veektarius

I agree with a few of the options that have been mentioned previously here, but just to give voice to one that's, I dunno, not a huge game that I had huge expectations for, but one that really missed an important mark for me, I'd go with the Battlefleet Gothic games. I like WH40 fluff and I love the idea of capital ship combat, whether it's at the fleet level or just that feeling of sitting on a chair on a bridge and waiting to see the outcome of the orders you gave.

Battlefleet Gothic is a game about capital ship warfare that manages to mechanically get so much right, without ending up being an abstract representation - you can look at your big honking battleships with their big honking broadsides between battles. But in both games, the rate at which you begin to acquire the best ships is too slow and the underlying campaigns are so mechanically clunky and imbalanced. Like, if they had just dropped the whole grand strategy conceit and let it be a linear scenario-based game, it could have been everything, and instead it was just a tease. And it would have been a much better way to spend their obviously limited development budget.

So based on the relatively positive coverage on this site I bought God Eater 2 on PC, which game with God Eater Resurrection bundled in for free. I was enjoying it for a while thanks to the pretty strong (anime) story, but I started to lose patience with how little the individual missions seem to have almost nothing to do with that story (and even when they do, the mission structure doesn't change). Is this a pattern for the series as a whole or should I watch the cutscenes and move onto the next entry to give it a shot?

Agree with most of your main points. I paid nothing for the game (as a standing member of Gamepass) and still ended up feeling a bit ripped off, if not for my money then for my expectations. The dialogue of the writing is clever but the story isn't, and anyone trying to draw parallels between the industrial age capitalism that thrives in these Outer Worlds and the modern day is stretching too much. Worst of all is the combat, and while some might say that good combat is only a "nice-to-have" for an RPG, any game with this much of it needs more variety and more engaging challenges than this one provides.

The only criticism I'd voice that I didn't see here is the thinness of its main plot. Like, I literally think that Fallout 3 had a better main story than Outer Worlds. The missions that Phineas (is that the right name?) sends you on have only the most indirect relationship to your ostensible quest to wake the colonists on the Hope, and your other quests don't feed into that main quest in any discernible way. Despite playing the game pretty intensively for a weekend, I would literally forget what the story of the game was between visits to him.

I got the game for free through Game Pass and still find myself feeling like I was tricked out of my money somehow. Though the writing and setting are okay, they, like everything in the game are so paper thin. It's a shell of all the systems you expect to find in a game of its type and I would with argue with a straight face that the main story of any Bethesda game is done better than Outer Worlds. All that good writing might go toward some clever phrasing, but it never seems as though it fulfills any purpose.

I don't hate the game, but I honestly just don't understand what people were experiencing when they gave it such high praise.

I haven't been on the site much lately, but I was honestly hoping to read this and find that the answer was "yes". Mario Sunshine was a fun game to watch despite its flaws, Donkey Kong 64 is nowhere close.

I think the last game I did this to was Tekken 7. I know I hate Tekken, so I didn't try it for a long time, but it went on a really good price and everyone had said such glowing things. The mechanics of Tekken just don't make sense to me. I literally couldn't beat some of the earliest story missions. Probably made it like ~45 minutes before returning it.

The other one that comes to mind is For Honor, and that's another one where I quit mostly because there wasn't much to do if I wasn't good at it and I didn't really want to get good.

I agree that hard/classic is a pretty good challenge, though in the mission I'm doing now there are artillery pieces critting my casters for 100+ damage and I'm pretty salty about it. As another poster mentioned, while part 1 was pretty harmless, in part 2 I've had a few cases where I really needed to straight up restart missions with a different character configuration to have any chance of a perfect clear.

So I'm not much of a competitive fighting game player, but I've been trying a little bit with SoulCalibur VI and now this. I have a couple question, first about connectivity and second about DOA mechanics

1) 9/10 matches are stuttery as hell, and in a timing based game like this, it's just more than I can handle. I assume that the problem is probably me rather than my opponents, but I have no problem playing shooters in most cases. Are online fighting games basically impossible to play without a wired connection? (the layout of my apartment makes this very difficult)

2) A lot of the time I'll get caught in my opponent's attack string for a significant period of time. I'll be holding block but at no point does my character try to block, even though it seems as though there was time. Is there a mechanic for reengaging your block, e.g. you have to release and press the block button again?

I'm not going to try and tell you your complaints aren't valid, I think that, like anime, JRPGs are a genre with a lot of capacity to encompass many different tones of story but which generally represent a pretty narrow range of tropes. Ultimately, the only solution to your problem is to stop holding out hope that they will change, because they've been playing on the same overly earnest/sentimental/highschool plotlines for the past ten years and they're not showing many signs of stopping.

I'm sure that most Japanese are similarly disinterested in our output - when you think about it, it's a minor miracle that they produce as much content that we're interested in as they do.

I feel like Waypoint was the outlet for the parts of Austin and Patrick's output that many people around here didn't care for. And without getting into the question of how good or bad that is, I feel like that sort of speaks to how small the potential audience becomes when you target only the people who do care for it. So it doesn't surprise me that the market can't support a website built on social commentary surrounding video games.