The fact that you didn’t find it fun is totally valid. BG3 is a very opinionated game that gets a huge number of things right for its target audience - the people who really enjoy CRPGs, branching paths, and choice driven gameplay. It does sound like that you’re really not into those things, so BG3 could never have been an excellent experience.

The games that you list are designed to be mostly linear experiences, so it was possible for the devs to make the core gameplay shine because they had time to really polish those systems and interactions. There was enough people and time to really tune RDR2’s gunplay, the horse riding, the hunting and tracking, and make the world feel organic.

BG3’s dev time was spent on tuning the combat encounters, tuning the class building options, and making sure the world (almost) always made sense. While baking in hundreds of stories about your companions, side characters, abusive store owners, and lost puppies. The game never holds your hand, only asks “here you are, this is what you’ve done, what do you do now?”. The amount of effort put into respecting the moment to moment choices made by the player is staggering.

The complexity in these systems in BG3 left preeetty clear issues with things that would otherwise have time to be polished out of a game before release (animation jank, visual bugs, pathing, pausing). For me, they were more like bumps in a very scenic road. But I hear you when you come in expecting a shiny polished RPG but there’s all these fourth wall breaking bits that kind of stall the whole show every like 5 minutes.

I think there’s enough nuance here to have both sides of the coin be true - it’s an absolute masterpiece for the players who enjoy the specific experience it offers, and it only makes sense to feel it’s overrated when you’re coming in expecting a cinematic or visceral experience.

totally understandable, they’re so close in controls, but so completely different in gameplay and pacing.

Ahh, for some folks, MOBAs are RTS games with the worst bits taken out!

As soon as I saw it’s locked at 30fps, it immediately killed any amount of interest I had in playing it. All the power to people who can stomach action games at what feels like a slide-deck input response.

I think Celeste is designed to be a super narrow experience - pure platforming. I found it pretty pleasant, but not what I’m generally looking to play. I personally don’t think it’s overhyped - the platforming design and movement is really very excellent. Having said that, not my cup of tea either.

nooooo not minesweeper ;-;

it’s dark souls 2, so there must be 2 of everything!

just kind of the nature of the genre for a lot of bands

I think I’m in agreement here, just a matter of phrasing it. It’s very easy for a metal band to think they’re stepping off genre in the albums they’re making if they’re a pioneer of some sort of subgenre (I think the most prominent example for me is Kamelot). So many of them end up making three or four mediocre albums that could have just been collapsed into one good one.

I also notice that some genres end up having really well defined ‘tropes’ that get established and then beat to death over a number of years. If you’ve ever listened to a band like Amaranthe, truly the Nickelback of power metal. They have like 5 albums and I can’t tell which song is from where. Not to say that they’re bad albums, or unlistenable, just kind of blurs together in a pleasant blob.

In comparison, Ghost really changed up their sound. They started off kind of like different Megadeth with a lot more theatrics (which is wild to think about), and now they’re ABBA with distorted guitars… and more theatrics.

Pulling up something from punk(ish) land, Streetlight drops albums so rarely, and they’re perfect shiny jewels every time. Not always totally fresh, but always putting a new twist on the last one.

A lot of metal acts tend to be scared of veering off from their niche subgenre, so they end up making albums that sounds like mashups of their earlier albums.

They have one song and boy are they going to milk it

It used to be pretty meaningful when autocomplete was not as powerful as it is today. Only very serious emacs users could achieve fast and flexible static completion before LSP forced everyone to step up their game.

Now that everybody and their grandparents have LSP available (or even more powerful tools if you’re using Very Professional IDEs), it’s not nearly as much of an issue, just hit tab and never type close brackets again.

It’s not that folks are averse to writing code, it’s more-so averse to actually typing out a shitton of boilerplate and feeling the slog until you actually get to the juicy bits where you have to think.

If camping is a problem, it’s almost always a system issue.

I can’t think of a story focused game that fits any of these points… has OP played many story driven games before?

That’s definitely something to consider. In my head ‘JRPG’ was used in the same vein as ‘manga’ and ‘anime’, where it’s used to group games that share a ton of stylistic choices. Stuff like being particularly plot-heavy, some sort of level progression system that leads to a grind, lots of secrets, intricate combat mechanics.

Didn’t realise there was baggage behind the term for some of the devs. I’m thinking the term ‘JRPG’ doesn’t mean what I think it means - perhaps for a lot of people it just lumps together all RPGs from Japan.

Hard for me to say. And to be honest, it’s been a long time since I exclusively thought about RPGs as a ‘RPG’ vs ‘JRPG’ kind of deal so the term actually hasn’t popped onto my radar unless I’m talking about squeenix/monolith/etc. games.

From a practical perspective, even using open source takes some time and effort. I suspect many people gravitate towards apple is because they nail the basics and have a great out of the box experience.

I’m against Apple in principle, but that doesn’t mean I didnt get an M1 air when I had to upgrade a year or something ago - it was simply the best in the market for the price at the time.

Also apple does not respect privacy nearly as much as they love to tout. Open source in general has a much better track record with privacy because of the people building the tools don’t have as much profit incentive or government oversight.

Edit: you’ll never catch me dead with an iPhone or iPad though, Apple’s mobile browsing experience has no ad block.