Following up on this comment since I haven’t seen a thread about it: https://lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/14639216
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.
Hogwarts Legacy
Sacred 2.
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.
The term you’re looking for is “Extra Medium”.
Ratopia
It’s like Oxygen not Included but worse
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.
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.
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.
Pretty much every modern AAA game. Theres an exception here and there but really smaller studios have been making bangers that AAA studios just cant seem to touch
Yeah, big studios are setting up to create the mediocrest game they can imagine. Taking risks might make the line not go up, and they can’t have this happening.
Ironically, this leeds to creation of absolute dogshit more often than not.
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
The outer worlds . it was just meh in my opinion. Not to be confused with the outer wilds game that I’ve yet to play
Well, I can sort of be impressed with what outer wilds did. I didn’t actually find it all that much fun to play, whereas I completed the outer worlds.
I was going to say outer worlds as well (outer WILDS is a fantastic game IMO) the game was entirely competent, just unimpressive in every way. Except Pavarti, she is a precocious sugar dumpling and must be protected at all costs.
Actual conversation had with my wife, who was watching me play near the end:
“That chick is cute. I bet her romance is adorable!”
“She’s aromantic and asexual, you can’t romance her.”
“I bet her quest line is fun”
“Nope. It’s a really boring fetch quest where you set her up on a date with some bland woman old enough to be her mother. She is also very obviously sexually and romantically attracted to this woman.”
“…huh.”
I love Parvati but Drinking Sapphire Wine is a terrible quest.
I thought The Outer Worlds was violently mediocre, and yeah, its really long uninteresting fetch quest, but:
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Parvati says she’s not interested in physical affection, but I don’t recall her ever saying she was aromantic. The closest thing I remember is that she feels like she’s better at dealing with machines than people, which definitely doesn’t mean the same thing.
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I also don’t recall her ever saying anything sexual about Junlei?
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how old does this woman look to you that you think she could have a 28 year old daughter?
The quest was nothing new sure, but the reason I’m doing the quest? I want her to have the best dam date ever. I just wanted to see her happy and help her get ready for her date. Not sure what they were talking about with her being aromatic, don’t remember that. And about the age thing? not sure what they meant by that either, she looks the same age as Pavarti to me.
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Outer Wilds is absolutely superb if/when you get it try to get the DLC too its a good value. Steam summer sale coming up soon if you’re in the states
Loll, people will never stop getting these confused
avowed and ACS were actually less than mid
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.
Basically sure. But the devil is in the details.
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.
Don’t censor yourself, who are you afraid of??
Mario Kart World
Just say it