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[spümpkin]

I actually quite like Starbound. I feel it gets a lot of hate, for various valid reasons, but I've been playing it for a while now, and it has indeed come a long way.

I remember getting a lot of enjoyment out of Heroes of Might and Magic 5 ... But at least it wasn't Heroes 4, amirite? Eh?

Dudes, HOMM4 was actually pretty good, at least in hindsight.
It was very unpolished, especially on the audiovisual end, but I loved some of its gameplay concepts that were sadly never expanded upon in future titles.
And the music was the absolute bomb. I dare say it was better than HOMM3's.
It's not my favorite game in the series, no, not by a long shot, but it really had potential to be very good. :v

I didn't play 4 very much, as I just didn't get hooked into it. I only really played HOMM games for the Hotseat multiplayer anyway, so me and my brother had to decide on one we both liked. Most of the time it's 2 or 3. 2 was my favourite, and still is, really.

[Levi]

I actually quite like Starbound. I feel it gets a lot of hate, for various valid reasons, but I've been playing it for a while now, and it has indeed come a long way.

Yeah, I kinda feel the same way.  Its not my favorite game ever, but I had fun enough with it early on and I look forward to trying the finished game.

[Sappho]

For me it's the story-based games and "walking simulators". Home, Proteus, Gone Home, Qora... They get a lot of hate from people who can't comprehend the idea that not everyone plays games for the challenge. I face challenges all day, every day in my real life out in meatspace, and when I come home I want to relax, not struggle even more. I appreciate games which are about experience and immersion rather than overcoming obstacles. I mean, I can see that they're not for everyone, but I don't understand why people actively hate them.

On the other hand, there are a lot of games that everyone seems to love but I don't like at all. Undertale is a prime example...

[TempAcc]

You should try The Witness :v!

Altough, its actualy pretty challenging later, so dont :v!

Also, how about Noctis? Its essentialy just a space exploration game with a huge galaxy to explore. Too Noctis 2 never became a thing ;~;

[MonkeyHead]

MoO3.

Yes, it is a broken mess, and killed the franchise and dented 4x as a genre.

But, fixed to its intended state, as it was by the modding community that grew to fix the fuckups... is it glorious. Subtle. Nuanced. Complex. Beautiful. I still play it at least once a week, on a custom mod build.

[Neonivek]

Dear Esther is the only Walking Simulator I have serious issues with.

[Levi]

Dear Esther is the only Walking Simulator I have serious issues with.

Drove me nuts with that slow ass walking speed.     I couldn't finish because I was too frustrated.

[Neonivek]

Dear Esther is the only Walking Simulator I have serious issues with.

Drove me nuts with that slow ass walking speed.     I couldn't finish because I was too frustrated.

For me it was that the game was lazy and the story and the 'game' were completely disconnected from eachother. You shouldn't get the same effect by listening to a book on tape while hiking.

[TempAcc]

Yeeeeea, its not that walking simulators are horrible or anything, its just that its the kind of genre that attracts a lot of lazy developers looking to make a quick buck. Dear Esther is the prime example of this.

Games based purely around exploration can be quite fun, if you actualy have a decent reason to explore, and not just roam around a boring and poorly done landscape with fog as an excuse for terrible FoV looking for things so you can hear a really boring monologue on something completely inane :v

The Stanley Parable is a good example of a game based mostly on exploration done right.

Anyway, on topic: I kinda actualy liked Age of Wonders 1 more then Shadow Magic. Its not that AoW1 was hated or anything, but its nowhere near as popular as SM is/was. Shadow Magic did some cool things, but it also did some thing I didn't like and that I feel strayed from the general feel AoW1 had, as in, it kind of "standardized" magic, IE every element having certain groups of spells that do the same thing, with the only difference being the type of elemental damage caused (I'm looking at you, summon dragon spells) while in AoW the different elements actualy seemed reasonably different from eachother.
I also liked AoW1's simpler art style and smaller unit sprites more then SM's hilarious pre-rendered sprites. AoW1 actualy had beautifuly done hand drawn and painted art for most unit portraits, too.

[Haspen]

Also, how about Noctis? Its essentialy just a space exploration game with a huge galaxy to explore. Too Noctis 2 never became a thing ;~;

I found Earth-like planet *once*. It had yellowish sky and grass, was cool to find something like that after charting about bazillion barren rocks v:

[TempAcc]

Spoiler: Noctis (click to show/hide)

The sol system, including earth, is actualy in the game, btw. You can find its coordinates online. It has ruins, animals and stuff on it too, but no humans, presubably extinct.

[Darkmere]

So, there's no shortage of love for Baldur's Gate and Planescape... but I have a soft spot for the two Icewind Dale games which are sort of bastard children in the... "series"? There was a lot less RP in the RPG's there, as they were basically dungeon crawlers with a railroad plot and the D&D rules slapped on it. I never managed to fall in with a stable tabletop group, so it gave me a small chance to experience the whole thing and learn what THAC0 is, which gives me nerd cred. Also, controlling a full party and working through all the numbers and builds to make it work was pretty addictive for me.

Along the same lines, I was a big fan of Dungeon Siege 2 for the same reasons. It was a kinda Diablo-style hack'n'loot, but you could eventually get 6 party members (or an actual pack mule party member!) that you got to toy with, and the skillup system was pretty organic as far as the genre goes. They managed to make great strides against DS1's vast, empty grindfest and the party AI was almost decent except during a few boss fights. The ability to control any party member directly at any time let me play what I felt like when I felt like it, or I could treat it as a real-time-with-pause if I felt like that too.

Then they shit all over it in DS3. So that's nice.

[Tawa]

I'm gunna be THAT guy and say Runescape, or at least until my main got banned for macroing on a date that I can prove I was playing it. I never touch macros or cheats in general.
It'd be OK if I were allowed to appeal, but Jagex's policy on the matter is 'You were banned. Feel free to make another account because we don't allow ban appeals'

I do have other accounts, it's just that that one I had been playing since I was about ten and damn the nostalgia.

I used to really like Runescape. At the time it was literally the only MMO I'd played, I didn't even realize that there were other games like it in existence. I used to love exploring the tiny free-play world, fantasizing about members-only stuff, chatting with whoever had a moment, throwing "parties" at that inn in Varrock and the party house in Falador, and spending literal hours begging people to help me with the Draynor Manor switch puzzle.

Nowadays it's just... so different. It's modernized a lot, there's a voice-acted tutorial and everything. Even when I go to bootleg RS2007 servers, it's just not the same.

It was kinda hilarious for my level 40-ish character to be stuck in the tutorial instance last time I logged on, though.

EDIT: WAIT WHAT YOU *HAVE* TO INSTALL RUNESCAPE NOW?

I REMEMBER WHEN THE LAUNCHER WAS A TOTALLY-UNSUPPORTED OPTIONAL CONVENIENCE THAT NOBODY USED OR KNEW ABOUT

STRRAAAAAAAAANGE THINGS ARE HAPPENIN TO ME

Ah, I loved Runescape! It was wonderful back in... oh, I started around '08 and stopped in maybe '12? I managed to catch the tail end of the game's Renaissance before the Gower brothers sold it to that guy who was obsessed with "modernizing" it.

I had this sense of childlike wonder the entire time I played it, of discovering the game world, exploring new places, meeting new people... I picked up a membership because I loved it so much, even, and went on all the quests I could. I eventually managed to finish every single F2P quest they made and something like a quarter of the P2P quests.

Even after I familiarized myself with the game's hotspots I didn't get tired of exploring. There was always something new, it felt like. An isolated corner in the northwestern hunting grounds. Getting a new, amusing line of dialogue from a throwaway NPC. Everywhere was new and interesting, even the places I was too wimpy to go into without getting torn to shreds.

Except the Underground Passage, fuck that.

I mean, there was an entire game mechanic dedicated to exploring new places! What happened to Clue Scrolls? I spent literal hours killing H.A.M. members for clue scrolls because I just loved that feeling of adventure and excitement that came from pursuing that treasure that might not even turn out to be good. I don't think the developers even remembered they existed when I left.

I miss late-2000s Runescape :c

[Krevsin]

I really enjoyed Hellgate: London. I might need to revisit it someday.

[itisnotlogical]

Opinions still seem to be divided regarding XCOM but I'll let it count for this thread.

I really like the core gameplay changes. I think almost all of them were for the better, although the reliance on cover mechanics does make things a bit stilted and obvious.

My problems with it are largely in the interface and aesthetic choices. In the base, captions for the support staff's non-stop whining cover up some of the drop-down menus, making it hard to see what I'm clicking on. Uncovering a group of aliens triggers a cutscene and musical sting every single time, and it gets pretty tedious even before the end of the first mission. The abundance of pre-rendered FMVs is pretty silly. And again, the support staff has a paragraph ready to say every single time you enter their facility.

I really, really like the tactical game of XCOM. But I wish that it was different in a lot of very small ways. I have yet to play XCOM2 so maybe that game fixed some of it?