Let me try to fix your moods with mods, guys

Here!

And here!

I recall someone in The Witcher (1) subforum a while ago (might have been two years) who clearly wasn't enjoying the game but fans of the game still kept telling them "it would get better once you get to the next chapter". That person made it to chapter IV thinking it would "get better" before giving up, and even then some people kept on saying it would get better. If you don't think the game is enjoyable with two chapters to go until the end, those remaining two will probably won't do it for you, either, just saying. It was painful to witness.

I understand trying to make others like the same things we do but, sometimes, instead of doing that, we might actually end up making them hate those things or even begrudge us.

It wasn't me. I never got nearly that far before realizing it wasn't going to get any better.

There are some treasured games here I despise and I find it easiest to just blame that on my lack of taste.

Don't even get me started on that... the only Infinity Engine I like is Planescape: Torment, and it's mainly because of the philosophical implications, and the fact I can pretty much play it as an adventure game.

Oh, and, as a point & click adventure fan who grew up with games of the genre and still loves them to this day, I could never understand the appeal of The Longest Journey. I don't think it's a *bad* game, by any means, but it's overrated as heck, and I fail to grasp what's so unique and great about it. It has some of the most bland or downright unlikable characters in any video game ever, and the "twist" is nothing that special... plus, I think it's way too long, for an adventure game, it overstays its welcome, to me.

I think the System Shock games are shit.

Well, I like the System Shock games (the first one more than the second), but I do think people tend to over-hype and overrate them a lot. And I would never tell you to keep playing them because they would "get better". :P

It isn't a major part of the game, especially with the much darker stuff going on more often. But the humor does happen fairly often enough to where I could see it grates on somebody eventually if it isn't their cup of tea.


I think I'd have to agree on DD. The game instantly sucked me in during those first few hours. I do want to try Beyond Divinity, but after seeing some of the criticisms of it (especially in comparison to DD), I've been hesitant. So I just went straight to Divinity 2, which I also find to be a great deal of fun. Maybe someday when I have more priority games in my backlog taken care of.

Similarly to you, Morrowind (and Oblivion) did not pull me in initially, after coming from Skyrim. But after giving them more of a chance, I grew to love them too (Morrowind and Skyrim are tied for my favorite TES games). Morrowind was what really cemented TES as my favorite series, and now Arena, Daggerfall, and Redguard are under my belt too.

For me, Beamdog's Icewind Dale: Enhanced Edition holds a top slot on this list. I never played the Classic Edition, but given how frustrating I found Enhanced, that's probably for the best. Icewind tries to be a fairly story driven game, which is fine. I could never get into the story because the user interface was so frustrating to use that I was constantly focusing on problems interacting with the game instead of challenges posed by enemies in the game. EE may be Enhanced relative to Classic, but there are many little quality-of-life issues that should have been cleaned up before calling it "Enhanced."

I am a numbers-oriented gamer. Whenever a game mechanic is simple enough for me to predict, I want to have the numbers to predict it. When it is too complex for a human to predict in reasonable time, I want to know that this is supposed to be beyond my ability to optimize. If a spell (such as Fireball or Web) has a set radius of effect, I want to know that radius so I can tell at a glance what parts of the play area will be in/out of the blast. I want to know that radius without experimentally casting a large set of fireballs and measuring their area. Instead, I want either an overlay showing its bounds or a good text description from which I can imagine that overlay. If a spell lasts for N rounds, I want either to have an on-screen reminder of time-until-expiration or I want an easy way that I can, with decent accuracy, predict when it will end. Icewind Dale has none of that. Duration is measured in in-game rounds, but I never found a way to get good enough timing data that knowing a count of rounds was worth anything. Spell radii are predictable, but only by exhaustive experimentation. Experimentation is made tedious by the classic AD&D mechanics that spellcasters get a pitiful number of castings before they must sleep to recover their spells. If my characters are supposed to know that a particular spell or attack is inappropriate, I want a visual reminder before they try and it fails. (If my characters are not supposed to know, for example because they've never seen this enemy before, then definitely don't show the hint. I don't want to cheat, but I also don't want to have to go re-read my characters' monster diaries (if they actually kept them, which Icewind doesn't) every time I see an enemy I haven't handled in real-world weeks.)

I want the game to handle boring details for me. For example, if I get a quest from an NPC, I want a way in game to list all my outstanding quests and, to the best of my characters' knowledge, recap any in-game instructions on what I should do. If a quest is designed to be vague, that's fine. Don't make me reload to a save from just before I got the quest and redo the quest-giving dialog to recap the details; instead, let me replay on the spot my characters' recollection of that dialog, preferably as a text summary instead of hearing the whole speech. Might & Magic 4: Clouds of Xeen (early 1990s) got this right with its quest auto-notes. Icewind has a character journal, but looking at one of my abandoned saves, there are quests I know I never finished that aren't even mentioned in the journal.

I want my characters not to act stupidly. It's too easy to interrupt a character's important orders with something useless. This is especially bad for the spellcasters, since you can easily interrupt a casting and then need a rest cycle before you can cast that spell again. Characters have a "party AI" option that lets the game auto-manage them, but every time I tried to use it, I got worse results than me trying to micromanage the entire party. If I set my characters to follow my lead character, they would follow, but only until I moved into the next scene. Then all the following characters would stop and wait for me to order them again to follow. This made it a nuisance to keep the party together.

I want keybindings to make sense, be customizable, and not step on other purposes. I had recurring problems with my characters switching out of special modes, which I ultimately traced to hardcoded keybindings I didn't want or need that were executing when I pressed a key for another purpose. In one case, a keybinding that was literally unused for that character was taking precedence over his other orders.

I want the game not to punish me for swapping gear while not in combat. My arcane caster found a dagger that gave him an extra spell slot, but every time he un-equipped the dagger, even briefly, the spell slot was cleared and he had to sleep to fix it. This was made even worse by a related issue I no longer remember clearly, other than that I found a way to unintentionally unequip the dagger while trying something else. I think the game should have left that spell slot defined, but uncastable until the dagger was re-equipped.

I feel like I could have enjoyed the game if the developers had spent a little more thought making it easy to interact with the game. Instead, I spent so much time fighting the game's interface that I came to hate the game through no fault of its story, the quality of its writing/graphics, or the balance of its combat.

How did you manage the dungeons in Daggerfall? They are the reason I had to stop playing the game, I just couldn't find my way around in the dungeons, meaning I couldn't finish e.g. guild missions because they were almost always about finding someone in some dungeon (and usually killing him/it).

Running aimlessly is circles in dungeons for hours (in real life)... I just couldn't take it anymore.

Many!
Some I played because everyone said are great. Some I played because I was a fan of the series.

For the fan part a couple stand out:

-Assassin's Creed Unity. I knew it was going to suck. I didn't want to buy it. I did not buy it! My colleagues gave it to me for my birthday... couldn't help myself, had to finish it. Shit game.

-Splinter Cell Blacklist. I enjoyed and finished multiple times the old games which were stealth based. I enjoyed and finished multiple times Conviction, which was action oriented. Unfortunately with Blacklist they wanted to please both sides and they fucked up royally. I wish someone told me exactly what I wrote before.

For the ones with great reviews:

-Age of Decadence Old school cRPG! Multiple ways to finish quests! Choice and consequence!... Bullshit! The only choice you have is on the creation screen. Make a warrior => do warrior quests the warrior way for probably some warrior faction. You are locked in your "choices" by the character you make. I hate that game with a passion!

-Binary Domain This one it's been 5 years since I finished it so I don't remember exactly what I disliked so much, but it stuck with me all this time that I hated it. I think it was too on-rails, but I don't know for sure.

There would probably be more if I spent some time to really think about it, but those are the ones that simply pop in my head as games I'm sorry I wasted my time on.

One of the many simultaneously fascinating yet infuriating aspects of Daggerfall, lol. I'll be honest: for most of the main quest dungeons I used UESP.net to guide me through. (For non-main quest dungeons there is no such luck with maps online.) Really, part of why I was able to get through it was because the last of the mainline games I had to beat, it was TES, and the game just captivates me enough to where I was able to make it through seemingly eternal dungeon crawls.

I don't blame anybody one bit if they find the dungeons too absurdly huge, because they are (although you can find crypts and some others that are significantly more manageable in size). I love the game, but it is easy for me to see how other people wouldn't like it or would even hate it, even beyond the colossal dungeons.

When I played it back when it was released, I eventually picked up some magic skill that had teleport. I would cast it at the beginning of the dungeon to mark the return spot, then proceed to wander around the dungeon. Once I completed the objective, I would cast the return teleport spell to get back to the beginning of dungeon.

Those random dungeons, even with a map, were a pain to traverse. The main story mission dungeons were bad usually. I almost gave up on the game until I got that teleport spell.

i enjoyed those links, lol makes me want to play skyrim again

I find that many forms of entertainment that begins to drag don't usually "get better" or at least not enough to keep slogging through them. Yes, most games have quests, missions, chapters etc. that are a little slow and you just got to suffer through them but if that slog takes more than a few hours then you might want to consider playing something else.

However I do think we need to keep our own mood in mind and understand that if we are going through a tough time in life then we may be a bit more grumpy and harsh on a new game and we could end up throwing a good game away. So it can sometimes pay off to go back to a game you abandoned and try it again with a fresh perspective after some time has passed.

But playing a game to dislike to completion is a waste of your time.

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/any_game_recommendations_on_gog_where_you_fight_kill_kkknaziswhite_supremacists/post6

I cannot stop and it drives me crazy.