I have played Eve Online so many hours, and it’s a bad game. Don’t do it. you will spend hundreds of hours dreaming about the cool thing you’ll do later, but for 99% of players the cool thing will never happen. You will be part of the one percent’s cool thing.
Do you have a similar game?
Marvel Strike Force. I’ve never played a mobile game before it and I don’t think I ever will. But it took up brainspace and time during the COVID isolation, and I put in enough money that I feel I can’t quit now.
But don’t do it. It’s a time suck, money suck, and it’s repetitive.
Can say the same for Marvel Contest of Champions. Never spent money but oh boy did I waste precious time playing that for several years and it was, if I’m being honest, rarely enjoyable. Most of the time it was just compulsive.
Destiny 2. Played it religiously and got like 3k hours in it since 2018, and just stopped last year. The grind was killing me season after season and the clan I was with has disbanded, everyone is super pissy in LFGs. Great shooter, but can’t do everything from zero every 3 months Bungie. Qlso the rotating meta, and the frind to get it.
Yeah +1 on Destiny. My most played game after ARMA2 and I’d not recommend it. It doesn’t respect your time and you’re expected to just grind the same 3 or 4 events constantly and those don’t have any variation to them. Each season roles around with the same event to do each week for the next 12 weeks to get a slight recoloured gun.
I know it’s common among MMOs to hyper focus in a small subset but at least alts exist and there’s a world to explore. There’s virtually no reason to go back to the main world in D2 outside of seasonal events and every area has the same feeling to it. Alts don’t really matter either, there’s 3 classes that all play almost the same way with slight variation. If I start a Mage or a Warrior in an MMO I’m going to have a different experience and challenge, In D2 the biggest challenge between a Hunter and Warlock is learning how double jumping works. I’m still going to be using the same gun to kill 99.9% of enemies.
The devs also don’t care that much about their game. That much is self evident if you followed the recent major DLC release where at the end of the story even the communities own lore experts were scratching their head about what exactly the MacGuffin in the story was. At no point did the writers decide they should tell the players what it is/does even though all of the NPCs talk to you as if you already know.
I haven’t played since they removed a bunch of content that I paid for. I played the hell out of Destiny and pre ordered Destiny 2 but Bungie is dead to me now.
Same. I think I have roughly 2k hours over the years, but I’ve reduced my own playtime (and also the amount of money I give them, I don’t buy it unless it’s more than 50% off) over the years and ever since Forsaken I’ve had less and less reason to recommend it to anyone else. The big reason is pretty simple. Bungie just keep giving it less and less focus while monetizing the game as much as possible. Without writing an essay on everything wrong with Destiny I think the best summary is that the game has lost it’s vision and turned into a content treadmill. The themes of the original story have been largely thrown out the window. There’s no longer a clear artistic style of Destiny but rather whatever seems “fun”, like having 80s themed sci-fi setting with a “surfs up bro” type of character for an expansion. That expansion in the context of the wider story was supposed to be the dreadful defeat and uncertainty about the future, but we’ve thrown the story out anyway so who cares? Content is largely the same thing we’ve been doing since Forsaken with the biggest difference being the setting. All the while price of the game is increased and content gets spread out between expansions, seasons, dungeons and in game store, so that Bungie could get all the money they want.
And that’s just for the seasoned players. New players have it even worse. The new player experience is a lazily put together nonsensical mess. One of the worst I’ve seen. New players would have to put in a lot of effort to “get” Destiny and for that commitment they get “buy now” thrown in their face on every possible chance like some shitty F2P mobile game.
Kept scrolling till I found this comment.
I absolutely loved Destiny 2 but good god is it terrible in a lot of ways. Couldn’t keep up with the time investment required and the game really likes using FOMO to keep players hooked.
It’s less of a game and more of a second job. At least, that’s how it started feeling towards the end for me.
Oh man, I used to love this game. I adored the lore and gameplay, but fell off at Season of the Splicer, which is a damn shame because I LOVE the eliksini!! It was like that season was made for me. But I just got tired of the weekly chore list, and the need to “get my money’s worth” for whatever season I bought. Story was locked behind these chores too. Just… damn shame.
I had a similar arc with D2. I was on it straight from work for hours for a few years, was a bit too much to be honest.
Then it became even more cyclical and the grind felt like I was Sisyphus, constantly working towards the next thing.
Haven’t turned it on in years now and happy that way!
The fact that nobody has said Escape from Tarkov yet is shocking. The desync makes you never sure if you were killed legitimately or from a cheater (of which there are plenty). You’re brutally punished for every mistake, including those caused by the ever present audio issues. The developer, Nikita, will make the most nonsense changes in the name of stopping Real Money Trading, but all it does is encourage people to pay cheaters to get ahead since it gets harder to progress every wipe (the game completely wipes your progress every 6ish months). The quests are uninspired and boring at best, or sadistic at worst and encourage the worst play styles. This is honestly just a fraction of all the issues with the game.
I haven’t played in probably 6-8 months and I will for sure go back because apparently I’m a masochist.
Stellaris. I can’t recommend it anymore due to how fragmented the game mechanics have become due to the dlc model
eyes 2K of game time
Honestly yeah. Like the last 2 DLC’s just did not do it for me, and I try to get excited and just can’t.
What really killed me was my saves breaking every update while I waited for mods. Live service games, and relying on mods to make the game fun, are two things that don’t mix well.
Skyrim modded is great because mods that haven’t been updated in a decade still work
Goat Simulator.
League of Legends. I’ve sank so many hours into it a few years back. It’s not a bad game, just highly addictive and toxic. It was only really worth playing it with friends, but now they’ve all moved on.
Diablo 2. Starcraft and Destiny 2. By far I have played more than any other single game. Diablo 2. I played more than destiny and starcraft combined.
World of Warcraft is by far one of the worst games ever made. Why people think it’s good and why so many people play it. I have no idea.
I think it’s really just addiction and not knowing any other MMORPG. For many players it’s the first or even only game they know.
I loved WoW when it first came out. It was a nice big world and I love exploring. And meeting people from around the world was nice too. But I found it way too grindy and left at around level 27 or so and never returned.
Apex Legends. Matchmaking is garbage, but when you win it’s a good high. I have way too many hours into that game. I would be well over level 1000 if it kept track
Same. I loved that game, and then one day, noticed how much I really, really hated it. The trios model is the worst. Dipped out and haven’t played since.
When I was about 13, I started playing this MMO called Nexus TK. I have spent what I’m sure is thousands of hours playing it. I kicked the habit for a whule, but recently re-registered to see what was going on. It’s a slow responding 2D “action” MMO, and the decline in players turned it into a weird niche clique where newcomers are basically not welcome. But it’s still up and running 25 years later.
You should go check it out. It’s awful.
NBA 2K games. Terrible loot system that never gives you good stuff until it enters endgame near the end of the year. Then they turn off the servers a few months later and force you to buy next year’s game that has the same graphics and a slightly tweaked playing mechanics.
But I honestly personally spent quite literally hundreds of hours on that series. Mainly cause I’m a huge NBA fan and I love building out custom teams and there’s not much competition in realistic basketball simulators at the moment.
Yeah I’m with you on those games. I want to like them, but I always feel like I’ve invested way too much time for way too little progress that eventually i give up. Then I try again a year or two later lol
Yea, I eventually just resorted to playing the offline modes. It’s much more fun than the rat race that is myteam
Cookie Clicker
like drugs… just say no
I think idle games are interesting to mindfully experience. They - at least good ones - demonstrate the influence of external motivation, of progression.
Outside of that… Yeah. There’s a fine line of experiencing theme and gameplay Design, and falling into mindless simple number scaling and waiting.
This is why Universal Paperclips is my favorite idle game, maybe my favorite game ever. It has an ending and you can even interpret a story from it. Definitely worth playing once.
This is a crazy one for me. I saw this for like 5 seconds and I knew instantly this would piss me off and I never ever ever touched it or any ‘idle’ type games. I would rather stand still and stare at a wall. I don’t understand how anyone could find any entertainment at all. And apparently they are massively popular.
It does weird stuff to your brain. Just never start any of these and you’re good.
Always thought I was immune until I was forced to play Roblox, of all things, with my niece. We played some kind of incremental / idle game and I had to continue to play this game. It was horrible. ( ; ω ; )
I enjoyed playing Cookie Clicker, but probably because I only really played it for a month or so - I can imagine playing that any longer would not be worth the time 😅
Ultima Online is the only thing that I can really think of. Most things I think are garbage, were always garbage. But UO used to be so fucking awesome until EA started trying to make it more like EQ and later WoW.
Boy, that’s a blast from the past. I felt the same way about Star Wars Galaxies.
I was broken hearted after the CU. Couldn’t play anymore after that. It was such an awesome game.
Paladins. I’ve spent like 400 hours in it and tbh it’s all hand crafted to keep you addicted and keep grinding their bullshit battlepass.
Honorable mention: Team Fortress 2. Game is great but Valve has pretty much done nothing with it. Last major update was in late 2017 and since then the game has received minor updates that usually only add shit for people to throw money at. The game still has a bot and cheater problem due to aforementioned fuck all Valve has been doing. Feel free to play, but you better open your wallet if you even want to speak! Let that one sink in, the game is free to play but you need to pay! To! Communicate! In the fucking game! Why? Oh the aforementioned cheating/bot problem of course! The bots were spamming racial slurs and other shit so Valve in infinite wisdom made free to play players unable to communicate at all! And that didn’t even do anything! The bots just had premium accounts! There are cheaters in the game with very valuable items and are not banned. After all that trash talk the game is still fun, 4000 hours well spent. It’s just sad that it’s being left to rot.
Yeah this is why I have completely given up on competitive multiplayer like this. Bots and cheaters everywhere.
I used to love playing CS Source and FEAR (that was sooo fun) and COD the-one-with-wall-running, but then cheaters ruined it all.
I’m rediscovering my love for single player games so, it’s not all bad.
Shop Titans (played on PC). It’s just predatorial and I got caught in its addictive gameplay loop for every waking hour of 2 days. I’m lucky that it was only 48 hours (compared to other people) and that I hate playing on mobile unless it’s short sessions of non-mechanical stuff because it seems mobile is full of games like this.
I don’t know if I can call it garbage but probably no one in their right mind should play Hearts of Iron IV. Somehow I managed to persist through hours of bewilderment and confusion, until it all clicked, and I soon found myself unhealthily obsessed and unable to rest peacefully until glorious France had swept across half of the globe
Well that’s just a Paradox game.
It took me about 40 hours of jumping between playing, videos, and guides before I was functional at CK2 but I loved that game. I’ve got over 1000 hours in CK2/3 and Stellaris. As much as I love them I can easily see why a lot of people hate Paradox grand strategy games.
Ahh Paradox games.
I love those games, everyone should play those games.
They make you miserable. But the pure sandbox jank is so fun! 00
You have to be a bit of a masochist to love Paradox which might be why I love Dwarf Fortress too.
Hah yeah I can’t recommend Dwarf Fotress.
I can recommend Stellaris though, all the cool events, all the new features you learn, learning all the techs, meeting the fallen empire for the first time, your first crisis, first time meeting exterminators. All very magical.
Trying to become a try hard map painter is a path of ruin and frustration with every single mechanic.
