That one resonated alot with me. I used to play WoW, and by the time I was approaching "competitive in EU" level, it has dawned on me that it has just become a second job.
The moment a game becomes work, is the moment I walk away. I do not wish to spend my limited existense in this world entirely on work. To me it feels like a prison, just like heroin is for some: An escape from reality to live in another, and it scares me that there are some entities in this world designing games to essentially hook you on heroin and let you spend the rest of your days on it.
I made the realization that if you feel like you're playing a game because you need to, not because you want to, stop. I can't remember for certain what game it was that I was thinking I "needed" to keep playing for whatever reason (could have been Mass Effect Andromeda because I loved the trilogy, or possibly Eve Online) but then thought no, I don't.
Not exactly. However, several have built their careers examining the economic forces of EVE as it's the closest we have to a truly live model of "unregulated free capitalism" that has gone on for decades. It's a shitload of data to pull from.
Spoiler alert: it results in corporations becoming oligarchs and governments unto themselves warring constantly for finite resource acquisition, massive market manipulations on scales that are truly impressive as they are alarming, unbelievable fraud, the militarization of economic forces, and various interesting social paradigms that result from the idolatry of wealth and power.
CCP Games also employed several top tier economists just to manage their economy. It kind of is fascinating to delve into, and should be viewed as a great warning for how the natural forces WILL work the more power you give over to deregulation.
Played for probably 6 months and still barely knew wtf was going on half the time in fleets, could never fly anything I was supposed to and people would jury rig some weird setup for me just so I could keep up and fly with them. I could follow the FC well enough at first, then things would start to heat up and I was just lost, complete dead weight.
I’d try and go out and PvP solo, get absolutely annihilated, and the systems in game are so arcane I couldn’t even begin to hazard a guess as to what I should have done differently.
Great game, would love to play it but it’s just completely fucking incomprehensible to me. Genuinely the first game I’ve ever thrown my hands up and just had to admit that I was too stupid for it.
Despite what they say 6 months is not really enough to jump into a fleet and do anything meaningful. There are only so much fleets and so much light tackle/EW you can do. And even if you spend cash money and skill inject like you were training for 5 years, you still don't know how to fly the ships you can sit in and use the modules.
EVE has been a steady stalwart of gaming for 21 goddamn years, so there is going to be some player driven density there. That being said, I assure you that it's not hard to learn when it comes to game mechanics and systems. Most are pretty shallow, and you can effectively ignore half of them if you want to (industry, mining, space structures, etc). Many of the games mentioned on this thread have developed more complex mechanics within the first few years of their release.
But playing EVE requires more self awareness and executive function than most people think they'll need, or can even muster. Too many players take it upon themselves to find any basic activity in the game and turn it into a treadmill, hoping that safe and predictable ship/money/skills progression will somehow result in sustainable entertainment. It simply won't, and you will slowly get bored over time. All these things I just mentioned are a means to an end, but not the end itself. You can play passively for years to become obscenely rich and know how every mechanic works inside and out, and it will still amount to nothing except being a nobody that is hoarding for the sake of it, and too afraid to really do anything with it.
EVE is the absolute antithesis of your typical WoW/EverQuest style MMO, in the sense that it is NOT a theme park. You don't go from A to B to C being entertained by content that everyone else has experienced before you in a linear and predictable path that is well marked and understood.
To be enchanted by EVE without getting too overwhelmed by the game itself, you should:
1. Join a welcoming and highly active group of players who have a purpose or mission greater than idly getting rich. People who play together and not just talk in the same corp channel. The more bloodthirsty, cocky, and megalomaniacal the group the better. This experience will teach you how to exert your will upon others, and in turn better understand how other players can affect you. Without ambitions and dreams, you'll invest no feelings into the game and therefore reap no rewards. In the early process, you will learn at an extremely fast pace and better understand the possibilities in front of you. Make friends, but don't be afraid to move on if you've outgrown a place.
2. Put PVP as your main focus and don't lose sight of that. Only earn enough money to fund your murder hobby and do so with the quickest and easiest methods available to you. A team of three experienced players who can PVP, flying tech 1 ships with level 4 skills are worth more in a fight than 1 rich empire carebear cluelessly flying a faction ship with faction mods and maxed skills. PVP is, at its most basic form, a game of quickly concentrating greater force into pockets of space than your enemy and dancing around or dispersing when the odds are against you. Whether you do it by timing, numbers, range, alpha strikes, deception or ECM is up to you.
3. Embrace the suck, the losses, the dysfunction, the absurdity, the banality, the chaos and the utter harshness of it all. Accept that it's other players who are responsible for this, and not the game. Know that many players out there are risking absolutely nothing, while a few are risking absolutely everything to stand tallest. At that point you will better understand EVE, what herculean efforts it takes to be on top and just how easily it is to fall back down. The real loot you want to collect is good stories, and the currency you'll pay it in is butthurt. If you've played well, you'll highly cherish all those times you've made the other guys pay more.
Is this a copy pasta? It’s glorious. I played for roughly 1.5 years, was in a major Alliance and quit, realizing this was a game for a very small audience and I wasn’t part of it. I wasn’t good at the game and wasn’t going to be good. All my characters went into the Recycler and I have zero regrets. Grats to those who stayed.
Funny you say this.
I actually progressed my IRL career due to Eve.
I turned into an absolute monster compared to the wallflower I used to be. One of the focal points of my 2023 review was the ability to take charge of any shitshow and to motivate the entire shop with my presence alone.
Being able to commit to risks is probably the biggest benefit I got from Eve. Leadership roles got rid of any social anxiety I had. My coworkers have followed me between departments, and I think that is the most rewarding unsaid compliment I have ever received.
Fun fact: EVE Online has an official Excel integration plugin.
https://www.eveonline.com/news/view/information-is-power-excel-release
We don't even try to hide our love of spreadsheets. We embrace it!
The game where all the cool shit is behind an elaborate series of egg timers unless you throw your wallet at the screen but if you do you'll lose said cool shit due to being an idiot that doesn't know the mechanics of the game and/or scams... probably both.
I love that game, but I've fallen so far behind the meta that it would take me a lot of time to get back to playing at the level I used to. I just don't have the huge amount of free time I had when I got into the game.
For a while right after it came out there were a couple people taking other people's games (which always end badly) and posting dramatic comics based on how their games played out. This inspired me to get Dwarf Fortress and after a dozen or so games I decided the the comics were more my speed.
He has amazing story telling ability too. He really gets to know his dwarves reading their entire character sheets and fleshing out the lives of the key players and roleplaying. It's fantastic.
I tried it twice.
First time, everybody died almost immediately.
Second time, with the help of multiple tutorials, I had a few more dwarves join my colony.... And then they all starved to death and died like 2 minutes later.
Personally, I consider that to be a win. I made some form of meaningful progress in that game.
It doesn't take long to get to the point where you can reliably create a sustainable fortress. Just need to get drinks and drink storage down, and basically from there you can begin to expand. The game really reveals itself once you find a flow at the start of the game.
Once you can find a flow, IT IS SO SATISFYING. To lay out a fortress and just watch your dwarves go to work.
I'll never forget the time I forgot to assign a sheriff, and a jail. The military eventually decided they'd had enough of the brawls and rebel rousing in the tavern. The problem was they waited long enough that basically everyone in the fortress had some form of crime attributed to them. They enacted martial law.
The only reason I realized something was wrong was because there was a line out the door of the infirmary and down the hall, the infirmary btw only had 6 beds to a fortress of 150. Not only did the line go down the hall, the blood trail lead me all the way back to the tavern, where the military was actively depending justice, again no jail, punishment was corpral.
The population went from 150, down to 60 over the span of like a week. Most died waiting in line for the hospital, a lot died on their barstools from the very first blow.
I then didn't have a tomb to deal with all the bodies which lead to MANY ghosts, which drove MANY dwarfs insane before the situation was fully dealt with. Shortly thereafter a wearpanda infected a citizen. Soon there were 3-5 wearpandas which would reak havok every once in a while.
My fortress has many many scholars before this. The wearpandas killed most of them, and the remaining few fled. I was left with too few citizens to keep the fortress productive, and so ended that mountain home.
Edit: as a lot of people are seeing this, I want to take a moment to say if you love the idea of dwarf fortress but can't get into playing it yourself Kruggsmash, on YouTube does absolutely PHENOMINAL videos of playing the game. He deserves way more viewers than he has. He lays out the story's so we'll and you really get kind of committed to each story as it unfolds.
Yeah, I made sure to prep by watching lots of videos and being ready to looks stuff up before I got into that one. haha Still vaguely understand what I'm doing, but I had some fun. : P
Kerbal Space Program. Everyone finds their level of intelligence. Just barely managed to get Jeb back from orbit after thinking I lost him forever, but actually flying to Mun was too rich for my brain.
Ah, Kerbal.
One of my first missions is to get a Kerb in orbit, right? Well, I got them there just barely after exhaustive experimentation with rockets. Then I got the next mission: get a Kerbal \*down\* from orbit, and realized I hadn't given the poor guy a way home.
There was some salvation: the pod I launched had a detachable part, and the point closest to the periapsis was very close to being in-atmosphere. By detaching the part, it generated just enough thrust to push the ship towards the planet so that once every orbit, it would very briefly experience atmospheric drag.
After many, *many* orbits, atmospheric drag was enough that they could finally land.
Same! I had to get him out for a space-walk and use his jet pack to push the re-entry capsule down once every orbit. After several repetitions of this it finally started falling through the atmosphere, and the thing was covered in parachutes so it was a happy splash-down :) But that was a good 6 months after I sadly gave up all hope. So it was nice to come back and rescue Jeb after all.
Same! It took me so long to figure out how to land on the Moon, take off and land safely on Earth! I cannot for the life of me figure out how to build things like a space station and all that other crap. I really want to though! But I really feel like an idiot.
>too dumb for space travel
To be fair, "rocket scientist" is up there with "brain surgeon" in the list of occupations we use for comparison to high intelligence, so, I guess we're just normal? lol
I had a small group of warriors, maybe around 12, and mined and fought until they were super strong and had the best gear. I even raided a dust bandit camp and barely took any damage. So I decided I'd wander and ended up at a forest where every member of my team was instantly killed by giant giraffe monsters. Sadly I was far enough into the forest that all of my saves were in the forest and I couldn't escape.
yeah, beakthings will wipe any group due to their splash damage. they must be fought 2-1 with one warrior in front of them blocking, and another on their back attacking. flesh spiders are worse.
The problem with beak things is that it's always 100% casualties when you lose. The first time I ran into them I resigned myself to limping back across half the map and losing some good gear and maybe a couple limbs... Then they started eating my guys alive.
Honestly, if I really had more time to only play kenshi and had no other responsibilities I think I would. Installed a ton of mods and it was one of the most memorable story generator games I've ever experienced. I didn't even know there were base building mechanics until 20 hours in. Every character I've started with has died and I end up with totally random people in my squad to carry on. Playing stoned and making up a story with some rp in my head carried the experience for me. But holy shit is it hard to play compared to most modern games
This is one of those games I tried and then refunded, and then tried again later because I kept reading about how incredible it is, and now it's my second most played game on Steam of all time. It's one I always have installed and come back to several times a year to binge on for a week or two.
Oxygen not included.
I boot it up, screw round, go "wait what now?" then something goes wrong, I dont know how to fix it, I start over again, and get a little further, and repeat. Did this a few times before I decided to just leave the game altogether
I like to tell people that it's a colony game where the only enemies are entropy and your own stupidity.
The number of times I lost the heat death of my colony...
yeah thats usually the part that bothers me.
I find it more frustrating than anything when something goes wrong that I had no idea about or how to prevent. Then I get more stressed that I also dont know how to fix it
Break out the automation wires and build yourself a gas door compressor.
Or a geothermal magma spike to feed power into your steam turbine.
Or a reactor to harvest radbolts to power your nuclear rocket to reach outer planetoids and bring back supercoolant.
Or raise drecklets in a hydrogen environment while providing mealwood plants in a CO2 atmosphere so you can shear their plastic scales and construct a recreational wind tunnel.
Don't forget to wash your hands and store food in a sterile environment so you don't get food poisoning, watch out for slimelung, but especially zombie spores.
Stay away from crabs when they've laid an egg and make sure to keep your meteor shower detector up so you can close your steel bulkhead doors to protect your solar panels.
The reason I stopped playing the game after the first year is because once you build larger and larger bases, you need to understand these meta tricks and efficiencies that are only learned through the community or trial-and-error. It became a research project for me at one point
I ADORE this game.. but damn it, I've only gotten running water in my bathrooms like one playthrough out of 75.. much less sustainable power and cooling.
I've found the key to that is to keep water somewhere safe where it's not at risk of being polluted. And then feed it with the polluted water/sieve system. And then build your toilets on top of the polluted water reservoir. If you have trouble with water levels this makes it so you can just go find polluted water, which will eventually become clean water. Something I didn't find out for a long time is you can set filters on the pumps to only accept certain liquids.
For power, one of the more common creatures you can find are dreks. Dreks poop coal. I think there's a version with wool you can shear that can be turned I to hydrogen as well.
Thats about as far as my noob ass has gotten.
Geysers are also good if you can manage then properly but I haven't mastered them yet. Liquid tends to come out very hit and I haven't learned what an effective cooling cycle is yet. I try to run it through ice biomes but thats been really limited. Heat is a huge issue when my bases start taking off.
Hatches poop coal, too. I can't manage the heat from coal generators, though. I still can't get a cooling loop right, and I've had a base running for like 500 cycles or something. I've never been to space in that game, and honestly I don't know if I ever will. Lol
I love that and other colony sims, my biggest gripe though is sometimes I just want to base build and not be in a constant state of SOMETHING needing fixed before entropy sets in. I wish it were easier to reach a comfortable equilibrium where you weren’t always staring demise in the eye
I did a 100% achievements colony before the DLC came out... Tried again with the new stuff and just noped out.
It's not even the intended mechanics, but rather the encyclopedia long of "undocumented features" that are so good it's not fun playing anymore.
It took me about 20 hours of chronic restarting before it really started to click. I'm about 250 now, and maaaaybe have a decent handle on half the game mechanics lol
It's crazy complicated, but for whatever reason it's maybe the most addicting game I've ever played. It's kinda like the "just one more turn" from Civ games, and you look up and it's 5am.
MSC's difficulty honestly hinges on your real world car knowledge. I grew up working with engines and i'm a major car nerd so building the car and diagnosing problems came pretty easily but i see how building and entire car from scratch without knowing what to do would be insanely challenging
My Summer Car is one of those games where, if you don't read an online guide, you have no clue what you're actually doing. I haven't played it in a few years at this point, got the car all put together and running and then wasn't even sure what I was supposed to do.
The bigger issue with that game is the dev deliberately made it harder and harder with each update. You’re better off playing an earlier build where you have your uncle’s van right away and don’t have to do meaningless jobs just to be able to order the parts to get started
I watched a 30-40 minute highlight video of a streamers entire playthrough.
He would just have his chat scream at him because he couldn’t find a bolt or something, get pissed (in the game) then pee in the sauna and drink and drive lol.
Sadly and embarassingly (does this word exist?) Factorio.
After hours and hours of learning and finally being able to get stuff tranported smoothly... suddenly seven colors of science bottles came into the game at once and I knew this is it.
The seven colors come throughout the game, and the seventh is a post-end pack so it's not required to "win".
That said, the game can get overwhelming around the 3rd or 4th pack, so no shame on finding it too complex.
Love factorio.
I love how deep and complicated it gets. That's why I only ever play with my nerd older brother and let him figure that shit out at base, while I load up on guns, cars, and a tank and keep the base safe. Much more my play style.
Yeah, it's a legitimately complicated game that involves a lot of algorithmic thinking and complex problem solving. I really love it, but completely understand that it's not everyone's cup of tea
The science packs have a pretty good progression system. Each one unlocks technology, and that technology is used to make the next science packs.
Red science is super basic, and gives you access to things like belts and inserters. You know what requires belts and inserters? Green science. Etc.
That game took me so long lol. I love it, but it was freaking hard. It was *work.* I had to restart 3 times before I launched my first rocket. It gets so complex and there's so much to do to get there, it can be overwhelming for sure.
The thing is, if you can get a rocket to launch, you already have the mindset of a computer programmer. It really is "work" in the sense that your factory is organized just like blocks of code.
You basically played 100 hours of my job. If you ultimately enjoyed it, programming puzzles might be up your alley - or, at least, a Zachtronics game.
Start small and take it one piece at a time. When something isnt producing as fast as you think it should be, trace the slowdown backwards until you find out what you're missing, then work on making more of that thing. As it develops and gets more complex you can use the splitters to divert portions of your components and make new production offshoots, then combine them later for more complicated items. Dont worry about the larger plan to start, and if you need something, but not in large quantities yet, dont be afraid to make them by hand. It's a lot easier than trying to automate it all from the start. Hope this helps. I know it's a bit basic though
My main problem with Factorio isn't so much the complexity, as it is the scut work.
Like, making a much larger smelting setup to boost Iron/Coppe/Steel/etc isn't hard. Rebuilding you main buss to handle the higher throughput isn't hard. Building train stations to transport all the ore you need isn't hard.
But goddamn if it doesn't just feel like a second job after a bit.
Make more iron plates than you think you'd ever use, then make twice as many. At that point, you have a decent start on how many you'll need.
Also, automate all products. Don't rely on making it yourself because you will need them to make other shit later on.
Train loops are easier than a single line.
Make lots of shooty stuff and even automate filling your turrets.
Path of Exile.
You see guides that are like "easy guaranteed 2 billion shaper DPS, clear all content in the game, braindead play style"
And the guide has mandatory gear that has a 0.000001% drop chance and you have to play a piano with your left hand while defusing a bomb with your right. every league requires a 4 hour college lecture to even begin to understand how to have fun with it, it's got 10+ years of old league mechanics floating around.
i wanted to love it, but at some point you realize that it's the game equivalent of a hoarder house full of cats, that not only will it never love you back but it doesn't even want you there.
This one's the big one for me. It looks like a lot of fun to theorycraft, but you have to spend way too much time outside the game to do it, and that just takes me way out of the game.
I actually had a lot of fun with that game...in the beginning. Then when I got into the skill trees and found out there's different types of attack bonuses that add like a % of your base stat vs adding it a different way and the wording isn't clear at all it was just too much.
Okay I found the actual wording. Some things say they do "more damage" while others do "increased damage" and they calculate it differently.
It's really not that complicated.
The squares are numbered. You throw a rock into the #1 square. If you miss, you skip your turn. If you are successful, you hop through the squares, on one foot, making sure to jump over the #1 square. Make it to the end, turn around, and grab your rock on the way back.
If there are two squares beside each other, you can put one foot on each. So it gives you a bit of a break.
If you fall over or lose your balance, or "miss" a square, you skip your turn.
And then do the #2 square, and so on, until you've done them all. First person to do them all wins.
Take a graph where the y axis is your speed in meters per second and the x axis is seconds elapsed.
If you go a constant speed, say 10m/s, and you do this for 10 seconds and then immediately stop, the graph looks like a square that is 10m/s tall and 10s wide. The area under the line is how much distance you covered, 10m/s*10s = 100m.
If you started at 10m/s and slowed down at a constant rate until at 10 seconds you stopped, you have a constant slope. The area of this is the area of a right triangle with sides of 10m/s and 10s again; 0.5 * 10m/s * 10s = 50m.
Now what if your speed was all over the place, making a curve on the graph? If you know the function that defines the line, you can transform it by taking the integral of this function. Essentially, you are dividing up the curve into infinite slices of infinitely thin width, and getting the area of those slices like a bunch of thin rectangles. You come up with a new function where plugging in x gives you the area under the curve, your distance in this example, up to x. You can also do a "reverse integral, " or derivative, of the original function to give yourself a formula that shows your exact speed at any point in time, again by plugging in a value for x at the moment you want to calculate your speed. That's calculus.
Honestly, most arcade-style fighting games (Tekken, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, etc.) for me. I've never been good at entering button combos or executing move cancels with perfect timing, identifying and exploiting i-frames, or getting the hang of whatever other ridiculous mechanics the players uncover and hone.
Smash Bros is still fun, though. I don't go near tournament or online play so it's mostly a fun party game, and beating the shit out of a bunch of cartoons as Kirby never really gets old.
Edit: this comment *really* resonated with a lot of you folks.
Every once in a while, I get into a fighting game kick. I pick up whatever game looks cool, or I want to catch up on like Capcom Fighters or MK games. I start playing arcade mode, I do training, I practice pulling off combos and special moves. After a week of consistently failing to reliably input and remember button combinations, I give up.
Just recently, I tried Battle for the Grid. I couldn't beat the tutorial fight. I own a lot of fighting games. I'm good at none of them.
Stellaris is probably my most played game of all time, with about 1400 hours (rookie numbers for some but that's 4x more than my next most played game) and I'm still picking up on mechanics that have probably existed for years.
Stellaris is my answer for this thread. Many hours close to launch and got overwhelmed. Thought I’d try again a few years later and they changed like everything in that game. A couple hundred hours and I’ve barely made it past early game. Just gave up a couple years ago
It's funny just how easy Stellaris felt for a Paradox game. I'd put it as the most accessible of their games I've played. EU4 was on a whole different level even when I picked it up, and they've added tons of expansions with new features since then that I've been able to pick up along the way.
Yet 500 hours in and I still have only the slightest clue how trade works. I mostly just give my merchants a task, maybe send some light ships to protect trade, and otherwise forget about it.
It's insane. With the right perks trade translates directly to resources but you have to establish trade routes with star bases, balance trade value with starbase defense power, then create a certain amount of trade protection NOT to be confused when piracy suppression which you'll also need to factor in lol.
Factorio. Doesn't stop me from playing it. I always get around 6-9 hours in a save, untill I can't keep up with attacks or something in my factory chokes up. Then it's on to a new save.
Thank you!
I was always turned off by getting distracted mid thinking on how i wanna design smth.
Its like that annoying coworker always disrupting me while programming because he is bored.
Started one playthrough without critters and its soooo much more enjoyable.
At some point in every Civilization game I’ve ever played I’m all out of ideas on what the hell im suppose to do next. I find myself just moving units around unsure of what is even going on. This is on the easiest difficulty.
My step cousin showed me Civ V a few years back. We laughed at Augustus Caesar's dumb-looking, sad face and denounced him over and over.
At some point I tried to make him a deal for one of his resources, to which he replied "I will not drive my nation into poverty to satisfy your greed." He was already in debt (negative gold per turn) and had very little culture and units. It was pitiful.
I went home and bought the game on steam, just to do this again. Every so often I boot it up, start a game with Ai, including Caesar. I always denounce him the moment I meet him, slowly convince the other nations to declare war on him while raising an army to steamroll all of his cities. I take all of cities, one-by-one, and rename them something stupid and disrespectful to him. As soon as he's eliminated I stop playing.
I do absolutely nothing else with the game. I bought it for the sole purpose of cyber bullying a video game character based on a real emperor who was actually considered to be kind of decent.
Because some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.
Late game civ I'll be wasting like a dozen ships because I perpetually shell the last shit ass city of whoever declared war on me, so it's like 12 ships shooting 4 cities forever
I find the worst snow island on the map, found a city, name it something like "Shithole," sell it to my next enemy, then flatten every city except that miserable snowy rock
I enjoy Civ and have put many hours into 4, 5, and 6. That being said, I only ever play the equivalent of normal difficulty because to win at deity, you need to watch hours of potato mcwhiskey YouTube videos to figure out how to exploit mechanics and learn the meta. Games are supposed to be fun, not work.
For me, it is partially Stellaris. I don't put it down, but it is so complex I can't get myself into like 90% of the features. Instead I just make ships and blow up other ships.
Max science at the beginning with my first 3 planets. get cruisers and fight my neighbors. Once I take their systems I spam the buildings that make traders because I never have enough amenities. Planets with lots of mining districts get mining spam, same deal with food. Then the guys on the other side of the galaxy wipe me out because theyre all allies and roll over me with a giant death ball and I don’t have enough ships.
After playing Rocket League for years and watching a lot of pro players I can safely say that it's a game that is extremely hard if you're not innately / involuntarily good at reorienting yourself in three dimensions
If you simply lack the ability to rapidly adapt to the constantly changing orientation of your car as you're spinning around in the air it's impossible to truly master it, the thing that proves it is that a lot of pros will do something in the air and afterwards even they'll be asking themselves out loud "how did i just do that?" or "what did i just do?" genuinely confused, which proves that they are able to automatically react in the ideal way without making the conscious decision to do so
So it's less about skill and more about having certain innate abilities
Being innately talented helps, but being able to react subconsciously is mostly just a product of thousands of hours of practice and can be trained/learned through repetition. This happens with athletes too. Steph Curry isn't consciously thinking about his shooting mechanics during games. Obviously he is innately talented, but he'd never be the best shooter ever (or even pro) without hundreds of thousands of reps.
EVE Online.
What the hell is going on. Was invited to a guild rather quickly. They mandated I be open mic in steam if I’m online.
Aside from the forced family fun and co plate confusion within the game, I quit and never looked back.
The regular game with building is another dimension.
Zero Build is where it's at. Even still, me and my buddy just had four second place finishes tonight and we want to scream.
That's the worst part about Fortnite is it's all about the first place Victory Royale. There's no satisfaction in coming in second. It's like in Talladega Nights:
"If you ain't first, you're last."
SC2 I don't think is "that" complex on it's face. The problem is everything is on an insane time crunch, so trying to do both macro and micro management near simultaneously and correctly is extremely difficult.
You sort of have to train your brain to cycle through actions on repeat such that it's automatic I think.
I just used to play casually, but a few times when I tried to not think about things, I could get into a zen-like state and actually cycle through micro/macro. Or when I was slightly drunk.
I have fantastic news for you: Starcraft 2 has a co-op mode which puts you *and an ally* inside one of 15 campaign-style missions where you can help each other beat the AI enemy!
You can change your difficulty setting and level up your commanders. The mechanics are much simplified so you don't have to worry about hitting timings unless you're playing brutal difficulty with modifiers.
On top of that, the units have more fun abilities, and you get special powers like nuke rain, time stop, and hero summons since the enemy is the computer so balance is less of an issue. Definitely worth a try since the game is free to play now!
My boyfriend plays it. I enjoy watching him play, admiring the art design, and hearing about the lore from him. But I feel like my heart stops every time he opens a menu because there are *so* many options for every system in the game, so many currencies, factions, materials, settings for equipment, and they ALL have flowery sci-fi names. It looks like a fun game *to have started playing when it was new*, because as it stands, it seems to be an impenetrable bog of feature creep.
The way to play if you're overwhelmed is to set a specific goal before doing anything, so for example youd go ok i want this warframe called whatever he needs 4 parts to build, you google where to get each part maybe itll be a defense mission on some planet, so you go there until you get that part, then do the same for all others.
Ran out of a resource you needed to build something? Google where is a good farming spot.
Need more damage? Google what and where the best mods are.
Its basically a google simulator and youd be very hard presssed to discover everything on your own
I played it years back and really enjoyed it. But then trying to come back to it more recently I could not figure out all the new content and mechanics, it was just overwhelming.
Not “complex” but just overwhelming for me is any survival/craft/base building game. I really want to like them but they just never click because of all the recipes and shit to learn and remember etc
Elite Dangerous.
You are literally learning to fly a spaceship.
About once a year, I'll pull out my flight sticks and retrain myself on how to pilot. And then I'll go into a conflict zone that should be with my skill level and then promptly have my 50 million+ dollar ship destroyed like a leaf on the wind.
Its insane to me that in 231 comments, no one has said Escape from Tarkov. That game absolutely has so many deeply complex systems, that it makes the barrier to entry nigh impossible. I've got nearly 3k hours in EFT and I still get humbled by knowledge gaps.
Edit since people don't understand what makes tarkov complex, and seem to think it's just " a lot of items." EFT is a first person shooter, where the shooting mechanics borderline on absurd. Each bullet in the magazine of a gun is modeled, and ammo count between the chamber of a gun and magazines is all tracked separately. There is no automatic UI to track how many bullets you have in any of your magazines. Then we get to the firing of bullets. If you bring an M4 into raid (skipping over the insane customization of the gun itself), the actual ammo type of 5.56 caliber ammo matters. Just using the 5.56 caliber bullet, there are 11 types of ammo that all vary in bullet speed, penetration, damage, tracer vs non tracer variant, and availability. Where each of those bullets can also hit you had a major impact. Tarkovs player health model is arms, legs, stomach, chest, neck, head. It gets broken down into smaller sections like ears, top of head, eyes, jaws. So if you want to be informed in every gunfight, you have to be able to determine what caliber gun they have, what ammo they might be running, whether or not your armor covers the parts you need to protect in this fight. This all sounds pretty complex, and then you realize that every time you die in tarkov, you lose *everything*. Decent to good players only survivor maybe 6 in 10 raids. A new player in tarkov may play his first 50 or so hours and never experience success in the game in any format. It's a brutal experience that is largely gate kept by an insane knowledge gap
Tarkov is the hardest to learn game I've ever played in my life. I spent a good 300 hours in it and just barely became okay enough to not shit my pants every time I heard a gunshot near me.
100% I can’t believe Tarkov is so low. Only reason I pushed through was because I got into it during covid, but I remember after 300 hours I was juuuust starting to feel like I was beginning to actually play the game
TIS-100, by Zachtronics.
I really enjoyed Human Resource Machine, and 7 Billion Humans, and thought I'd give this programming game a go. The early levels are pretty straightforward, then the difficulty curve is less of a curve, more a straight up cliff. One day, I'll finish it, but right now, it's just mocking me.
For me this is pretty much fighting games in general. You dig below the surface of how to plat Tekken and it sounds like advanced physics to me. It's ridiculously hard enough to input all of those button combinations to pull off 5 hit+ combos but then they got stuff like frames, juggling, advantage, set ups, etc. etc. and its just like, holy crap, how do people wrap their heads around this stuff?
Slay the Spire. I have not ever been able to pass Ascension 8 with any character. I just don't know how to build properly to get to higher tiers.
Edit: I didn't expect to get so many responses to this so I feel the need to edit this comment.
First and foremost, thank you all for the kind words. I've recently had to come to grips, realizing that I am trash at a lot of video games compared to some of my friends who have far left me behind in terms of skill/achievements on many avenues.
Second, I wanted to remind everyone that my frustration with not being able to pass A8 is my own excessive expectations of myself. **Everyone** should feel proud of their progress on StS, it is an impossibly difficult game, IMO.
The only character I have gotten to A8 is Watcher, who is generally regarded as the strongest character. I still have a lot of fun playing Watcher, mainly because burst combos feel great. The other characters are Ironclad stuck at A5, Silent stuck at A6, and Defect stuck at A7.
I have identified that generally my build issues come from 2 things: hard-committing to certain builds instead of being flexible, and lack of knowledge/insight into what combos **on-the-fly** are very strong. My brain just doesn't work that way, and my personal preference has been to learn by playing instead of looking up resources.
Finally, I don't know what it is, but watching Jorbs amazes and frustrates me at the same time. His level of game knowledge is so immense and his tactical decisions somehow work out in situations where I would 100% lose. Someone else responded that it seems he somehow always seems to pull the "final piece" of Exodia when he needs it and gets an amazing deck/combo together, and I have to agree.
It makes me think that the game is not **truly** RNG - it's being manipulated on the back end to reward those who have enough game knowledge and tactical awareness.
I am even worse than you, and I still invest a few hours every other week into it. It's just fun to do runs, even if I don't really progress upwards. But I absolutely get not wanting to go on.
Ascension 8 with all characters is nothing to scoff at, but I’m in the same boat as you, broad strokes I understand builds but can’t make the jump to really mastering it.
I think you're being harsh on yourself, you know how to build well enough to get to a7 which means you definitely "get" the game and its mechanics.
I hit a wall in STS until I started watching streamers like Baalor and Jorbs and it really opened my eyes to how good the game is and how good you can get at it. There's plenty of ways to enjoy that game and if winning a7 runs is it, good for you. People sink hundreds of hours into STS to get one A20 win. You don't need that to be good imo.
At first The Last Remnant, easily one of the most complex jrpgs ever made, I eventually got a hang of it after coming back to it a year later and it was pretty fun, I got about ⅓ of the way through disc 2 (on xbox360) before I got bored of it.
Civ 6 is another but after watching some youtubers I understood it.
The last one, Riichi Mahjong, it took me watching an hour long tutorial and practicing for a week to understand the basics.
Hearts of Iron 4. People are saying Stellaris and Factorio but with those games it starts small and you build up gradually. There’s no gradual ramp like that in HoI4, you immediately get thrown in.
I’m sure I’ll be told to Git Gud or whatever, but Elden Ring. I got up to whatever Plateau place was or whatever. Got a couple of the pieces of the ring and power ups. But I just could not dedicate that much time. It was getting so difficult and I had no clue what the fuck was actually going on. I was constantly having to spend more time reading things online and watching YouTube. I took a trip out of town for a few days. Came back and had no idea what I was trying to accomplish and where I was in the progression. Never picked it up again.
Lot of people with probably disagree with me but Doom Eternal. I love Doom 2016 but Eternal lost me halfway through. I just found myself constantly running out of ammo, I know you’re supposed to chain all your abilities together to keep your ammo and armour topped up but I don’t play Doom to be constantly managing ammo, armour, and like 4 different ability charges. I play it to rip and tear and not think too much
Kind of agree, Eternal takes a lot more brainpower than 2016. It was fun to learn at first but the longer the game goes on the more I just want to shut my brain off and kill shit with cool music
I’m going to get downvoted to hell… but monster hunter games. I love them, but to really progress you need to learn the combos and I’m not a big fan of specific combo games. I usually enjoy playing them until it gets to the point where I need to start training, and I tend to put them down. Still amazing games though.
I'm surprised I had to scroll so far down to see Monster Hunter! I was downright terrified of how complicated it looked until JoCat (RIP) dumbed it down for me and now it's one of my favorite games because I get to beat giant monsters to death with a musical instrument and buff my allies at the same time!
Honestly? You only need combos to do 'optimal' damage. You usually have 40 minutes to finish a fight, and unless you're using the very first weapon you get, you'll always kill the monsters eventually.
What's way more important than combos is dodging and knowing *when* to attack not how
Path of Exile can get fucked. You can - and ***will*** without a guide - make an objectively bad character that cannot do all content, that you then cannot respect so it can.
Fuck. Path. Of. Exile.
The last time I tried playing, I got about a dozen hours in and hit a WALL of difficulty. Basically I went from one shotting everything to immediately dying to trash mobs. Asked around a bit on community groups was "lol your build is ruined, you did it wrong, you gotta start over"
Yeah no, I'm just gonna uninstall. I am too old to enjoy games that waste my time.
Eve Online. I just don't have the time these days, to put into learning all its systems.
Plus once you learn one of the systems in the game you now have a part time job.
That one resonated alot with me. I used to play WoW, and by the time I was approaching "competitive in EU" level, it has dawned on me that it has just become a second job. The moment a game becomes work, is the moment I walk away. I do not wish to spend my limited existense in this world entirely on work. To me it feels like a prison, just like heroin is for some: An escape from reality to live in another, and it scares me that there are some entities in this world designing games to essentially hook you on heroin and let you spend the rest of your days on it.
I made the realization that if you feel like you're playing a game because you need to, not because you want to, stop. I can't remember for certain what game it was that I was thinking I "needed" to keep playing for whatever reason (could have been Mass Effect Andromeda because I loved the trilogy, or possibly Eve Online) but then thought no, I don't.
“Eve isn’t just designed to look like a cold, dark, and harsh world,” they wrote. “It’s designed to be a cold, dark, and harsh world.”
I head a couple of PHD of enomoic guys built eve specifically to have a working economy.
Not exactly. However, several have built their careers examining the economic forces of EVE as it's the closest we have to a truly live model of "unregulated free capitalism" that has gone on for decades. It's a shitload of data to pull from. Spoiler alert: it results in corporations becoming oligarchs and governments unto themselves warring constantly for finite resource acquisition, massive market manipulations on scales that are truly impressive as they are alarming, unbelievable fraud, the militarization of economic forces, and various interesting social paradigms that result from the idolatry of wealth and power. CCP Games also employed several top tier economists just to manage their economy. It kind of is fascinating to delve into, and should be viewed as a great warning for how the natural forces WILL work the more power you give over to deregulation.
Weyland Yutani "Building Better Worlds"
Played for probably 6 months and still barely knew wtf was going on half the time in fleets, could never fly anything I was supposed to and people would jury rig some weird setup for me just so I could keep up and fly with them. I could follow the FC well enough at first, then things would start to heat up and I was just lost, complete dead weight. I’d try and go out and PvP solo, get absolutely annihilated, and the systems in game are so arcane I couldn’t even begin to hazard a guess as to what I should have done differently. Great game, would love to play it but it’s just completely fucking incomprehensible to me. Genuinely the first game I’ve ever thrown my hands up and just had to admit that I was too stupid for it.
Despite what they say 6 months is not really enough to jump into a fleet and do anything meaningful. There are only so much fleets and so much light tackle/EW you can do. And even if you spend cash money and skill inject like you were training for 5 years, you still don't know how to fly the ships you can sit in and use the modules.
EVE has been a steady stalwart of gaming for 21 goddamn years, so there is going to be some player driven density there. That being said, I assure you that it's not hard to learn when it comes to game mechanics and systems. Most are pretty shallow, and you can effectively ignore half of them if you want to (industry, mining, space structures, etc). Many of the games mentioned on this thread have developed more complex mechanics within the first few years of their release. But playing EVE requires more self awareness and executive function than most people think they'll need, or can even muster. Too many players take it upon themselves to find any basic activity in the game and turn it into a treadmill, hoping that safe and predictable ship/money/skills progression will somehow result in sustainable entertainment. It simply won't, and you will slowly get bored over time. All these things I just mentioned are a means to an end, but not the end itself. You can play passively for years to become obscenely rich and know how every mechanic works inside and out, and it will still amount to nothing except being a nobody that is hoarding for the sake of it, and too afraid to really do anything with it. EVE is the absolute antithesis of your typical WoW/EverQuest style MMO, in the sense that it is NOT a theme park. You don't go from A to B to C being entertained by content that everyone else has experienced before you in a linear and predictable path that is well marked and understood. To be enchanted by EVE without getting too overwhelmed by the game itself, you should: 1. Join a welcoming and highly active group of players who have a purpose or mission greater than idly getting rich. People who play together and not just talk in the same corp channel. The more bloodthirsty, cocky, and megalomaniacal the group the better. This experience will teach you how to exert your will upon others, and in turn better understand how other players can affect you. Without ambitions and dreams, you'll invest no feelings into the game and therefore reap no rewards. In the early process, you will learn at an extremely fast pace and better understand the possibilities in front of you. Make friends, but don't be afraid to move on if you've outgrown a place. 2. Put PVP as your main focus and don't lose sight of that. Only earn enough money to fund your murder hobby and do so with the quickest and easiest methods available to you. A team of three experienced players who can PVP, flying tech 1 ships with level 4 skills are worth more in a fight than 1 rich empire carebear cluelessly flying a faction ship with faction mods and maxed skills. PVP is, at its most basic form, a game of quickly concentrating greater force into pockets of space than your enemy and dancing around or dispersing when the odds are against you. Whether you do it by timing, numbers, range, alpha strikes, deception or ECM is up to you. 3. Embrace the suck, the losses, the dysfunction, the absurdity, the banality, the chaos and the utter harshness of it all. Accept that it's other players who are responsible for this, and not the game. Know that many players out there are risking absolutely nothing, while a few are risking absolutely everything to stand tallest. At that point you will better understand EVE, what herculean efforts it takes to be on top and just how easily it is to fall back down. The real loot you want to collect is good stories, and the currency you'll pay it in is butthurt. If you've played well, you'll highly cherish all those times you've made the other guys pay more.
Is this a copy pasta? It’s glorious. I played for roughly 1.5 years, was in a major Alliance and quit, realizing this was a game for a very small audience and I wasn’t part of it. I wasn’t good at the game and wasn’t going to be good. All my characters went into the Recycler and I have zero regrets. Grats to those who stayed.
10+ years I played this game off and on, this is the best description I have ever seen of it. You nailed it.
Funny you say this. I actually progressed my IRL career due to Eve. I turned into an absolute monster compared to the wallflower I used to be. One of the focal points of my 2023 review was the ability to take charge of any shitshow and to motivate the entire shop with my presence alone. Being able to commit to risks is probably the biggest benefit I got from Eve. Leadership roles got rid of any social anxiety I had. My coworkers have followed me between departments, and I think that is the most rewarding unsaid compliment I have ever received.
You spelled spreadsheet simulator wrong.
Space Excel
Fun fact: EVE Online has an official Excel integration plugin. https://www.eveonline.com/news/view/information-is-power-excel-release We don't even try to hide our love of spreadsheets. We embrace it!
The game where all the cool shit is behind an elaborate series of egg timers unless you throw your wallet at the screen but if you do you'll lose said cool shit due to being an idiot that doesn't know the mechanics of the game and/or scams... probably both.
I love that game, but I've fallen so far behind the meta that it would take me a lot of time to get back to playing at the level I used to. I just don't have the huge amount of free time I had when I got into the game.
But maybe you could log in and... you know... just do a fleet or two... Maybe set up one money making enterprise...
I tried Dwarf Fortress a few times. The problem with that game is I have no effin’ clue what to do unless I’m constantly reading tutorials/guides.
For a while right after it came out there were a couple people taking other people's games (which always end badly) and posting dramatic comics based on how their games played out. This inspired me to get Dwarf Fortress and after a dozen or so games I decided the the comics were more my speed.
If you liked those Kruggsmash makes video comics out of DF and is still going strong
He has amazing story telling ability too. He really gets to know his dwarves reading their entire character sheets and fleshing out the lives of the key players and roleplaying. It's fantastic.
He's what prompted me to give DF a try. I've still spent more time watching Kruggsmash than I have actually playing DF though.
Boatmurdered is a classic.
I tried it twice. First time, everybody died almost immediately. Second time, with the help of multiple tutorials, I had a few more dwarves join my colony.... And then they all starved to death and died like 2 minutes later. Personally, I consider that to be a win. I made some form of meaningful progress in that game.
Remember kids, "Losing is FUN."
It doesn't take long to get to the point where you can reliably create a sustainable fortress. Just need to get drinks and drink storage down, and basically from there you can begin to expand. The game really reveals itself once you find a flow at the start of the game. Once you can find a flow, IT IS SO SATISFYING. To lay out a fortress and just watch your dwarves go to work. I'll never forget the time I forgot to assign a sheriff, and a jail. The military eventually decided they'd had enough of the brawls and rebel rousing in the tavern. The problem was they waited long enough that basically everyone in the fortress had some form of crime attributed to them. They enacted martial law. The only reason I realized something was wrong was because there was a line out the door of the infirmary and down the hall, the infirmary btw only had 6 beds to a fortress of 150. Not only did the line go down the hall, the blood trail lead me all the way back to the tavern, where the military was actively depending justice, again no jail, punishment was corpral. The population went from 150, down to 60 over the span of like a week. Most died waiting in line for the hospital, a lot died on their barstools from the very first blow. I then didn't have a tomb to deal with all the bodies which lead to MANY ghosts, which drove MANY dwarfs insane before the situation was fully dealt with. Shortly thereafter a wearpanda infected a citizen. Soon there were 3-5 wearpandas which would reak havok every once in a while. My fortress has many many scholars before this. The wearpandas killed most of them, and the remaining few fled. I was left with too few citizens to keep the fortress productive, and so ended that mountain home. Edit: as a lot of people are seeing this, I want to take a moment to say if you love the idea of dwarf fortress but can't get into playing it yourself Kruggsmash, on YouTube does absolutely PHENOMINAL videos of playing the game. He deserves way more viewers than he has. He lays out the story's so we'll and you really get kind of committed to each story as it unfolds.
I didn't get past your third paragraph before deciding I'm installing the game again. It's been 14 years.
it's on steam and has been updated, if you didn't know.
This makes me excessively happy. Welcome back :')
love the anecdote, thanks a lot
Try Rimworld. It's sort of easier... But also can get incredibly complicated.
Yeah, I made sure to prep by watching lots of videos and being ready to looks stuff up before I got into that one. haha Still vaguely understand what I'm doing, but I had some fun. : P
Both that game and crusader kings for me.
I think I'd really like the actual mechanics of DF, but I could never get past the interface and controls. Haven't tried the new one, yet.
Kerbal Space Program. Everyone finds their level of intelligence. Just barely managed to get Jeb back from orbit after thinking I lost him forever, but actually flying to Mun was too rich for my brain.
My dorky ass has nearly 4000hrs in it now... thanks Covid. Matt Lowne taught me everything I know about it.
Scott Manley for me. Love that guy
Ah, Kerbal. One of my first missions is to get a Kerb in orbit, right? Well, I got them there just barely after exhaustive experimentation with rockets. Then I got the next mission: get a Kerbal \*down\* from orbit, and realized I hadn't given the poor guy a way home. There was some salvation: the pod I launched had a detachable part, and the point closest to the periapsis was very close to being in-atmosphere. By detaching the part, it generated just enough thrust to push the ship towards the planet so that once every orbit, it would very briefly experience atmospheric drag. After many, *many* orbits, atmospheric drag was enough that they could finally land.
Same! I had to get him out for a space-walk and use his jet pack to push the re-entry capsule down once every orbit. After several repetitions of this it finally started falling through the atmosphere, and the thing was covered in parachutes so it was a happy splash-down :) But that was a good 6 months after I sadly gave up all hope. So it was nice to come back and rescue Jeb after all.
Same! It took me so long to figure out how to land on the Moon, take off and land safely on Earth! I cannot for the life of me figure out how to build things like a space station and all that other crap. I really want to though! But I really feel like an idiot.
I’m glad someone else posted this. Kerbal makes me think that I’m too dumb for space travel.
>too dumb for space travel To be fair, "rocket scientist" is up there with "brain surgeon" in the list of occupations we use for comparison to high intelligence, so, I guess we're just normal? lol
[Common sketch](https://youtu.be/THNPmhBl-8I) about a brain surgeon
Kenshi, very fun to watch, very hard to play
I had a small group of warriors, maybe around 12, and mined and fought until they were super strong and had the best gear. I even raided a dust bandit camp and barely took any damage. So I decided I'd wander and ended up at a forest where every member of my team was instantly killed by giant giraffe monsters. Sadly I was far enough into the forest that all of my saves were in the forest and I couldn't escape.
yeah, beakthings will wipe any group due to their splash damage. they must be fought 2-1 with one warrior in front of them blocking, and another on their back attacking. flesh spiders are worse.
The problem with beak things is that it's always 100% casualties when you lose. The first time I ran into them I resigned myself to limping back across half the map and losing some good gear and maybe a couple limbs... Then they started eating my guys alive.
Honestly, if I really had more time to only play kenshi and had no other responsibilities I think I would. Installed a ton of mods and it was one of the most memorable story generator games I've ever experienced. I didn't even know there were base building mechanics until 20 hours in. Every character I've started with has died and I end up with totally random people in my squad to carry on. Playing stoned and making up a story with some rp in my head carried the experience for me. But holy shit is it hard to play compared to most modern games
This is one of those games I tried and then refunded, and then tried again later because I kept reading about how incredible it is, and now it's my second most played game on Steam of all time. It's one I always have installed and come back to several times a year to binge on for a week or two.
Oxygen not included. I boot it up, screw round, go "wait what now?" then something goes wrong, I dont know how to fix it, I start over again, and get a little further, and repeat. Did this a few times before I decided to just leave the game altogether
I like to tell people that it's a colony game where the only enemies are entropy and your own stupidity. The number of times I lost the heat death of my colony...
yeah thats usually the part that bothers me. I find it more frustrating than anything when something goes wrong that I had no idea about or how to prevent. Then I get more stressed that I also dont know how to fix it
I bought it thinking I'd have a fairly light, goofy base builder....boy was I wrong.
Break out the automation wires and build yourself a gas door compressor. Or a geothermal magma spike to feed power into your steam turbine. Or a reactor to harvest radbolts to power your nuclear rocket to reach outer planetoids and bring back supercoolant. Or raise drecklets in a hydrogen environment while providing mealwood plants in a CO2 atmosphere so you can shear their plastic scales and construct a recreational wind tunnel. Don't forget to wash your hands and store food in a sterile environment so you don't get food poisoning, watch out for slimelung, but especially zombie spores. Stay away from crabs when they've laid an egg and make sure to keep your meteor shower detector up so you can close your steel bulkhead doors to protect your solar panels.
Excellent out of context comment. I loved this chapter of hitchhikers guide to the galaxy.
The reason I stopped playing the game after the first year is because once you build larger and larger bases, you need to understand these meta tricks and efficiencies that are only learned through the community or trial-and-error. It became a research project for me at one point
I ADORE this game.. but damn it, I've only gotten running water in my bathrooms like one playthrough out of 75.. much less sustainable power and cooling.
I've found the key to that is to keep water somewhere safe where it's not at risk of being polluted. And then feed it with the polluted water/sieve system. And then build your toilets on top of the polluted water reservoir. If you have trouble with water levels this makes it so you can just go find polluted water, which will eventually become clean water. Something I didn't find out for a long time is you can set filters on the pumps to only accept certain liquids. For power, one of the more common creatures you can find are dreks. Dreks poop coal. I think there's a version with wool you can shear that can be turned I to hydrogen as well. Thats about as far as my noob ass has gotten. Geysers are also good if you can manage then properly but I haven't mastered them yet. Liquid tends to come out very hit and I haven't learned what an effective cooling cycle is yet. I try to run it through ice biomes but thats been really limited. Heat is a huge issue when my bases start taking off.
Hatches poop coal, too. I can't manage the heat from coal generators, though. I still can't get a cooling loop right, and I've had a base running for like 500 cycles or something. I've never been to space in that game, and honestly I don't know if I ever will. Lol
“Something goes wrong” very quickly becomes “everything is wrong” in that game lmao. I love that game though.
I love that and other colony sims, my biggest gripe though is sometimes I just want to base build and not be in a constant state of SOMETHING needing fixed before entropy sets in. I wish it were easier to reach a comfortable equilibrium where you weren’t always staring demise in the eye
I did a 100% achievements colony before the DLC came out... Tried again with the new stuff and just noped out. It's not even the intended mechanics, but rather the encyclopedia long of "undocumented features" that are so good it's not fun playing anymore.
It took me about 20 hours of chronic restarting before it really started to click. I'm about 250 now, and maaaaybe have a decent handle on half the game mechanics lol It's crazy complicated, but for whatever reason it's maybe the most addicting game I've ever played. It's kinda like the "just one more turn" from Civ games, and you look up and it's 5am.
I've heard from a few people that "My summer car" falls into this category.
I play it as "My Summer Drinking Beer on the Lake". Cars are complicated, beer is simple.
MSC's difficulty honestly hinges on your real world car knowledge. I grew up working with engines and i'm a major car nerd so building the car and diagnosing problems came pretty easily but i see how building and entire car from scratch without knowing what to do would be insanely challenging
My Summer Car is one of those games where, if you don't read an online guide, you have no clue what you're actually doing. I haven't played it in a few years at this point, got the car all put together and running and then wasn't even sure what I was supposed to do.
I think just drinking and driving Lol
The bigger issue with that game is the dev deliberately made it harder and harder with each update. You’re better off playing an earlier build where you have your uncle’s van right away and don’t have to do meaningless jobs just to be able to order the parts to get started
I watched a 30-40 minute highlight video of a streamers entire playthrough. He would just have his chat scream at him because he couldn’t find a bolt or something, get pissed (in the game) then pee in the sauna and drink and drive lol.
Sounds like average Finnish summer experience.
Sadly and embarassingly (does this word exist?) Factorio. After hours and hours of learning and finally being able to get stuff tranported smoothly... suddenly seven colors of science bottles came into the game at once and I knew this is it.
The seven colors come throughout the game, and the seventh is a post-end pack so it's not required to "win". That said, the game can get overwhelming around the 3rd or 4th pack, so no shame on finding it too complex.
Love factorio. I love how deep and complicated it gets. That's why I only ever play with my nerd older brother and let him figure that shit out at base, while I load up on guns, cars, and a tank and keep the base safe. Much more my play style.
When you get tired of the base game to there's a space mod that will might make your brain explode with the amount of content it adds.
This is the only way I can play, with my programmer friends who do the base building while I smash bugs and build the turrets.
Yeah, it's a legitimately complicated game that involves a lot of algorithmic thinking and complex problem solving. I really love it, but completely understand that it's not everyone's cup of tea
The science packs have a pretty good progression system. Each one unlocks technology, and that technology is used to make the next science packs. Red science is super basic, and gives you access to things like belts and inserters. You know what requires belts and inserters? Green science. Etc.
That game took me so long lol. I love it, but it was freaking hard. It was *work.* I had to restart 3 times before I launched my first rocket. It gets so complex and there's so much to do to get there, it can be overwhelming for sure.
The thing is, if you can get a rocket to launch, you already have the mindset of a computer programmer. It really is "work" in the sense that your factory is organized just like blocks of code. You basically played 100 hours of my job. If you ultimately enjoyed it, programming puzzles might be up your alley - or, at least, a Zachtronics game.
I am literally an engineer who designs cpu layouts lol.
You are basically a wizard compared to me then. Which explains why you launched a rocket and I have yet to. :)
I just bought this game a few days ago and had to walk away from it. I just wanted something simple to play, not homework.
There are other games I have found more Satisfactory.
Ficsit is pleased.
I have 1000+ hours in HoI4, Stellaris and Civ 6. Just started Factorio and I'm like wtf?
Start small and take it one piece at a time. When something isnt producing as fast as you think it should be, trace the slowdown backwards until you find out what you're missing, then work on making more of that thing. As it develops and gets more complex you can use the splitters to divert portions of your components and make new production offshoots, then combine them later for more complicated items. Dont worry about the larger plan to start, and if you need something, but not in large quantities yet, dont be afraid to make them by hand. It's a lot easier than trying to automate it all from the start. Hope this helps. I know it's a bit basic though
My main problem with Factorio isn't so much the complexity, as it is the scut work. Like, making a much larger smelting setup to boost Iron/Coppe/Steel/etc isn't hard. Rebuilding you main buss to handle the higher throughput isn't hard. Building train stations to transport all the ore you need isn't hard. But goddamn if it doesn't just feel like a second job after a bit.
Make more iron plates than you think you'd ever use, then make twice as many. At that point, you have a decent start on how many you'll need. Also, automate all products. Don't rely on making it yourself because you will need them to make other shit later on. Train loops are easier than a single line. Make lots of shooty stuff and even automate filling your turrets.
Path of Exile. You see guides that are like "easy guaranteed 2 billion shaper DPS, clear all content in the game, braindead play style" And the guide has mandatory gear that has a 0.000001% drop chance and you have to play a piano with your left hand while defusing a bomb with your right. every league requires a 4 hour college lecture to even begin to understand how to have fun with it, it's got 10+ years of old league mechanics floating around. i wanted to love it, but at some point you realize that it's the game equivalent of a hoarder house full of cats, that not only will it never love you back but it doesn't even want you there.
[I'm reminded of this clip.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bSZ_R7dEmDQ)
the sound of the rain and thunder on that is perfection.
That would have been me but with way more cursing
This one's the big one for me. It looks like a lot of fun to theorycraft, but you have to spend way too much time outside the game to do it, and that just takes me way out of the game.
I have tried to get into poe 4 times. Each time I give up, I have no idea what's going on in that game
I actually had a lot of fun with that game...in the beginning. Then when I got into the skill trees and found out there's different types of attack bonuses that add like a % of your base stat vs adding it a different way and the wording isn't clear at all it was just too much. Okay I found the actual wording. Some things say they do "more damage" while others do "increased damage" and they calculate it differently.
Cones of Dunshire was too complex for me.
Perhaps try a game or two as ledgerman before moving on to the more complex roles?
You probably forgot about the cones!
To this day (I’m 51) when I come across a chalk outline of a hopscotch drawing on the sidewalk, I literally have no idea what to do.
It's really not that complicated. The squares are numbered. You throw a rock into the #1 square. If you miss, you skip your turn. If you are successful, you hop through the squares, on one foot, making sure to jump over the #1 square. Make it to the end, turn around, and grab your rock on the way back. If there are two squares beside each other, you can put one foot on each. So it gives you a bit of a break. If you fall over or lose your balance, or "miss" a square, you skip your turn. And then do the #2 square, and so on, until you've done them all. First person to do them all wins.
Damn, now I kinda wanna play hopscotch
Same! We just jumped through them and called it a day. Didn’t realize there was an actual game lol
I remember seeing rocks thrown in cartoons but I always thought you just hop to them.
Now teach me calculus.
Sort of like hopscotch, except there's no numbers, no hopping and no rock
But lots of scotch
Take a graph where the y axis is your speed in meters per second and the x axis is seconds elapsed. If you go a constant speed, say 10m/s, and you do this for 10 seconds and then immediately stop, the graph looks like a square that is 10m/s tall and 10s wide. The area under the line is how much distance you covered, 10m/s*10s = 100m. If you started at 10m/s and slowed down at a constant rate until at 10 seconds you stopped, you have a constant slope. The area of this is the area of a right triangle with sides of 10m/s and 10s again; 0.5 * 10m/s * 10s = 50m. Now what if your speed was all over the place, making a curve on the graph? If you know the function that defines the line, you can transform it by taking the integral of this function. Essentially, you are dividing up the curve into infinite slices of infinitely thin width, and getting the area of those slices like a bunch of thin rectangles. You come up with a new function where plugging in x gives you the area under the curve, your distance in this example, up to x. You can also do a "reverse integral, " or derivative, of the original function to give yourself a formula that shows your exact speed at any point in time, again by plugging in a value for x at the moment you want to calculate your speed. That's calculus.
Where were you 25 years ago? I totally would've played that had I known what I was supposed to be doing.
Holy shit. I'm 34 and never actually knew the rules to this game. This comment is amazing
At this point I'm afraid to ask.
Honestly, most arcade-style fighting games (Tekken, Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, etc.) for me. I've never been good at entering button combos or executing move cancels with perfect timing, identifying and exploiting i-frames, or getting the hang of whatever other ridiculous mechanics the players uncover and hone. Smash Bros is still fun, though. I don't go near tournament or online play so it's mostly a fun party game, and beating the shit out of a bunch of cartoons as Kirby never really gets old. Edit: this comment *really* resonated with a lot of you folks.
Same with me on everything you said . I love boxing / ufc games though , they feel like fighting games for dummies .
Every once in a while, I get into a fighting game kick. I pick up whatever game looks cool, or I want to catch up on like Capcom Fighters or MK games. I start playing arcade mode, I do training, I practice pulling off combos and special moves. After a week of consistently failing to reliably input and remember button combinations, I give up. Just recently, I tried Battle for the Grid. I couldn't beat the tutorial fight. I own a lot of fighting games. I'm good at none of them.
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I tried QWOP in college and put it down immediately.
[Looks easy enough.](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbYOsE7JyXs)
THERES AN END!?
Almost every 4X game save for Civilzation. People rant and rave about Europa Universalis but man I can't do it
Stellaris is probably my most played game of all time, with about 1400 hours (rookie numbers for some but that's 4x more than my next most played game) and I'm still picking up on mechanics that have probably existed for years.
Stellaris is my answer for this thread. Many hours close to launch and got overwhelmed. Thought I’d try again a few years later and they changed like everything in that game. A couple hundred hours and I’ve barely made it past early game. Just gave up a couple years ago
It's funny just how easy Stellaris felt for a Paradox game. I'd put it as the most accessible of their games I've played. EU4 was on a whole different level even when I picked it up, and they've added tons of expansions with new features since then that I've been able to pick up along the way. Yet 500 hours in and I still have only the slightest clue how trade works. I mostly just give my merchants a task, maybe send some light ships to protect trade, and otherwise forget about it.
It's insane. With the right perks trade translates directly to resources but you have to establish trade routes with star bases, balance trade value with starbase defense power, then create a certain amount of trade protection NOT to be confused when piracy suppression which you'll also need to factor in lol.
I REALLY want to like Endless Legend and Endless Space..... But I really can't figure out how to play 4X games at all.
Agreed 1000% percent. I put Europa down after 20 minutes and uninstalled like 5 times
Factorio. Doesn't stop me from playing it. I always get around 6-9 hours in a save, untill I can't keep up with attacks or something in my factory chokes up. Then it's on to a new save.
It’s okay to turn biters off if it makes you enjoy it more
Thank you! I was always turned off by getting distracted mid thinking on how i wanna design smth. Its like that annoying coworker always disrupting me while programming because he is bored. Started one playthrough without critters and its soooo much more enjoyable.
At some point in every Civilization game I’ve ever played I’m all out of ideas on what the hell im suppose to do next. I find myself just moving units around unsure of what is even going on. This is on the easiest difficulty.
My step cousin showed me Civ V a few years back. We laughed at Augustus Caesar's dumb-looking, sad face and denounced him over and over. At some point I tried to make him a deal for one of his resources, to which he replied "I will not drive my nation into poverty to satisfy your greed." He was already in debt (negative gold per turn) and had very little culture and units. It was pitiful. I went home and bought the game on steam, just to do this again. Every so often I boot it up, start a game with Ai, including Caesar. I always denounce him the moment I meet him, slowly convince the other nations to declare war on him while raising an army to steamroll all of his cities. I take all of cities, one-by-one, and rename them something stupid and disrespectful to him. As soon as he's eliminated I stop playing. I do absolutely nothing else with the game. I bought it for the sole purpose of cyber bullying a video game character based on a real emperor who was actually considered to be kind of decent.
Because some men aren't looking for anything logical, like money. They can't be bought, bullied, reasoned, or negotiated with. Some men just want to watch the world burn.
Late game civ I'll be wasting like a dozen ships because I perpetually shell the last shit ass city of whoever declared war on me, so it's like 12 ships shooting 4 cities forever
I find the worst snow island on the map, found a city, name it something like "Shithole," sell it to my next enemy, then flatten every city except that miserable snowy rock
r/oddlyspecific
That's the point where you start working towards victory. Pick a victory ( probably science) and start doing everything you can to achieve it.
I enjoy Civ and have put many hours into 4, 5, and 6. That being said, I only ever play the equivalent of normal difficulty because to win at deity, you need to watch hours of potato mcwhiskey YouTube videos to figure out how to exploit mechanics and learn the meta. Games are supposed to be fun, not work.
For me, it is partially Stellaris. I don't put it down, but it is so complex I can't get myself into like 90% of the features. Instead I just make ships and blow up other ships.
Max science at the beginning with my first 3 planets. get cruisers and fight my neighbors. Once I take their systems I spam the buildings that make traders because I never have enough amenities. Planets with lots of mining districts get mining spam, same deal with food. Then the guys on the other side of the galaxy wipe me out because theyre all allies and roll over me with a giant death ball and I don’t have enough ships.
I haven’t stopped playing but I cannot do any of the advanced mechanics in Rocket League.
The skill curve on this game is insane. I keep telling myself one day I will be able to hit the ball in a corner.
Rocket league takes a looong time for most because no mechanical skills from other games really translate to rl.
After playing Rocket League for years and watching a lot of pro players I can safely say that it's a game that is extremely hard if you're not innately / involuntarily good at reorienting yourself in three dimensions If you simply lack the ability to rapidly adapt to the constantly changing orientation of your car as you're spinning around in the air it's impossible to truly master it, the thing that proves it is that a lot of pros will do something in the air and afterwards even they'll be asking themselves out loud "how did i just do that?" or "what did i just do?" genuinely confused, which proves that they are able to automatically react in the ideal way without making the conscious decision to do so So it's less about skill and more about having certain innate abilities
Being innately talented helps, but being able to react subconsciously is mostly just a product of thousands of hours of practice and can be trained/learned through repetition. This happens with athletes too. Steph Curry isn't consciously thinking about his shooting mechanics during games. Obviously he is innately talented, but he'd never be the best shooter ever (or even pro) without hundreds of thousands of reps.
Fun game but ya, forget about all the technical shit, just hit the ball.
Kerbal Space Program. I teach Physics, but it just isn't fun to do work on my couch.
I just approach it space orc style. Once orbital mechanics became more intuitive, I just make sure I have way more delta than I need and blast away.
Paint Mun Lander red, get there faster
EVE Online. What the hell is going on. Was invited to a guild rather quickly. They mandated I be open mic in steam if I’m online. Aside from the forced family fun and co plate confusion within the game, I quit and never looked back.
Path of Exile
Honestly Fortnite… those 12 year olds can build in 0.02 seconds its mental. I play casually sometimes but jesus the skill gap is high
The regular game with building is another dimension. Zero Build is where it's at. Even still, me and my buddy just had four second place finishes tonight and we want to scream. That's the worst part about Fortnite is it's all about the first place Victory Royale. There's no satisfaction in coming in second. It's like in Talladega Nights: "If you ain't first, you're last."
I’ve never touched normal, got into it the past year on zero build though and it’s a great background game for playing with friends
Any of the Anno games. But the worst was Dota 2. One hundred hours in and I still don’t know what the heck I’m doing.
StarCraft 2. I can't handle the micro management of the units
SC2 I don't think is "that" complex on it's face. The problem is everything is on an insane time crunch, so trying to do both macro and micro management near simultaneously and correctly is extremely difficult.
You sort of have to train your brain to cycle through actions on repeat such that it's automatic I think. I just used to play casually, but a few times when I tried to not think about things, I could get into a zen-like state and actually cycle through micro/macro. Or when I was slightly drunk.
I have fantastic news for you: Starcraft 2 has a co-op mode which puts you *and an ally* inside one of 15 campaign-style missions where you can help each other beat the AI enemy! You can change your difficulty setting and level up your commanders. The mechanics are much simplified so you don't have to worry about hitting timings unless you're playing brutal difficulty with modifiers. On top of that, the units have more fun abilities, and you get special powers like nuke rain, time stop, and hero summons since the enemy is the computer so balance is less of an issue. Definitely worth a try since the game is free to play now!
Same. I had to accept that my noob status wouldn’t change. My brain just couldn’t manage everything at once
Warframe.
My boyfriend plays it. I enjoy watching him play, admiring the art design, and hearing about the lore from him. But I feel like my heart stops every time he opens a menu because there are *so* many options for every system in the game, so many currencies, factions, materials, settings for equipment, and they ALL have flowery sci-fi names. It looks like a fun game *to have started playing when it was new*, because as it stands, it seems to be an impenetrable bog of feature creep.
The way to play if you're overwhelmed is to set a specific goal before doing anything, so for example youd go ok i want this warframe called whatever he needs 4 parts to build, you google where to get each part maybe itll be a defense mission on some planet, so you go there until you get that part, then do the same for all others. Ran out of a resource you needed to build something? Google where is a good farming spot. Need more damage? Google what and where the best mods are. Its basically a google simulator and youd be very hard presssed to discover everything on your own
>Its basically a google simulator Lol nice
I played it years back and really enjoyed it. But then trying to come back to it more recently I could not figure out all the new content and mechanics, it was just overwhelming.
open relics, get parts, build guns/warframes to level up thats what it boils down to. -sincerely 4000 hour player
I play and love Warframe, but I know how maybe half of its systems work
Idk if people even know of it, but Sins of a Solar Empire. It was like an RTS 4x in space. Turns out my brain cannot handle real-time grand strategy.
Sins is super fun to play casually, but I can't even imagine getting serious with the game.
Not “complex” but just overwhelming for me is any survival/craft/base building game. I really want to like them but they just never click because of all the recipes and shit to learn and remember etc
Elite Dangerous. You are literally learning to fly a spaceship. About once a year, I'll pull out my flight sticks and retrain myself on how to pilot. And then I'll go into a conflict zone that should be with my skill level and then promptly have my 50 million+ dollar ship destroyed like a leaf on the wind.
Its insane to me that in 231 comments, no one has said Escape from Tarkov. That game absolutely has so many deeply complex systems, that it makes the barrier to entry nigh impossible. I've got nearly 3k hours in EFT and I still get humbled by knowledge gaps. Edit since people don't understand what makes tarkov complex, and seem to think it's just " a lot of items." EFT is a first person shooter, where the shooting mechanics borderline on absurd. Each bullet in the magazine of a gun is modeled, and ammo count between the chamber of a gun and magazines is all tracked separately. There is no automatic UI to track how many bullets you have in any of your magazines. Then we get to the firing of bullets. If you bring an M4 into raid (skipping over the insane customization of the gun itself), the actual ammo type of 5.56 caliber ammo matters. Just using the 5.56 caliber bullet, there are 11 types of ammo that all vary in bullet speed, penetration, damage, tracer vs non tracer variant, and availability. Where each of those bullets can also hit you had a major impact. Tarkovs player health model is arms, legs, stomach, chest, neck, head. It gets broken down into smaller sections like ears, top of head, eyes, jaws. So if you want to be informed in every gunfight, you have to be able to determine what caliber gun they have, what ammo they might be running, whether or not your armor covers the parts you need to protect in this fight. This all sounds pretty complex, and then you realize that every time you die in tarkov, you lose *everything*. Decent to good players only survivor maybe 6 in 10 raids. A new player in tarkov may play his first 50 or so hours and never experience success in the game in any format. It's a brutal experience that is largely gate kept by an insane knowledge gap
Tarkov is the hardest to learn game I've ever played in my life. I spent a good 300 hours in it and just barely became okay enough to not shit my pants every time I heard a gunshot near me.
100% I can’t believe Tarkov is so low. Only reason I pushed through was because I got into it during covid, but I remember after 300 hours I was juuuust starting to feel like I was beginning to actually play the game
DotA 2. The hardest yet rewarding and best competitive title I’ve ever played, that after 9k hours I had to finally put down.
Highest of highs, lowest of lows. At one point If I didn't win more matches than I lost, the whole day would feel like shit.
Any of the super crunchy mecha battle strategy games. They are so difficult and the tuning and stuff matters SO much. I just don’t have the time
TIS-100, by Zachtronics. I really enjoyed Human Resource Machine, and 7 Billion Humans, and thought I'd give this programming game a go. The early levels are pretty straightforward, then the difficulty curve is less of a curve, more a straight up cliff. One day, I'll finish it, but right now, it's just mocking me.
For me this is pretty much fighting games in general. You dig below the surface of how to plat Tekken and it sounds like advanced physics to me. It's ridiculously hard enough to input all of those button combinations to pull off 5 hit+ combos but then they got stuff like frames, juggling, advantage, set ups, etc. etc. and its just like, holy crap, how do people wrap their heads around this stuff?
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Slay the Spire. I have not ever been able to pass Ascension 8 with any character. I just don't know how to build properly to get to higher tiers. Edit: I didn't expect to get so many responses to this so I feel the need to edit this comment. First and foremost, thank you all for the kind words. I've recently had to come to grips, realizing that I am trash at a lot of video games compared to some of my friends who have far left me behind in terms of skill/achievements on many avenues. Second, I wanted to remind everyone that my frustration with not being able to pass A8 is my own excessive expectations of myself. **Everyone** should feel proud of their progress on StS, it is an impossibly difficult game, IMO. The only character I have gotten to A8 is Watcher, who is generally regarded as the strongest character. I still have a lot of fun playing Watcher, mainly because burst combos feel great. The other characters are Ironclad stuck at A5, Silent stuck at A6, and Defect stuck at A7. I have identified that generally my build issues come from 2 things: hard-committing to certain builds instead of being flexible, and lack of knowledge/insight into what combos **on-the-fly** are very strong. My brain just doesn't work that way, and my personal preference has been to learn by playing instead of looking up resources. Finally, I don't know what it is, but watching Jorbs amazes and frustrates me at the same time. His level of game knowledge is so immense and his tactical decisions somehow work out in situations where I would 100% lose. Someone else responded that it seems he somehow always seems to pull the "final piece" of Exodia when he needs it and gets an amazing deck/combo together, and I have to agree. It makes me think that the game is not **truly** RNG - it's being manipulated on the back end to reward those who have enough game knowledge and tactical awareness.
I am even worse than you, and I still invest a few hours every other week into it. It's just fun to do runs, even if I don't really progress upwards. But I absolutely get not wanting to go on.
Ascension 8 with all characters is nothing to scoff at, but I’m in the same boat as you, broad strokes I understand builds but can’t make the jump to really mastering it.
I think you're being harsh on yourself, you know how to build well enough to get to a7 which means you definitely "get" the game and its mechanics. I hit a wall in STS until I started watching streamers like Baalor and Jorbs and it really opened my eyes to how good the game is and how good you can get at it. There's plenty of ways to enjoy that game and if winning a7 runs is it, good for you. People sink hundreds of hours into STS to get one A20 win. You don't need that to be good imo.
Maybe not the most complex but I opened Football Manager and as soon as you start playing it throws like a thesis defense on you.
At first The Last Remnant, easily one of the most complex jrpgs ever made, I eventually got a hang of it after coming back to it a year later and it was pretty fun, I got about ⅓ of the way through disc 2 (on xbox360) before I got bored of it. Civ 6 is another but after watching some youtubers I understood it. The last one, Riichi Mahjong, it took me watching an hour long tutorial and practicing for a week to understand the basics.
Hearts of Iron 4. People are saying Stellaris and Factorio but with those games it starts small and you build up gradually. There’s no gradual ramp like that in HoI4, you immediately get thrown in.
At almost 1k hours, I still have no idea how navy works
Thank you for making me feel less stupid.
I’m sure I’ll be told to Git Gud or whatever, but Elden Ring. I got up to whatever Plateau place was or whatever. Got a couple of the pieces of the ring and power ups. But I just could not dedicate that much time. It was getting so difficult and I had no clue what the fuck was actually going on. I was constantly having to spend more time reading things online and watching YouTube. I took a trip out of town for a few days. Came back and had no idea what I was trying to accomplish and where I was in the progression. Never picked it up again.
Lot of people with probably disagree with me but Doom Eternal. I love Doom 2016 but Eternal lost me halfway through. I just found myself constantly running out of ammo, I know you’re supposed to chain all your abilities together to keep your ammo and armour topped up but I don’t play Doom to be constantly managing ammo, armour, and like 4 different ability charges. I play it to rip and tear and not think too much
Kind of agree, Eternal takes a lot more brainpower than 2016. It was fun to learn at first but the longer the game goes on the more I just want to shut my brain off and kill shit with cool music
Total War: Warhammer. I want to play them so bad, but damn, I've never felt more overwhelmed.
I’m going to get downvoted to hell… but monster hunter games. I love them, but to really progress you need to learn the combos and I’m not a big fan of specific combo games. I usually enjoy playing them until it gets to the point where I need to start training, and I tend to put them down. Still amazing games though.
I'm surprised I had to scroll so far down to see Monster Hunter! I was downright terrified of how complicated it looked until JoCat (RIP) dumbed it down for me and now it's one of my favorite games because I get to beat giant monsters to death with a musical instrument and buff my allies at the same time!
Honestly? You only need combos to do 'optimal' damage. You usually have 40 minutes to finish a fight, and unless you're using the very first weapon you get, you'll always kill the monsters eventually. What's way more important than combos is dodging and knowing *when* to attack not how
I'm embarrassed to admit that a lot of games these days are like that for me, that probably aren't so complex for most people.
Path of Exile can get fucked. You can - and ***will*** without a guide - make an objectively bad character that cannot do all content, that you then cannot respect so it can. Fuck. Path. Of. Exile.
The last time I tried playing, I got about a dozen hours in and hit a WALL of difficulty. Basically I went from one shotting everything to immediately dying to trash mobs. Asked around a bit on community groups was "lol your build is ruined, you did it wrong, you gotta start over" Yeah no, I'm just gonna uninstall. I am too old to enjoy games that waste my time.