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?
League of Legends
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.
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.
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.
And you will play hundreds more.
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.
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
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.
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. 🤔
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.
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.
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.
Cookie Clicker
like drugs… just say no
I think idle games are interesting to mindfully experience. They - at least good ones - demonstrate the influence of external motivation, of progression.
Outside of that… Yeah. There’s a fine line of experiencing theme and gameplay Design, and falling into mindless simple number scaling and waiting.
This is why Universal Paperclips is my favorite idle game, maybe my favorite game ever. It has an ending and you can even interpret a story from it. Definitely worth playing once.
This is a crazy one for me. I saw this for like 5 seconds and I knew instantly this would piss me off and I never ever ever touched it or any ‘idle’ type games. I would rather stand still and stare at a wall. I don’t understand how anyone could find any entertainment at all. And apparently they are massively popular.
It does weird stuff to your brain. Just never start any of these and you’re good.
Always thought I was immune until I was forced to play Roblox, of all things, with my niece. We played some kind of incremental / idle game and I had to continue to play this game. It was horrible. ( ; ω ; )
I enjoyed playing Cookie Clicker, but probably because I only really played it for a month or so - I can imagine playing that any longer would not be worth the time 😅
Genshin. Sucks really, and I felt that after I quit the game, looking back, I never had fun at all.
It’s Hearthstone for me. Spent a lot of time and even some money on a game that was just getting shittier every year.
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…
GTA for the Gameboy on the other hand, kinda rad.
I’ll have to check that out lol.
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.
D3 got better with age. The seasons, especially the later ones, were a blast.
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.
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.
Ah E:D. Love and hate it. Wide as an ocean, deep as a puddle.
I have a few hundred hours in ED. I accomplished absolutely nothing in the game. It’s basically Space Travel Wallpaper The Game .
For me it’s Space Truck Simulator
I can’t knock that. I play ED and American Truck Simulator lol
None of my friends know about Truck Simulator though
Agreed. Don’t expect the end and all of storytelling. It’s a make your own adventure game with surprisingly deep lore through galnet.
Same here. I’d be playing much more of Odyssey ran better on Steam Deck. On foot stuff is rough, but maybe I should just look at my settings again. I can’t remember if they’re down all the way or not. Ship stuff runs just fine though!
Oooh yes. I cannot even explain why I’m hooked. The first obstacle new players have to overcome are the absolutely insane default key/mouse bindings.
Oh haeeell no, I used an xbox 360 controller, never KBM. …which is probably one reason I was trash at combat.
I was really disappointed with this one. I tried it out per a friend’s recommendation after they heard I was playing a freeware space flight simulator (Orbiter, which I do actually recommend).
What didn’t you like about it?
Sort of a dumb reason, but imo, flying a spaceship is not really what the game is about and that’s all I wanted to do. For example, I wanted something where I had to use orbital mechanics to dock with a station, but the powerful SciFi boosters in Elite Dangerous take all that fun away.
I really enjoyed it up until the Engineers update, that just totally killed it for me. Spending god knows how long trying to find “Modular Terminals” that are described as “Ubiquitous” but almost impossible to find was just maddening. At least call it fucking Unobtanium or some shit.
I did LOL pretty hard when I saw what the space legs stuff ended up being. Some people are having fun and good for them, but even the tech demo Star Citizen on foot stuff is better than that.
They ended up tweaking engineering to a point where its tolerable, and mining became so cool. Exploration too. Those two gameplay loops are great.
But the game was unplayable without third party tools. Which was kind of fun, having them open in a second monitor added to the immersion, but without them you’re shit out of luck. Those tools were how I knew how to sell my mining stock. It was also how pirates knew where to blockade, which made for awesome emergent gameplay.
I’m bummed that space legs ended up being a buggy mess, because I wanted them real bad. Mostly I wanted to do an EVA in deep space, hanging off my ship, and enjoying the sound design. I never tried it because I heard the update did something weird to planets.
The update did do something weird to planets. They regenerated them all and their terrain got a lot more same-same with fewer canyons and mountains. Texture popping got a lot worse for a while but they smoothed that out to tolerable.
Even still, Odyssey killed ED.
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.
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.
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.
Pour a drink out for a fallen friend. Hurts so much to see a game you once enjoyed devolve into utter garbage.
