FOMO stands for Fear Of Missing Out.
I’ve tried playing some JRPGS because they are considered classics and detective games like LA Noire before realizing the genre just wasn’t for me.
I’ve also been stuck in the mentality of if I want to play a game in a series I need to play the prior games. I’m doing this currently for Deus Ex, the Witcher, and Splinter Cell. I guess I’d consider that FOMO to a degree.
Edit: I meant FOMO as in the fear of missing out on something relevant. Not necessarily something that is intentionally being time limited like raids or micro transactions.
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Umm. It sounds more like that you are just trying out new things and genres and finding that it’s not always a hit with you. That’s healthy.
When you put it like that yeah but I was forcing myself through games I wasn’t necessarily enjoying.
That’s not really FOMO. FOMO would be like, pre-ordering a special edition of a game you aren’t even sure about wanting for $90 because there’s a “Preorder-Only” in-game perk and you just have to have, or falling for those “Limited Time Only” microtransactions in FTP games.
I guess I meant it more so in the fear of missing out on something culturally relevant. Whether it’s a modern multiplayer game like Destiny 2 or a classic that is frequently referenced like Half Life. Not being able to be part of the conversation when it’s brought up
I guess I can see where you’re coming from. Kind of the fear of missing out on being a part of the gaming zeitgeist.
There’s an important moment where you have to ask yourself…
“Is this story so bad I’m not invested in it anymore?”
“Is the gameplay bothering me so much that it feels bad or unfun to me?”
If the answer is yes to both of those, you may feel free to drop the game with full confidence you’re not gonna play it again.
I get what you are saying but a lot of the time it’s just a mediocre experience and I’m not necessarily disliking it. More indifferent than anything. Occasionally a game has made a pretty solid turn around in the last act
It’s okay to stop playing a game after you’ve played enough of it to understand it isn’t for you.
I think I had about 10~12 hours played of Diablo 4 before I noticed it wasn’t for me and stopped. Still enjoyed what little I played of it, but wasn’t motivated to continue.
Surprisingly, Baldur’s Gate 3. I absolutely love D&D, but I tried playing through the Pathfinder video games, Pillars of Eternity, Divinity: Original Sin 2, and nothing stuck with me. I just wasn’t a fan of the CRPG genre, despite me playing in-person tabletop RPGs multiple times a week.
I bought BG3 thinking I probably wouldn’t get hooked, but I didn’t want to miss out when literally every one of my friends is playing it. Well, I am absolutely hooked and have 40 hours in the game and will likely do multiple playthroughs, and I kind of “get” the genre now. I know PoE, PF, or DOS2 may not be as good, but I feel a lot more confident at the prospect of playing them now.
So in this case, FOMO helped me a great deal.
I’m in the same boat, I’ve been playing Death Stranding and a few other indie games once every weekend or two… or three. Now every one of my friends and coworkers are talking about hundreds of hours in BG3, I’ve bought and downloaded it last night to catch up.
The genre itself appeals to me, but the amount of time and concentration it takes me to get into a game nowadays, maybe this gets a kick start.
Mass Effect Andromeda. The reviews convinced me I’d hate it, but I couldn’t stand the thought of possibly missing some lore after I loved the first 3 so much. Turns out it was actually pretty good.
No Man’s Sky. It looked slow and grindy but people kept hyping it up. I caved, and forced myself to play 20 hours trying to find the good bits. I never found them.
I think the hate for Andromeda was a little overblown. I enjoyed the heck out of the game, regardless of any weird facial expressions! It of course was never going to live up to the original trilogy but it stood out on its own in a lot of positive ways
Right? ME Andromeda felt really good for me, with the bases becoming more and more human friendly. I quite liked it.
No Man’s Sky. It looked slow and grindy but people kept hyping it up. I caved, and forced myself to play 20 hours trying to find the good bits. I never found them.
That’s a game I tried as well but I feel like I set myself up for failure by trying to see everything the beginning of the game had to offer versus exploring naturally.
Flying around in VR in space in NMS is amazing. I think I lost interest because of the unnecessarily cumbersome crafting and item management though.
Cyberpunk 2077. I was pretty skeptical of it before it came out (didn’t really feel like it was doing anything unique), but it was such a big release I picked it up to have an opinion on it.
Don’t think I’m gonna do the same for Starfield, though, that’s just a pass
I think for me it’s going to end up depending on the modding community and how linear the game feels.
I played The Outer Worlds due to the hype around Obsidian releasing a game but it just felt kind of flat and lifeless. Maybe it’s just because it seems similar in atmosphere but I’m worried Starfield is going to end up feeling the same.
Even though I agree for the most part about Cyberpunk,I did finish it ,but skipped parts of story by doing the worse ending. I intend to start a new game after Phantom Liberty dlc comes out just cause I’m curious about the improvements.
Starfield… Now I never liked Bethesda games and could never finish most. I did finish FO4,but was very very bored by the end and rushed it. Starfield is just so bland and has so many mixed ideas and mechanics from other games it just feels like it can’t make up its mind what it wants to be. And the combat… Cyberpunk feels like a combat masterpiece compared to Starfield and Star Citizen the same (despite all issues) for the space part. Starfield just can’t draw me in.
Edit: autocorrect
Cuphead and I fucking hated it. Lovely art style and retro feel but my god. I play video games to unwind and have fun. What the hell maaaaaaaaaan.
I recently removed it from my wishlist because of this, loved the artstyle and had seen a lot of praise, but gameplay wise looked 100% like something not for me, i had just wishlisted it bc of it’s reputation.
Elden Ring
The glowing review and how people say its the best time to try a souls game made me buy it.
Not a game for me.
(Just in case people start saying I need to get good. It has nothing to do with the difficulty. I am thoroughly enjoying AC6 now.)
No worries! I’m a big fan of FROM and you are absolutely right, they just aren’t for everyone. I honestly wish more people would see that a game can be good but you don’t have to enjoy it. That’s me and a lot of strategy games like Crusader Kings.
Minecraft.
Way back in its beta days, a couple of mates couldn’t put it down. They couldn’t explain why digging holes was fun nor placing cubes. I really didn’t get it after a demonstration from them. Eventually had a LAN with a mate that was vaguely curious but also didn’t think it was going to be interesting.
We didn’t sleep for the next 36hrs, nor notice it was a new day until my family got up and started making breakfast.
Did you two play much afterwards? I’ve played a few times with friends but I find it usually fizzles out after a couple months then it’s just me who hosts occasionally messing around.
Fully the same here. Sometimes I get bouts of inspiration to hop on the server or organize to do something with the group we have, but always fizzles out after a few months as you say. Which is fine really, a lot of other good games I tend to circle back to over time just like minecraft.
Diablo 4. Played it for 10hrs then I got bored of running 30m, fighting a group of demons, running 30m, fight demons, repeat. Haven’t touched it since.
They’ve improved monster density, but it’s still just… meh. I picked it up because I didn’t want to miss season 1. I was seriously forcing myself to play it and decided to just quit.
I did that same thing with Diablo 3 and overwatch.
That’s not what fomo means. I have a bad case of FOMO right now with Genshin Impact. I genuinely like the game, but it forces me to login twice a day with the resin system (basically energy that accumulates over time), otherwise it caps and I lose progress. Also a lot of their content is in the form of limited time events. They do this for the obvious reason of it being extremely profitable. This is why you should be very cautious about getting into live service games.
Welp, I was interested in trying GI until reading this.
Yeah it’s a legitimately a really good game and still has a huge amount of permanent content, but that’s the nature of live service games. They need that constant engagement to survive. A game like Baulders gate, you buy it and the devs are paid regardless of how much or how little you play, not really the case with live service.
Oh and GI is gacha which isn’t good either. But then they do cool stuff like make a really good card game in game that’s completely free with zero paid stuff, and even hold irl tourneys with big prize pools.
The only live service game I have and likely will ever allow myself to play is Another Eden, ostensibly a mobile gacha but unlike any others in that genre (and yet… not entirely if you know what I mean:-D - it is less predatory than any modern game that allows in-app purchases that I’ve ever even heard of but that aspect is not entirely absent from it). It hits the JRPG nostalgia feel for being a spiritual successor to Chrono Trigger and Cross, made by some of the same developers actually, and the artwork and music especially are just gorgeous.:-D
And ironically, many people complain bitterly that they want it to be more like GI, with a pity system. Never mind that the gacha can be irrelevant here as you can do everything purely with the free characters (and more effort, especially JP-style i.e. heavy grinding), the FOMO salt is real, and I see now that games are just giving the people what they want, regardless of whether that’s good for them or not. On the one hand it keeps further game development going, and people are free to spend how they please, while on the other there are horror stories of people dropping hundreds or even thousands of dollars (I think even USD $ currency), while having little to show for it in the end.
Predatory is predatory, and while on the one hand I’d love to check out GI someday, on the other I just don’t think I could stand the gacha elements in it. It warps and twists EVERYTHING it touches, e.g. increasing pressure to make waifu/husbando portraits that objectify both women and men in it, and leads to content that looks visually appealing but in Another Eden at least, has not been tested and is not “fun” to play.
The funny part is that originally I had to choose between GI and AE, and I am so glad that I went the way that I did. Although probably better to avoid any such gacha at all in the future.:-|
To be fair, a pity system should definitely be a thing if there’s any sort of gamba. That way there’s at least a hard limit on what you can waste your money on until it’s guaranteed. I at least find GI characters not to be too predatory, you mostly pull them for fun. In fact some of the best characters are the starting 4 stars lol, and you pull cuz you like the character a lot. They really develop the characters a lot, and if you’ve seen any comic cons or anime conventions, you’ll see an insane amount of Genshin cosplays cuz they suck you in by really loving the characters. The gameplay is honestly so easy you absolutely don’t need a good character, and it’s actually incredibly balanced. The earliest characters released are actually still S tier because they fucked up the balance a bit with them so the new characters are still good but more niche focused, so everything is still relevant.
The only hard content is what’s called the spiral abyss, which is a completely optional dungeon that rotates every 2 weeks and 100% clearing it gives you like 5 free gacha rolls, so people really just use it to bench mark characters since nothing else in the game is remotely challenging, nor is there any pvp aspect or anything.
But yeah, also Gacha and live service games tend to be a drug, once they have you hooked it’s hard to quit. Sunk cost fallacy is real hard to overcome in gacha games.
I mean… you are not wrong, but to put on my debate hat (for the funsies:-D) I suppose the counter-argument is that since they made it so that the ga(t)cha system is itself irrelevant (at least, in the earlier days of the game, before Power Creep became rampant), they seemed to feel like that was the way to keep the game “balanced”. It might also go over better in Japan than the more Western world where people might less like this idea of something that is unattainable. Oh, and one REALLY crucial detail is that you can straight-up exchange irl cash for any particular character that you want (well, any OLDER one, while the absolute newest ones are only available by the gambling approach that offers no such guarantees). Those sales only come every so often each year, but with them you can have your guarantee - and e.g. if you pull your desired character in the meantime, then you can select someone else, whoever you want in the list. Also iirc (some of?) the paid banners offer a “guaranteed 5-star”, though it lacks GI’s system where (eventually) it is the particular 5-star that you pulled for. There is also a second, subscription system where you pay to support the game each month and get increased basically stamina-style rewards, and you select 7 characters where you are guaranteed to get one of those.
So there is a “pity”, technically, just not available at all for F2P, and instead comes in the form of a P2W purchase opportunity.
I heard that GI was really bad, but also that was like several years ago, and it has been cleaned up significantly since then. And some banners much worse than others - particularly weapons ones iirc? - where like you get this 5-star weapon and then nobody who can use it. Ofc this is biased, listening to the stories of people who decided to leave it, rather than stay and git gud:-).
It does look gorgeous though, which is kinda weird for a mobile game imho but so long as processing power can keep up…
You really don’t “need” to login twice a day. A single extra domain/boss drop isn’t going to completely make or break any content in the game. Even spiral abyss is only 2ish extra gacha pulls if you are really pushing it. Which again, won’t make or break any content in the game.
A huge amount of the event stuff is totally skippable, some minor lore here and there can be watched on YouTube, there are sometimes event weapons, but the majority of those aren’t even that much better than other permanently avaible ones, and certainly not over weapon banners.
I’ve been playing GI for almost a year, and it has been an absolute blast. I do the content I care about, skip stuff I dont. Its a fantastically fun game, that I can pop in go hunting for chests for an hour or two, maybe do some event minigames for pulls. If you have low self control and cannot bare to be 5% less effective in combat where you one shot everything with a single burst then it might not be a game you want to play, but for casual playing around and exploring the world fighting random monsters for happy treasure chest sounds, it has been an absolute delight.
Among Us. But it was free and I only needed a couple of rounds to figure out I don’t enjoy it much
A lot of the Zelda games, for me. I tried Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask and they were not my thing. A lot of people raved about those games but I couldn’t get into them. Then there were a couple on the DS that I couldn’t get into, either.
But then I found Wind Waker and absolutely loved it, and then loved Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom (so far), too!
Subnautica, because lots of people said it was a great game and there were things that could be spoiled, so that indicated a neat story. The beginning was freaking awesome! But I hate crafting survival games, so I didn’t play for very long.
The grind and particularly the inventory management make me never want to play Subnautica games again despite loving the first one. I hope they sort this out for the next game in this style if they do it again. The base needs to have a shared inventory that it pulls from when crafting, and preferably stacks of items are shown instead of individual items.
That said, I don’t know if they’ll do another survival game again. They made Natural Selection before it (which is awesome and still has a community) and have made Moonbreaker now. They tend to jump around to a ton of different styles of games.
Fallout 3 was one. I had just transferred to a new college and was dorming. Several of the guys were playing FO3, so I decided to get it, even though I knew almost nothing about FO games. But I knew it’d be something to talk about with people. And it worked, even though I didn’t get that far into the game. Made friends; some that 15yrs later I still talk to on occasion. As far as the game itself, I haven’t played another FO since; just generally not my kinda game.
My gaming buddies now, who I’ve known them for several years, have the attention span of goldfish, so I’ve largely stopped FOMO games purchases. I can’t keep spending money on games they’ll play for a week or two, or less. Though if it appears there’s some longevity, then maybe I’ll jump in. Barotrauma and Project Zomboid are a couple where the FOMO eventually won out, but it did pay off. We’ve sunk hundreds of hours into each game over the last 2-3yrs.
Fallout 1 and 2 are 2D isometric turn based games, while 3 and later move to a first person perspective so you might enjoy the classics… Unless you just don’t enjoy the setting - in which case fair enough.
Really? I do enjoy turn-based games, so that’s good to know! It’s definitely the first-person perspective that I think I just don’t care for. The post-nuclear apocalypse setting I’m into. Looking at some pics, I’m kinda reminded of Shadowrun Returns, which I enjoyed. Is that an apt comparison?
Fallout 1 & 2 are absolutely phenomenal classic games, but they are very old school (they’re 90’s releases, after all) so you have to be up for that. Not just graphically, but game design too. If you’re okay with that, they’re really worthwhile experiences, and I might even prefer Fallout 2 over unmodded New Vegas.
As is usually the case with games from this era, look for the unofficial patch and the Restoration Project, too.
Not a bad comparison but fallout 1-2 are decades ago so quite a jump in graphics and stuff. Huge classic fallout fan, and I enjoyed shadowrun so you might like it
I grabbed Elden Ring on sale for $40 and I wish I hadn’t
What’s wrong with it?
It’s not worth $40. It’s basically a Bethesda game without the modding community to fix it.
I found ER to be pretty polished on ps5. When i bought it in pc to do the seamless coop with my friends i was shocked by the stuttering that i couldn’t get to stop. So I’d say it depends heavily on platform
Yikes. Thanks for the heads up.
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For what it’s worth, most people would not agree with their assessment. To me, it’s open world Dark Souls, but better.
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A lot of people liked it. I’ll probably beat it because I bought it, but I’ll throw it on the heap of other Fromsoft titles that I find to be lacking. I don’t see myself wasting time on NG+ as the first playthrough has been less than satisfying.
stardew valley and the stanley parable. no regrets :)
