TheMobRules wrote on 2021-04-30, 18:36:

[*]Dragon Age: absolutely loved the first one, the second one was probably the biggest disappointment I've ever experienced in gaming, a truly wretched game in my opinion. I managed to finish it somehow, but by the end I was wishing that every character would die in horrible agony.Didn't bother playing the third one, all I saw was a clip of the characters having a discussion about modern social issues, and at that point I decided that I was fed up with nu-Bioware trying to force their morality lectures on the player, and that's not what I seek on medieval fantasy RPGs.

This is something that diminished GTA:Vice City for me. The radio in that game is generally fun, but the somewhat frequent injection of modern political attitudes against the 1980s setting were grating and anti-immersive. If I'm playing in a fantasy or historical setting, I want the setting to speak for itself in it's own words. I don't want to hear the developer's sarcastic opinions about it.

That's one of the reasons I think Apollo 13 is a great movie. It puts you in the culture of 1969/70 without any judgement. Most directors would feel required to make a social argument based on present-day beliefs and attitudes, but that movie didn't touch that. It's like 1970 made the movie about itself, instead of being made by a neighbor who wanted to show why it was superior.
That's the way I think most movies and video games should be made. The setting should be depicted according to it's own culture. I'm going into a fantasy world to escape to there, not to look at it through the glasses of today's contemporary world.

One of the most repelling games I've seen for me personally is Bioshock. I don't like most FPSes anyway, but this one pushes me away *hard* by being built around an absurd political caricature dreamt up by the devs.

Skyrim presented a compelling opportunity to join a rebellion against the Empire. That to me was the most interesting part of the game. "Politics" in a fantasy setting can add texture as long as the developers avoid taking sides and it isn't portrayed in a way that tries to connect it to anything in real life.
I was disappointed that Bethesda couldn't depict both sides with equal degrees of thought. Instead they clearly favored the Imperial perspective over Skyrim's. I pretty much had to read between the lines to side with the Stormcloaks, while the developers emphatically spelled out why they wanted me to do the opposite.
My "team" was depicted as stupid, racist, etc. not so much by opposing NPCs but by the writing of the game itself by the developers. They basically wrote the Stormcloaks to be dismissable via the typical one-word arguments we hear routinely in real life and to give them no ability to speak effectively for themselves.
I wanted to see stronger arguments for the Stormcloak side, arguments I could have written so I don't see why Bethesda couldn't.

After GTA San Andreas I just lost interest in GTA completely, I haven't even played 4 and 5 because I wasn't interested in them.

Virtually any I've ever played. My experience is that it is quite rare for subsequent releases to live up to the predecessors and eventually (like seasons of TV shows or sequels to movies) it is marketing/merchandising rather than creativity driving the process.

A good example is Morrowind/Oblivion/Skyrim, each successive game had much better graphics, animation, and sound than the previous one ....but less and less actual game play. You could easily spend over fifty hours in Morrowind and never touch the main quest, Oblivion could be finished in less than thirty. (And don't get me started on the construction sets.)

SimCity 2000 was a fun game that let your creativity show. SimCity 3000 buried you in micromanagement and artificial population caps that forced you to play/build a certain way for your city to continue growing. SimCity 4 was rife with weird building restrictions and communities which inexplicably wouldn't grow. SimCity Societies was an arcane compilation of new age philosophy, social engineering, and "aura" ....put the city dump next to a mansion and no one cares as long as you surround the dump with pretty posters.

But. It is my contention this shift is also driven by gamers themselves. Lately graphics are the "be all, end all" to games, players want something photoreal which they can plaster across three screens at 4k resolution to impress their friends and make videos of every scene to post on youtube. Forums, once filled with instructions on how to find something or defeat a particular opponent, are now little more than complaints/questions about getting higher resolution or spanning multiple screens. Race sim forums no longer discuss driving styles or creating setups, it's all about "the resolution is too low, I can't tell what brand sneakers the flagman is wearing". Flight sim forums are not about flight procedures, navigation instruments, or landing charts, but about getting more detail on the aircraft so they look better in videos (one person even said he wanted to walk around the cabin, sit down, have the attendant bring him a drink, watch a movie; 🤣, that's not a flight sim, that's a passenger sim).

And attention span also factors in. I read a blog a few years ago that exemplified this regarding Skyrim (paraphrasing), "I created a character, raided a couple of dungeons, visited a small town, then went to a larger town. At this point I noticed I'd been playing three hours. I don't have time to look in every nook and cranny for loot, I don't have time to talk to every NPC for quests. I like a game I can play through in 12-15 hours and move on".

So, the more games you sell, the more money you make. Give the market what it wants - visually impressive games that can be played in a few hours, and by the time people are tired of them, you've released the next in the series. And just like Star Wars fans will flock to any new Star Wars movie, fans of a computer game will purchase the next release ....no matter how comparatively poor is either.

DOOM.
Reason: Rip and tear is from some comic, not present in the original games for me. So all that "you must kill demons doomslayer" thing feels irritating unlike relative freedom of choice you had in the original games.

Call of Big Duty

After playing one everything after that is derivative and horrible, kind of like playing different versions of pong, except occasionally pong was more fun years or decades later