Following up on this comment since I haven’t seen a thread about it: lemmy.blahaj.zone/comment/14639216
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
What's an absolutely medium quality game? Not great, incredible or terrible or any single ended extreme. Dead medium quality
Submitted 20 hours ago by weirdbeardgame@lemmy.world to games@lemmy.world
Comments
JoeKrogan@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Nindelofocho@lemmy.world 1 hour 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
TheGreenWizard@lemmy.zip 12 hours 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.
Kolanaki@pawb.social 20 hours 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.
AlexisFR@jlai.lu 14 hours 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 10 hours 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.
OriginalUsername7@lemmy.world 16 hours 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.
jedibob5@lemmy.world 11 hours 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…
ICastFist@programming.dev 12 hours 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.
TheGreenWizard@lemmy.zip 12 hours 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.
Noite_Etion@lemmy.world 20 hours ago
Any assassin’s creed from the last 10 years, probs gonna get hate for that but they are just so average to me.
callouscomic@lemm.ee 16 hours ago
A hell of a lot of Ubisoft open-world slop.
thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works 18 hours ago
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.
sexual_tomato@lemmy.dbzer0.com 11 hours ago
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.
thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works 3 hours ago
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!
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
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.
callouscomic@lemm.ee 16 hours ago
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.
thatKamGuy@sh.itjust.works 15 hours ago
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).
Phen@lemmy.eco.br 12 hours ago
Anything from Ubisoft
Tikiporch@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
This is probably more subjective than best/worst. So…
Vanilla Skyrim.
umbraroze@slrpnk.net 6 hours 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 6 hours ago
I love Bullet Witch and I’m still looking for a physical copy of this and Ninja Blade on Xbox 360.
reksas@sopuli.xyz 11 hours ago
anything ubisoft makes
bob_lemon@feddit.org 10 hours ago
I disagree. Some of them are actually bad.
reksas@sopuli.xyz 6 hours ago
yes, but medium is the absolute best they can manage
danhab99@programming.dev 5 hours 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.
poolhelmetinstrument@lemmy.world 7 hours ago
Warhammer 40,4000: Space Marine.
Voroxpete@sh.itjust.works 14 hours 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.
vrighter@discuss.tchncs.de 14 hours 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 11 hours 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.
weirdbeardgame@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Defo agree. But I will admit that the soundtrack is fire
klobuerschtler@lemm.ee 11 hours ago
Elex 1 and Elex 2
BroBot9000@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
From a gameplay perspective GTA has been mid for ages.
Quazatron@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
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.
SirSamuel@lemmy.world 11 hours ago
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
Flamekebab@piefed.social 13 hours ago
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.
caseofthematts@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
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.
Sonotsugipaa@lemmy.dbzer0.com 19 hours ago
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.
JoeKrogan@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
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”
Sonotsugipaa@lemmy.dbzer0.com 9 hours ago
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.
Coelacanth@feddit.nu 16 hours ago
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.
caut_R@lemmy.world 13 hours ago
Sleeping Dogs is easily my fav GTA-esque game and I weep that there‘s no successor, to each their own
esc27@lemmy.world 15 hours ago
Avowed was very mid. I enjoyed it enough, but nothing about it was particularly brilliant or terrible.
southsamurai@sh.itjust.works 20 hours ago
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).
bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 17 hours ago
brsrklf@jlai.lu 17 hours ago
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.
Brylant@discuss.online 14 hours ago
Greedfall
Geth@lemmy.dbzer0.com 12 hours 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 13 hours 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.
Horsey@lemmy.world 9 hours ago
Portal 1 & 2. Far too short.
tuckerm@feddit.online 18 hours ago
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.
ICastFist@programming.dev 12 hours ago
How does U2 compare to UT2003/4 in multiplayer?
tuckerm@feddit.online 9 hours ago
It's a very different game, although it does have vehicles, so it has something in common with UT2004 in that way.
Unreal 2's multiplayer only has one game mode. It's kind of like capture the flag with some resource management. There are power generators that you need to take for your team in order to use vehicles. You can also capture respawn points which give your team more choices of where to respawn from.
You choose one of three classes when you spawn, with each class having specific weapons. You don't pick up weapons as you go.
There is a release of the multiplayer that's available for free here: https://xmpcommunity.com. After Epic tool all Unreal titles off of digital stores a while ago, they specifically mentioned xmpcommunity.com in a blog post as a way of still playing the game. So it has their blessing.
ICastFist@programming.dev 13 hours 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
Breezy@lemmy.world 12 hours ago
Im sorry but perfect world got down flying before any other game and it was hella fun.
bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 17 hours ago
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.
umbraroze@slrpnk.net 4 hours ago
Neverwinter Nights is the best PC game I’ve played, all thanks to the custom content the players made.
Bioware made the toolset and modding support a big part of the prerelease interviews and live demos. The message to the tabletop RPG crowd was “hey, you can finally build and run your D&D modules as a real DM-led multiplayer group experience online”. Probably the only problem with that marketing was that making modules from scratch was still an involved process and making usually needed scripting skill, so maybe the TTRPG crowd didn’t end up as enthusiastic as they could. But people still ended up making boatloads of great singleplayer and multiplayer-capable adventure modules! And the multiplayer persistent worlds were essentially like MMOs but in small scale.
I think the built-in campaign was more of a hindrance in retrospect, because if you hadn’t heard this, you probably expected another game like Baldur’s Gate 1/2. A lot of people went in thinking that the official NWN campaign was the main offering. The campaign was incredibly mediocre by Bioware standards because Wizards of the Coast was incredibly needy. They wanted high level of control, and essentially only approved a committee-built pile-of-meh plot, leaving Bioware to build something around that.
This, by the way, led to Bioware swearing they’d not work with needy licensors anymore and ended up designing Dragon Age instead.
(And if anyone is saying “wait, didn’t this just happen again with Baldur’s Gate 3?” Yes. Yes it did. WotC is basically impossible to work with.)
Droechai@lemm.ee 14 hours ago
The original single player is so bad I’m certain it was just cobbled together as a demo of the engine and for inspiration for user content. Then the team had time to develope proper story with the expansions
umbraroze@slrpnk.net 4 hours ago
Wizards of the Coast spent lots of time in meetings with Bioware to make sure every damn detail of D&D 3e was implemented according to the book. And even longer time micromanaging the campaign design. A lot of the scenarios are essentially repeats of the others - “do these four smaller thingies and then go kick the main baddie” - because getting that approved by WotC was easier.
Why are there so few D&D games these days? Why do video game dev houses want to make their own RPG systems instead? Well, they don’t want the headache of dealing with WotC.
JeeBaiChow@lemmy.world 19 hours ago
Mighty no 9.
ampersandrew@lemmy.world 12 hours 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.
Pogogunner@sopuli.xyz 19 hours ago
Just Cause 3
Movement was more annoying than Just Cause 2
ICastFist@programming.dev 12 hours ago
I really enjoyed 3 more than 2, despite never quite getting the hang of doing hook-gliding combos. Flying a heli with missiles in 2 was the game’s “I win” button, dodging AA missiles was pretty trivial, 3 doesn’t have anything as OP
yamper@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
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.
Armok_the_bunny@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Lies of P is amazing how dare you.
stm@lemmy.dbzer0.com 17 hours ago
Nindelofocho@lemmy.world 1 hour 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