I have played Eve Online so many hours, and it’s a bad game. Don’t do it. you will spend hundreds of hours dreaming about the cool thing you’ll do later, but for 99% of players the cool thing will never happen. You will be part of the one percent’s cool thing.
Do you have a similar game?
Skyrim. The writing is horrible, I can’t remember the name and personalities of more than 5 NPCs, the town’s are microscopic, it can’t handle more than 5 NPCs on screen, all the dungeons are theme park rides with gift shop exits, combat is a horrific sloppy mess, it’s ugly, it has 4 voice actors, it’s a buggy mess despite being released 37 times, the only way to interact with the world is violence, and all of the quests are flaccid boring murderfests.
I’ve played hundreds of hours.
Actually the first thing I thought of. Played the fuck out of that game, but kinda always hated it while playing it. Can’t explain why. Was a weird time.
Your post is like a year late for me.
“Everyone” loved the game, so I finally bought it, installed mods for days, played it like an hour and haven’t touched it since. It’s just too shallow in comparison to other/modern games.
Definitely. Wide as an ocean and shallow as a puddle. I would have settled for a nice lake.
I do this with a ton of open world games. I always like the scenery and want to enjoy the game but end up bored. Some do manage to keep me interested, I got through Horizon Zero Dawn eventually and enjoyed God of War.
I quite enjoyed the Horizon series! I found the world building and enemy design really kept my interest, even if the game follows the Ubisoft formula (though I admittedly do not play that many open world games, and thus lack that jadedness).
Now I’m partway into Forbidden West after a half year break post Zero Dawn, and my partner’s just finished ZD. I can’t state how much I enjoy shooting components off enemies without getting trampled into the ground, like shooting apples off a tree.
I don’t disagree with anything but man, I love Skyrim anyways. I guess because quests do get repetitive I love the stupid ones, like the ones given by the Mara priestess.
People that complain about Skyrim town size complain that Lego Police stations are missing a back wall.
There are not a lot of games where you can play a thief and up being a vampire, after recovering from a alcohol night with a deadra.
I played tons of Morrowind and Oblivion… could not get into Skyrim at all and I tried multiple times.
When it released I wanted to play it one without any mods. I lasted less than a week.
I love ultimate Skyrim/wildlander though, it gives it a lot of improvements and I just rp in my head.
I’m kind of afraid for Starfield. It looks interesting but given their track record I’m afraid they might botch it up.
Don’t even be afraid they “might”, just accept that they will. Go into it with the understanding that it’s going to be an overhyped bugfest when it launches, that you can then eventually fix and massively overhaul with mods, just like every other Bethesda game, and then you can just skip the part where you’re disappointed.
And you will play hundreds more.
This is 1000% my Skyrim experience. Also, Oblivion and Fallout 3. and yet, I can’t get enough.
I mean, I clearly can, since I haven’t played them in a couple years, but you know what I mean.
Play some modded Morrowind and live the good life
Thank God Bethesda knows how mods keep them up or I wouldn’t bother with anything they put out.
Starfield mods bout to be crazy, I can feel it.
I must have played skyrim on 5 different platforms, started by playing 250 hours on pirated copy and then buying it and playing for 750 hours at least.
League of Legends
It’s a bad game that makes you bad by exposure
I really wanted to get into MOBA games, the idea seem really cool. But every one I’ve tried the meta/community seem infuriating.
It’s just annoying how everything has to follow the “meta” and if you do dare to try something else and you don’t perform above expectations you’ll get shit on. I just want to play the game the way I enjoy it sometimes.
I play Blizzard’s MOBA, Heroes of the Storm, every now and then.
Similar to most others, the community can be toxic as fuck, but the “vs AI” mode is fun enough to keep me coming back.
It’s so good. I tried it first and then tried LOL. I couldn’t do it because it was such a step back.
The worst game I’ve ever sunk thousands of hours into
Yep, this is mine. And I have barely any time in compared to serious players. But when it was first becoming a thing I think I probably put in 50+ hours playing with my friends. As someone who primarily plays single player games this is a lot. Then I realized I hated every minute playing, and it was making me hate my own friends. It was actually stressful to play. I would be angry after ever play session. So I quit.
Fuck League of Legends. It’s shit and no one will convince me otherwise.
it was making me hate my own friends
Yep. Other games it’s easy to brush off a mistake and laugh about it. Just something about this one (probably the massive time investment and amount of attention required for every game) had us seething at each other… I played for 10 years and probably played less in those 10 years than most of my friends I played with did in their first 2… Lol. I liked team fight tactics, but blizzard did it better in my opinion. And they removed Dominion. Was the only game type that was worth playing.
.>
I hate this game but I love Bard. He’s the only fun thing in the game. ARAM too.
I’ve find aram to be pretty fun tbh. No raging or anything, just skill spamming and it’s super casual
OMG so much this!
My dumbass ex-brother-in-law is deep in the process of losing his wife and two kids largely because of his EVE Online addiction.
I can see it, I played a lot, but I never lost my job over it.
But there were folks that were on no matter what, and as time has gone on the micro transactions have only gotten worse and more aggressive. So it’s easy to imagine that those folks who were on 24/7 were burning whatever money they had on the micro transactions.
The high of the really good things happening felt SOO good. Like pulling off the perfect heist/ambush felt so good it pulled you through another 50 hours of grinding on the amount of adrenaline and endorphins you would get after that 5 minute victory.
I’ve only ever been a miner, and not a moon miner, but like the kind who goes to .4sec and just tries finding the most valuable ore… I know there is a huge pvp and pve scene, but like, where can I find it? I’ve also never been a multi boxer, so I have one character who over the course of 7+ years has trained every possible thing, and i have no idea what to do with that, besides maybe joining for a week and strip mining before gettin burnt out
How you were unable to find those is shocking to me, as they are everywhere. But I’m not going to tell anyone how to better find the good bits of eve.
Fair enough, that said, I was never much a social bug. Only ever joined a corp because someone would find me strip mining, and offer to help me out via a corp, and try to get me to moon mine with them.
I definitely had my fun, but similar to others even just moon mining cut deep into time I should have spent with my family.
I feel like that game isn’t good enough to warrant that sort of sacrifice. It’s gotta be more than just his addiction to tanking a fake economy…
Fucking Ark. I have a major love-hate relationship with that game.
This review visualizes it well.
Is that screenshot from this year? ARK came out 2015, so if this person had 2 years of playtime in 2020, then they basically spent 40% of their time every day playing this game. That’s 9.6 hours every day!
Or they left it on while they were doing other things.
I hope so! Otherwise that statistic makes me a bit sad. I mean, I love playing games, but spending basically all your free time on a single game for 5 years straight?
(warning: link to reddit) - the thread is ~3 years old, so it sounds like your rough calculations are correct.
I’m just a filthy casual, so I never had the skills to tame high level dinos and stuff, but this game was still such a time suck! And so frustrating yet addictive.
Yeah that post was what I thought of when I asked this question. I don’t have THAT many hours in Eve, but oh boy did I waste so much time in eve.
I was bitten by the eve bug. I played early on, and then it got to a point where there was too much new content, that it became so much of a chore to bother with. Fwiw I stopped playing around the time when you could interact with planets, however long that was.
I love ARK so much, it is an amazing game when you customise your own server and play with friends only.
Just … don’t join any public server where the admin is a 17 yo who makes up weird rules like every woman has to join his harem or no one is allowed to ride a bigger dino than his. ( ´ ▽ ` )
every time I see this I think someone must care about this person and is missing the red flags about their crippling addiction
I feel this so much. I wasn’t sure if I would answer Ark or The Sims 4. I have my own personal Ark server because I don’t like the timers on official, housing or dino. I have other things I need to do besides watch a downed dino for 20hrs. I don’t want to rely on tribe member dinojoe to help me either. But my goodness I love playing Ark. 😕 I stopped recommending it several years ago. But I still play it myself. 🤔
Just bought it lol
Just in case you’re out of the loop and it’s relevant to you: they’re remaking Ark in Unreal 5 and going to be shutting down official servers for “old” ark within the next few months. And then it looks like you might have to pay for everything all over again. At the very least the base game already seems to have a set price.
Call of Duty. And any other game that makes you pay more money (after you’ve already paid for the game) for loot boxes that are basically gambling for kids.
I can’t stand the state of modern games. They arrive broken, have pay-to-win models, and promote an unhealthy dopamine cycle of gambling and addiction.
I played a shitload of COD4 with friends in college. I think I played MW2 briefly and then basically dropped COD.
When I bought a PS5 I was looking for games with PS5 versions to show off the graphics and thought hey, why not get back into COD? So I bought Cold War.
The multiplayer menus and lobbies are damn near indecipherable nonsense. There is so much spam and shit I can’t even see what I should do to play the game. It’s a sad state of affairs how things are now.
It makes me sad to say it now because I used to love it so much, but Destiny.
It’s just a micro-transaction shadow of its former self now.
Definitely destiny, I realized I was paying an absurd amount of money for seasonal content just to play once a month with friends, the separate dungeon pass was the last straw, wish I had moved on sooner
I’ve lost interest in the game, but in terms of bang for your buck entertainment, I have no regrets for the money I’ve spent on Destiny. Even at 100 bucks a year for the most recent expansion and all the seasons, it still feels like a deal to me, but I’ve never spent a dime on the cosmetics and that may not be the case for others.
Sim City for GameBoy. If you’re thinking, “how the heck would you play Sim City on a GameBoy?” Exactly, don’t do it. Young me wanted to like it, but just spare yourself…
Genshin. Sucks really, and I felt that after I quit the game, looking back, I never had fun at all.
Imo Genshin is a decent game at its core. The problem is that the gacha elements make it really hard to enjoy.
That’s true. I just can’t seem to separate the breath of the wild aspect of it. It’s like I’m playing BOTW with more characters.
Weird I didn’t mind the gatcha it’s the fucking non-stop talking fairy and unskippable dialogue, I have 30 minutes to an hour of time to PLAY the game and I’m sat smashing A trying to get to the content.
Elite: Dangerous.
If you want to enjoy it, you need to go in with lowered expectations and a certain frame of mine, lest you go mad grinding materials.
Destiny 2. Played it religiously and got like 3k hours in it since 2018, and just stopped last year. The grind was killing me season after season and the clan I was with has disbanded, everyone is super pissy in LFGs. Great shooter, but can’t do everything from zero every 3 months Bungie. Qlso the rotating meta, and the frind to get it.
I had a similar arc with D2. I was on it straight from work for hours for a few years, was a bit too much to be honest.
Then it became even more cyclical and the grind felt like I was Sisyphus, constantly working towards the next thing.
Haven’t turned it on in years now and happy that way!
Same. I think I have roughly 2k hours over the years, but I’ve reduced my own playtime (and also the amount of money I give them, I don’t buy it unless it’s more than 50% off) over the years and ever since Forsaken I’ve had less and less reason to recommend it to anyone else. The big reason is pretty simple. Bungie just keep giving it less and less focus while monetizing the game as much as possible. Without writing an essay on everything wrong with Destiny I think the best summary is that the game has lost it’s vision and turned into a content treadmill. The themes of the original story have been largely thrown out the window. There’s no longer a clear artistic style of Destiny but rather whatever seems “fun”, like having 80s themed sci-fi setting with a “surfs up bro” type of character for an expansion. That expansion in the context of the wider story was supposed to be the dreadful defeat and uncertainty about the future, but we’ve thrown the story out anyway so who cares? Content is largely the same thing we’ve been doing since Forsaken with the biggest difference being the setting. All the while price of the game is increased and content gets spread out between expansions, seasons, dungeons and in game store, so that Bungie could get all the money they want.
And that’s just for the seasoned players. New players have it even worse. The new player experience is a lazily put together nonsensical mess. One of the worst I’ve seen. New players would have to put in a lot of effort to “get” Destiny and for that commitment they get “buy now” thrown in their face on every possible chance like some shitty F2P mobile game.
Yeah +1 on Destiny. My most played game after ARMA2 and I’d not recommend it. It doesn’t respect your time and you’re expected to just grind the same 3 or 4 events constantly and those don’t have any variation to them. Each season roles around with the same event to do each week for the next 12 weeks to get a slight recoloured gun.
I know it’s common among MMOs to hyper focus in a small subset but at least alts exist and there’s a world to explore. There’s virtually no reason to go back to the main world in D2 outside of seasonal events and every area has the same feeling to it. Alts don’t really matter either, there’s 3 classes that all play almost the same way with slight variation. If I start a Mage or a Warrior in an MMO I’m going to have a different experience and challenge, In D2 the biggest challenge between a Hunter and Warlock is learning how double jumping works. I’m still going to be using the same gun to kill 99.9% of enemies.
The devs also don’t care that much about their game. That much is self evident if you followed the recent major DLC release where at the end of the story even the communities own lore experts were scratching their head about what exactly the MacGuffin in the story was. At no point did the writers decide they should tell the players what it is/does even though all of the NPCs talk to you as if you already know.
Kept scrolling till I found this comment.
I absolutely loved Destiny 2 but good god is it terrible in a lot of ways. Couldn’t keep up with the time investment required and the game really likes using FOMO to keep players hooked.
It’s less of a game and more of a second job. At least, that’s how it started feeling towards the end for me.
Oh man, I used to love this game. I adored the lore and gameplay, but fell off at Season of the Splicer, which is a damn shame because I LOVE the eliksini!! It was like that season was made for me. But I just got tired of the weekly chore list, and the need to “get my money’s worth” for whatever season I bought. Story was locked behind these chores too. Just… damn shame.
I haven’t played since they removed a bunch of content that I paid for. I played the hell out of Destiny and pre ordered Destiny 2 but Bungie is dead to me now.
Elite: Dangerous.
Hell of a good space trucker sim. If you like spending 2 hours managing your ship before making a 6 system jump only to dock and do it all over again.
The king of ‘oops I forgot my keys’ simulation
You mean fuel scoop. Nothing worse than making jumps with a full tank only to get to your destination and realize you forgot to equip a fuel scoop. Better hope they have a fuel scoop you can afford that also doesn’t take forever to refuel!
I quit when they stopped developing vr. I bought my headset for elite.
Same here. I got a Oculus DK2 VR headset solely for Elite Dangerous. Have since moved on from Elite but haven’t lost the enjoyment for VR games.
I haven’t lost the enjoyment just the software to make it happen on pc since I stopped using windows lol. Looking forward to whatever valve’s got coming next though, I’m sure it’ll be a fine upgrade to my Quest 2
I second this. I really love the aesthetics and design direction - especially the sound - but the gameplay just falls flat after a few dozen hours. Doing anything cool requires copious amounts of grinding, and the story has been dead in the water for years.
It’s a real shame that Frontier botched it so badly.
But the ship management is very basic and less complicated than what you’d find on ETS2 for example.
I played a shit ton of WoW when I was younger. It stopped being fun a long time ago. Mostly it was only fun with friends.
D3 also sucks. Played a lot of that at launch, and also when the expansion came out (can’t remember the name). D2 was always way better, and now with D2R, I don’t think I’ll ever need to buy another game in my life.
Had to scroll way too far to find WoW. I’m still actively raiding wotlk classic with my small guild, but blizzard seems to have a policy of,
- Step 1: determine what should be done
- Step 2: do the opposite
For everything. Server population management. Bots. Moderation. Customer support. It’s incredible how incompetent they are. Any patch now they’ll add RDF and I’ll unsub one last time and be done for ever. Cannot NOT recommend it enough.
Yeah. I feel like blizzard has always been that way. How long have you been playing WoW? I feel like it was a product of it’s time. I quit before WoW classic got started, but I started playing the original about 2 months after launch. It was incredibly fun back then, but I wasted way too much of my life on it.
It felt like vanilla wow was inherently more interesting than retail. Classic felt dated, but it also felt more interesting than modern MMOs, because the game wasn’t afraid of player interaction.
I think today companies have found that the most profitable way to run an MMO is to prevent any player from being inconvenienced, especially by another player. So over time they got rid of mage portals, and quests that required you to have a player craft something, and gave everyone the ability to self heal and fight multiple mobs at once. And of course, RDF. Slowly WoW became a single player game, and any dependency on another player was seen as an outlier experience that provoked a toxic player response.
I still wish there was a non-MMO game that replicated the wow raiding experience, but afaik nothing like it exists. Which is part of why I still play wrath classic.
But classic wow as an MMO is functionally dead.
It felt like vanilla wow was inherently more interesting than retail. Classic felt dated, but it also felt more interesting than modern MMOs, because the game wasn’t afraid of player interaction.
I think today companies have found that the most profitable way to run an MMO is to prevent any player from being inconvenienced, especially by another player. So over time they got rid of mage portals, and quests that required you to have a player craft something, and gave everyone the ability to self heal and fight multiple mobs at once. And of course, RDF. Slowly WoW became a single player game, and any dependency on another player was seen as an outlier experience that provoked a toxic player response.
I still wish there was a non-MMO game that replicated the wow raiding experience, but afaik nothing like it exists. Which is part of why I still play wrath classic.
But classic wow as an MMO is functionally dead.
Hard agree with you that D2 was better than D3 in every way. I also bought D2r and played it a bit at launch.
Have you played any D4 yet? As someone who never loved D3 I will say that D4 has been refreshing. I have some low level gripes with it, but overall I am really enjoying it.
I haven’t played D4 yet, no. I rarely play games anymore. Not like I used to. And I’m too nostalgic for D2.
Makes sense, harder to do as you get older. If you catch it on a sale though and you’re curious I think it scratches the itch unlike D3.
D3 got better with age. The seasons, especially the later ones, were a blast.
League of Legends.
I had some fun at the beginning but soon realized that this game just is way too complicated. I don’t want to study a game and watch dozens of YouTube tutorials just to be at an average “not really bad” level. And my friends tried to convince me to play over and over again and I joined them without actually having any fun at all. Will never play this dogshit game again.
This is also one of the few games where I realized I was angry and unhappy whether I won or whether I lost. Just a super emotionally exhausting experience.
As someone who’s been playing since season 1, I can’t imagine starting the game now and learning all the champions, there’s so much shit. Also low levels are filled with toxic smurfs which just ruins the experience. So yeah, I’d say LoL is a dead game for new players.
My biggest complaint is how it CONSTANTLY changes. I started playing back in season 2, and played pretty consistently for at least like 5 years or so. Then life got busier, and I would have to drop it occasionally for a few months. But then when I’d pick it back up, there were tons of new things to learn or find out no longer existed, every single time. It was exhausting to catch back up on to a point where the game was playable and fun again. I kept that up for a few years, but then spent just a little too long not playing one of those times and the barrier to re-entry was just too big, so now it’s been like 2 years since I’ve played. And honestly, I don’t miss it.
Idleon - The Idle MMO. The dev billed himself as a non-predatory mobile dev; premium currency could be reasonably earned for free. I was happy to support the dev by buying seasonal bundles. Then he started adding stuff that had to be purchased directly with money. Then he implemented FOMO with rotating bonuses. This guy makes millions a year and rants on Twitch streams about having to pay too much taxes.
Recently, he added a gacha system with a separate premium currency that cannot be earned for free so that the very few players who are running a hacked version of the game can’t pull the best equipment. F2P players get one pull a week and will statistically likely pull the best bonus in 1-3 years, but there are already plans to add more bonuses and rotate out existing ones.
This was right after another controversial incident when many players exploited an infinite currency bug which was predicted and could have been removed well in advance. Historically, the attitude was “you guys had your fun” and he removes the bug with no punishment to players. This time, he went into full meltdown mode, posting walls of text on discord with screenshots of Steam reviews that hurt his feelings, then reset a bunch of exploiters’ skill - not just rolled back but reset to remove months of progress.
He’s recently removed a statement from the Steam page that stated mobile game developers don’t have to be predatory, so at least he’s self aware I guess? Steam reviews were very positive; recent reviews are mostly negative. He’s responded by offering a concession that the best bonus is guaranteed after 200 pulls, which equates to 3.8 years if you’re F2P.
I haven’t quit the game yet, but I’m pretty close. My wallet is closed for sure.
It’s Hearthstone for me. Spent a lot of time and even some money on a game that was just getting shittier every year.
The main game is just impossible to catch up nowadays if you want to have competitive decks and not spend money.
However, I love Battlegrounds and buying the stupid season pass doesn’t do much 4 me (4 hero picks instead of 2 and cosmetics that I don’t care about).
Yeah, BG is definitely the choice these days, I never really could get into it though. Hearthstone was most fun for me when setting up elaborate decks around weird cards or combos.
I just couldn’t click with Hearthstone. Wanted a time killer that I could jump into for a quick game or two and just couldn’t figure out what was going on really.
Even at my lowly beginner level it seemed that everyone else knew what was going on and would ace me. And I was just left dumbfounded. Couldn’t figure out if it was just me not getting the game or a load of smurfs.
Also doesn’t help that there’s years and years of content to catch up on and anyone new is just in an ocean of it.
Yeah, it was a bit overwhelming to get into. You only got the ball rolling once you had a good library of cards and could start experimenting.
Maybe get a template/concept from the Internet and then start changing things was how I learned the most.
But the barrier to entry became way too high over time
The single player mission packs were great. I loved Naxx and League of Explorers. I wish Blizzard could have just made that a separate game, since there was no incentive for unfun power creep in a single player experience. I guess Slay the Spire fills that void at least.
I wish there was a way for games like this to not have an annoying, expensive, ever-changing meta! That’s always the reason I end up dropping games. Did the same for Hearthstone and League, it was either too expensive to try and have a feasible deck and/or too difficult to have to constantly keep up with changing metas.
It would be possible I think, but corporate greed is a thing.
Like if it was $10 a year to get everything, maybe with a slow free to play option.
But there is also a certain addictiveness of cards actually being rare and getting a rush when opening something cool. I don’t know how you get that without limiting content and user experimentation, which is where most the fun comes from.
That makes sense. I agree that opening card packs and whatnot was part of the excitement and draw. I wonder if there’s a way to get the best of both worlds. Maybe a (one-time) paid game rather than free to play, and still have packs and rarity and whatnot, but lock packs behind game experience/quests/challenges/winning/etc, rather than having them available to buy.
I know that probably wouldn’t be a popular model for companies trying to wring out as much money as possible from the almost-basically-gambling model where you can buy packs, but I feel like as a player I’d like that a lot more!
