Everyone has their own opinions about the state of gaming and what games they think are good or bad. I have some very unpopular takes that I’ve decided to share, and before you draft your angry comment, you may want to know that this only fuels me to make worse and worse takes.
Elden Ring
To start off with a bang, let’s talk about the award winning Elden Ring. First off, the story absolutely SUCKS, more specifically how it’s told. Here’s what I was able to piece together in the first ~8 hours of playtime and seeing some people talk about the game;
- There used to be a queen who messed up so bad that death no longer exists.
- A bunch of people took shards of the Elden Ring and became demigods.
- I need to kill the aforementioned demigods for some reason,
Apart from this, if you want to know more you must scour the world for tiny bits of info, told to you by people who know 40 synonyms for every word and yet cannot punctuate a sentence to save their lives.
Another issue is the direction the player is steered in. When you start up the game it tells you to go to a castle, where you must meet a “maiden” in order to level up. You are then steered into the boss room, but you actually aren’t meant to fight him yet. No, you need to spend 5 hours running around in empty plains doing jack all for 10 minutes at a time and occasionally fighting some peasants. This is just straight up bad game design, you haven’t told the player anything and just plopped me into the world like, “figure it out, lmao”. The design philosophy clearly hasn’t shifted enough to support an open world experience from the more linear experience of the Dark Souls games.
Wizard of Legend 2
To start off, Wizard of Legend 1 is a great game, with an incredible pixel art style, snappy movement, and great music. On the other hand, Wizard of Legend 2 is a disappointing game, with a poorly executed 3D artstyle, slow and unresponsive movement and the most annoying announcer voice I have ever heard. Ultimately this boils down to one thing, the original developers,Contingent99, have been replaced with a new team called Dead Mage, and the irony seems to have flown over their heads. Ultimately, without some pretty core changes to the gameplay Wizard of Legend 2 is doomed to be just another forgettable Hades clone.
Zenless Zone Zero / Wuthering Waves
Zenless Zone Zero (ZZZ) and Wuthering Waves (WuWa) are two new gacha games released in 2024, which both fall short in two separate ways.
WuWa hit me by surprise, I hadn’t even seen a trailer for it and only heard about it from others talking about it in some gacha communities. It suffers from 3 problems.
- A poor launch – Combined with the low levels of marketing outside of Asia, there were a myriad of bugs. No matter how much free loot was offered, it couldn’t make up for the lost faith, and what use is a free character if you can’t even play them?
- Sub-par writing – an uninteresting story really didn’t help. Perhaps a better localisation would help, but ultimately the poor EN voice acting from a relevantly unknown cast was the final nail in the coffin.
- A poorly executed combat system – it seems like they aimed for a higher skill ceiling but ultimately were not able to implement it and had a simple Light Attack/Heavy Attack system instead. You can see remnants of this with the Plunging Attacks, but with such a simple combat experience you can clearly see a poorly executed copy of Genshin Impact’s combat.
Zenless Zone Zero falls short in many ways but does exceptionally well in some, for example the combat, it is incredibly fast paced and fluid, expanding from Genshin’s slow character switching that slows down the gameplay. While the combat is incredible, ZZZ falls short in almost every other way. It’s gameplay outside of combat is subpar, the daily rewards are tedious and the UI is horrid.
Team Fortress 2
Team Fortress 2 (TF2) is a game with an incredible legacy, starting careers and changing the way that games are monetised (for better and for worse). Ultimately it has had a profound impact on gaming and other online communities, but I think it’s time for TF2 to go by the wayside. While TF2 was revolutionary, it isn’t so anymore and the game has become rather dated. One large issue with TF2 is the horrible experience for new players- a lackluster tutorial combined with the game’s reliance on custom weapons that any new player will have no idea how to access. The game’s new player experience is on par with Foxhole, but at least Foxhole has a rather accepting community to help teach you the basics. In comparison TF2 has a rather unwelcoming community filled with jaded veterans. While TF2’s legacy and the projects it has inspired are incredible (SFM for instance), it is long past its heyday and Valve had the right idea to stop development.
While I think these games aren’t very good, some may disagree. Feel free to cry about it or type up a counterargument that I will ignore.