i keep buying games and they're not what i expected

any way i can improve my vetting process so i don't keep buying these "not exactly what i expected" games?

Watch footage of people playing them on YouTube / twitch. There's a whole genre called "Let's play" these days.

Morrowind is/was great. Combat is a bit meh - they've slowly improved it in Oblivion/Skyrim, but IMHO the Morrowind world is far more interesting than the new ones.

There's dungeon crawling once you start doing quests (lots of people will send you off into caves to find things...) but they're usually quite short and linear. It probably also takes 100 hours to fully complete. It's also quite easy to stray into areas that you're really not strong enough to be in yet (something Oblivion fumbled), making some quests really feel like big adventures, where you'd spend just as long preparing your inventory beforehand as doing the quest.

Sim City 4 is still the best sim city game. IMHO it's aged pretty well, especially when compared to any of the previous installments :lol:

Farcry 2 is pretty much "open world". FC1 was CryTek, but after that, they're all Ubisoft games.

Yuri's revenge was really fun in multiplayer. It was popular at LAN parties back in my day :cool:

KOTOR has turn-based combat; that's how turn-based combat always works. It's just speeded-up.

Seems you are on the verge of blasphemy :/

Among Railroad series, Railroad Tycoon 2 (preferably Platinum edition) is the best game. And it is an amazing game not deserving to be stoned due to these expectations, I still play it :)

KOTOR is the first RPG game I played and it is a legend, both game and story wise. And yes that's combat :) , you can pause anytime and give orders to any party member. If you seek an FPS experience, you can look at ancient Jedi Knight series (especially JK:II and JK:Academy)

And for Simcity 4, I still believe that it's the best game in known universe and no better game will come in next x (x >= 10 no matter which year we are in) years. After 13 years, it aged ofc but especially with lots/plugins it is an endless game. Btw, I assume that you already handled custom resolution and hardware renderer from command line so refer other things by aging.

Finally, if you won't find things to be disappointed :) , I can recommend openTTD (open source as name implies) , Capitalism Plus (oldie but goldie) , Time Commando (ancient graphics but good game) , Fragile Allegiance, TransOcean and Medital Total War 2 (if you didn't play before, I didn't like regional management of Rome 2)

Disclaimer : Please watch gameplay videos , reviews etc before so don't swear at me after :)

i keep buying games and they're not what i expected.

I keep going to movies and they're not what I expected.
I keep tuning into new TV shows and they're not what I expected.
I keep buying books and they're not what I expected.

I really do disagree about simcity 4.

That and simcity 3000 had horrible micro management. "you didn't spend 3 days wiring pipes to each house so now they're rioting... Did I mention those pipes degrade and need repair every game day?"

Not to mention simcity 4 seemed a big fan of "game over" situations, where if you ran up too much debt you'd be booted out of office. That's it, game over.

In previous incarnations at least the game play was endless, even if you were billion simoleons in debt it was your job to find a way out of it so you could build again.

I heard it went downhill even further in the next version which was basically online only against other people running other towns you could partner with.

Not my cup of tea.

If you can get them to run the old games are still the best. Command and conquer tiberium sun (not tiberium wars), and if you like that kind of thing, grand theft auto San Andreas... With cheats enabled of course.

Enjoy!

I am too old to remember about Simcity 3000 (but I remember that I like one city challenge instead of region logic) but at Simcity 4,

You don't have to provide water (which limits growth) and never seen anyone rioting. You also don't have to lay pipe to every house, pipe has effective area just like electricity. And if water services funding is less than ideal, you experience pipe issues time to time.

It is easy to bankrupt if you don't micromanage your services (fine tune school funding, delay services like police, firefighters etc until it's a real issue) and expand quickly without human capital infrastructure. And game offers you options to get out of debt (casino, missile ground, military base, maximum security prison etc buildings with monthly income but with negative effects)

And yes,

Simcity 2013 was a bad game in city building game standards imo , after online playing experience EA later changed game also allowing single player in few time after saying that "It is impossible to make single player because it uses too much element from serverside" :) Problem with SC2013 is it was classic EA game, not a Maxis one, people didn't like very small space at first and DLC oriented logic.

I've been buying games that aren't quite what I expected for years now. It's getting to the point that I don't buy games anymore. I think the turning point for me was Diablo 3. I was such a huge fan of Diablo 2 that I went into D3 with some pretty high hopes. But high hopes notwithstanding, I felt that D3 was such a colossal turd that it kinda soured me on games altogether for awhile. My thinking was that if this was the sort of utter bullshit people were wanting, then the industry really had left me behind. Path of Exile came along and somewhat redeemed things, but I still have that bad taste in my mouth a little bit.

Norman: I noticed you only listed big-studio games. A bit ironic since you're an indie developer.

Hop onto Steam or Desura and grab a few games. There's so many oddball niche games, there's got to be one that's up your alley.

It's harder to find review and coverage on some of the games, but since most are fairly low prices, you're not dropping $60 to find out if it's good.

Bethesda games are great, but you need to mod the everloving crap out of them for them to be playable/balanced/content packed.

If you want a really action-y long RPG, check out Dragon's Dogma:Dark Arisen.

Red alert 2 was better than it's expansion (Yuri's revenge).

Witcher 3, Skyrim, plain old momorpegher like Guild Wars 2, if you're looking for a time sink. Minecraft if you're into farming, crafting, exploring. Dragon Age : Inquisition, I've heard good things about it.

Personally, I find GW2 too Grindy and unfocused to hold my interest. Minecraft the same. Witcher 3 has a nice balance, Skyrim needs slow progress, the main quest line is rather short. I like the Mass Effect series, it's a nice RPG with half decent combat, but maybe not what you're looking for. Same with BioShock series.

All games have flaws, and nowadays, they tend to take the facile route of a short main story, while peppering their 'open world' with side quests. TBF, doing a 25 hour main quest line is quite an undertaking these days.

I've been buying games that aren't quite what I expected for years now. It's getting to the point that I don't buy games anymore. I think the turning point for me was Diablo 3. I was such a huge fan of Diablo 2 that I went into D3 with some pretty high hopes. But high hopes notwithstanding, I felt that D3 was such a colossal turd that it kinda soured me on games altogether for awhile. My thinking was that if this was the sort of utter bullshit people were wanting, then the industry really had left me behind. Path of Exile came along and somewhat redeemed things, but I still have that bad taste in my mouth a little bit.

They kinda turned things around a bit when they scratched the whole auction house concept.

You also might want to take a look at Grim Dawn. It's the spiritual successor of Titan Quest and I have been spending an obnoxious amount of time there since it came out.

BTW, The Wicher 3 is on sale on Steam right now (at least UK), £18. Well worth the price.

>> Watch footage of people playing them on YouTube / twitch. There's a whole genre called "Let's play" these days.

yes, i was trying to get the vetting over with quickly, so i didn't watch any "lets plays", i just read descriptions and did google searches. mostly checking for 1PV support. turn based combat didn't even occur to me.

>> Morrowind is/was great. Combat is a bit meh - they've slowly improved it in Oblivion/Skyrim, but IMHO the Morrowind world is far more interesting than the new ones.

i killed a giant grub with a halberd on my way to join the legion. they said i had to go someplace else to join up. i didn't know where the town was and didn't feel like exploring, so i joined the fighters's guild. they game me some gear and said "go level up and come back when you're tougher". i got a side quest to kill rats or something. and that's when i stopped playing. i guess i'm looking for the more classic D&D type grind - just give me a store (sell loot), a BIG dungeon (find action), and a tavern (rest and heal, hire followers).

>> Sim City 4 is still the best sim city game. IMHO it's aged pretty well, especially when compared to any of the previous installments

maybe i should revisit it. as i recall, i was only able to get so far in advancing the cities. in general i found the tutorials and help rather lacking. and i used to get VLSI chip design in v1.0 (1 million population) - when crime breaks out, bulldoze the churches and build police stations.

>> Farcry 2 is pretty much "open world". FC1 was CryTek, but after that, they're all Ubisoft games.

i'm beginning to think that "open world" and "living world" are two different things. an open world is really nothing more than a huge open level map. one you've killed all the targets at all the spawn points, all that's left is a big empty level - and then its nothing more than architectural walk though software.

this is part of the reason why i didn't freak out when farcry primal came out - i realized its nothing at all like Caveman. its more like a lite weight skyriim in a stone age setting.

i've modded skyrirm to respawn after 1 game day instead of 3 game weeks in order to make it easier to find action.

>> Yuri's revenge was really fun in multiplayer. It was popular at LAN parties back in my day :cool:

i think i was just a bit shocked at how dated it looked. i never played any C&C games when they first came out - i know, hard to believe - so AOE 1.0 or maybe Warcraft II was the graphics quality level i expected. the game also seems to run fast compared to other RTS's. it may not have a fixed timestep - so it runs too fast and isn't really playable.

I always watch a "Let's Play" before buying any game.

Seems like games are marketed now-a-days around a lot of hype, false promises and exaggerated 'game trailers' / 'promos' . Most 'game review' sites I have visited seem to publish 'doctored' reviews that give bad games almost perfect scores.

>> Among Railroad series, Railroad Tycoon 2 (preferably Platinum edition) is the best game. And it is an amazing game not deserving to be stoned due to these expectations, I still play it :)

i found v2 better than v3. in V2 you could optimize the rolling stock. in v3 you just build rails and wait. i also found the splines used in v3 (and sid meyer's), while better looking, were maddening for laying track. some didn't have a real sandbox mode, just a couple of "sandboxy" missions.

>> KOTOR is the first RPG game I played and it is a legend, both game and story wise. And yes that's combat :) , you can pause anytime and give orders to any party member. If you seek an FPS experience, you can look at ancient Jedi Knight series (especially JK:II and JK:Academy)

i seek an FPS RPG "living world" experience. apparently KOTOR has RPG elements, and Jedi Kinght has 1st person view, but neither has both. and both are storyline mission based shooters i suspect, not "living worlds" or even "open worlds" for that matter.

>> Medital Total War 2 (if you didn't play before, I didn't like regional management of Rome 2)

i still have to use up shogun2 and rome2. at least one game studio out there knows how to build a non-mulitplayer game with high replayability.

(spellcheck doesn't know multiplayer or replayability - we need a gamedev spell checker! )

and whats happened to selective quote? this cut and paste sucks!

i keep buying games and they're not what i expected.

I keep going to movies and they're not what I expected.
I keep tuning into new TV shows and they're not what I expected.
I keep buying books and they're not what I expected.

yes, but with a movie blurb or a tv show ad its usually much easier to figure out if its your "cup of tea". i guess its cause games are a more complex form of entertainment - especially big games.

>> My thinking was that if this was the sort of utter bullshit people were wanting, then the industry really had left me behind.

yes, the tastes of the market have changed. but then it was to be expected. games at first were niche market entertainment for geeks with PCs. then came mass market, appealing to the lowest common denominator, and all that jazz.

>> Bethesda games are great, but you need to mod the everloving crap out of them for them to be playable/balanced/content packed.

tell me about it!

i run fast respawns and merchants have gold. that way the dungeons aren't all empty and the stores have enough gold to buy your loot. but i should probably do more. loot doesn't scale with difficulty, so its "monty haul" at lower difficulty levels. XP scales with difficulty, so the tougher it is the faster you level up - sort of negating the whole point of making it tougher. the game is only balanced for one follower, so multiple followers doesn't really work well. many of the quest and dungeon mods have navmesh issues and are thus not follower friendly - Marzak, the #1 DL on nexus comes to mind. and again, they are much like bethesda dungeons - linear - just few rooms and encounters per level - all hard coded spawn points, about the only cool thing about bethseda dungeon design is the :"quick exit" at the end. but the linear design means having to leave without going all the way through (IE packing out a load of loot) is a lot of walking (thank god for the SetGobalTimeMultiplier console command so you can accelerate the game!). i've been really temped to make a mod for skyrim, a dungeon of at least 10 levels, with at least 30-40 rooms per level and 20 or so encounters per level, and encounter difficulties would increase as you went to deeper levels. with random spawn points and random encounters if possible. i sort of doubt the engine can do all that - especially the random spawn points and encounters and the monster levels appropriate for the dungeon level.

>> Witcher 3, Skyrim, plain old momorpegher like Guild Wars 2, if you're looking for a time sink. Minecraft if you're into farming, crafting, exploring. Dragon Age : Inquisition, I've heard good things about it.

i used up skyrim long ago. i'm looking for something that supports first person view. i find 3rd person view un-immersive, and technically speaking, the artificially enhanced situational awareness is cheating - i consider it a crutch for those who's fighter pilot skills at 3D spatial concepts and being able to mentally track targets outside their field of view are lacking. so a number of titles such as witcher were considered, but didn't make the cut. for lack of 1pv support they lost a sale.

>> I like the Mass Effect series, it's a nice RPG with half decent combat, but maybe not what you're looking for. Same with BioShock series.

yes, mass effect 2, bioshock, and deus ex all seem to be along the lines of what i'm looking for. but i'm afraid they're just open worlds with storyline based quests. or worse, non-open worlds and storyline based. i want to play in world, not play through a script.

>> and nowadays, they tend to take the facile route of a short main story, while peppering their 'open world' with side quests. TBF, doing a 25 hour main quest line is quite an undertaking these days.

yes, an open level design and a bunch of hard coded quests doesn't really make for a world you can play in long term. funny thing, when i used to play tabletop D&D, "quest" was a spell that a cleric would cast on you to make you do something you were unwilling to do voluntarily (getting a quest was something that would make you moan and groan). the only thing worse was a geas spell cast by a mage, which could actually kill you if you didn't pursue the quest. i only got 1 quest in 6 years of playing. and that was to clean out the original 3 dungeon modules (about 9 large dungeons / quest lines total). the reward was a small kingdom for each party member. the questor was the elven king. the DM wanted us to go though the dungeon modules, and that was how he got us to do it. i estimate that "quest" took 250-500 hours of gameplay - not easy to do when you have to gather the same 5 people around the same table at the same time to play.

take fallout new vegas for example. i bit the bullet and got it right after i posted my OP. so i started out just testing the RPG capabilities, no following quests, just looking for caps and action (XP). being a bethesda game, that meant looting bodies for gear. i soon discovered there was little action to be found, and ended up behaving like the T3 terminator 3: "I like your gun..." before you know it, i've wiped out entire towns, failing quests left and right as i kill anything with loot. it automatically gave me a perk (forget the name) - i get bonus damage against everything cause i like to kill everything (not really - i just like their guns! ). i killed the kings and took their HQ over (i love the heart shaped bed, its probably the nicest bed in the game, better than the best beds at tops or lucky 38 casinos). i killed everyone in tops - even the customers - i killed Mr house and all his bots and took over new vegas (but i don't seem to get anything for it- maybe i should have stuck with caesar), i killed everyone in feeetown just looking for action. the NCR sent some troopers to "talk" to me about my behavior. i sent them home in a box and declared war on the NCR. i've wiped out every NCR thing i can find, except the visitor center at the dam - hey i'm only 10th level so far and those guys have power armor and rocket launchers! i have over 2 dozen NCR ranger dogtags in my inventory. guess there's something i could do - go finish those guys at the dam off. need caps for better weapons and ammo though, so that puts me back to wandering the wasteland looking for action and folks with nice guns. and it looks like it doesn't respawn much at all. soon i'll be the only thing left alive in nevada! ( well - i try not to kill the cashiers so i can gamble later, but my follower always kills them). one thing that's kind of cool is that the game realizes what i'm doing. i went to see caesar - and he knew what i'd done at tops - not just that i killed benny - that i killed everyone in the building - guilty and innocent alike - hell hath no fury like a man buried alive and left for dead!. and i'm teaching that lesson to new vegas one corpse at a time (evil grin )

i think i'll have to start another game and play a nice guy and help everyone. it seems like that's the only kind of quests there are. goody two shoes BS. from what i've seen of the quests ( i did do the ringo quest - reminded me a bit of high plains drifter what with getting the town together to fight and all) it looks like it might not be bad for a law and order type character. but the game does not really seem condusive to the free style "fistfull of dollars" gameplay i've been doing. basically its too much work finding monsters, so i end up killing the NPCs for loot. i guess they assume you'll follow quests and not just go looking for action. and when i mean action i mean like taking on the NCR in the visitor's center at hoover dam. maybe i just need to turn up the difficulty level. its not much of a challenge unless i'm outnumbered at least 6 to 1 vs opponents with guns, not melee weapons. and my follower is just a porter, i don't give her any gear. i'm still running at default difficulty level (medium(?) diff level, not hardcore mode, true iron sights).

my fears about not open world were unfounded. its was just a newbie crying about the radscorps and deathclaws north of your start point between you and new vegas. i went north, maybe 2nd level at the time, no problem. it was fun messing with the deathclaws with my scoped 9mm pistol from high above in the rocks. before i knew it i was wandering around the perimeter wall of new vegas looking for the door. only to discover i needed 2000 caps to get in and confront benny. i think its at that point that i became less particular about how i made my money.