Following up on this comment since I haven’t seen a thread about it: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/14639216
Starfield. It’s the definition of a “mixed” rating on Steam. It’s not bad, but it’s not good either. You play it for an hour and your reward is that an hour has passed.
After running through the main story once, I modded it to where you cannot buy any natural resources - they must be harvested in person and/or setup a base and and ship all natural resources to a central storage planet. This essentially turned it into a spreadsheet-logistics game which gave me a a second, much more enjoyable playthrough. But I agree - absolutely medium-tier game.
Hogwarts Legacy
The term you’re looking for is “Extra Medium”.
Probably everytbing put out by Nintendo in a long time. Yes, even that one. That one, too.
Excuse you, but Breath of the Wild was amazing.
Breath of the Wild was basically a Ubisoft game with a Zelda coat of paint.
But instead of playing the map as a menu screen, you actually play in the world and discover things.
That was the crucial difference for me.
I envy you and wish I could see games through your eyes.
I don’t think Blackmist has a hot take here. The Ubisoft formula is: navigate to a tower. Tower gives you a checklist of things to do. You do the things, then look for a new tower.
Breath of the Wild is different. Yes, you start by navigating to a tower, but then… no checklist is given. You look around, you explore, you find things to do. Maybe you find everything, maybe you miss things, maybe you miss everything. You can always come back and explore more later… and when you’ve done everything, you can’t really be CERTAIN that you got it all. The lack of a checklist dramatically shifts the gameplay from doing a list of events, with little difference from selecting them from a menu, to actually having to explore the world and look around.
To call it the Ubisoft formula is to vastly misunderstand what the Ubisoft formula is. The formula is a list of things to do. BotW does not have that. Not even slightly. The towers are just something to aim for to get you started, and a place you can use your eyes to look around from, also to get you started.
And to add to that, it also gives you the tools for discovery. It’s not just “Ubisoft, but they hide the icons”.
The shrine detector (which can become an anything detector), the ability to look through binoculars or whatever it is and stamp a limited number of visible waypoints onto the map. Tears of the Kingdom gives you a slightly obscure ability to highlight all the cave entrances nearby, which you can then try to mark up and see if you’ve been there.
Other games have started trying to do some of this, but I think a lot of it is added late on in development and doesn’t really work well. Like Jedi Survivor gives you the ability to mark things with icons, but what for? You can’t see the markers when you’re walking around. There’s not really much to discover from a distance, and it’s pretty far from being a vast open world.
Is it perfect? No. The last few shrines are often a complete ball-ache to find, although a lot of them are just a generic fight and they’re pretty optional, it feels like you should do them.
Is it better than a world as a menu screen as offered by Ubisoft and those that copy them? Yes.
I think in general a lot of developers should take a long look at what they’re actually trying to make before going with the open world approach. It’s getting tired, and they’re mostly doing it badly.
Ubisoft wishes they could make a game that good.
They do make games that good, hence the comparison.
Basically sure. But the devil is in the details.
Don’t censor yourself, who are you afraid of??
Mario Kart World
Just say it
Mechwarrior online.
Free, online “shooter”, good community, runs on linux, gameplay is dated and doesnt get tons of dev support anymore but its still how I kill an evening once or twice a week.
If you like space dogfighter sims, try Chorus. You can score it super cheap on sales and I think it’s a solid 6/10. Combat is fun and it’s nice to look at. Unfortunately the story has terrible pacing and kinda doesn’t make sense at times. Also, the missions get kinda repetitive. These two things really held it back for me, otherwise it’s a fairly good game.
Another, if you like top down shooters, is Subterrain. Doesn’t always go on sale, but when it does it’s dirt cheap because it’s like 10 years old at this point. It’s got some weird survival mechanics that I think are kinda pointless, but the gameplay and story were enough to keep me mildly entertained. I’d call this a “potato chip” type game. Not particularly good, but somehow kind of satisfying if you don’t think too much about it. Definitely a 6/10.
On another note, what’s y’all’s stance on the association that 5/10 = bad? I feel like it’s because people equate it to being 50% and associate that with bad due to school grades. I see it as an average score and when I give something a 5 or 6, that means I’m neutral to slightly positive feeling about it.
I don’t think a 5/10 game is necessarily bad, but it needs to have some kind of - I dont know, character? Niche appeal? - to shine for the players who are going to like it.
I’ll throw out Krater as an example. It’s not great, but it has a unique setting, great atmosphere, and some interesting ideas driving it. I kinda love it for its eccentricities in spite of the overall experience being a bit meh.
I remember Krater! I played it for a while and I liked the atmosphere, but I only got so far before I saw how… 1-dimensional it was?
I don’t know how exactly to put it into words, but some games that aren’t so good I have a “see behind the curtain” moment. Once that happens I tend to quickly get turned off to a game because I feel like it’s not fun anymore. In Krater that happened when I realized that all the fights were essentially the same and equipment was all stat sticks with no unique qualities.
Pretty much what your characters did at the beginning of the game was what they did at mid game with no noteworthy changes. There were other characters you could sub in and that changed things up a little but the repetitiveness of it all really ruined it for me.
I agree that’s a really good example of a “meh” game and I think 5/10 is a very fair assessment.
First thing that came to my mind was Crysis 2. Absolute mid-tier FPS, which was unfortunately pretty disappointing coming off of the first game.
Definitely worth a look if you just want to run around and shoot shit.
From the 360 Era — Too Human
The control scheme is bizarre at first (right stick is melee) but it works once you’re used to it. It’s Sci-Fi Norse mythology, I recall it having a pretty solid art style. I picked it up used from either Blockbuster or EB because I wanted to see just how bad it was, ended up enjoying it far more than I expected, I’ll give it a “Yeah, it’s ok”, disc images are readily available if you want to emulate it, can find a physical copy cheap online too if that’s your thing.This is the game that ended up taking down its studio (Silicon Knights, they developed Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem and Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, they tried to sue Epic, who countersued and won, probably added to my initial interested tbh.
It’s interesting that Too Human began development as a PSX game, back in the late 90s. Quite a bit of development hell to go through
Sacred 2.
Ratopia
It’s like Oxygen not Included but worse
The Technomancer
2 that make fans go bananas.
Torchlight 2; Grim Dawn
Right in the middle of the middle part of the middle part of the middle pack.
Torchlight 2 is fun when you start out, but gets really repetitive quite fast. Good fit for a right in the middle
The incredible adventures of Van Helsing. Decent rpg with loot but was fairly imbalanced among character classes. The real winner was the mini tower defense games in it and the spinoff tower defense game, imo.
avowed and ACS were actually less than mid
