Quoting: EhvisAlways funny how people experience things differently. I played all Witcher games on the highest difficulty (excluding the permadeath one) because I need my failure to hurt for immersion. Considering the hundreds of hours I have in those three games, no complaints from me. :)

Yes and here's the thing. We probably play games for different reasons. I do it to relax, and for escapism.

Those Witcher games are exactly that, for me, and because I don't have to worry about health or things like eating food to fix it, they are immersive to me. I love the characters, including my Geralt.

I am the same with the Mass Effect games (though there's no need for any kind of cheats, if they would even exist). I find them comforting. One time (2008'ish, first Mass Effect game) I was dreading a little meeting with the taxman and found myself on a remote planet, with a toxic ammonia atmosphere, with winds blowing, in a long abandoned camp with a lean-to for parking a vehicle. I thought "Nobody will find me here".

To me there are two types of immersion, story and graphical. I can be immersed in story and character, and immersed in a game but only if the graphics jibe. For example, there's no realism in traversing a world where the objects look like cheap props, lilliputian in perspective (e.g. Dragon Age II). That's not even quality of graphics I'm talking about there. When I walk up to a building, does it look like it's 10 stories tall? When I go in, does it feel like I'm walking though a doorway, or am I watching someone behind my eyes play a stupid video game?

Combat isn't normally what immerses me. I like some combat (and love theatrical violence and gore), but I don't like difficulty. I don't want to die and lose progress and resources. The only time I will play a harder game is if there's some sort of dopamine reward (e.g Borderlands 2 at high levels). That was a winning formula for those games, and they blew it with Tiny Tina's Wonderlands.

Moreover, that's the only thing that will get me to play a game that's all combat for very long, some sort of psychological tweak like that. Leveling, looting, so you can kill better, so you can level and loot. I know what it's doing, and I let it lol

I generally don't like winding up my nervous system though. Adrenaline/norepinephrine is toxic to me. Being angry is not pleasant for me either, it affects me for a while. So a game that pisses me off has got to go (unless it can still manage to tweak that reward circuit in the brain, like Borderlands games)

A game with a lot of traversal, interspersed with combat is perfect for me. If this traversal is at my leisure (open world) so much the better.

Crowdfunding. Significant contributors can get burned. Look at the Oculus Rift, the recipient sold the device to Facebook for a billion and skipped off with the money. It was supposed to be a project that people could benefit from (access to interfaces etc.). The Minecraft developer, Notch, apparently contributed a fair bit of bacon. He was going to have his own interface to it in his game. That made ME mad, and I had no horse in the race or notion of having such a device.

But... if crowdfunding means donating $50 for the promise of a good game that's a better gamble than buying lottery tickets at least. Not that much different than buying a game these days

Hogwarts Legacy - that game is a glitchy mess, and 55h in with half way done with the story, my save glitches out and I can't start the next quest. This is worse than just wasting money.

Most recently, Yakuza 0. Reddit hyped the game up endlessly, appearing on countless Beat Of lists. I did buy it on sale at least, but it's definitely not my type of game.

Valheim

I usually just refund the game when i see that i made a terrible purchase. Happens rarely though (i dont buy into hype) and sometimes i do that deliberately to check the state of triple A... and almost always its horrible.


Amnesia: Rebirth is one that was pretty bad game, that i didnt refund just to suppor the devs though. I wish they made SOMA 2.. but i hear Bunker is pretty good also.

Last edited by Xpander on 12 June 2023 at 8:04 am UTC

FarCry 6. Enemies are sponge bullets, even sniper don't harm anyone.

Quoting: Grogan

Quoting: EhvisAlways funny how people experience things differently. I played all Witcher games on the highest difficulty (excluding the permadeath one) because I need my failure to hurt for immersion. Considering the hundreds of hours I have in those three games, no complaints from me. :)

Yes and here's the thing. We probably play games for different reasons. I do it to relax, and for escapism.

Those Witcher games are exactly that, for me, and because I don't have to worry about health or things like eating food to fix it, they are immersive to me. I love the characters, including my Geralt.

I am the same with the Mass Effect games (though there's no need for any kind of cheats, if they would even exist). I find them comforting. One time (2008'ish, first Mass Effect game) I was dreading a little meeting with the taxman and found myself on a remote planet, with a toxic ammonia atmosphere, with winds blowing, in a long abandoned camp with a lean-to for parking a vehicle. I thought "Nobody will find me here".

To me there are two types of immersion, story and graphical. I can be immersed in story and character, and immersed in a game but only if the graphics jibe. For example, there's no realism in traversing a world where the objects look like cheap props, lilliputian in perspective (e.g. Dragon Age II). That's not even quality of graphics I'm talking about there. When I walk up to a building, does it look like it's 10 stories tall? When I go in, does it feel like I'm walking though a doorway, or am I watching someone behind my eyes play a stupid video game?

Combat isn't normally what immerses me. I like some combat (and love theatrical violence and gore), but I don't like difficulty. I don't want to die and lose progress and resources. The only time I will play a harder game is if there's some sort of dopamine reward (e.g Borderlands 2 at high levels). That was a winning formula for those games, and they blew it with Tiny Tina's Wonderlands.

Moreover, that's the only thing that will get me to play a game that's all combat for very long, some sort of psychological tweak like that. Leveling, looting, so you can kill better, so you can level and loot. I know what it's doing, and I let it lol

I generally don't like winding up my nervous system though. Adrenaline/norepinephrine is toxic to me. Being angry is not pleasant for me either, it affects me for a while. So a game that pisses me off has got to go (unless it can still manage to tweak that reward circuit in the brain, like Borderlands games)

A game with a lot of traversal, interspersed with combat is perfect for me. If this traversal is at my leisure (open world) so much the better.

Lots of this really vibe with me. I get very frustrated with difficulty in some games, like RPGs and platformers, because it often means repeating the same challenge many times, or grinding for more power. Failure creates a stopping point ("just died, let's stop and tomorrow I re-start fresh") rather than a reward cycle ("oh so this part didn't work, let's just change it"). Combat in these games is really an interruption for me. But I love really difficult puzzle and strategy games, because that usually means I really have to dedicate all my attention to a hard problem, which makes it easier to tune off from everything else. It is really relaxing (so long as I don't get to a hard wall or an overly punitive situation - I will absolutely look for answers or savescum if needed). Otherwise, I might just go for a visual novel (or a book, or a movie) and get lost in the story without having the hiccups of an RPG or action game.

And yeah, I have a problem with games that stress me out (for example, anything fast-paced counts, or anything that makes me angry or excessively alert). Even when it is a game I enjoy, I need to take frequent breaks and sometimes I'm just not in a good mood for it. I don't want the adrenaline that some people crave - I get enough of that from reality. :P

Recently, I refunded Callisto Protocol because it ran so badly on Steam Deck. IIRC it was the first in the now sizeable list of bad PC releases and it was certainly a gamble on my part getting it right at launch. I will try it again after a steep sale.

But the game I thought of immediately when I saw the thread title was Ultima IX back in, apparently, 1999. I loved all the preceding Ultimas I’d played and I splurged on a huge box special edition, or whatever it was called, imported from the US. It cost a lot, shipping was expensive and on top of that I had to pay a huge customs fee. And the game itself was… very disappointing.

I still have it, it’s a treasured possession. I don’t think I’ll ever play it, however, unlike VII and VIII which are just splendid.

Death Stranding. I don't recall buying it, so it probably came from a bundle and only cost a few bucks. But still, I played it for a few hours and it was almost all cutscenes. Sometimes many cutscenes with mandatory player interaction in between, like clicking each item in a room to get a cutscene describing it or giving some other exposition. I eventually just started skipping them all, and they *still* made up almost half my time in the half hour after that (because it takes 2-10 seconds before you can skip each one, and often there are more than a few in a row).