Most overrated games.

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I love the Witcher 1 and TW3 (reading the books too atm), but Witcher 3 has some real fucking boring combat, and doesn't make the alchemy system half as important as it should be, considering how often Geralt in the books is mentioned to have only survived an encounter threw preemptive use of potions or entering a toxicity-fueled dance-macabre that reduces average human opponents to bloody flesh-ribbons. It also continues the Witcher game tradition of having a really shitty skill tree, where some paths are objectively garbo, and you wind up either building Bear-school armor tank-man who's got quen and swallow active 90% of the time, or a toxicity build in manticore armor (running euphoria, objectively the best mutagen in blood and wine) that just lets you hit like a truck for filling the funnhi green bar up with literally anything (including pops mold antidote, a quest recipe with generally useless effects besides adding toxicity). It's a shame CDPR can't nail a combat system to save their lives, because that game still looks gorgeous (especially toussaint), has a 10/10 ost, and has some of the best writing in a AAA game (almost as good as the books occasionally). But failing to make a compelling combat system holds all these games back from being perfect for me personally, since Geralt's defining features as a witcher are meant to be his prescision combat, alchemical mastery as far as making high-risk high reward potions go (and not immediately having his innards liquify), and having to meaningfully change how you prepare for any monster encounter (not just putting up Quen and throwing yourself at absolutely anything for the most part).
 
CS:GO. There's a lot of CS:GO fanboys out there who claim it's the best thing ever. I have a few things I disliked about the game that made me drop it quite quickly.

The weapons are probably the worst of it. I'm huge on the idea of satisfying gunplay, making me play shitty games way longer than I should or dropping good ones entirely. This game for any good that it does, has those awful spray patterns, weak firing sounds, and the guns feel like barely statistically different weapons sometimes. Getting kills doesn't give me joy at all, even with headshots. There's also little variety in actual play, most guns are situational except for the AWP, the M4, and the AK47.

The maps are pretty boring. I adore environments you can interact with, maps with multiple heights/levels, and a lot of flanking routes. Add to that a lot of areas where different types of weapons can excel at, and you get the ideal map in my eyes. I think theres a few okay ones, but I dont like Dust2, Inferno or Mirage very much for example. Very linear and open, although the last two at least have some sort of flanking routes and different heights. I liked the direction CS:S seemed to be heading to way more.

The movement and aiming. I'm a fan of movement shooters so this is more of a personal thing, but I dislike the slower horizontal movement and how aiming works in this game. I mentioned spray patterns already, and although I'm not a mag dumping retard, the guns don't really feel consistent at all when it comes to accuracy, even with burst firing. It's not my cup of tea in this specific case, but the thing is that I dont necessarily hate slower paced aiming games, I really enjoyed fighting as a French tank in WT, and I definetly could get into the idea.

Finally, the meta. I dont like very much games that don't change at all over time. Chess is an example of a game that I enjoy sometimes but I definetly wouldn't play often. It's not as big a dealbreaker, but games that are very static meta-wise dont sound fun. In the end it adds up to just having way too many watered down elements that come from a different era. I enjoyed R6S way more, and at least in it's early versions, I found it much better as the type of teamwork based FPS so many CSGO players claim that it is.​
 
Metal Gear Solid 2

The enemy placement relies to much on tranq pistol (something that has plagued the whole series since). Planning and routing simply cannot get you through the game where as it was the entire backbone of MGS1 and created an almost puzzle element to the game.

The bosses are fucking weak. Olga is the only one I found to have anything going for it since her fight actually has a lot of emphasis on avoiding her sightline and staying hidden to score good shots.

The storyline takes a huge step back in tone from MGS, and the ideas and themes explored in the endings are not as groundbreaking as Kojima fanboys make them out to be. Maybe they were for video games, but censorship and media/information manipulation has been shit that Alex Jones and the like were talking about for years before MGS2.

Not a bad game, definitely great for the time but not worthy of the constant reverence it gets today. I'd personally rate it the weakest out of the first 3 MGS games.
 
The word "overrated" will be thrown around since it can be applied to popular titles that admittedly can be shit in certain ways such as Fallout 3, Oblivion, Skyrim, Overwatch, etc. That said, I'd imagine this is all just ones own experience with a product that has some popularity to it regardless of all the shit talking and dick sucking said product gets now and later.

Oftentimes it's not the game itself but the stupid fanbase. There was a time on GameFAQs when you couldn't read an RPG review without some 8th grader comparing it to Final Fantasy like it was a huge ripoff of that franchise.

Rabid fanboys can make you hate anything when they refuse to shut up every time you bring up the game they can't stop gushing over. If you like Pokemon or Zelda ect... Stay away from the communities because they will make you want to punch baby ducks.
 
Epic bump niggas 'cause I got something to say!

Lifeforce sucks!

It's been praised as one of the best shmups on the NES but it sucked. The level design is fuck you bullshit Battletoads I Wanna Be The Guy kind of difficulty. But the weird part is that the bosses are extremely easy by comparison. And it has limited continues and no passwords. Thank you Zardoz for the Konami code and this is the only game where I had to use a cheat code to beat. I don't need the code for Contra, Super C, Gradius or Jackal (all great games especially Gradius 2). But Lifeforce sucks.

Abadox, which has been called a ripoff of Lifeforce, is way better and much more fair with it's difficulty. It helps that it has infinite continues as well.
I cannot defend Lifeforce beyond simple nostalgia and like @Groundbreaking-maize mentioned a killer NES Soundtrack. But the Arcade only sequel Salamander 2 is one sick looking game.

Unforunately the level design is pretty weak for its genre, but man I just love the game in terms of visuals. Pretty much the best Gradius in terms of visuals besides the sadly overlooked Gradius V. Fuck I've been waiting a decade for Gradius V to get an HD Rerelease. Hope it happens before Treasure goes defunct if they haven't already.
 
Bad Rats, mostly since it is not really an awful game as it is poorly executed and brought forth by Something Awful as an over-hyped meme.
 
Fallout 2.

Now, I do think it's a very good game in many ways. The way companions were handled was a big step up from 1, and I honestly can't play New Vegas without a mod that emulates that system. That being said though, 2 I feel was a pretty massive and unfocused slog in a lot of places. The main story took a big backseat to pretty much everything else that was going on, and of course there was the over-reliance on pop culture references.

Fallout 1 I feel was much better for it's pacing and overall cohesiveness. And yeah, you're more limited in terms of roleplaying, but I always kinda felt a lot of the stuff you could do in 2 didn't really add a whole lot to the grand scheme of things in terms of character development and plot.

New Reno in particular I can't help but feel was just Black Isle's attempt at being super edgy and controversial. Oh hey! You get to be a pornstar! Woop dee doo.

But I guess what I hate the most was the fucking Oil Rig.

Who in the world thought that electric floor room was in any way a good idea? Also, what's the point of gassing the place with the FEV if I still have to kill the President directly to get the keycard I need to take out Frank Horrigan without having to deal with his turrets? Part of what made 1 so great was that you could play as a pacifist and not have to kill anyone directly, In 2, you either have to kill the Prez or have to deal with Frank, his turrets, and if you don't have good Speech, a whole bunch of Enclave soldiers.

On top of that, if you're playing the Resoration Patch, I think you also need a high Science skill to even access the console for the turrets. So in general, the whole place punishes players who don't tag Speech and Science so you better hope to god you're armed to the teeth and have tons of Stimpaks. Whereas the Cathedral in 1 was specifically designed so that the three pre-made characters, all of which represent the three major playstyles, all had an equal and viable shot at getting through.

I also can't help but feel like there was supposed to be an option to disable the turrets as I remember there being an option that "disables the security systems". But nothing seemed to happen.
 
That's nice but I'm not an Oblivion apologist, the thread is about overrated games and I don't think it's overrated. You'll have an easy time finding someone shitting on it, not many people praising it. I never said Oblivion was the first to do anything, but for its time it was well received and for good reason, it did a lot of things other games weren't doing at the time and did them well enough to be fun. It also got shit on a lot by people who thought it wasn't RPG-y enough or was too dumbed down.

Anyway, your argument that other crpgs did the same thing doesn't hold up, a 1990s crpg is nothing like any mid-2000s rpg with a mass release. May as well say "Daggerfall did it all, but better" even though they're completely different games yet closer than anything on your list.
This is a little old to dig up, but Oblivion still had tons of normie fans. If I bring up my dislike of the game to my casual friends they are usually shocked. For one of them, the game was actually a huge event at his school and the first time he saw students and teachers both excited for the same game.
 
Super Metroid is one of my favourite games of all time, one that I grew up with and have gone back to replay again and again.
The music is atmospheric, the pixel art is masterful and it has the one term that every Metroid fan loves to throw around in spades "environmental storytelling."
But it is not perfect. The default controls blow ass, wall-jumping is sometimes imprecise, aerial Morphballing is way too messy/finicky despite being required for some items and the quicksand in Maridia pauses all the excitement of the game in exchange for pure tedium where you mash the jump button in hopes of the game deciding to let you free.
Super Metroid has a few hard strats for speedrunning but the difference between these examples and say the machball is that these were intentional features that sometimes feel incomplete or buggy.

On the topic of Metroid, AM2R is fantastic. A genuinely incredible game with relatively few issues but I do feel that its popularity causes people to overlook Nintendo's own remake: Samus Returns. It doesn't play exactly how you expect Metroid to but neither did the original Return of Samus. It isn't bad, just different in the same way that Fusion is different.
 
And as to actual overrated games.

I feel like Divinity: Original Sin II has a lot of jank, at least in the Switch version, that shouldn't be accepted in a modern day games. Like, I get it being a return to a dead genre, but did people really like those games due to the awkward character movement and menuing, or did they like the quests/combat/dialogue? Because I couldn't take more than an hour of it.


And, doubling down on jank, Morrowind was a ton of fun back in the day, but looking back on it the instability is unforgivable. You shouldn't have to save every ten/twenty minutes out of fear, not that you will die, but that your game will randomly shit itself and crash.

And here's one that might get me some hate, but having gone back and played it as an adult, Sim City 2000/3000 is actually a very simple/mind-numbing game. Losing (nigh impossible,) or even doing poorly, takes deliberate sabotage. Also fuck replacing water pumps, least enjoyable part of that game. After a certain point it led me to CIV III pollution levels of contempt.
 
Metal Gear Solid 2

The enemy placement relies to much on tranq pistol (something that has plagued the whole series since). Planning and routing simply cannot get you through the game where as it was the entire backbone of MGS1 and created an almost puzzle element to the game.

The bosses are fucking weak. Olga is the only one I found to have anything going for it since her fight actually has a lot of emphasis on avoiding her sightline and staying hidden to score good shots.

The storyline takes a huge step back in tone from MGS, and the ideas and themes explored in the endings are not as groundbreaking as Kojima fanboys make them out to be. Maybe they were for video games, but censorship and media/information manipulation has been shit that Alex Jones and the like were talking about for years before MGS2.

Not a bad game, definitely great for the time but not worthy of the constant reverence it gets today. I'd personally rate it the weakest out of the first 3 MGS games.
I don't remember all of it, but MGS2 really used the pressure sensitivity of the face buttons, Olga's fight was one of those. That aspect doesn't age well because even at the time a lot of people didn't understand it and it doesn't emulate at all. GTA3 had pressure sensitive gas/brake on the face buttons and I don't think most people realized that, such a weird feature.
This is a little old to dig up, but Oblivion still had tons of normie fans. If I bring up my dislike of the game to my casual friends they are usually shocked. For one of them, the game was actually a huge event at his school and the first time he saw students and teachers both excited for the same game.
It's popular to hate on normies and I can complain about Oblivion, but I really like people going largely blind into Oblivion or Skyrim and having the same experience I had when playing Daggerfall, or the Fallout setting. Dragon Age 1 pulled in some people that never played Infinity Engine games and that was great, Mass Effect 2 was VERY friendly towards non-spergs and it was so fun to meet and chit-chat with people of all ages about things they have done or seen or think is going to happen. It's fantastic when more people share what you enjoy and games like that creates stories with a personal flair even if the non-normie doesn't understand the relatively simple mechanics. "Have you met a talking dog? no, yeah well I was in [place] and there was a talking dog and..."
A 35+ year old woman, while knitting, said to me "I've been trying to learn how to play Crusader Kings..." Not a 1488 trad wife nutter either just a casual going from The Sims to the really Machiavellian The Sims that is Crusader Kings. It's so fantastic to hear things like that.
That's why the gamergate scaremongering was such complete bullshit. The only threat Zoe Quinn, Brianna Wu and those like them faces is the threat of being replaced by normal(biological) sane women.

Anyway, original point is that I can't really hate Bethesda and other companies that I can introduce their games to, even if they're shallow and broken people often see what I saw in the superior old releases. And I already know the people I bring in today will read about horse armor, ME3 ending or FO76 and talk endless shit about the devs on the internet, so I just kick back and relax, let the plebs post my rage for me. That's how you hate efficiently.


edit: shit that went off on a tangent. Give me enough puzzle pieces to salvage this horse.
autism horse next to a dumpster.jpeg
 
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They must've been really really high while playing MGS2.

I can understand at the time why people would rate MGS2 higher because of the graphics and the first person shooting and the amount of detail put into the envrionments.

But today, when I actually played the first three back to back, I was just baffled at how I ever thought MGS2 was *that* great. It's an amazing tech demo I guess, but as a gameplay experience it falls short overall.

Something else I failed to mention was how boring and lame all of the exposition being told through codec screens was. At least in MGS1 they put some FMV nuke footage or something else that wasn't quite so boring for those scenes on top of just keeping it short and sweet.
 
I fell off completely during
"RAIDEN, ur girlfriend is an AI"

And as to actual overrated games.

I feel like Divinity: Original Sin II has a lot of jank, at least in the Switch version, that shouldn't be accepted in a modern day games. Like, I get it being a return to a dead genre, but did people really like those games due to the awkward character movement and menuing, or did they like the quests/combat/dialogue? Because I couldn't take more than an hour of it.

I appreciate the effort that went into D:OS2 but I put it down around when I realized I've built my characters wrong, and that I didn't really have the knowledge on how to abuse the combat system that the game seemed to require.
 
This is a little old to dig up, but Oblivion still had tons of normie fans. If I bring up my dislike of the game to my casual friends they are usually shocked. For one of them, the game was actually a huge event at his school and the first time he saw students and teachers both excited for the same game.
That's ok, I'm still around. Oblivion was the first big casual TES imo but I don't see how that makes it overrated. It's known for being "bad".

I think all of those Tell-Tale games were massively overrated, it was like people had never heard of adventure games and suddenly they existed and were cool for 5 seconds again.
 
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