Last game you finished, tell us about it

Tha Assassin's Creed series has been boring the hell out of ne for years and years. I keep giving it another chance, and it keeps boring me.

porcozaur said:

Wanted to play Odyssey too, but i suspect its the same boring shit since these 2 were made in parallel.

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They weren't. Just as with Origins there is one simple rule with Odyssey: don't grind.
That means no accepting bethesoid radiant garbage quests! And no timewasting on sweeping the map of all pickables/lootables.

Finished Vampyr.
The story is good. Visual presentation and music also good. But…
- You need xp desperately to fight chapter related levelscaled trashmobs.
- Trashmobs respawn indefinetly and net you symbolic xp (5 per killed group).
- You'll have to run forward and backward through town and these trashmobs are annoying.
- If you want thousands of xp you have to suck people dry but before that you need to unlock their "secrets".
- Each talkable NPC has a key and their personal locked chest, you can get their key only if you kill them.
- You get to use some weapons that are upgradeable through crafting and you can't ignore crafting. Also you need to buy bullets, you won't have enough by just looting and you need guns!
- There are cca 20 main quests and 20 sidequests. Only. Short game artificially prolonged through annoying trashmobs filler.
- And there are cca 20 (mini)bosses. All bosses are Dr. Mundo from LoL (billions of HP) while boss fights are darksoulsy rubbish.
- The game has one autosave and is performing it on every action of yours which is okay as you never lose hours of game like in checkpoints based outdated junk. You can't save manually.

Played on normal difficulty. Sucked noone, turned noone into a vampire. The game overstayed it's welcome fast with the retarded respawn everything design, I had a feeling I'm grinding on some job, not playing a game. The story was good enough and somehow still kept me going.
IMO this title is only for dark souls diehards. Can't recommend it to anyone else.

Joxer is right about Odyssey. It's fun if you focus on the right stuff.

The Witcher 3 also gets pretty boring if you start trying to clear all the little '?' symbols on the map. Don't do it.

That's quite the back-handed compliment: "The game's pretty good if you ignore lots of its rubbish content."

?

No. It's basically "the game is good if you ignore every reviewer and their mother who wrote grind or microtransactions are mandatory".

lackblogger said:

That's quite the back-handed compliment: "The game's pretty good if you ignore lots of its rubbish content."

?

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It's, from my perspective, an accurate description.

To qualify it with some more details: There are games where "ignore lots of its rubbish content" would essentially boil down to "uninstall the game". Whereas Odyssey still has a shitload of good stuff to do, experience and see.

Cacheperl said:

Joxer is right about Odyssey. It's fun if you focus on the right stuff.

The Witcher 3 also gets pretty boring if you start trying to clear all the little '?' symbols on the map. Don't do it.

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Agreed. It's a mistake even to highlight them on the map. If I had it to do over again, I would have just let myself come upon them naturally. What is often worth doing is heading for anything that looks like a structure on the map. Theh ? symbols are 99% repetitive boring stuff, like monsters nests and bandit camps.

I did find this to be less true in Blood & Wine, though. A good number of the ?'s lead to something worthwhile in Toussaint.

Also agree completely re: Odyssey. Odyssey is a HUGE game, with tons of actual quests. More than most people will reasonably care to do, really. There is zero reason to do those procedurally generated ones. When it was released, there was this guy on the subreddit who was whining about how generic the quests all were, and we told him the same thing. He just argued about it. You can't help somebody who won't help himself.

lackblogger said:

That's quite the back-handed compliment: "The game's pretty good if you ignore lots of its rubbish content."

?

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You haven't played it then, I take it. They set the game up so that it has unlimited stuff to do for those who might want that. But ignoring that is like ignoring the bounty hunts in the PoE games. There's multiple games worth of scripted, unique content completely aside from the randomly generated stuff, and it's extremely obvious which is which in the game.

JFarrell71 said:

You haven't played it then, I take it. They set the game up so that it has unlimited stuff to do for those who might want that. But ignoring that is like ignoring the bounty hunts in the PoE games. There's multiple games worth of scripted, unique content completely aside from the randomly generated stuff, and it's extremely obvious which is which in the game.

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You are correct, I most certainly haven't played it, or any of the other games mentioned.

Since these revelations I've been trying to wrack my brain to think of examples of RPGs I've really enjoyed and would recommend to anybody but with the proviso that they should "avoid XYZ content", and for the life of me I can't think of any ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I'll keep thinking, but don't hold your breath.

lackblogger said:

You are correct, I most certainly haven't played it, or any of the other games mentioned.

Since these revelations I've been trying to wrack my brain to think of examples of RPGs I've really enjoyed and would recommend to anybody but with the proviso that they should "avoid XYZ content", and for the life of me I can't think of any ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I'll keep thinking, but don't hold your breath.

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There's a lot. I already mentioned one, Pillars of Eternity. The Dragon Age games are another. I just told you that it's blindingly obvious and signposted. You more have to go out of your way to DO that repetitive content. But you're right, I won't hold my breath for you to listen. Easier to just use it to reinforce your disdain for certain games.

lackblogger said:

You are correct, I most certainly haven't played it, or any of the other games mentioned.

Since these revelations I've been trying to wrack my brain to think of examples of RPGs I've really enjoyed and would recommend to anybody but with the proviso that they should "avoid XYZ content", and for the life of me I can't think of any ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ I'll keep thinking, but don't hold your breath.

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You haven't played Skyrim? Granted, compared to Oblivion the scripted quests aren't quite as good either, but the radiant ones? Horrible idea (or implementation actually, the pitch for the radiant AI was all kinds of awesome. To awesome to be true apparently).

Not to mention the Elder Scrolls radiant quests. Ugh…

TomRon beat me to it.

JFarrell71 said:

There's a lot. I already mentioned one, Pillars of Eternity. The Dragon Age games are another. I just told you that it's blindingly obvious and signposted. You more have to go out of your way to DO that repetitive content. But you're right, I won't hold my breath for you to listen. Easier to just use it to reinforce your disdain for certain games.

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Ah yes, Dragon Age is a series I played a couple of games of. Yes, now you remind me I do remember some pointless quests in that game. I think that was the first game I played that had a 'quest noticeboard' LOL.

My 'just finished' review of Origins was in 2012 and was surmised as:

To conclude, this is quite a fun little odd jobbing dungeon crawl RPG which shines in this respect between the Lothering and Landsmeet phases, but is otherwise pretty forgettable.

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I quite enjoyed Awakenings, but there was nothing in that one that I remember being pointless avoidware. Dragon Age 2 was more memorable, but for the wrong reasons of course. The worst thing about DA2 was that you couldn't skip anything really. Now there was a game that desperately needed skipping buttons galore, but then there'd only be about 10 minutes of game left.

So, yeah, I'm not sure anything written this decade by anyone can reinforce something that I'm guessing I'm genetically coded to both dislike and mock in computer games.

The thing is though, I have actually tried to like these kinds of games. I have tried to play a few of them at one time or another. But by 2012 I had already tried enough to know I didn't like them one bit and it was pointless trying to like them.

Now, can you say the same thing? Have you ever gone out of your way to play and enjoy games where you never once have to second guess, no matter how obviously, whether the content you're playing is actual content. Where literally everything in the game is… the game… ? I don't mean purely linear, but just where all the content feels like coherent content and content that you really want to play as well as any main quest content.

TomRon said:

You haven't played Skyrim? Granted, compared to Oblivion the scripted quests aren't quite as good either, but the radiant ones? Horrible idea (or implementation actually, the pitch for the radiant AI was all kinds of awesome. To awesome to be true apparently).

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I tried Morrowind and couldn't get past the opening area before putting my hands to my head, breathing deeply and loudly and ejecting the disc.

I tried Oblivion thinking that maybe I just wasn't getting something, and had the exact same experience with that game.

So, no, never tried Skyrim.

lackblogger said:

Now, can you say the same thing? Have you ever gone out of your way to play and enjoy games where you never once have to second guess, no matter how obviously, whether the content you're playing is actual content. Where literally everything in the game is… the game… ? I don't mean purely linear, but just where all the content feels like coherent content and content that you really want to play as well as any main quest content.

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Have I gone out of my way? No, I guess not, but I play a lot of games, and plenty of them have only content essential to what they're about. I usually avoid games where I'm forced to do a lot of boring busywork, but I don't put something like AC:Odyssey in that category because the boring busywork is so easily avoided, and by so avoiding it, I know I'm not missing anything. I would always prefer quality to quantity. I don't need a game to throw a bunch of filler at me to pad out a long game into an even longer one.

I recognize that there's this idea of "live service games" these days, an idea that started with nearly obligatory DLC, and which has now extended to continously rolled out new stuff for a game well past its debut. It's not a model I'm into, mostly because I've yet to see one that made good use of that model. It's usually oriented around multiplayer, which I don't partake in, and/or it's bittty content, inferior to anything handcrafted and unique. If anything, I have a short attention span and love shiny new things, so my idea of the perfect game is definitely not one that you buy and then play indefinitely.

Do you happen to have any suggestions for RPGs that you thought really nailed what you're talking about? Having content (including side content) that all felt equally valuable and substantial? I'm tuned in enough to have heard of most things, but there could easily be some that I've so far let go by me. There's always games I'm curious about but have yet to play (Underrail, for example)

Are there any open world games which do not have totally skippable content? I doubt it.

But I do think that even non-story, filler content varies in terms of quality. For instance, leaving the story-path in Elex was much more interesting to me.

This is all getting into 'let's make a new thread and stop derailing this one' territory, but one last reply I guess:

Cacheperl said:

Are there any open world games which do not have totally skippable content? I doubt it. But I do think that even non-story, filler content varies in terms of quality. For instance, leaving the story-path in Elex was much more interesting to me.

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All RPGs usually, and should have really, content that's skippable. Side content. We were talking about games where this content is so bad that people are advising other people to skip it, not that it exists.

JFarrell71 said:

Do you happen to have any suggestions for RPGs that you thought really nailed what you're talking about? Having content (including side content) that all felt equally valuable and substantial? I'm tuned in enough to have heard of most things, but there could easily be some that I've so far let go by me. There's always games I'm curious about but have yet to play (Underrail, for example)

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Again, I'm happy to recommend games, but I'll have no idea what your graphics, gameplay, mechanics & general aesthetic tastes are and I can only recommend games that fit the description and that I have played and enjoyed. These games might have flaws in other areas depending on your threshold for specifics, but you can get a general idea of their consensus popularity by looking at the Decade poll or historical polls:

This decade: Blackguards, Lords of Xulima, Eschalon Book 2, Drakensang: The River of Time, would be examples of games where playing every last cent of the game feels as relevant as any other cent.

Last decade: Hoards of the Underdark, Icewind Dale, King's Bounty: The Legend, Avernum, are another four to consider.

I could list many more that I liked, but for the specifics of the question eight should be enough to get on with to allow a choice of one to try. They are all remarkably different games, not one single one is similar to the other, but whichever one you chose should provide a game that makes you want to complete everything the game provides. I'll repeat though, this doesn't mean everyone will like them as there are other factors to taste than merely a sustained and consistent objective quality to a game's content.

There is content and there is grinding.
Depending on a game the two aren't necesserily the same thing.

People recommend or not stuff that fit their taste. In most cases to warn potential newcommers and not because of some evil agenda.
Critics are special sort of people who refuse to stigmatize grinding thus praised DA:Bears initially only to later write articles with the title "leave Hinterlands!".

Since I all of a sudden have a heck of a lot of free time just sitting around the house, I've actually been finishing games for the first time in quite a while.

I jumped back into Disco Elysium after a false start months ago, tore through the game in four days, and already restarted for an alternate character set up.

Disco Elysium is quite simply the best written game I've played, hands down. Not even close.

I dumped a bunch of points into a skill that I thought would give me lots of clues to the mystery. Nope, no useful clues. Practically the skill's sole purpose was to give me additional paragraphs of descriptive text to read through.

Here's the thing, though: I'm not sorry I took the skill. Cause those were some really good descriptive paragraphs. Damn good.

This game has rearranged my all-time top forty, and after I sit with it a bit and finish the replay, is very likely to crack the top ten. Next time through I'm gonna be a political centrist with free market leanings! Exciting, I know!

Hexprone said:

Next time through I'm gonna be a political centrist with free market leanings! Exciting, I know!

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I'm living it. Don't gimp your character.