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!

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.