Videogames You Should Stay Away From

[kyonides]

Videogames You Should Stay Away From​

First of all, I gotta say this thread is not about telling people about how ugly you find the bubbleheaded characters present in famous games or even in MV / MZ like games. That's not the focus here.

What this is all about is telling you to not spent a dime in videogames that will make your gaming life miserable.

Happy with a sweat I mean, this handles about those games that make you go nowhere after playtesting them right after purchase, and after applying n number of patches, etc.

What inspired me to open this thread now?​

Well, it happened once upon a time, like yesterday, that I bought a game called Divinity 2: Developer's Cut, some 32 bit era kind of game, and : guess what? It didn't run, not even once!

Besides showing you 2 optional introductory WMA videos that could savely move to any other directory, it simply crashes. Nope, you don't get your typical Windows debugger window popping up at all. No registry is created. You simply get a few seconds of a TV big black nothing and that's it.

If you search for patches, you will find none that can 100% or 90% guarantee it will start running.
Some claim that patching the executable to make it allow to use more than 2 or 4 GB of RAM is all you ever needed. Other say that installing stuff like DirectX 9.0c will do the trick. Another group says that you gotta have an Nvidia card, others say that it's not that important and ATI/AMD cards will work with some slight performance.

The thing is that even from an earlier patch / upgrade, this issue has never gone away at all. And it was first released between 2009 and 2010. Then it got updated a couple of times like back in 2010 and 2012. You can still find support threads from 2014 or even 2019 and 2020 either on GOG or Steam.

I know that old games might not run on Windows 7, 8 or even 11.
Yet, even Lords of the Realm II that was released in the 90's runs even on Linux via Wine.
Nope, emulating it only results in getting a frozen big black nothing. I tried that already and got nowhere.

 

[TheoAllen]

First of all, you shouldn't buy any videogame that you don't have plan/time to play just because it is on sale and sitting there forever in your library with zero hours played

 

[Sword_of_Dusk]

I feel attacked, @TheoAllen. It's not my fault I've got many games at such great prices. I'll get to them eventually, I swear!


Probably.

 

[ramza]

I was pretty sure I own Divinity II on steam, although it turns out I don't.

It's posted as $21.99 CAD, and the community discussion threads seem to show me that you might get some unexpectedly low performance on modern hardware, but nothing I saw on a quick perusal seemed to indicate the game straight up doesn't launch.

With that being said, with something that old, there's really no guarantee that it works on a modern system, and for that, steam has a very nice return policy. Namely that if you have less than 2 hours played on it, and bought it within two weeks, you can return it, with no exceptions.

If you bought it because it was on sale, and then didn't play it for 10 years, well, that's on you I guess.

I would like to salvage this post and pivot more into a discussion about games you literally shouldn't play, though.

And top on my list for that is Maplestory.

Let me start by saying I've played the global version of Maplestory since the open beta period in 2008? I think? I played beta, my characters were erased when they went to official release. I was there when the cash shop opened with cosmetics and pets. I was there when exp boosters and drop boosters became a thing. I was there when they first started adding new jobs. I have literally tens of thousands of hours in this game. I used to use Xfire and it tracked my play time, and it was reading 7000+ hours on there, and that was only a small fraction of the actual time I'd played, and I've played many, many more years after that.

The game is a boring grindfest designed to siphon as much of your money away from you as it can. Upgrading items requires you to touch RNG systems on top of RNG systems on top of RNG systems, and on a regular server 3/4 of those systems also require you to spend real actual money to get anywhere.

When they launched reboot, a lot of the pay to win aspects were dialed back, in favor of spending straight in game currency to get a lot of those items, but all this really did was make the game an unending slog of grinding mobs for hundreds of hours per month to spend all of the in game money you got on the (very slight) chance of successfully upgrading a couple of pieces of your gear for a slight increase in damage, but more likely you'd downgrade your stuff and have to spend another hundred hours grinding back the money to hopefully get back to where you started.

Not to mention the stability issues, terrible support system, and the fact that GMS is actively trying to sabotage their own product for seemingly no reason. Their in game events often cause so much in game lag that the game is unplayable. Their channel servers just occasionally die, and cause recent progress made to simply vanish into nothing. Their support staff is less than helpful, and their anti-cheat/anti-bot detection is laughably bad, often triggering auto bans on innocent people which don't get overturned because of the aforementioned support staff, while somehow not being able to actually detect and ban botters/hackers at all.

They recently removed an entire job from the game, one which was made available about 10 years ago, and was a GMS exclusive job. While it wasn't particularly popular, there were still active people playing it up to the end, and they provided those people, who likely spent hundreds or thousands of hours on that one character, the ability to change to a small selection of other jobs, a few EXP items, and a couple of replacement equipments for the new job.

There are a couple of other Jobs in the game which are not originally from the korean version of the game as well, which the player base collectively assumes will also be removed at some point in the future as well.

As someone who has way too much time (and money) sunk into this game, I can honestly say that no one should ever play it. I haven't played it in over a year, but I can never stop forever, and it won't be long until I'm back playing it again. Play something that respects your time.

 

[ATT_Turan]

steam has a very nice return policy. Namely that if you have less than 2 hours played on it, and bought it within two weeks, you can return it, with no exceptions.

If you bought it because it was on sale, and then didn't play it for 10 years, well, that's on you I guess.

I feel personally attacked

 

[ActiveMagicEffect88]

Freemium gacha games. You'll ended up paying them more than you pay for AAA games when you reach 50+ hours of gameplay. Tho it's your money so I won't stop you if you happy spending on it; just don't look back and then regret it later on.

 

[kyonides]

I've been wondering where did that "buy it long time ago but start playing it just this week" come from. Just in case, I wanna tell anybody that I just bought it. Thus, my mistake was to trust the developer and GOG in my case by thinking it'd work just like any other old game that was on sale at some point in the last couple of months.

Oh and I got another example of terrible, painful games here!

Don't play any game of the Hero of the Kingdom series! Seriously, don't do it!
Unless you wanna know what a carpal tunnel syndrome and a terrible lame story really look like...
Plus, it's a very short game in my angry opinion.

 

[AphoticAmaranth]

Any online/live service game with lootboxes/gacha/pay-to-win.

Even if you do pay, there isn't any guarantee that the servers won't shut down or your stuff won't get powercrept.

 

[JohnDoeNews]

One game you should def. stay away from is Jumanji. Doesn't matter if you play the board game or the video game, it will ruin your life.

And the video game is even worse... it will not just trap you... But it will trap you with Kevin Hart. That is actual torture. I rather get waterboarded on a bed of nails.

 

[wolfr136a1]

@kyonides Divinity II i.e. Ego Draconis, really? I thought Larian was one of the better studios.

EDIT:

Larian was pretty responsive with Baldur's Gate 3 feedback. Maybe older games are handled by a division with more apathetic staff?

@AphoticAmaranth Gacha games have some kind of Catch 22. If they try to squeeze too much money from players they'll get really annoying. But if they don't make enough money they shut down.

 

[Ms Littlefish]

This one is extremely specific to me (and probably other people with wonky brains) …but don’t buy that game with overly jolty movements and/or flashy swirly backgrounds. You will get dizzy, fall down and have a bad time mmkay? Shout out to Smash Bros making the Omega versions of all the stages so I can play on Final Destination without playing on Final Destination.

 

[Dalph]

Game: Warcraft 3: Reforged
Reason:

Sadly I agree. It was a huge disappointment and with it, Blizzard even ruined the original Warcraft 3.

I would also like to add to the list anything made for mobile which is gacha, free, freemium and p2w. All that requires you to buy gems and ingame currency with real cash to keep playing faster/better and unlock cosmetics is the scourge of gaming and shouldn't exist.

 

[JohnDoeNews]

I would also like to add to the list anything made for mobile which is gacha, free, freemium and p2w. All that requires you to buy gems and ingame currency with real cash to keep playing faster/better and unlock cosmetics is the scourge of gaming and shouldn't exist.

Don't forget the ads! That is almost as bad as the mini purchases.

I thought this would never happen in payed full versions of any software... But RPG maker proofed me wrong. Now we have ads in RPG maker, even though we payed full price. I have heard so many complaint about this, and to be honest, I am not really happy about this either.

Ads are fine (but annoying) in free software or free games, which otherwise do not make any money, but not in software which people payed full price for.

 

[pawsplay]

Wizardry VII. I loved the game back in the day, and always intended to get around to beating it. But the GOG version will repeatedly corrupt your savegame, and at that point, you'll have to delete your game and sometimes reinstall just to get the game to open again.
Also, while the current version usually works okay, from time to time they will un-fix an important fix where if you max out all your skills and level again, you won't be able to advance in the game because it wants you to spend all your points.

 

[TRIDIUM]

This one is extremely specific to me (and probably other people with wonky brains) …but don’t buy that game with overly jolty movements and/or flashy swirly backgrounds. You will get dizzy, fall down and have a bad time mmkay? Shout out to Smash Bros making the Omega versions of all the stages so I can play on Final Destination without playing on Final Destination.

Dang, I've been trying to figure out how to quote people correctly for the longest time, and I think I finally have it.
I second this. I can only handle so much at once.
Also, games where the hud is either spread across the whole screen or shoved in to the corner. (Bonus points if it's on the bad eye side)

 

[Sword_of_Dusk]

Dang, I've been trying to figure out how to quote people correctly for the longest time, and I think I finally have it.

Curious as to what troubled you.

Anyway, my contribution to this topic is to stay away from Fallout: New Vegas on PC unless you're following the Viva New Vegas mod guide. Without its guidance, you will find your game crashing all too often.

 

[TRIDIUM]

Just plain ignorance on my part, @Sword_of_Dusk

 

[Sword_of_Dusk]

It happens sometimes, @TRIDIUM. At least you figured it out.

 

[JohnDoeNews]

Curious as to what troubled you.

Anyway, my contribution to this topic is to stay away from Fallout: New Vegas on PC unless you're following the Viva New Vegas mod guide. Without its guidance, you will find your game crashing all too often.

New Vegas? Itbis not my favorite fallout game either, but for many players it is. So this surprises me.

 

[Sword_of_Dusk]

New Vegas? Itbis not my favorite fallout game either, but for many players it is. So this surprises me.

Might wanna read my post again. It is my favorite Fallout (and honestly the best), so I do recommend people play it.