Starfield. I love some Bethesda games, and I don't hate the game, it's just not worth the price. It would be way more tolerable at $40. I got about 40-45 hours into it, and I don't know if I'm ever going to complete it. I feel like I've seen everything the game offers and there doesn't seem to be anything new coming along in terms of mechanics or story.
Baldurs Gate 3
There’s nothing wrong with the game, I just don’t find it fun to play. Somehow got 48 hours out of it, but never made it to the end of act one. The gameplay just wasn’t something I terribly enjoyed.
I don’t necessarily regret the purchase as supporting smaller, decent studios is a good plan, but it’s still a game I’m not going to get a lot of use out of
Elden Ring.
Waited all year until it was on sale as I thought it might not be my cup of tea, tried not to let my prejudice get the better of me but felt it was such a drag I had to put it down.
It was recommended to me as I like Zelda but it couldn't be further from the things I like about it: innovation, fluid gameplay, freedom, puzzles, multiple ways to tackle enemies.
I don't think it's the difficulty as I play lots of roguelike and bullet hell games. My main gripe is the clunkiness of the combat to the point it's unfair. Like you don't really stand a chance through reactions alone, you have to learn the patterns and hitboxes of enemies so that you know in advance when to react.
Also I kept hearing how good the graphics are but I think they're kinda average although the actual art style is quite nice.
Any suggestions on how I might enjoy it would be much appreciated as I haven't got very far.
Starfield. I want to like it - and there are some things I really do like about it - but it’s just not a very good game. The menus and inventory management is atrocious, which is unforgivable when you have to spend so much time on those screens. The enemies are bullet sponges. It’s not fun dumping a magazine into a guy, reloading and doing it again while the guy just walks right into it like you’re spraying him with a garden hose. I’m ok with there not being a map on remote planets, but it makes no sense that there wouldn’t be one in a city. It’s the kind of stuff you’d overlook if it was an indie early access game, but it doesn’t fly when it’s a $70 game from a major studio. I can’t imagine what they were doing all those years the game was in development because it’s not reflected in the product.
I don't really have any recent ones, but I think my most recent one would be Doom Eternal. That's not saying that it's a bad game, I can understand why people like it. I'm just not a fan of how it plays compared to the original Dooms or even Doom 2016. My biggest complaint is really about how little ammo you can carry for each weapon. I don't like being forced to switch weapons all the time or else glory kill every other enemy. I wasn't a fan of glory kills in Doom 2016 because I felt like they interrupted the pacing in an otherwise fast-paced game, but I put up with them because you could ignore them if you wanted to. You can't really ignore them (or the chainsaw kills) in Doom Eternal though, otherwise you'll find yourself regularly running low on ammo. I guess at least the chainsaw has more utility in Doom Eternal than it did in the original games (on harder difficulties it's hard to justify the chainsaw on anything except low-tier enemies), but I never finished the game because of the ammo restrictions.
Another game I have regrets about is The Sims 4. I knew I was getting into a dlc-pit but it didn't bother me too much because I tend to subscribe to the "Paradox Method" - buy what you like, pirate the rest - when it comes to games with lots of DLC. Additionally, when I pick up a game and really enjoy it, I don't have problems dropping money on dlc because I tend to play it for hundreds or even thousands of hours. However what I wasn't expecting was that I'd end up pirating the entire game anyway because updates almost always break mods and there's no way to disable updates (Origin let you do it, but neither steam nor the new EA games app lets you disable updates). So what was the point of buying anything if I was going to have to pirate the game to stop updates from randomly breaking shit?
Edit: some games I don't have buyer's remorse for are Cruelty Squad, Bomb Rush Cyberfunk, and Factorio. Those could easily be 2x the price and still be worth it imo.
Diablo 4, hands down. My best friend and I have been playing co-op games together for many years, and we were convinced that D4 would be the next 200+ hour co-op event of the year. So I bought myself the 100 dollar collectors edition and he, the same one since his birthday was near launch.
Yep, after 2 weeks we both admitted it just wasn't a good game, and neither of us wanted to play anymore. What a massive disappointment.
Firewatch was a recent purchase for me which I mildly regret.
As a walking simulator it's wholly dependent on the quality of its story, and the quality just isn't there. It starts strong but the ending is rushed and without a coherent resolution. It does so much work to set up multiple dramatic mysteries and then haphazardly solves half of them out of nowhere and forgets the rest in the final scramble to finish.
Nice graphics. Great voice acting. Neat concept. Needed more time to cook and left me feeling like I wasted my time getting invested in the story.
A recent release? Diablo 4 I guess. I don't really regret it since I knew what I was in for. I bought it to play with my best friend, and we had fun together until he got bored and frustrated. My hopes were high but my expectations were minimal and it still barely managed to meet them.
Insurgency: Sandstorm. Because I've wasted 600+ hours on it and still going strong. I'm literally not getting anything from the game but I still have to play it. It's like what I assume being hooked on meth would be. And Steam doesn't even allow me in my moments of lucidity to remove the game permanently. Their "permanently remove game from my account" option can be rolled back with about 3 clicks from the support page. I feel like I need to throw away my whole Steam account that I've been accumulating since 200x just to get rid of that one game.
Then sometimes I see other players whose levels are double or triple my level. Which means they have to be playing 4-8 hours every single day. It's like having a bit of trouble with meth yourself and then wandering into a full-ass crackhouse.
Many other games have been a waste of money, but Insurgency is a huge waste of time and mental resources. Which is money.
Punch me, but: "Doom Eternal."
I thought it was a guaranteed hit, but it turned out to be a really bad arena shooter where you make colorful resources shoot out of enemies and are forced to run into the middle of enemy groups, exposing yourself to attacks from all sides that don't count because you're repeating 5 kill QTEs ad nauseam - the only tactic the game allows.
Latest one for me is Disco Elysium. Didn’t really like its form of story telling. Played it for about 6-8 hours without feeling that the plot had made any meaningful progression.
The trailer was also misleading, selling it more as some form of detective thriller. Most of the dialogue is about stuff unrelated to the ongoing investigation.
I also didn’t like how some actions could randomly kill you. Oh, got a bad dice roll? Too bad, you must reread the dialogue of the past few minutes again. In the end I actively saved the game over and over again to avoid losing any progress.
Command Modern Operations.
I love EVE for being spreadsheets in space. I love Masters of Orion. I loved Harpoon. I thought I knew a lot about military hardware (certainly more than my friends, and enough to be annoying at parties). I have a PhD, so I'd like to think I'm pretty smart...
But this game broke me. The 450page manual destroyed me. I have 120 hours in this game, 3 whole working weeks and at least as twice as much reading guides and watching letsplays, and I understand absolutely fuck all about it. I feel like retard every time I start it and didn't take into account some insanely niche details about missile turning rates or how I should just know the radar crosssection of an F15 increases threefold when it climbs and turns right.
This game has won. I give up.
This one might controversial, but Baldur’s Gate 3 for ps5.
- I had plenty of technical issues, like my Karlach questline being glitched out because of some of mission, which was the worst since she was my main companion. I also had to start over earlier as well when I didn’t know that I would get locked out of quests for simply going to a the next area, I didn’t know that was “act 2”.
- I finished divinity os 2 in august and I didn’t really find this game all different other than the crazy production value jump. Which I don’t want to underplay, it’s much much better and ver very good for a crpg.
- the community is very circlejerk-y, when I mentioned in one of the threads about being locked out from doing other act 1 quests because I jumped to act 2 accidentally, they just said that it’s a “skill issue”. Also, the big reason I bought this game was because I kept hearing “I don’t usually like crpgs, but this game is a must play” so I was a victim of hype, that’s on me.
Edit: to add, I rarely ever buy new games. I just buy my Monster Hunter, some Nintendo games and From Software games.
Elden Ring. The game is just too obnoxiously hard. I don't mind difficulty, I finished Doom Eternal and all its DLC on nightmare. But Elden Ring seemingly makes very little effort to teach me its mechanics, whereas Doom Eternal's mechanics felt pretty intuitive after just a little bit of trial and error.
As far as FromSoft games go, I had a much better time with Sekrio. That game had a good tutorial, and that ghost dude who would help you practice the more difficult aspects of the combat.
Diablo 4
Squid 44, I bought it before the name change and easy anti cheat. I now can't play on Linux 😕 not a recent purchase but recently went to try it out
D4, Starfield, Cities Skylines 2, and Mortal Combat 1. D4 and Starfield are self explanatory. CS2 is my biggest disappointment in years. Paradox killed whatever good will it had left by forcing the demise of CO. Under no circumstances should CS2 released this year. There's no mods. It doesn't function in any meaningful way. It's a performance nightmare. CS1 danced on the grave of SimCity and committed all the same sins a decade later. Don't listen to anybody that says the game has potential. They're sitting on 2000+ assets they can't release because they can't import buildings into their own city building game post release. That's how bad it is. Cities Skylines 2 was dead on arrival and it took the community 4 months to realize it.
MC1 isn't worthy of the K. It's just a slog. I don't know how much they fixed it but that doesn't break the fact that cameos are a major turnoff. Or that it has the worse progression system of recent MK games. Or that it's sitting on potentially one of the biggest rosters MK ever had but culled itself in half by reserving half the characters for cameos. Tekken 8 and SF6 have lapped MK hard this generation. Hell even Strive and DBFZ have taken steps to stay more relevant than MK1.
And you know what the kicker is? I bought all these games at the same time. I've been playing the clip of Totalbicsuit singing we don't pre-order games a lot lately.
Dwarf fortress. It makes me want to forgo sleep in favor of weed lol
I got Super Mario Bros. Wonder day one and it made me realize I don't like Mario nearly as much as I thought I did. And I already knew I liked Mario less than most people. It kinda made me realize the only games in the series I truly loved were Super Mario World and Bowser's Fury. If you include the alternate character spinoffs you can add Yoshi's Island to the list.
It's definitely the best 2D Mario since NSMB DS, there's nothing wrong with it and it's the most creative 2D Mario since World...but it still fails to stick in my mind the way Kirby games, Sonic games, Mega Man games, and more do. It was fun but it didn't wow me and I thought it was too easy (am I crazy or are 2D Mario games easier than Kirby games?) I'm glad I played it but I wish I picked it up sometime in the upcoming period when the Switch is completely removed from being current but not old enough to be retro.
What I've noticed about myself is that I'd pick a Sonic game that's considered "decent" or "debatable" over a comparable Mario game that people consider a GOTY candidate easily. with very few exceptions. And while Wonder vs. Superstars is an exception, it's only because of how godawful Superstars' bosses are.
Balders Gate 3.
I really hate conversation trees. In a TTRPG you come up with any solution, and the GM will adjudicate it. In BG3, you have a couple of options in each scene. Not at all surprising, given that it's just a fancy choose your own adventure, but still, I'd forgotten how confining it feels.
I tried to return it, but I'd started the game and then gone off to do something else, which had pushed me an hour or two out of the return window.
Diablo 4. No doubt Diablo 4. Guess I never hated something as much as I hate buying Diablo 4
Recently purchased? Fallout 76. God, it could’ve been great.
Recent? None right now, but I also rarely buy games nowadays.
If we’re able to go outside of recent times, I’m still pretty salty about buying fuckin RPG Maker 2 & 3 on the PS2 without having a way to connect my PS2 to the internet.
Monster Hunter.
Start the game with 2 hours of unskippable tutorials, endless dialogue and the explanation of a million game systems that should not come into play until later.
Then you're set out into the wilderness to track a monster, and all you do is pick up mucus... Eventually found the monster and hit it a bunch, then it ran away... and I chased it around for 10 more minutes.
Said what the fuck is this, and just uninstalled and never looked back.
Idk if this counts as recent but breath of the wild. Idk the last time I spent $60 on a game, let alone the $100 I spent on botw + DLC, because "how can literally everyone be wrong about this game".
The combat was fun for a decent amount of time but at a certain point I asked myself "wtf am I doing". I didn't care about the story because it was awful and the voice acting was embarrassing. Exploring the world felt incredibly shallow, with the most exciting thing to randomly run into being recycled mini bosses that rewarded me with weapons that I didn't need. Any challenge the combat or exploration presented could be bypassed by grinding for potions.
By far the most bafflingly over hyped game I've ever played.
Squad. Looking for a more serious FPS game other than the popular shooters like CoD or Battlefield. Got a rec for it, so why not. Went to buy it and it’s $50. Well, the reviews looked mostly ok, and so did the screenshots… so I bit.
Man, the game plays like it’s 10-15 years old. Slow, clunky and the graphics leave room for improvement. Very dated. I don’t think I’d mind this game for the $15-25 range, but not $50. I returned it. I think probably the second game ever I returned.
Warhammer 40k: Mechanicus
I thought it was gonna be like an XCom or Divinity Original Sin kinda combat game.
Maybe it is? I don’t think so, but the UI and controls are so bad that I never really figured out how to play, and there’s no tutorial, so I can’t say for sure what kind of game it actually is.
All I figured out in my 2ish hours is that it’s not a game for me.
Not just the games, but the whole of the PSVR2.
I really liked the Horizon games, so I bit thinking it’d be more like the others but in VR.
Gameplay is much different. It looks cool, but if the gameplay is balls it doesn’t matter how good it looks.
All the other games I got make me sick to my stomach. VR is a niche and an acquired taste.
Ready or not Gameplay is pretty fun with the homies But for a $40USD game some maps are powerpoint slide shows on high in hardware 20-30fps on the house map.
For refrence Pc specs I5-10400 6700xt 32gb of ddr4 Game makes if feel like im playing on a toaster oven
Hogwarts Legacy on Switch. I should have known better, but my local Walmart had it on sale for $29.99 a few weeks ago and I bought on impulse after reading a few posts about how it's gotten better after updates. I've had glitches galore. Mad pop-in, falling through geometry, crashes, and two save game corruptions, all in the most up-to-date version available. If this is better, I can't imagine how broken it was at launch. I feel like I got $5 of content out of this. If the glitches were at least amusing, I might be ok with it, but the save corruption is just unacceptable.
If i would have bought watch dogs legion for full price I would have buyers remorse for sure. But I picked it up for 8 bucks and had a few hours of fun with it. So most of this thread is more about price for fun than anything I guess.
Escape from Tarkov
Maybe I just didn't spend enough time researching how to actually play the game but it didn't live up to the hype.
Honorable mentions: Squad and The Division 2
I want my money back for battlebit remastered. It took about six hours to realize "wait, this game is half baked" last summer. Steam did not accept my refund request just one hour outside of their standard trial window (which they've always been extremely cool about before), i'm guessing because a bunch of people didn't like it all at once. I tried it again just a month or so ago, a bunch of stuff is still wonky, and the logarithmic decrease in players (even after a spike from winter sale) since its peak last june reflects this. Seems to me they put all their effort into skin and map "content" than actually fixing bugs or improving systems and mechanics.
Recent? None so far.
Somewhat old? Civilization III. I ordered it like 5 years ago and was trying to scratch the itch left by Call to Power II, but the multiplayer is flaky at best on LAN and the tech tree just isn't interesting to me. Later entries also have the "tech tree doesn't interest me" thing and also don't scratch the Call to Power itch (they don't have the wacky future tech like hover tanks and eco-warfare) but they also look a lot more visually interesting at least.
I miss when stacking was a thing in Civ. Sure it was relatively unbalanced, but that's part of the fun in my experience.
/end grandpa rant
Enshrouded. I'm on a 5600X and a 6800XT and no matter the settings or reported FPS I feel like I'm running on 30-40fps. Also for some reason the distant LODs look like garbage, nothing like the gameplay I've seen in review videos.
Devs confirmed it was a bug with the camera but they did not know what caused it. Engine is entirely in-house so hopefully they fix it soon.
The only thing I managed to care about so far was building a nice cave home with a huge great hall and ruining the scenery by building a giant Peter Griffin pixel art outside.
That Avatar game.
I thought it was an Assassin's Creed game with an Avatar skin, but it's a Far Cry game with an Avatar skin.
None.
Almost always I can tell if a game is for me or not within the first four hours and I'll just return it on Steam if it isn't. I've done it dozens and dozens of times without any problems.
Now, sometimes I'll not be entirely sure if those four hours are enough but some reviews left me unsure. Star field was such a case. I procured that through alternative channels and decided after about twenty hours and four times as many crashes that it was indeed shit.
Last one for me was Batman something something. Arkham something maybe. Don't really care about batman, didn't enjoy the mechanics, don't remember if there was a story, no idea why I bought it.
I've since realized that if you just wait a year or two games usually a) work properly and b) cost less. Haven't had buyers remorse in a long while.
The settlers 2 history edition after I discovered that there is also an community remake (Settlers 2 RTTR) which is just overall better and actually fixed some decades old bugs, which the official re-release apprently didn't bother with. But that's Ubisoft for you.
I rarely bought game lately, so it's gonna be game from 2020 to now.
Grim Dawn: it's really a subpar diablo clone and it's boring, enemy either dies immediately or it's spongy as heck. Played to the point where i have to get to some manor but thus far the gameplay feels bland, and looking at the skill tree it doesn't offer much new thing. Not enjoying this one
Black Mesa: Not remorse per se, but i got bored of it and turn my attention to something else.
Call of Juarez Gunslinger: again, not remorse, i got bored of it.
Elder Scrolls Online: i have no idea what i expect from it, and i'm disappointed anyway. I thought it will play like the other ES but it's really just an MMO. Bought it with other game on sales but by the time i play it it's already off the refund time.
Forza Horizon 4: it's pretty good actually, but i feels like it just wasn't a good kb&m game. I can't turn well in curved road when in high speed while the bot turn just fine. It's one of those game that's meant for race wheel. This and asseto corsa have the same issue, and i was led to believe i can play just fine with kb&m but that wasn't the case at my end.
Space Pirate and Zombie 2: it's boring.
Back 4 blood. They added so much nonsense to it, I just want to slash my way through waves of zombies with fun weapons, not to manage a card deck and play in a very specific way to be able to advance in the campaign.
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The Front
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Lethal Company
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Sonic Frontiers
Squad. People said that I would like it because I like Arma 3, but with no AI scenarios, editor or singleplayer for that matter, I just didn't like it. It felt too sweaty as opposed to Arma where I can take my time or have a casual game of Wasteland. Plus it feels like there isn't a casual gamemode in Squad like Arma KOTH which is basically just giant tdm with some squad and support mechanics.
Vermintide 2 Just not my kind of gameplay.
Buying RDR2 to play Red Dead Online with a friend. I got disconnected three different times while trying to complete the first mission, which you have to finish before the game lets you do anything else. Every single time I had to start the mission over from the beginning, including the stupid-ass cutscene.
I gave up after the third time when I got dropped as I was literally about to finish. Fuck that scam.
Remnant2. It wasn't bad exactly, but it didn't click for me. Not worth the $40. Maybe it's more fun with friends. But it just seemed kind of.. meh. Maybe I'd there were double the monsters or something
Darktide. One of the biggest complaints about Vermintide 2 is that it is too god damn grindy, so what did Fatshark do with it's next game? Make it so much worse.
I want to do build crafting, I want to try new weapons, but to experience the endgame means hitting the slots again and again hoping to get a weapon I can build on. It ruins what could otherwise be a good game, and I just can't do it anymore.
::: CW: Unpopular opinion, incoming:
Tears of the Kingdom
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Brotato. I mean, it's cheap, so not a huge regret, but I really thought I would like it, but only ended up playing it twice .
The Planet Crafter. Which is actually a terrific game, but I don't really have enough graphics card to play it properly. I have it at the lowest detail settings and the game still grinds to a near-halt when I'm in some parts of the map. Parts that I need to be in to advance. It doesn't crash, but I get something like one frame per five minutes. Maybe I should have waited until it was out of early access but I was impatient and the early game has been so much fun.
All of them.
The only one I wouldn't are those I didn't pay for like Sauerbraten & Wesnoth. But I didn't pay for them so NA.
And now I play board games.
I'm glad I didn't but that new Enshrouded. I was really excited for it. I'm so picky about new games and thought this could be one. But the first moments I saw some playthrough today, and I saw the crappy graphics, I was out. I don't even want to see anyone play it. Yuck.
Why in 2024 do they release these "hot" games with jaggy graphics, low quality graphics, cartoony and low color graphics?
Tiny Tina Wonderland but only because my friend has been busy lately so we didn't start yet, I could do with that money that I bought it on sale though...
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Where The Water Tastes Like Wine. Got tired of hearing the game's mouth before even getting to anything resembling a main gameplay loop, chose to exit, and it started another long winded speech, which I Alt+F4'd out of. I learned of this game via youtube recommendations of its soundtrack, liked some of the songs, game went on my wishlist. Got a Steam notification it was on sale, hit buy. Was busy with other shit for awhile, when I got around to playing and UTTTERLY FUCKING HATING it for thoroughly refusing to respect my time, the Steam refund period had lapsed. Did you know there's a "remove from library" feature where you can just...unown a game. I've used it precisely once.
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BATTLETECH. I was thinking "Hmm, I've enjoyed this franchise for awhile but never actually played the tabletop game, and I live in an oubliette so I'm the only person within 100 miles that's even HEARD of the game, so maybe this will let me experience that gameplay. I died of old age three times in a row just waiting for the opening cinematic to finish. It's in the style of "slide the camera slowly across hand-drawn art while a voice actor monologues" things. It ran like constipation, somehow. Like it felt like the computer was struggling to handle what should have been simple video playback. The story is apparently about YET ANOTHER non-canonical pointless little periphery nation to be served by YET ANOTHER pointless little lance-strength mercenary company. The main menu appears and gave me a choice between 'Story Mission" and "Campaign" which...those are synonyms. Then we FINALLY after four generations have come and gone we get in-engine, and the tutorial mission is the last goddamn straw. They vomit story and gameplay control tutorials at you simultaneously, so you're hit with a voice saying "The duchess knows she can count on you.", a prompt at the bottom of the screen that says "Press T to use your weapons" and a text box on the left edge of the screen that says 'The duchess understands that it's dangerous being in a Battletech game, but she knows you'll do the best you can."
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Young Souls. I'm pretty forgiving when it comes to couch co-op games if we find one we can both enjoy.
And this one was good, but it was basically unplayable on the Switch (or, at least, constantly crashed mine). Finally got to the very end (where there's no saving from the start of the end cutscene until the finale) and it crashed before the final battle. Restarted, got through several minutes of cutscenes, got a little farther but crashed again, this time in the final battle. Tried one more time and it crashed again in a different spot. Promptly deleted the game.
So I guess we'll never finish that one.
Atomic Heart. I was excited to learn that Mick Gordon participated in the music and I got hooked by the aesthetic of the intro sequence, but the drawn-out underground lab
missionseries of fetch quests completely killed my enjoyment. I'd only gotten to three out of four macguffins before I gave up.The insufferable talking glove didn't help either.
