Following up on this comment since I haven’t seen a thread about it: lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/14639216
What's an absolutely medium quality game? Not great, incredible or terrible or any single ended extreme. Dead medium quality
Submitted 9 months ago by weirdbeardgame@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
Comments
PieMePlenty@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Aspharr@lemmy.world 9 months ago
If you like space dogfighter sims, try Chorus. You can score it super cheap on sales and I think it’s a solid 6/10. Combat is fun and it’s nice to look at. Unfortunately the story has terrible pacing and kinda doesn’t make sense at gimes. Also, the missions get kinda repetitive.
Another, if you like top down shooters, is Subterrain. Doesn’t always go on sale, but when it does it’s dirt cheap because it’s like 10 years old at this point. It’s got some weird survival mechanics that I think are kinda pointless, but the gameplay and story were enough to keep me mildly entertained. I’d call this a “potato chip” type game. Not particularly good, but somehow kind of satisfying if you don’t think too much about it. Definitely a 6/10.
On another note, what’s y’all’s stance on the association that 5/10 = bad? I feel like it’s because people equate it to being 50% and associate that with bad due to school grades. I see it as an average score and when I give something a 5 or 6, that means I’m neutral to slightly positive feeling about it.
grueling_spool@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
I don’t think a 5/10 game is necessarily bad, but it needs to have some kind of - I dont know, character? Niche appeal? - to shine for the players who are going to like it.
I’ll throw out Krater as an example. It’s not great, but it has a unique setting, great atmosphere, and some interesting ideas driving it. I kinda love it for its eccentricities in spite of the overall experience being a bit meh.
Aspharr@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I remember Krater! I played it for a while and I liked the atmosphere, but I only got so far before I saw how… 1-dimensional it was?
I don’t know how exactly to put it into words, but some games that aren’t so good I have a “see behind the curtain” moment. Once that happens I tend to quickly get turned off to a game because I feel like it’s not fun anymore. In Krater that happened when I realized that all the fights were essentially the same and equipment was all stat sticks with no unique qualities.
Pretty much what your characters did at the beginning of the game was what they did at mid game with no noteworthy changes. There were other characters you could sub in and that changed things up a little but the repetitiveness of it all really ruined it for me.
I agree that’s a really good example of a “meh” game and I think 5/10 is a very fair assessment.
Simulation6@sopuli.xyz 9 months ago
Sacred 2.
Krudler@lemmy.world 9 months ago
2 that make fans go bananas.
Torchlight 2; Grim Dawn
Right in the middle of the middle part of the middle part of the middle pack.
moonburster@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Torchlight 2 is fun when you start out, but gets really repetitive quite fast. Good fit for a right in the middle
SoftestSapphic@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Ratopia
It’s like Oxygen not Included but worse
LordWiggle@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Hogwarts Legacy
Quibblekrust@thelemmy.club 9 months ago
The term you’re looking for is “Extra Medium”.
Shardikprime@lemmy.world 9 months ago
avowed and ACS were actually less than mid
Delphia@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Mechwarrior online.
Free, online “shooter”, good community, runs on linux, gameplay is dated and doesnt get tons of dev support anymore but its still how I kill an evening once or twice a week.
morbidcactus@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
From the 360 Era — Too Human
The control scheme is bizarre at first (right stick is melee) but it works once you’re used to it. It’s Sci-Fi Norse mythology, I recall it having a pretty solid art style. I picked it up used from either Blockbuster or EB because I wanted to see just how bad it was, ended up enjoying it far more than I expected, I’ll give it a “Yeah, it’s ok”, disc images are readily available if you want to emulate it, can find a physical copy cheap online too if that’s your thing.This is the game that ended up taking down its studio (Silicon Knights, they developed Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem and Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain, they tried to sue Epic, who countersued and won, probably added to my initial interested tbh.
ICastFist@programming.dev 9 months ago
It’s interesting that Too Human began development as a PSX game, back in the late 90s. Quite a bit of development hell to go through
ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Starfield. It’s the definition of a “mixed” rating on Steam. It’s not bad, but it’s not good either. You play it for an hour and your reward is that an hour has passed.
brendansimms@lemmy.world 9 months ago
After running through the main story once, I modded it to where you cannot buy any natural resources - they must be harvested in person and/or setup a base and and ship all natural resources to a central storage planet. This essentially turned it into a spreadsheet-logistics game which gave me a a second, much more enjoyable playthrough. But I agree - absolutely medium-tier game.
DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
The Technomancer
iowagneiss@midwest.social 9 months ago
The incredible adventures of Van Helsing. Decent rpg with loot but was fairly imbalanced among character classes. The real winner was the mini tower defense games in it and the spinoff tower defense game, imo.
Nosavingthrow@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Probably everytbing put out by Nintendo in a long time. Yes, even that one. That one, too.
ArchmageAzor@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Excuse you, but Breath of the Wild was amazing.
Nosavingthrow@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Breath of the Wild was basically a Ubisoft game with a Zelda coat of paint.
DoucheBagMcSwag@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
Mario Kart World
You can say it
Nindelofocho@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Pretty much every modern AAA game. Theres an exception here and there but really smaller studios have been making bangers that AAA studios just cant seem to touch
Nalivai@discuss.tchncs.de 9 months ago
Yeah, big studios are setting up to create the mediocrest game they can imagine. Taking risks might make the line not go up, and they can’t have this happening.
Ironically, this leeds to creation of absolute dogshit more often than not.
danhab99@programming.dev 9 months ago
Team Fortress 2:
I’d say its gameplay is more “robust” than special. Like you can have any and every kind of fight in TF2 but none of it is more special than an FPS that specializes in any game mode.
umbraroze@slrpnk.net 9 months ago
Every Halloween, I play this Xbox 360 (I think it’s also on PC now) game called Bullet Witch.
Basically a third-person shooter with postapocalyptic supernatural horror theme. You play as a witch who shoots zombies and weird creatures with a magic machine gun broom thing. Also you get spells. Some are bloody awesome.
This game is peak Xbox 360 to the core. The distinct memorable thing about it is that I can actually list good and bad things about it. Level design varies between meh and decent. Some of the particular setpieces are pretty awesome though. (You get to fight at an airport, and you get to do a boss fight at the top of the plane mid-flight!) Spells are fun. The mega-spells are hella fun. (Just call up lightning and watch stuff explode.) Shooting is kinda jank but it works. Jank is explained by lore. (Why is friendly fire not a thing? Well, you see, this is a magic machine gun broom thing, so bullets dodge the civilians and allies by ~magic~.) Enemy designs are nothing to write home about at first glance, but are actually kinda memorable. (You first meet up the zombies and hey, they’re talking zombies. With military helmets and guns. Like, what? You don’t see this every day.) There are some things that seem just not very well designed, like there’s these gigantic enemies that serve as minibosses and they’re a lot less scary when you note the AI is probably bugged and they often just decide to stand at place for a while and eat a lot of bullets.
I got this thing in the bargain bin. It’s a zombie shooty game that’s perfect for Halloween so that’s what I use it for. That’s all it does. That’s all I could ask it for. And it’s fine at it.
SlothMama@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I love Bullet Witch and I’m still looking for a physical copy of this and Ninja Blade on Xbox 360.
poolhelmetinstrument@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Warhammer 40,4000: Space Marine.
Horsey@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Portal 1 & 2. Far too short.
vonxylofon@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Short, but anything but mid.
klobuerschtler@lemm.ee 9 months ago
Elex 1 and Elex 2
reksas@sopuli.xyz 9 months ago
anything ubisoft makes
bob_lemon@feddit.org 9 months ago
I disagree. Some of them are actually bad.
reksas@sopuli.xyz 9 months ago
yes, but medium is the absolute best they can manage
Phen@lemmy.eco.br 9 months ago
Anything from Ubisoft
XM34@feddit.org 9 months ago
Was gonna say it. This perfectly descripes the last few Assassins Creed titles. Not bad enough to put them away, but also not good enough to leave any kind of lasting impact.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 9 months ago
It’s like chewing gum. You just keep going as it gets blander with no end in sight.
Tigeroovy@lemmy.ca 9 months ago
Yeah, Assassins Creed was cool at first but they just bled that shit to death with too many releases. It’s hard to keep things fresh when you put out like 10 sequels.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 9 months ago
I suppose Resident Evil 8? The scares weren’t very scary, the exploration was all very fake, and the bosses all showed up for attendance. It definitely functioned, but it didn’t impress in the way previous entries did. It wasn’t frustratingly bad like 5, nor was it interestingly bad like 6. It just felt like a lesser version of what they’ve given me before, somewhere between 4 and 7.
LaserTurboShark69@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
My hill to die on is that RE7 and 8 should have been a new IP. I think both the Winters’ story and the overall Resident Evil plot would have stood stronger on their own and forcing them together in such a contrived way dilutes both of them.
JoeKrogan@lemmy.world 9 months ago
The outer worlds . it was just meh in my opinion. Not to be confused with the outer wilds game that I’ve yet to play
KuroiKaze@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Well, I can sort of be impressed with what outer wilds did. I didn’t actually find it all that much fun to play, whereas I completed the outer worlds.
Nindelofocho@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Outer Wilds is absolutely superb if/when you get it try to get the DLC too its a good value. Steam summer sale coming up soon if you’re in the states
overload@sopuli.xyz 9 months ago
Loll, people will never stop getting these confused
TheGreenWizard@lemmy.zip 9 months ago
I was going to say outer worlds as well (outer WILDS is a fantastic game IMO) the game was entirely competent, just unimpressive in every way. Except Pavarti, she is a precocious sugar dumpling and must be protected at all costs.
ItsMrChristmas@lemmy.zip 9 months ago
Actual conversation had with my wife, who was watching me okay near the end:
“That chick is cute. I bet her romance is adorable!”
“She’s aromantic and asexual, you can’t romance her.”
“I bet her quest line is fun”
“Nope. It’s a really boring fetch quest where you set her up on a date with some bland woman old enough to be her mother. She is also very obviously sexually and romantically attracted to this woman.”
“…huh.”
ICastFist@programming.dev 9 months ago
Pretty much every korean MMORPG released from 2006-2014, as they were desperately trying to be “World of Warcraft, but better”. Perfect World, Aion, ArcheAge, 4story, Granado Espada, etc etc etc, even when you have the better experience of playing on a private server with significantly less P2W (as in, nearly everyone gets most of the shop for free)
To me, personally, ArcheAge would be the best fit for “dead medium quality”. It boasts naval combat, which is meh; player run trade caravans, which probably only worked as intended in the first 2 months after launch; limits on gathering and crafting, which just forces free players to buy premium; graphics are the generic korean mmo variety, pretty but almost impossible to distinguish between games; music, enemies, dungeons and most gear exist
Rai@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
Ragnarok Online was the last incredible MMO.
ICastFist@programming.dev 9 months ago
Eh, debatable. I’ve played it for roughly 2 years (2004-6) on private servers and even then I knew it wasn’t “the best” or “incredible” by any means, but it was light years ahead of Tibia (which was my first taste of MMORPGs, back when the starter island was a mess with too many players and not enough rats in the sewers for people to kill and level up) in every regard. Even with higher rates and an incredible teenage patience for braindead repetition, the grind got old really damn fast, not to mention that the game penalized fucking around (no stat resets, only on the 99 rebirth) and fucking up (1% xp penalty on death hit harder and harder the higher your level).
Played for a long time on EuphRO server (3x/3x/2x), my highest level character was 75 or something close to that. I think I gave up playing altogether around the time I got a super novice to level 50 on a different, higher rate server
Breezy@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Im sorry but perfect world got down flying before any other game and it was hella fun.
Flamekebab@piefed.social 9 months ago
Godus.
I know lots of people hate it but taken in isolation it's okay. I found its aesthetics charming and its pace generally pretty chill. It wasn't good but it wasn't terrible. Low medium perhaps but I have comfortable memories of listening to an audiobook whilst playing it.
Brylant@discuss.online 9 months ago
Greedfall
Geth@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 months ago
The developer, Spiders, seem to be experts at creating mediocre games with very small budgets, and again they didn’t quite have the money to take it all the way with greedfall, but they did make more than a mediocre game in my opinion. For me it was memorable enough unlike others mentioned in this thread.
Coelacanth@feddit.nu 9 months ago
Even though Greedfall is hardly a great game I think it has too much charm to really fit here. I found it too memorable to really be a “mediocre slop” contender.
lath@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Atlas Fallen. Having played it, all I can say is that it doesn’t elicit any heightened emotions from me.
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
Ghost Wire: Tokyo.
It sells itself on cool aesthetics, but the moment you get past that you realise it’s just a very, very generic open world shooter with incredibly bland and boring shooting layered over an impressively faithful recreation of Shinjuku. And even the aesthetics wear thin very quickly, being largely just a whole lot of “Hey I know that anime” level stuff cribbed from Japanese culture. The game is mostly just running around a map collecting stuff.
weirdbeardgame@lemmy.world 9 months ago
Defo agree. But I will admit that the soundtrack is fire
vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 9 months ago
i still enjoyed the crap out of it. Sometimes zoning out and just running around collecting stuff is just what I need.
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
I mean, that’s exactly what makes it so “mid” to my mind. It’s not an atrocious disaster like Gollum. It’s not appalling bad, or even moderately bad. It’s just… There. The shooting isn’t dreadful, just dull. The map, the movement, the exploration… None of it is exactly bad, but none of it left any kind of impression on me. Like you said, it scratches that “running around and collecting stuff” itch, the numbers go up, you unlock new powers, etc. But it all just kind of passes straight through you and at the end you’re left with “Well, that sure did kill a few hours.”
Horizon: Zero Dawn suffers from all the usual modern open world hallmarks, the map littered with things to collect, the towers, the grinding to level up abilities, etc, etc. But the story is an absolute banger, and even a lot of the random collectible junk is full of little moments of deeply moving storytelling. I remember collecting every single one of the vantage points because I absolutely needed to hear all of the short story you unlock by doing it. It has zero relevance to the plot, but it’s just a great piece of writing. In comparison Ghost Wire is just, sort of… There.
grueling_spool@sh.itjust.works 9 months ago
First thing that came to my mind was Crysis 2. Absolute mid-tier FPS, which was unfortunately pretty disappointing coming off of the first game.
Definitely worth a look if you just want to run around and shoot shit.