Games you hate, yet everyone else cherishes.

[Eschaton]

I hate these games more than anything: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_game_franchises

^This.

 

[hian]

I don't really like Mario either. I had infinitely more fun with the Ape Escape series than any Mario game ever.

The Dragon Quest series I don't particularly like either. To days date, it's probably the only major RPG that I've never bothered to play a title from for more than a couple of hours.

I just can't stand the storylines and the overall presentation.

And finally - Halo. I love shooters, but I can't for the love of me see the appeal in Halo.

 

[Aryam]

I hate these games more than anything: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_best-selling_video_game_franchises

You're a funny guy.

 

[Tai_MT]

I hate Assassin's Creed.  I tried to get into the game (the second one was a free downloadable game on the Xbox 360 which I started with) and didn't really see the appeal.  I got something like 2 hours into it and couldn't wrap my head around the controls or the mission objectives.  On top of which, anyone I've ever asked "What is the storyline about?" looks at me funny and can't really explain it to me.  I've always taken that as a sign you've got a really terribly written story.  If your audience can't summarize your story in two or three sentences, you need to figure out how to write your story much better than you have.

It's a franchise I pretty much hate the crap out of for its collectibles, its gameplay, and its story.  I don't understand why people enjoy the franchise so much.

 

[Eschaton]

I hate Pokemon.  I hate how its infinite roleplaying potential is wasted on a powergamer's wet dream of a meta game.  I hate how it's the same dayum story every time.  I hate how it's gameplay is still trapped in the 80's, only appending silly gimmicks rather than making the core gameplay more intuitive or streamlined.  If there is a visual metaphor for Pokemon's gameplay, it's this.

If there's one IP that should have been made into an MMORPG, above all else, it should have been Pokemon.  And they didn't.  I guess I can't blame them though.  I'm getting the feeling that Tajiri wanted to espouse real social interactions around the game, rather than in-game social interactions.

 

[Alexander Amnell]

I hate Assassin's Creed.  I tried to get into the game (the second one was a free downloadable game on the Xbox 360 which I started with) and didn't really see the appeal.  I got something like 2 hours into it and couldn't wrap my head around the controls or the mission objectives.  On top of which, anyone I've ever asked "What is the storyline about?" looks at me funny and can't really explain it to me.  I've always taken that as a sign you've got a really terribly written story.  If your audience can't summarize your story in two or three sentences, you need to figure out how to write your story much better than you have.

It's a franchise I pretty much hate the crap out of for its collectibles, its gameplay, and its story.  I don't understand why people enjoy the franchise so much.

I can easily summarize the storyline in three sentences...

Spoiler

Guy goes back in time through his dna and lives pseudo-historic hallucinations that are somewhat interesting but take a turn when near the end of the game the developers decide to throw magic into the pot out of nowhere in the form of magic apples and other artifacts that can do things like bend reality. These artifacts were made by 'god' or an alien race that dominated humanity in the beginning of time. At the end Desmond uses these artifacts to unlock a convenient device that stops the end of the world but one of the 'gods' is a part of it and takes over the world and enslaves humanity at the end, which is counterproductive to the entire franchises underlying theme.

There you go, now you don't have to waste your time...

 

[Tai_MT]

Well, at least I won't have to waste my time with the franchise now!  Ha ha.

 

[The Stranger]

I can easily summarize the storyline in three sentences...

Spoiler

Guy goes back in time through his dna and lives pseudo-historic hallucinations that are somewhat interesting but take a turn when near the end of the game the developers decide to throw magic into the pot out of nowhere in the form of magic apples and other artifacts that can do things like bend reality. These artifacts were made by 'god' or an alien race that dominated humanity in the beginning of time. At the end Desmond uses these artifacts to unlock a convenient device that stops the end of the world but one of the 'gods' is a part of it and takes over the world and enslaves humanity at the end, which is counterproductive to the entire franchises underlying theme.

Spoiler

There you go, now you don't have to waste your time...

I can't help but think they should have done away with that plot, and simply made the game solely about being an assassin.

 

[Eschaton]

^ Right?

 

[Sketcy-Sketch]

Final Fantasy 11. Yep.

 

[Tai_MT]

Yeah... Final Fantasy 11 was very poorly designed and programmed from the standpoint of "here's a final fantasy mmo".  Gaining levels takes forever (I seriously spent 25 hours getting to level TEN), interesting skills are on supermassive cooldowns and almost never work (to my utter disgust and hatred, Steal is on a 30 minute cooldown and works one in every 50 executions.  When it does work, you don't get much good in terms of loot), and questing/gear collecting is massively convoluted and needlessly difficult (nothing ever drops Gil.  Oh no, you have to kill monsters, hope they drop something, then sell it for the tiny amounts of Gil they give you in order to HOPEFULLY afford the next weapon up from the crappy starting one you have).

I have no idea how anyone managed to play it, or even how they managed to have FUN with it.  At 25 hours and not being impressed, I would say it was designed wrong.  I guess other people thought it was designed well and continued to play in order to max out all their classes.  There are some really sad people in the world, I guess.

Plus, when you have MORE GRIND than Runescape, you need to fire your entire Dev Team, maybe make a few commit ritual suicide, and start the crap over on the project, 'cause you done messed it up.

 

[Berylstone]

Yeah... Final Fantasy 11 was very poorly designed and programmed from the standpoint of "here's a final fantasy mmo".  Gaining levels takes forever (I seriously spent 25 hours getting to level TEN), interesting skills are on supermassive cooldowns and almost never work (to my utter disgust and hatred, Steal is on a 30 minute cooldown and works one in every 50 executions.  When it does work, you don't get much good in terms of loot), and questing/gear collecting is massively convoluted and needlessly difficult (nothing ever drops Gil.  Oh no, you have to kill monsters, hope they drop something, then sell it for the tiny amounts of Gil they give you in order to HOPEFULLY afford the next weapon up from the crappy starting one you have).

I have no idea how anyone managed to play it, or even how they managed to have FUN with it.  At 25 hours and not being impressed, I would say it was designed wrong.  I guess other people thought it was designed well and continued to play in order to max out all their classes.  There are some really sad people in the world, I guess.

Plus, when you have MORE GRIND than Runescape, you need to fire your entire Dev Team, maybe make a few commit ritual suicide, and start the crap over on the project, 'cause you done messed it up.

lol.  Well I guess I am one of those sad people in the world you speak of  I played that game for many years and - for the most part - enjoyed it.  

Many of your criticisms are valid though.  The economy was terrible.  Some of the cool down on abilities were far too long.  It was very difficult.  Which I can understand being a problem for some (though I liked the difficulty).

But judging by your post, I am guessing you played this game during its inception.  Leveling up doesn't take very long currently.  I went from level 30 to 90 for example in a couple of days.  My opinion about grinding is pretty straight-forward.  As long as it's fun, I don't mind it.  I don't care if it takes me a month to get a level.  If I am having fun while I do it then time is not an issue.  And I had a lot of fun on that game grouping up with friends and grinding my levels.  

What eventually turned me away from the game was notorious monster camping.  Which has got to be about the most boring video game mechanic ever devised.  And it was far too prevalent toward the end of the game for me to deal with it.  

But I do think it's important for MMORPGs to be difficult.  If they aren't, players won't feel encouraged to team up and the game essentially turns into a solo game.  Which in my opinion kind of defeats the whole purpose of a MMORPG.  

I should also point out that FF11 is SE's most profitable game to date and is still hanging in there over a decade later.  So clearly they did at least some things right.  

 

[Tai_MT]

The problem I tend to have with most MMO games is the fact that they CUT YOU OFF FROM CONTENT if you do NOT team up with people.  I don't like guilds.  I don't like randoms trying to help me (and me trying to tell them what to do 'cause they have no clue what they're doing).  I also do not enjoy the whole "shared loot" aspect or the "run this dungeon 400 times with your group of 15 friends just to get a single set of armor YOU can use".  I also don't like the socialization aspect as after years on the internet I've learned that most people who have internet access really shouldn't be socialized with if you value your sanity or maturity.  On top of which, a guild or a group trying to raid simply builds up endless criticism towards each other as well as animosity and often "cliques" form because of it.  There's also the whole "begging" aspect associated with it.  "Come on!  We need help to do this Raid!  Just come help us out for an hour!" when you're already engaged in something else you'd rather be doing.

You see, I prefer working together and socializing in the real world where people tend to be nicer and less whiny douchebags.

It also does not help that in most MMOs, there are "ultimate builds" that guilds or raids REQUIRE YOU to have and use in order to maximize effectiveness against a dungeon or a boss.  There's no room for experimentation or alternate builds.  If you're not built the way your entire team DEMANDS you be built, they stop including you.  These games are designed in such a way that this is the only way to play a raid or a boss, because the developers actually suck at their job and are really great at rendering their "choices" as meaningless as possible.

As for when I played...

It was sometime around when the Xbox 360 first came out.  I had noticed the game with its three expansions was available on the console, so I purchased it.  After a lengthy install of 11 gigs on my 12.5 gig harddrive...  I set about to playing the game.  What I found was basically the worst game I've ever played.  Trust me on that, I've played and own a LOT of terrible games.  I honestly don't mind "grind" that much either if it's fun.  The problem FF11 has is that it's super grindtastic for no reason (or at least it was when I played).  Let me put it to you this way.  I started in some desert town.  I could not get 300 yards out of town until I was level 10.  It took me 25 hours to grind to level 10 on the paltry amount of Quests I found (which were mostly above my level or required me to venture past that 300 yard mark in order to complete, which I couldn't because the monsters there destroyed me) and the stunning amount of mobs I could fight (grand total of freakin' THREE).  Most of the drops in the area were things for crafting, which I knew I'd need later, so I didn't try to sell them.  What remained was the "vendor trash" which was worth maybe 1 or 2 Gil a piece and not enough to afford the LOWEST PRICED DAGGERS in the NPC store (200 Gil).  After 25 hours of grinding, I could not even afford that 200 Gil dagger.

At that point, my choices were "continue playing out of spite and hope the game gets better after you get out of newbie town" or "quit playing altogether and find any number of much better MMOs to play".  I went with the second option as it seemed much smarter to me at the time.

Currently, I play Guild Wars 2.  Honestly, best MMO I've ever played.  Not that it would take much to be a better MMO than anything else out there (yes, including WoW).  I still log into it from time to time, will do some daily achievements or maybe do a "boss run" with a bunch of other random people who don't ask me (or demand of me) that I be spec'd a certain way or be in their clan.  Sure, money is hard to come by in that game too, but the fact that you rarely need it is kind of nice.  The one thing I don't like?  Dungeons don't scale to party size.  Trying to get 5 people to work together in a dungeon without someone (or most of them) rage quitting is a miracle.  I have no idea how players in other MMOs ever accomplish the feat.  But, the fact that it's tricky to get 5 people to work together is probably a testament to the amount of stress a clan leader goes through in any MMO.

 

[Berylstone]

The problem I tend to have with most MMO games is the fact that they CUT YOU OFF FROM CONTENT if you do NOT team up with people.  I don't like guilds.  I don't like randoms trying to help me (and me trying to tell them what to do 'cause they have no clue what they're doing).  I also do not enjoy the whole "shared loot" aspect or the "run this dungeon 400 times with your group of 15 friends just to get a single set of armor YOU can use".  I also don't like the socialization aspect as after years on the internet I've learned that most people who have internet access really shouldn't be socialized with if you value your sanity or maturity.  On top of which, a guild or a group trying to raid simply builds up endless criticism towards each other as well as animosity and often "cliques" form because of it.  There's also the whole "begging" aspect associated with it.  "Come on!  We need help to do this Raid!  Just come help us out for an hour!" when you're already engaged in something else you'd rather be doing.

You see, I prefer working together and socializing in the real world where people tend to be nicer and less whiny douchebags.

It also does not help that in most MMOs, there are "ultimate builds" that guilds or raids REQUIRE YOU to have and use in order to maximize effectiveness against a dungeon or a boss.  There's no room for experimentation or alternate builds.  If you're not built the way your entire team DEMANDS you be built, they stop including you.  These games are designed in such a way that this is the only way to play a raid or a boss, because the developers actually suck at their job and are really great at rendering their "choices" as meaningless as possible.

As for when I played...

It was sometime around when the Xbox 360 first came out.  I had noticed the game with its three expansions was available on the console, so I purchased it.  After a lengthy install of 11 gigs on my 12.5 gig harddrive...  I set about to playing the game.  What I found was basically the worst game I've ever played.  Trust me on that, I've played and own a LOT of terrible games.  I honestly don't mind "grind" that much either if it's fun.  The problem FF11 has is that it's super grindtastic for no reason (or at least it was when I played).  Let me put it to you this way.  I started in some desert town.  I could not get 300 yards out of town until I was level 10.  It took me 25 hours to grind to level 10 on the paltry amount of Quests I found (which were mostly above my level or required me to venture past that 300 yard mark in order to complete, which I couldn't because the monsters there destroyed me) and the stunning amount of mobs I could fight (grand total of freakin' THREE).  Most of the drops in the area were things for crafting, which I knew I'd need later, so I didn't try to sell them.  What remained was the "vendor trash" which was worth maybe 1 or 2 Gil a piece and not enough to afford the LOWEST PRICED DAGGERS in the NPC store (200 Gil).  After 25 hours of grinding, I could not even afford that 200 Gil dagger.

At that point, my choices were "continue playing out of spite and hope the game gets better after you get out of newbie town" or "quit playing altogether and find any number of much better MMOs to play".  I went with the second option as it seemed much smarter to me at the time.

Currently, I play Guild Wars 2.  Honestly, best MMO I've ever played.  Not that it would take much to be a better MMO than anything else out there (yes, including WoW).  I still log into it from time to time, will do some daily achievements or maybe do a "boss run" with a bunch of other random people who don't ask me (or demand of me) that I be spec'd a certain way or be in their clan.  Sure, money is hard to come by in that game too, but the fact that you rarely need it is kind of nice.  The one thing I don't like?  Dungeons don't scale to party size.  Trying to get 5 people to work together in a dungeon without someone (or most of them) rage quitting is a miracle.  I have no idea how players in other MMOs ever accomplish the feat.  But, the fact that it's tricky to get 5 people to work together is probably a testament to the amount of stress a clan leader goes through in any MMO.

You make a fair argument and I have no inclination to dispute it.  Much of it I agree with, even if we have different views about what the priorities of MMORPG design should be.  

I would like to point out that an MMORPG is just like any other social experience where as the quality of it will largely be dependent on the people you share it with.  

 

[Galenmereth]

@Tai_MT: I feel that you're a little bit too on the offensive when it comes to these games you dislike. It's uneccessary to call others "sad people" for enjoying a game you personally don't like. To each his own, right? I personally fell out of love with GW2 for multiple reasons (major being living story), but you're not a loser for enjoying it still. In fact it makes me happy that people like different things; like I mentioned a page or two ago, it means there's rooms for all kinds of games, even the weird one I'm making. Probably. Hopefully

 

[Tai_MT]

I'm not really "on the offensive" with games I don't like.  I hate a fair many games and some of the people who play them.  What I'm "on the offensive" about in most of these games is the large fanbase they manage to garner despite all the supermassive design flaws and poor decisions made.  It's one thing to hate games other people enjoy due to personal taste.  It's quite another to hate games that are poorly designed, poorly thought out, and are broken in multiple facets.  My irritation only grows worse when these kinds of games have huge fan bases.

From my point of view, it's sort of like people telling you 2 + 2 = Strawberry Shortcake and you're screaming at the top of your lungs that no, it in fact equals 4, and they should be able to see that.  As I said before, I play and own a large chunk of "terrible games".  I wouldn't even mind if someone criticized me for my taste in games.  You see, the thing about the world is that it's full of people who will disagree.  It's full of people who will insult you (either to your face, or behind your back.  I prefer to my face when possible).

If people enjoyed Final Fantasy 11, that's fine.  It just so happens that I think players who spent a lot of time with Final Fantasy 11 and maxed out all their classes are "sad people in the world".  That is to say, they are people who didn't discover much better MMOs, or decided they enjoyed the absolute mess of the game and continued to play regardless.  This is subjective personal opinion.  All insults are subjective personal opinion.  As such, they should only bother you if you feel the insults actually do apply to you (as in, you think of yourself that way to begin with).  My opinion on those players has no more basis in fact than the opinion of those players saying the game is "fun".  My opinion versus theirs.  It doesn't mean I think ill of them on a personal level.  It means that I pity them in a broad generalization of the fan base.  Can I be friends with these players?  Oh yes, yes I can.  It just means that like any good friend you've got, it's a dirty little secret they won't let you ever live down.  Basically, it's ribbing.

Now, if I were advocating violence in some way towards the fanbase, you could probably be worried.  As for an innocuous and pointless insult towards people I really don't know and haven't really met...  Well, that's no more dangerous or mean than anything anyone else hasn't ever done in their lives (everyone judges books by their covers, it's human nature.  To deny you have ever done it is to lie to yourself and to everyone else.).

The way it sounds, Beryl played the game further down the line than I had, when much of my complaints had either been fixed or addressed.  This, obviously, will create a difference of opinion.  Perhaps if he/she had played around the same time I had and experienced much of the frustration and annoyance I had, he/she would hold the same opinion of the game as myself.  We can never know because it never happened.

As for me, yeah, I enjoy Guild Wars 2 and call it the best MMO I've ever played.  However, I did qualify that opinion.  I stated that it honestly wouldn't be too difficult to be better than every MMO out there, 'cause the bar is fairly low.  Basically, what GW2 does for me is fix all my complaints with most every MMO I've ever played and makes me irritated with new problems in the system.  The worst of that being that some of the classes are just massively better than other classes at not just PvE, but also PvE and it needs a severe rebalance or retooling.  We're not even going to get into the absolutely terrible loot system that makes any sort of mat farming far worse than it should be.  We're also not going to get into the crafting system which is broken beyond belief because of the fact that none of the gear you create is USEFUL up until you can create the Exotic stuff at max level (which means you can't even sell it to other players).  We also won't even get into how little cash the game gives you and how much cash other players typically ask for when buying things.  Oh, we also won't go into how the game doesn't actually start until you hit max level.  Likewise, we won't get into how much vendor trash there is in the game that isn't even worth the trip to the vendor to get rid of it (even high level vendor trash isn't worth much more than 15 copper, which is freakin' stupid).  Guild Wars 2 has a plethora of really stupid design decisions and annoying features.  It's just that, I think it's the best MMO out there at the moment.

Now, if we ever get something out there that fixes all my gripes with every MMO I've ever played, I'll hop on board that sucker.  Until then, I'm alternating between Defiance, Guild Wars 2, and Runescape.  None of which I really play all that much, most of which have some really bad design and execution.  If I get too tired of the MMO scene, I just load up my Xbox One or Xbox 360 and play something solo for a while.

As for Beryl's reply to my post:

I agree about the community thing.  It's just that, for me, I've been burned by too many MMO communities to continue to try to differentiate them from each other.  It all just blurs together for me any more and I usually just mute whatever chat system they have and try to do as much of it solo as possible, or with friends I know well.  The absolute worst community I've ever seen was on WoW, but I'm sure there are worse ones.  I seriously have no idea how a game can have an "auction house" or whatever it is, and yet people are still spamming the World/Trade chat with items to sell or buy.  Surely it would be more worthwhile to just go to the freakin' "world trade" section of the game to get whatever you want instead of spamming chats with it.  But, no, I guess not.  That's WoW for you.  That, or constant trashtalking and sexual harassment.  Let's add that to the list of why I like Guild Wars 2 so much...  Nobody uses the chat system for anything.

God, it's weird to say I enjoy silence in a game genre that revolves around other player interactions.

 

[Engr. Adiktuzmiko]

The determination if a game is poorly designed is a matter of personal preferences too... everything is biased, subjective... that's why when there's a contest or something needs to be reviewed officially, there is a panel of several people so that we can hopefully minimize the effects of these biases...

 

[Tai_MT]

Not really.  It's easy to determine if something was intentional or not by game developers as well as see if it causes any sort of actual problems.  Poor design isn't really "personal opinion" as it relies on systems working, working optimally, and having that optimization lead to very few problems in a game.  If I designed a game in which 99% of the words in the storyline were misspelled, none of the features or systems worked (or worked sporadically), and included a lot of extraneous and unnecessary stuff that adds nothing to gameplay, but is required to even play the game as intended...  Well, then it's poorly designed.

Just like you can tell if a piece of glassware is good to drink out of by merely spotting the cracks, the same can be done with video games.  No personal opinion involved.  Though, you will still have people who just don't care about the cracks in their glass and try to drink from it anyway.

 

[Galenmereth]

Just like you can tell if a piece of glassware is good to drink out of by merely spotting the cracks, the same can be done with video games.  No personal opinion involved.  Though, you will still have people who just don't care about the cracks in their glass and try to drink from it anyway.

It's rarely that simple, however. I mean, in your criticism of FF11, all of your major gripes were subjective. You dislike the huge grind, the long cooldowns, etc. But those are not bugs, or errors, or flaws objectively. They were made that way specificially, and many people enjoyed that.

 

[Engr. Adiktuzmiko]

A game that doesn't work or full of bugs is a broken game not a poorly designed one... calling it poorly designed is quite an understatement... its BROKEN...


and yeah, things like grinding are not bugs or whatsoever...


Mispelled or not working stuff are yeah, bugs and would be objective but this one:

and included a lot of extraneous and unnecessary stuff that adds nothing to gameplay, but is required to even play the game as intended...

is subjective...


like this one:

The problem I tend to have with most MMO games is the fact that they CUT YOU OFF FROM CONTENT if you do NOT team up with people

it's subjective... and IMO, it's an MMO so it's so much logical that they would require you to play as a team... else, why even make the game as an MMO??? they would have just made it an SPG then...


though that is why I stopped playing MMOs, coz I have no one to play with... but do I hate them for it? do I call them as having poor design? NOPE, because their design is totally logical and acceptable... and actually good if you consider the fact that it encourages interaction between players... it's an MMO, an MMO, an MMO, an MMO...


or they can also make it Diablo style so it's playable on both somehow... but doing it that way or not doing it that way is never an reason to say if it's poorly designed or not...