcore for casual play but at the same time the only thing No Man’s Sky has done is make me want to play Elite again.

    • cafuneandchill@beehaw.org
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      11 months ago

      Same here – I’ve been doing exploration exclusively in Elite, and it got kinda samey and boring. Yet, somehow playing Elite was so mentally taxing, it quite often felt like having a second job. So, I decided to try out NMS, after hearing about its redemption so much.

      The story of NMS was kinda neat, even though it was presented in a very dry way. The visuals were also not bad. Looking at planetary landscapes sometimes felt like stepping into the world of The Sand Sea and the Plateaux of Mirrors, which is a very good thing imo.

      The actual gameplay just wasn’t engaging enough, though, and super janky (making gas/mineral farms sucks). Like, it’s very hard to find meaning in whatever you’re doing in that game. In contrast, doing exploration in Outer Wilds was very fun, because it felt like you were exploring an actual living world. In NMS, you get the same prefab randomly generated building and a sliver of lore. No environmental storytelling, no anything. So, it’s very difficult to connect to NMS’s world.

    • tygerprints@kbin.social
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      11 months ago

      I wanted to like “No Man’s Sky,” when it was finally available on the Switch (my PS4 had just died when it came out) I was elated to play it. After a couple hours of playing, I wanted those two hours of my life back. An ugly game with very little color, and absolutely no direction as to what you’re supposed to be doing, I wasted those two hours trying to figure out what the hell was going on. I absolutely hated it - the only game I ever asked for a refund on.

      • davehtaylor@beehaw.org
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        11 months ago

        I’ve often described NMS as Minecraft in Space. The “story”, such as it is, is completely pointless and superfluous. You just fly around, mine minerals, build stuff, and that’s about it. And it wears thin really quickly.