For me it’s a couple
First is GTA. I played a LOT of Vice City and and San Andreas as a kid, but mostly because everyone else played them at the time and there wasn’t really many games quite like it where you could mess around and explore a massive city and find cool vehicles just by exploring. But by the time GTA 4 rolled around other open world games did things just as good and the edgey humor has starting to wear thin on me so I had moved on to things like Elder Scrolls by that time.
Another is Minecraft. Minecraft is the exact kind of game I should be in to, it looks so fun! But I just found the artstyle so damn ugly. It’s so rare for me to avoid something for aesthetic reasons, usually low poly art is charming but for some reason Minecrafts style just looks really unappealing to me. This is coming from someone who likes a lot of games people think are ugly.
Lastly are what I’ll call “grizzled white guy action games” Uncharted, Red Dead, The Last of Us. They just feel too much like they’re trying to be be a blockbuster for for guys that don’t want to be made fun of for liking games rather than games. I know that that probably isn’t the case, but they just seem too normal to me.
However I respect that these are all good series but they just aren’t for me. Are there any game series where this is true for you?
Don’t be afraid to say a series you know I like, I won’t be offended.
I really tried to like mobas. I put in like 500 hours on Dota 2 and I dunno how many into league, but I don’t feel like I ever had fun with them at any point. Really wanted to be into them because I had friends who played them and they have such broad appeal that it seems like an easy way to connect with people.
I’d add dark souls as well, but I really don’t understand the appeal.
Battle Royales, I’ve played a few since that’s what friends want to play but I’d never play one of my own volition. It doesn’t help that I’m just not good at them & I feel like dead weight on a team of 3
Take apex legends, it’s a solid game with really smooth movement/gunplay but it’s so damn stressful to keep track of everything that’s going on. I much prefer single player RPGs like New Vegas, Shadowrun Returns, Baldur’s Gate, etc but obviously they aren’t exactly social games
(oldschool)RuneScape, I find the planning out of grinding fascinating but have no desire to commit hours to it myself.
I’ve never met a deck builder game I’ve liked.
And I’ve never made it further than like Day 2 of Disco Elysium. It’s just so so dense and I need to be in a novel-reading mood to enjoy it properly, and those are far between so I end up forgetting what I did in between runs and restarting.
Same on Disco Elysium. Also it makes me sad
It is a very sad game. It also wouldn’t work if it wasn’t sad. The sadness is why people care about Harry. The sadness is why people care about Revachol. If Revachol wasn’t so bleak, La Revacholiere would just be self indulgence, Cindy the skull writing a hopeful message in fuel oil wouldn’t matter, the communists telling you “In the dark times, should the stars also go out” wouldn’t hit.
And it wouldn’t be so fucking funny for Harry to do the finger guns, try to do a matrix dive, and immediately hit a woman in a wheelchair.It making me sad isnt a bad thing, just a reason I never finish it
I’d read a disco Elysium book, but I can’t get far in the game.
Dwarf fortress is one of the coolest concepts I’ve ever seen, and I cannot get into it.
I couldn’t enjoy GTA (it really fell off after 2), the Witcher games, or Disco Elysium (I ain’t reading all that)
I understand the appeal of Hades but tbqh I like the broadly similar game “curse of the dead gods” way better.
I like hades, but I will not be completing the same game 30 times with self imposed difficulty sliders.
Dark Souls, I play games to have fun but I can understand other people may have different reasons
Fighting games and rts games. I wanna already know how to play them cause they seem fun as hell once you have the hang. I cannot get the hang.
Sorta kinda the soulsborn stuff… a lot of people like em for different reasons and I dont. Whether or not I understand and respect kinda depends. I think most controversially. I dont mind the gameplay, I dont like the aesthetic or storytelling. Make a castlevania game in thst style and id be right there. I just dont like grimdsrk fantasy that I have to work out why I give a shit about what improving in the first place over the course of doing it cause for most of the ds1 which is the one I played in had no idea why I should give a shit about any of this generic dark fantasy crap. I know if you dig deep enough to make a 6 hour podcast then there is stuff but nothing maxe me feel compelled to look into it. Also as a gameplay tjing that is a me thing, im good at hard 2d games and bad at hard 3d games or at least like 2d difficulty more and am less easy to give up. There are a variety of reasons mostly availability of information on the screen that makes 2d feel more fun to be challenged in. I wish I liked them, people that like em sre having lots of fun. But I really dont get it.
Fighting games and rts games. I wanna already know how to play them cause they seem fun as hell once you have the hang. I cannot get the hang.
Old RTS have great single-player modes. I’d start with Warcraft 3 and Red Alert 2 and work backwards in their respective series. They pretty much all (even back the original C&C and Warcraft) have super easy starting missions, and steadily get harder. A lot of the time that’s gonna be too hard for a newbie by like the fourth mission, which is why I recommend hopping between games when it happens instead of plowing ahead. But after a loop of a few you’ll find that you’ve gotten better at all of them.
If you want to get into competitive, I don’t know. I think AOE2 still has a big enough community to match noobs against noobs (but it’s Microsoft so I dunno, I won’t touch it). A lot of other games have been whittled down to just people who already know it though.
I don’t know anything about fighting games.
I dont want to get into them. I just respect em. I dont play video games much anymore in general.
Fighting games. Zero interest in memorizing combos and using them with millisecond precision.
name any popular JRPG. I just never really could. i probably didnt get past disc 2 of FF7, and i played FFX a decent bit but pretty sure i didnt beat that.
also, pretty much any Zelda not called Wind Waker.
Disc 1 is by far the best part of FFVII anyway. The game opens with you playing as a gang of ecoterrorists who blow up a power plant and literally nothing they do later in the game can live up to it.
trying to be be a blockbuster
The more games try to be movies the more I’m adverse to playing them. I really don’t like the Sony stable of modern games. When everything became over the shoulder and mostly open world (the detritus of the 7th gen) Ever chasing realism most of the games look so similar in the environments, it’s become rather stale.
Minecraft
Would be one pick that I find too unstructured to enjoy and I don’t really engage in any multiplayer.
Slay the Spire and Balatro were two games that people I know have gotten really into but I could never get through. It’s something about any type of card game that doesn’t jive with my brain.
Also slay the spire’s art direction didn’t do it for me, and that’s basically a necessity in roguelike games.
I never finished Half Life because there were too many “where the fuck do I go/do moments” which might be a skill issue but whatever.
Fallout 2 had that god awful tutorial section that made me quit and I found the story to be a repeat of the first game anyway. Never played the Bethesda fallouts because I already played Skyrim.
Haven’t got into any RTS games for a similar reason to card games.
TBH I enjoy most video games by watching people play them since I can’t find the time nowadays. Very much born and raised on let’s plays.
Pretty much any big AAA game franchise for me. I have friends play them and I just don’t get it? Like they look pretty, but they all feel so samey, all got this same kind of third person perspective and it never really feels all that different from each other, whether you’re an assassin dude or a cowboy dude or a vampire hunting dude, they all feel so…artificial? Like token RPG elements and vague “exploration” to collect doodads to get 100%, everything feels very scripted and kind of soulless sometimes.
Any game that I’m bad at. It can be well designed and smooth to play, but if I’m bad at it I’m not going to enjoy it. It sucks being bad at something, especially a leisure activity you paid money for
