The RPG that pissed you off the most

[ERYFKRAD]

I don't know enough about League of Legend mechanics vis-a-vis Dota 2, but I can imagine skillshots make the game more accessible to casuals. To be clear, like putting the basketball in the hoop, the goal of a skillshot-oriented character is obvious, even if it it's not easy to execute. Someone who's unfamiliar with the game can tell when you're hitting Mirana's arrows consistently, but he might have no clue what it looks like to play Dark Seer effectively. The skill involved in that is more subtle, and that means there's a higher threshold of knowledge required just to spectate the game.

I find most of the people who constantly talk about how "hardcore" they are and how "they only play hardcore games" and how "it took me a long time to LEARN headshots so it's high skill" are some of the most casual players ever. Dumbfucks who want to endlessly repeat the same action over and over again to claim some semblance of skill in repetitive motion because they are too stupid to read an opponent and react in a meaningful manner.

A lot of the games that appeal to these sorts of people - Counter-Strike, Valorant, Overwatch, Apex Legends, Starcraft, most Fighting games - have very little if any strategy or counterplay, and largely focus on mastering some sort of repetitive action. Most competitive FPS nowadays have such low TTK that counter play is largely impossible - once you get in a fight, you either win or lose, and accuracy plays a huge part in it. Yes, I am aware Starcraft is on the list, and that's probably the most contentious game on there. Unofortunately, the Starcraft pro scene is largely not related to strategy and is more about direct unit counters and fighting against the games limitations to manage your base. This is exactly why people argue that the unit selection limit in Starcraft is a positive and it's removal is one of the reasons Starcraft 2 sucks (which is literally insane reasoning if you actually think about it. The game being tangibly worse to play aparrently makes it better).

Oblivion.


Perfect example of Bethestardian fustercluck:

0:42 I was wondering what this meant and I went to remind myself who Salmo was. He's a baker in Skingrad. The wiki has this to say Salmo has two AI packages commanding him to take five loaves of bread to the Two Sisters Lodge at 10am and to the West Weald Inn at midday, but the packages never execute as he has no bread in his inventory and the packages are of "escort" type, meaning he doesn't actively seek any out. It's possible this bug was introduced to avoid another, more serious one: if bread is given to Salmo using the console or CS, he will walk to one of the inns as commanded, take a bite of bread, and the game will crash. That's such a deep level joke, god I love you Young Scrolls.

You can reliably crash Morrowind, Oblivion, Fallout 3 and New Vegas by adding an item to the inventory of a deleted actor via a script.

There is no error checking or contingencies in place in the engine whatsoever. Which is genuis design when you consider that this is a game made by possibly hundreds of people, many who don't understand the nuances of the engine, who will be constantly editing and deleting things in the creation process. This is even more hilarious when you realise that the only thing keeping TES afloat is the modding scene, which will often be done by people with very little software experience who likely know even less about the engine than Bethesda. Absolute 1000 IQ level engine design.

People forget the time where Oblivion would literally corrupt your save after ~100 hours of play because it wasn't cleaning up used references, leading to an overflow. This was mainly noticeable after isntalling Shivering Isles (which would make it happen after more like 40 hours of play) because it was creating about 20 new references per second because of it's horrendously written scripts. Want to play an open world RPG for a long time? Tough luck, your game is fucked. Luckily they did patch this, but the fact it happened in the first place (and that NOBODY in the office played the game for 100 hours on a single play to experience the bug) speaks volumes.

A gamebreaking animation bug (that kicks in after about 250 hours) still exists to this day.

Bethesda are possibly the most incompetent company in gaming. The fact that it took fans until Fallout 76 to realise just how broken their game code is astounds me. I honestly don't know why so many people give them a free pass.

It just works

 

[Robotigan]

Luckily for Dota, it's gotten away with promoting a lot more styles of play, and I respect it for that. It's probably the most interesting multiplayer game I have played as a result.

My favorite kind of games are the ones where the devs embrace out-of-the-box tactics. I miss the really zany stuff in Dota like the completely naked splitpush strats with 0/0/0 stats. I miss being able to overwhelm the opposing team through sheer economy alone. When the game started tilting too much towards always being teamfight centric is when I quit.

 

[Sykar]

There is no error checking or contingencies in place in the engine whatsoever. Which is genuis design when you consider that this is a game made by possibly hundreds of people, many who don't understand the nuances of the engine, who will be constantly editing and deleting things in the creation process. This is even more hilarious when you realise that the only thing keeping TES afloat is the modding scene, which will often be done by people with very little software experience who likely know even less about the engine than Bethesda. Absolute 1000 IQ level engine design.

People forget the time where Oblivion would literally corrupt your save after ~100 hours of play because it wasn't cleaning up used references, leading to an overflow. This was mainly noticeable after isntalling Shivering Isles (which would make it happen after more like 40 hours of play) because it was creating about 20 new references per second because of it's horrendously written scripts. Want to play an open world RPG for a long time? Tough luck, your game is fucked. Luckily they did patch this, but the fact it happened in the first place (and that NOBODY in the office played the game for 100 hours on a single play to experience the bug) speaks volumes.

A gamebreaking animation bug (that kicks in after about 250 hours) still exists to this day.

Bethesda are possibly the most incompetent company in gaming. The fact that it took fans until Fallout 76 to realise just how broken their game code is astounds me. I honestly don't know why so many people give them a free pass.

I didn't even mention that this still works

Still, the fact that they managed to create a baker bringing bread to a tavern, taking a bite from the bread leading to crashing the game is hilarious.

Luckily for Dota, it's gotten away with promoting a lot more styles of play, and I respect it for that. It's probably the most interesting multiplayer game I have played as a result.

My favorite kind of games are the ones where the devs embrace out-of-the-box tactics. I miss the really zany stuff in Dota like the completely naked splitpush strats with 0/0/0 stats. I miss being able to overwhelm the opposing team through sheer economy alone. When the game started tilting too much towards always being teamfight centric is when I quit.

That is because it is not "exciting" for the average fantard to watch.

 

[SomeGuyWithAnOpinion]

That is because it is not "exciting" for the average fantard to watch.

This is basically it.

All of the money from esports comes from viewerships. Even sponsorship money is contingent on viewerships. They need to get those tune ins. And it's much easier for people to cheer on and get excited for a nice skillshot than it is for them to be interested in some micro-optimisation to slightly improve economy over time, or perfect positioning leading to denial of an enemy attack.

But I am pretty much done with multiplayer gaming at this point. Between the huge decline away from interesting gameplay and towards repetitive "skill" challenges, the endless amount of cheaters in basically every game (although this depends on the specific game), the fact that they eat through all your time endlessly if you want to be even remotely good, more and more greed leading to predatory monetization like battle passes and the complete obsession gamers have with cosmetics, game companies now starting to crack down on and ban people for "bad behaviour" (which is usually based on an arbitrary list of words rather than actual behaviour), and the often completely awful and cringe communities of fanboys and obsessed autists who talk nonstop about how DEEP and AMAZING these shallow experiences are, the real chad move is to just play single player games. They often have far more interesting mechanics, they don't waste my time with endless grind (at least USUALLY, ubisoft games are still pretty good at this, but I avoid them), and they usually offer a nice, tailored experience for some specified amount of hours, then they're done. Oh, and no loot boxes. Occaisonal coop games with my friends are usually pretty good, but the whole industry around competitive multiplayer gaming could die and we would lose nothing of value as far as I am concerned

 

[Fedora Master]

The fact that it took fans until Fallout 76 to realise just how broken their game code is astounds me.

You must be new here. Half the Codex still hasn't learned that lesson.

 

[Sensuki]

I saw people like @Sensuki and @Bester actually try

Actually, I didn't have any semblance of a vision of what was "wrong" with the game at the time. All I personally tried to do was to bring it closer to the IE-experience, but it didn't redeem the game.

Sensuki saw problems with some stuff, but I don't think he had a cohesive vision of what needed to change overall.

I think it was the first time for both of us that we saw a game which sucked, and desperately wanted it not to suck. I can't speak for him, but I hadn't given game design much thought before PoE. We lacked experience to understand why PoE sucks and how to fix it.

To fix its writing - rewrite everything. Or at the very least, a strong editor pass + deep modifications of the story, characters and their motivation.

Seems to me like your opposition to the game is largely political in nature.

I remember the conversation Bester and I had on Steam chat in 2015 after playing PoE for a week or two. Believe me, if we thought the game was worth fixing, we would have probably kept at it. The story/writing was a huge letdown in Pillars of Eternity. There are lots of problems with the system design and clarity of the combat but the content in the game itself is simply not worth fixing the systems and combat for.

All of my casual gamer friends thought the same about the game - they just thought it was boring/meh - most played it for a few hours, but lost interest during Act 2. Only one of my friends finished it, and he also finished the second - but he is notorious for completing games in general.

I don't know if it's the most disappointing game I've played, but it would be in the top 5 most disappointing.

 

[ResetRPG]

Divinity Original Sin 1.

People heralded it has a masterpiece on the level of the infinity engine games, and I just couldn't see why. I didn't like the world, I didn't like the characters, and the combat was just okay. I got extremely bored and eventually put it down around 20-30 hours in. Hopefully I will pick it back up and give it a spin again, but at the moment I have absolutely 0 interest in returning to it.

Thankfully D:OS 2 fixed a lot of the issues I had with the first game and I really enjoyed it. It ended up being in my personal top 5 for 2017.

 

[eli]

Divinity Original Sin 1.

People heralded it has a masterpiece on the level of the infinity engine games, and I just couldn't see why. I didn't like the world, I didn't like the characters, and the combat was just okay. I got extremely bored and eventually put it down around 20-30 hours in. Hopefully I will pick it back up and give it a spin again, but at the moment I have absolutely 0 interest in returning to it.

Thankfully D:OS 2 fixed a lot of the issues I had with the first game and I really enjoyed it. It ended up being in my personal top 5 for 2017.

-OG1: good combat, leveling, itemization, and charecters; shit
-OG2: worse combat, leveling, itemization, and characters; top five
?

 

[ResetRPG]

Divinity Original Sin 1.

People heralded it has a masterpiece on the level of the infinity engine games, and I just couldn't see why. I didn't like the world, I didn't like the characters, and the combat was just okay. I got extremely bored and eventually put it down around 20-30 hours in. Hopefully I will pick it back up and give it a spin again, but at the moment I have absolutely 0 interest in returning to it.

Thankfully D:OS 2 fixed a lot of the issues I had with the first game and I really enjoyed it. It ended up being in my personal top 5 for 2017.

-OG1: good combat, leveling, itemization, and charecters; shit
-OG2: worse combat, leveling, itemization, and characters; top five
?

I just can't agree with your characterization of this.

If you're a fan of OS 1 then that's fine, but D:OS 2 was just a much more worthwhile experience to me.

 

[BoroMonokli]

Tides of Numanuma or Mud & Midgets Legacy.
It's almost a tie.

I was eagerly waiting for a PST sequel, what a disappointment...
I stopped caring quite fast though because the game is absolute garbage.

So, the crown probably goes to Mud & Midgets X Legacy.
I wasn't expecting this one but man, a new M&M would be so great, except they randomly mixed old and new M&M features with JRPG elements, added some old wizardry features and not the best ones and most of all, delivered an engine way below M&M III & VI standards, that's the most unforgivable sin.

How much did you donate to the scam?

Seeing this I am reminded why many devs dont put demos out nowadays anymore: I only caught wind of numanuma after their ks, tried the demo, and forgot about the game / lost interest / deciced I should play more ps:t

For what its worth the numenera book (I "found" a nice pdf on the net) is serviceable. So there was that much upside.

 

[BoroMonokli]

Besides, if it didn't have "intelligent barbarians", we would be in an alternate universe where you would be complaining that "you can only ever put strength on your barbarians, there's no nuance or builds, it's just the same character archetypes over and over again that we have all seen before"

The problem with the abstractions in PoE is that the stats are difficult to understand and putting a number in one category will just give you another number in another category, so you have to snake through and discover what each number does and look at multiple mechanics to really understand what your one stat point means.

If I put a point into Might, that gives me +3% Damage and Healing, which is obvious and makes sense because anyone who has played a game before knows what those things are (although I have seen players confuse healing and health, which is also a problem). But it also gives 2 Fortitude. So now I need to go and look up Fortitude.

Fortitude (FOR): Represents a character's endurance to "body system attacks" such as poison or disease. It is based on Might and Constitution

Okay, so that definition is meaningless to a lot of players. "Body system attacks" is a meaningless term. Most poeple know what poison is, but then it begs the qeustion, should I put points into constitution or might? Well okay, constitution gives endurance and health. So now I need to look up what Endurance does, and I need to understand the difference between endurance, health and healing power.

etc etc.

Oddly this makes Pillars look interesting in my eyes, interesting enough to mess around with at least. Smart (magic) barbs are my thing (it is the most tactically compelling class in diablo 2), muscle wizards I also enjoy (even if only for the 1d4chan joke), and this kind of stat convolutedness (although with a somewhat clearer text) is exactly why I like wizardry 8.

 

[Aemar]

Planescape Torment. I thought it didn't have enough action back then.
And Arcanum for its shitty combat.

 

[Fargus]

Evil Islands. Combat was really frustrating especially for 11 y\o kiddo.
Underrail. Many things inlcuding: try hard combat, respawning monsters, tedium, fuckery with loot, backtracking etc. GoTY
AoD. Try-hard min max visual novel. Ragequit.
BG2. Frustrating and chaotic rtwp combat in overall good game. Learned to deal with it.
Gothic 2 NoTR. I raged a lot but it was a good kind of rage.
Battle Brothers. Love hate kinda game, but mostly love. And lots of rage.
New Vegas because of how much it was crashing back when i didnt know how to mod it right. Same with other gamebryo games i guess.
PoE. Pissed off because i backed this trash.