What's a game that got critically and player acclaimed that you disliked anyway?
What's a game that got critically and player acclaimed that you disliked anyway?
This is a followup to @SorosFootSoldier@hexbear.net 's recent thread for completeness' sake.
I'll state an old classic that is seen as a genre defining game because it is: Myst. Yes, it redefined the genre... in ways I fucking hated and that the adventure game genre took decades to fully recover from. It was a pompous mess in its presentation and was the worst kind of "doing action does vague thing or nothing at all, where is your hint book" puzzle gameplay wrapped in graphical hype which ages pretty poorly as far as appeal qualities go.
So many adventure games tried to be Myst afterward that the sheer budgetary costs and redundancy of the also-rans crashed the adventure game genre for years.
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The Witcher 3
The game has some pretty graphics at times but all in all the story was a boring slog and the gameplay could be neatly split into "puzzles" where you just press the Witcher sense button to see what to interact with and combat where despite, the large bestiary you fight everything the same way.
There were some alright side quests, but most of the open world felt like an unnecessary hurdle between point A and point B instead of an interesting place to explore.
Imho the best thing about The Witcher 3 being popular is that there were enough fans of the series knocking around that the books got English translations.
It's weird for that game to have such ponderous and unpleasant combat and for its big deal to be the story/characters/sidequests yet I kind of hated how those were presented every time I tried it.
Oh yeah time for the narrative rails to tell me that trying to improve society somewhat is naive and stupid and bad. Again. I didn't follow the Witcherino code closely enough, silly me. Helping those people was stupid actually. You're supposed to be enlightened in your self interest and only care about immediate family-ish relations.
The cussing and overall edginess was just... tiresome to me. There's cussing in other games and that's fine; it doesn't wear out its welcome as much.
It's so weird, because the games had to give Geralt amnesia so he forgot his character development in the books, just so they could have him be a cynical centrist and then lightly push his character back on to the path of becoming the character he was before the games.
Like, the depending on what side quests you do, Geralt is on the path to stop being such a centrist but he never returns to being who he was before (maybe he does in the DLCs, I never played them).
The sidequest chain with Triss where you help her smuggle a bunch of people out of Redania before the next wave of pogroms happen, is an example of Geralt helping people despite it not being of any benefit to him. But he only does it because Triss is dragging him into it.
just so they could have him be a cynical centrist
It's kind of a red flag for me when some
says that the writing is, quote, "smart" or even "nonpolitical." The 
outright wriggle out and wave at me when I hear "it doesn't take a side." Because that means fucking nothing really changes except for small personal benefits for the bland power fantasy morally gray protagonist.The sidequest chain with Triss where you help her smuggle a bunch of people out of Redania before the next wave of pogroms happen, is an example of Geralt helping people despite it not being of any benefit to him. But he only does it because Triss is dragging him into it.
Of fucking course.
In a way, it feels like this is a version of Geralt that never went to Blaviken and thus never saw what the end result of following the Witcher code would lead to him doing.
There is no such thing as a witcher code, it's a thing Geralt made up when he didn't feel like doing something and didn't want to have to explain his reasoning.
Considering the way they handled the main plot, though, I wouldn't be surprised if somebody at CDPR misunderstood that and made the witcher code a real thing. Did you know that the White Frost is literally just normal climate change in the books? Nothing supernatural about it, no way to stop it, and it's not going to be a serious threat for thousands of years.
I've only read a couple of the books, I should probably get 'round to reading the rest one day.
They're pretty good if you don't mind the edgelord pseudo-grimdark stuff going on. If you've read the short stories you know about as bad as the edgelord stuff gets. Otherwise they're just fun, clever, subversive fantasy done very well.