games

Rimworld encourages you to perform Eugenics on any undesirable colonists, especially with the biotech DLC. Also encourages cannibalism and harvesting your opponents organs to sell on the market for greed and profit.

Also too many quality of life mods should be in the base game.

Why the fuck do so many enemies have elemental weakness before you ever get access to anything that uses an element. Wasted ideas that hopefully wilo be fixed in the re-release

(OFF)

Shadow Empire's user interface is quite possibly the least intuitive I've ever used, and I play Paradox games.

Morrowind should have a start that gives just a little more direction and reason to keep playing.

Morrowind's combat sucks even if I got very good at making it work for me. I get what they were going for, but it's a very weird thing to allow you to aim at people in first person and still have your accuracy determined by dice roll.

Life is Strange has a lengthy stealth section in a dream sequence near the ending which doesn't really add anything to the game but tedium.

The gameplay loop was developed in the 80s for the sole purpose of munching quarters and dick all has changed despite how much gaming has evolved

I love Portal but I would vehemently disagree with anyone who says it's a better game than Portal 2. Even just ignoring all the stuff like plot structure and graphics, Portal 2 is way ahead in terms of puzzle design. Also Portal 2 does better job at fully exploring the concept of portals, while Portal 1 feels like a tech demo in some parts

Stormworks: I think overall I'm pretty happy with it. There are some things where they don't change stuff because too many people's creations would break if they changed (e.g. parallel jet turbine bug). Also, the actual overworld game is pretty undeveloped. I think people would really appreciate a semi-live economy, though simulating the physics of that would be wild.

My main frustrations with the game are usually because I want to make things by myself, instead of downloading other people's engine controllers and ballistic computers >.>

Also having a creation tip over outside of the de-spawn range and having to restart a game because there isn't enough money to re-make it.

Then there's just a pile of parts that are either too big (pivots, sliding connectors) (usually from the early era of the game), only in one size despite it being quite a broad range of products (pneumatic piston), or just missing.

It would be nice if you could simulate/control things with hydraulics without an intervening electrical component (e.g. carburetor, piston control units), but I also get that that might be rather complicated.

It would also be nice if there was a way to have parts on non-cardinal directions at the start without shenanigans.

Also, I always play by myself and wish my friends would come join me and say "Oh wow, you're not a complete idiot" or something. :(

Prey (2017)

• Poorly balanced in some ways. The Typhon Neuromods give you some nasty diminishing returns, requiring more and more Psi to the point that it's not worth it to max them out. Same with some of the standard Neuromods. It's to the point that I always recommend the Core Balance mod you can find on Nexus.

• Really blows its wad with the mindfuckery early on and doesn't take more chances to layer it further, ending notwithstanding. When I first broke out of the apartment my jaw genuinely dropped. It surprised me in a way few games or even other pieces of media have. Then it just kinda peters out. It had the potential for more.

• Poor pacing on the plot. It kind of herds you through every sector of the station and implies an urgency that can undercut the exploration if you take it at face value. It also locks you out of half the station for half the game. Not a great thing to have in an ImSim.

• Visual variety on the Typhon is lacking. The Weavers look super cool and the way the Phantoms move is pretty unsettling, but the Telepaths and Technopaths are just big black blobs that kinda float around mind-controlling other enemies and hurling annoying projectiles at you. Likewise with the variant Phantoms just being tougher versions of the base one with different damage type auras.

Still my favorite goddamn game it is so fucking amazing

Final Fantasy X, a game with heavy enphasis on death and mourning, didn't feature the death of a party member. Sin is terrible and named characters die to it, but it's not the same. In fact there were few on-screen deaths.

Also, I wish the world didn't feel like it had a population of 200. I get the population was dwindling after the thousand years, but it just felt so small. I think this could have been solved by having a larger unexplored world or by explicitly stating there are villages dotted all over Spira that the protagonists cannot explore on their journey.

Also also, over the course of 1000 years only five people performed the pilgrimage to the point of defeating Sin. The practice of the pilgrimage would have fallen out of favor with such a low success rate. I'd sooner expect Spirans to move underground in tunnels as mole people.

Also also also, there was no water Aeon. Leviathan deserves justice. More Aeons in general could have explored more heroes who defeated Sin in the past.

Earthbound can be a real piece of shit, everybody knows the clunky and limited inventory is a pain in the ass, and it is completely true. Furthermore, the story, while good, lacks a lot of personality building for the main cast of characters, which is funny cause every npc has amazing dialouge. While the lack of character building doesn't harm the ending overall, it certainly does not hit as hard as Mother 1 or 3's endings, due to them actually taking a few moments to flesh out the main cast of heroes at several points.

Total War: Empire, a buggy mess that likes to crash in the late game. Unfinished, AI is illogical in both diplomacy and a lot of battle tactics (Which makes the few times they pull a clever maneuver incredibly surprising) and nearly requires modding to be playable, either through script edits or from installing overhauls.

EU4: Now this is one I haven't thought of much, but there certainly are many flaws to find in this one. First off, 93% of the gameplay is just finding buttons to press with the right timing, that's it. The DLC's have mostly been focused around adding more buttons to press. Powercreep has been a real issue, like how Spain will have colonized most of Oregon and Alaska before a Russia player can even hope to have gotten to East Siberia. Many intended paths require RNGesus to smile upon you, and whose alternative requirements can be very difficult to achieve in comparison. (So many MP games of my friends grumbling over many such cases.) And, despite being an 11 year old game, some regions are still not very fleshed out. India and parts of the Americas lack flavour and content. And of course, the UI can be a bit inscrutable at times, with a few features hidden away or poorly explained, like the macrobuilder diplo screen. And yeah yeah, the DLC policy is terrible as it locks out critical features behind a paywall, which has only been partially fixed with updates and working older DLC into the base game.

Baldur's Gate 3 can be too safe art direction wise. I get they are trying to do the DnD aesthetic and I'm sure WotC had a specific view on what it wanted the Forgotten Realms to look like, but it feels a bit too generic fantasy.

Final Fantasy XIV needs new quest design for the main story. Dawntrail suffered because of the quest design.

Imma hit STALKER franchise (haven't played S2) and Project Zomboid (with great pain because it's an indie game but I have to)

STALKER: The worldbuilding of GSC is not great to be honest. A place like the Zone in real life would be an insane mess of world powers and ridiculously big and powerful corporations butchering each other to control it. To think that a place that can naturally warp reality, spawn science-shattering artefacts and control the minds of people like it's nothing is not object of contest between AT LEAST NATO and Russia is insane to me. In the game the Zone is known to relatively few people and the Ukrainian state is able to more or less "keep it under control". Everyone inside appears to be ukrainian or russian but most are freelancer weirdos who go there to be rich or hide from authorities. There is little to no foreign interference. It makes little sense that such place would go unnoticed by the world's biggest powers. In the real world a place like this would have their weak "loner", "bandit", "duty" and "freedom" factions, among others (including the mutants) be swept aside by the sheer power of entire militaries called to intervene and control the place, all of this would have immense geopolitical rammifications. It is implied in the game that outside forces know about the Zone and are interested in it's riches, but these outside forces do not intervene other than sending Mercs to do their shit and maybe finance the Monolith, but in general they leave that place alone and do not try to directly control it which is not very realistic imo. Yet despite all this I love the Zone as it is in STALKER, it's just me being insufferable, that's all.

Project Zomboid: Best zombie survival game that ever existed but it has an awful development cycle. They released one update in two years and frankly it sucks, it's broken and it added uninteresting stuff like animals and pointless crafting. Devs refuse to listen to players (who have been asking for NPCs since day ONE AND THAT WAS OVER A DECADE AGO) .Also the devs have left a lot of stuff just incomplete for years and years, from bugs to half-baked gameplay features. And tbh the game lacks a purpose and general depth, like one you get to your first month there is NOTHING ELSE to do other than finding your own way to just die or you'll just get bored and drop the game. The game is easy when you figure out the basics and surviving becomes trivial unless you push it to the absolute limit.

Kenshi: after hundreds of hours put into the game and going thru multiple cycles of starting a new game, struggling to make money, fighting, losing, fighting again, building and automating a base, etc, and all the emergent storytelling that comes out of that -- I feel like it was only the combat-related systems that were fully fleshed out and ultimately, the only way to interact with the world in a meaningful way is through combat. Though the visuals and worldbuilding do great of offering the promise of a lot, the dialogue system is not developed enough to allow for any dialogue mods that integrate well with and impact the world or player characters. Animations systems are similarly limited, with the system allowing for minute customization and replacement of combat animations, and very little room for any animations not combat-related.