recent: tears of the kingdom, or as i like to call it botw 1.2, its the same thing all over again just with one or two added gimicks, the open world is dead, npcs are boring and nintendo just got away with it like that
not so recent: i cant stand persona 5, joker and his entourage are annoying teenagers, the time management is a horrible gameplay addition and the artstyle is just a visual overstimulation
with that being said,~~ plz dont kill me~~
Didn’t see anyone else mention it, so I’ll say MMOs. Pretty much all of them. WoW, FFXIV, Guild Wars 2, Star Wars one (can’t remember the name). I really like the idea of MMOs, having a huge shared world that feels alive, tons of lore, epic quests, but I just find the gameplay loop so boring. They just feel like endless busywork to me.
The content and world in MMOs feels superficial. I much prefer a tightly constructed narrative with deep, meaningful character development. The Last Of Us is a great example of this.
This may just be old man nostalgia talking, but at least part of that spark feels like its gone because the genre became too popular and information flowed too freely.
One of the things I distinctly remember about older MMOs, especially Pre-WoW ones, is how so much information was basically just passed on from player to player. You’d join a guild, because the guild forums are where you could post maps and strategies and the like. But your guild forums were also mostly just private to you, so useful stuff could take a long time to leak out.
With the rise of wikis and big, well connected social communities, a lot of the exploration element of the games is just theme park rides and the mechanical experimentation gets analyzed to death in the first few days because of how collaborative everyone is instead of everyone being stuck in smaller groups with non-perfect info.