This is a followup to @[email protected] ‘s recent thread for completeness’ sake.
I’ll state an old classic that is seen as a genre defining game because it is: Myst. Yes, it redefined the genre… in ways I fucking hated and that the adventure game genre took decades to fully recover from. It was a pompous mess in its presentation and was the worst kind of “doing action does vague thing or nothing at all, where is your hint book” puzzle gameplay wrapped in graphical hype which ages pretty poorly as far as appeal qualities go.
So many adventure games tried to be Myst afterward that the sheer budgetary costs and redundancy of the also-rans crashed the adventure game genre for years.
Metal Gear Solid 1 & 2
I appreciate the plots of these games, and I’ve enjoyed watching them played by other people, but my god the controls for these two games are so wretched I cannot play them myself without dissolving into a superdense mass of gamer rage.
Dark Souls
The difficulty of these games comes from 50% fun things that you can git gud at doing and 50% from random unfun bullshit that makes it just not worth doing. By comparison every thing that killed me in Sekiro felt fair, so I really enjoyed that game.
Starcraft 2
This is weird because I can fully admit that SC2 does a bunch of things objectively better than the first game. I love the idea of playing coop, I love the idea of the single player campaigns, I love the idea of all of this game’s strategies - but then when I actually try and play it it’s like the screen is covered in grease and my eyes slide right off of it. I could play Brood War for months on end without ever getting bored, but the vastly improved sequels to it just make me want to do something else.
World of Warcraft
When this came out I was playing Final Fantasy 11 and Star Wars Galaxies, and when I decided to give the new game everyone was raving about a try I thought it was really dull in comparison to those other two. Final Fantasy had much more engaging design and Star Wars was, well, Star Wars and both then and now I appreciated the sandbox style of it more than the theme park style of most other MMOs. It’s a shame what happened to that genre as a whole - the best example of it right now is a game that can be played completely solo from start to finish, and every gameplay concept that once made MMOs unique experiences are now considered bad design.
I’m playing FFXI at the moment completely solo, I wish I could be more social in it but I don’t have the time out commitment to do so. I know I’m missing out, but my goal at the moment is to just absorb as much of the story as possible before it inevitably gets shut down
I revisit FF11 every couple of years and I appreciate what it is now, where most of the content is kind of a museum you can travel through and then the endgame still has a small but very dedicated player base. But then FF14 is also set up that way, where the only content that you actually need to talk to other players to do is endgame content, and I just don’t think an MMO with a huge playerbase that it still getting major expansions should be designed like that.