Submitted 4 days ago by weirdbeardgame@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
Following up on this comment since I haven’t seen a thread about it: lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/14639216
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.
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.
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
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.
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.”
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
Loll, people will never stop getting these confused
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.
Any assassin’s creed from the last 10 years, probs gonna get hate for that but they are just so average to me.
I got the viking one for free. Didn’t make it much farther than the initial area, which is hours long.
I’d say they are worse than mediocre.
Also most Ubisoft games in the last 10 years overall
This is probably more subjective than best/worst. So…
Vanilla Skyrim.
It was a fun game, but the main quest was so railroading.
Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning
Had all the individual makings of an exceptional game (with input from Todd Macfarlane, R A Salvatore and Grant Kirkhope), and while it was definitely enjoyable enough - it lacked any wow-factor whatsoever, winding up an otherwise forgettable 7/10.
At the time of its release, it’s wow factor for me was simply some fucking color, compared to PS3 Skyrim which had released mere mo ths earlier.
Oh no doubt, my (vague) memories of it are definitely in vivid bright colours.
I originally got it as I was looking for a single player World of Warcraft-like experience, and I did play through a significant portion of the main story - but eventually went back to WoW as it didn’t quite scratch that itch enough.
I probably should revisit it sometime in the near future - hopefully on the Steam Deck (haven’t checked compatibility).
7/10 to me is a good game. I hate how people rate games. I’ve always hated it. A 6/10 game is enjoyable. A 5/10 game is absolutely mid. A 4/10 game is okay. 3/10 has huge flaws but is worth playing if you’re into that.
Subnautica is an 8/10 game for me. I thought it was amazing. I loved it. Below Zero was a 6/10 game. I thought it was good. I enjoyed it, and I would not call it “absolute mid.”
In a world where games are scored across a full spectrum 0-or-1 to 10, then yes - anything 4-6 would be considered middle of the road.
However, due to a number of factors - that’s unfortunately not the reality we find ourselves in.
Firstly, “mid” is hard to define as it can mean anything from ‘mediocre’ to ‘fine, but forgettable’.
Secondly, ratings/scores tend to skew upward as people tend to reserve 1s for outright scams, broken games and review bombs. With 2 & 3 often used for ‘asset flips’ and similar non-games - so we end up grading on a curve from 4-10.
This also works well for mainstream outlets as it keeps advertisers happy, due to arbitrarily inflated scores.
Lastly, in a world of cumulative media (new releases don’t cause older ones to stop existing) - even ostensibly good games will fall by the wayside as players have access to 10/10 titles from previous years.
So all things considered, a 7/10 is well and truly “mid” in this topsy-turvey IGN-eque world
The main thing I remember about this game is that it was financed by the fortune of a former MLB baseball player, independent of any game studio.
Sort of. Their funding was also tied up in the state of Rhode Island. Reckoning was purchased by 38 Studios, who were making a Kingdoms of Amalur MMORPG, and then the game was made to be in the same universe. The MMO burned through cash and never released, and the sunken studio brought Reckoning’s developer down with it.
Yes, it was developed by Curt Shilling’s 38 Studios - but it was actually largely financed by the state of Rhode Island, and the studio ended up defaulting on payments!
Honestly, the story of the game’s development was more interesting than the story within the game itself!
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
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.
A hell of a lot of Ubisoft open-world slop.
Anything from Ubisoft
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.
It’s like chewing gum. You just keep going as it gets blander with no end in sight.
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.
Hogwarts Legacy
Probably everytbing put out by Nintendo in a long time. Yes, even that one. That one, too.
Excuse you, but Breath of the Wild was amazing.
Breath of the Wild was basically a Ubisoft game with a Zelda coat of paint.
Mario Kart World
You can say it
From a gameplay perspective GTA has been mid for ages.
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.
i still enjoyed the crap out of it. Sometimes zoning out and just running around collecting stuff is just what I need.
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.
Defo agree. But I will admit that the soundtrack is fire
I think Halo Infinite qualifies, I played the multiplayer waaay back when it released so things may have drastically changed (haven’t heard of it being the case);
it didn’t / doesn’t do anything that no other game does, nor did / does it do anything particularly well nor better than its competitors (including every Halo from Bungie).
I did watch a walkthrough of the campaign, and it doesn’t look particularly engaging either.
The thing that gets me the most is they dont push the story forward. It felt like they said “lets slap some shit together so we can focus on competitive multiplayer”
I wouldn’t know what the thing that gets me the most is, there is so much that Cyberpunk 2077 corpo ass studio has done to ram the franchise into the ground after digging it up from its sacred resting place.
Other than brand loyalty (which at this point shouldn’t even exist anymore), I wonder how H:I ended up lasting years more than Concord.
The Halo series.
I like shooters, so I got the full bundle and I tried hard to like it.
None of the games gave me a lasting impression. The plot didn’t stick with me, the enemies were weird, the guns felt weak and flimsy, the rooms kept repeating in some sections and it got very boring. There were some fun bits with the vehicles, etc., but overall the experience was… pretty much average.
I was expecting something like the Half-Life series, but this wasn’t it.
Halo was best when it was Halo:CE played 4v4 on two linked systems, with the teams on two screens in an undersized dorm room in 2002. Alternatively, two people playing through the entire game in co-op mode and finishing at 3 in the morning.
Everything since then has been mid at best
I kinda agree. It was fun playing with my SO but they’re pretty boring on their own. The multiplayer is fun, but the actual story mode just kinda exists.
Thank you! I felt like I was the only person on the planet to think that those games only hit the dizzying heights of "okay, fine at a push". They're perfectly serviceable and not much more.
I never had an Xbox, so really only grew up playing Halo Reach (I think) co-op when I’d go to a friend’s house. But I recently played through most of the halo games with a friend and I have to say, I agree. I can’t remember any particular moments or scenarios, no part of the story that stands out in my mind, etc. It was perfectly fun to run through most of them (though we did get tired of it, which is why I said “most of the games”), and I can certainly see why for when they came out, they received the attention they did.
anything ubisoft makes
I disagree. Some of them are actually bad.
yes, but medium is the absolute best they can manage
The term you’re looking for is “Extra Medium”.
Well, when it comes to video games, despite being foundational, Mario Bros. At the time, it was mids, but there were a lot less truly great games, and less abysmal ones so it looked better than it was. The series got better, but that first one was kinda meh. It’s all timing jumps, which is fine as far it as it goes, but there were both better and worse options on that console.
Away from video game, Life is about as meh as it gets. No real strategy, no depth. But it’s a good time killer and you can play it with a table full of people drinking and not get bogged down or into arguments because of the game (unlike monopoly lol).
If you are actually talking about Mario Bros., i.e. the game that’s only about kicking turtles, crabs and flies coming from pipes, yeah, I’d say that one was hardly a new thing.
Super Mario Bros. though? Hard disagree. Back then, that’s a scrolling platformer with controllable jumps, inertia that let you do sliding tricks, and relatively complex physics (acceleration, positional damage, shells, …)
Also very good readability with mechanics that were easy to learn on the spot.
Look at what most platformers played like around that time, and even what basic design errors a lot of them kept doing long after that. SMB was lightning in a bottle.
I said any Call of Duty from the past decade as answer to the original comment, and I still think that is a solid candidate. However, another game I played recently that qualifies I think is Sleeping Dogs. Perfectly cromulent 7/10 GTA clone but ultimately not pulling up any trees.
Sleeping Dogs is easily my fav GTA-esque game and I weep that there‘s no successor, to each their own
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.
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.
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.
I love Bullet Witch and I’m still looking for a physical copy of this and Ninja Blade on Xbox 360.
Unreal 2, at launch, was the most absolutely 7/10 game I've ever played. Just a very generic singleplayer FPS, and not the sequel to Unreal that everyone was hoping for.
I say "at launch," though, because almost a year after the game's release, they added multiplayer, and that is still my favorite multiplayer game.
Elex 1 and Elex 2
Just Cause 3
Movement was more annoying than Just Cause 2
Avowed was very mid. I enjoyed it enough, but nothing about it was particularly brilliant or terrible.
Neverwinter Nights
The multiplayer is supposedly incredible. But I remember being extremely whelmed by the main game.
But it’s hard to remember the mid games. Because it is very likely that they didn’t leave any lasting impression.
And especially if previous titles in a series or from a studio were great a mid game would feel disappointingly bad. Although compared to other games they might actually still be considered great.
we are in a golden age of medium good action games. lies of p, stellar blade, khazan the first berserker, another crab’s treasure come to mind for me.
non-fromsoft soulslikes are starting to find their voice. they’re not quite great yet, but they’re competent now.
Mighty no 9.
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.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 4 days ago
From recent memory: Starfield.
I didn’t think it was terrible in and of itself, but it also wasn’t very good. It was just missing that certain something Bethesda RPGs had before it. Just a meh experience the whole way through.
jedibob5@lemmy.world 3 days ago
Starfield faked me out for a bit when I took the character creation perk that gave my character living parents that I could go visit and would show up from time to time. They were funny and adorably charming, and I thought it was an inspired touch. Little did I know that was the absolute best part of that game…
OriginalUsername7@lemmy.world 4 days ago
I think it was the way that exploration felt like a grind that made it so “meh”. A whole universe to explore, and you’re either going to come to a barren rock planet, or find the same enemy base/outpost 5 times in a row.
For a game where space exploration was one of the main selling points, it felt remarkably unlike exploring at times.
ICastFist@programming.dev 3 days ago
The first space exploration game without space or exploration
AlexisFR@jlai.lu 3 days ago
As a big fan of space sims and action RPGs, I wrote that game off when looking at reviews and how the spaceship building system and space travel were.
It’s like they choose the worst of Elite Dangerous and mixed it with the worst parts of previous Bethesda RPGs.
CIA_chatbot@lemmy.world 3 days ago
It always felt to me they wanted to create what star citizen is supposed to be someday (press x to doubt) and the. Looked at no mans sky and were like, we should add that too! And then realized the scope of that was ridiculous and half assed both of those parts.
TheGreenWizard@lemmy.zip 3 days ago
Star field was just mediocre enough that it pissed me off, the loading screens and menues are egregious enough to make me go ballistic. It’s hilarious because instead of criticizing the game for actuall gameplay, at launch it was lambasted for “pronouns”. Then normal people got to playing it and actually explained the issues.
ICastFist@programming.dev 3 days ago
I personally judge that game as plain bad with decent shooting and ok loot. The main story, and the game universe in general, are memorable for how stupidly thought out they are, even for the low standards of Bethesda post Oblivion. The citizens and assorted non-hostile npcs feel less alive than the people you run over in GTA games. They also managed to take the fun basebuilding of Fallout 4 and make it bad AND pointless - very little customization and freedom of certain objects’ placements, plus you’re better off just buying resources from vendors.
brendansimms@lemmy.world 2 days ago
I modded it with the ‘no purchasable resources’ and it became a totally different game; It was all spreadsheet/logistics and organizing galaxy wide shipping to central hubs where I had to fabricate all my own materials to be able to upgrade equipment. I found that far more enjoyable, but the game is still meh. Not worth the replays like skyrim was.