I've been revisiting anno 2205, infamously the ugly duckling of the Anno series of RTS games. I don't mind so much the fact that it's different, lacks customisation and random map generation - I'm bothered because the game is so slow to progress through on challenge settings, and it feels like a game designed just to artificially waste your time; in other anno games, you can always pull tricks to dig yourself out of economic crisis - selling off assets and surplus goods, completing quests for other parties, or taking loans. 2205 is very very confined in terms of what you can do to financially recover in the early game and forces you into a lot of military events.
As a teenager, I played a lot of the early Assassin's creed games, but fell off the franchise around Origins, when they stopped releasing to steam and kept it on the Ubisoft store, and in general fell away from gaming in general in this era.
Eventually I pick up Assassin's Creed Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla together, probably about 3 years ago and play each. I put about 60+ hours into the first two, and somehow put 200 into Valhalla, basically just mentally switching off and getting 100% of the content, which is a lot for Ubisoft game.
Perhaps it filled a good 'get home from work and crash' need for me, and the experience wasn't wholly bad by any means, but it's so bland. I've dropped off the franchise entirely now, after being an obsessed fan a decade ago when I was younger and more naive. The entire game basically has 0 positive memories attached, basically no memories at all, good or bad.
I tend to hold off calling anything that's not AI slop, but this game needs to be an exception. Assassin's creed doesn't deserve all the hate it gets, if you ever boot into the historian exploration mode and just walk around ancient landmarks hearing the development commentary, the respect for the historic is monumental across all the games, and in the gameplay there are lots of interesting aspects amongst everything else, but that everything else is very much the problem. Slop is the perfect word, it's blended pulp where the quality of the ingredients vary from gourmet to rotten, and I was the pig at the trough.
I could honestly give e the exact same feedback for the Lego Star Wars Skywalker Saga game. I have find childhood memories but that game doesn't have an ounce of passion in it.
These games aren't helped by the fact that the 3 games I played through after this era were Outer Wilds, Disco Elysium and Hollow Knight, which IMO are the three pinnacles of what games as a medium can be.
I've played every proper AC game except the Japanese one (not got around to it yet), but I doubt any of them to 100% completion.
I'm a bad-ass assassin/warrior who... checks notes... goes around collecting... checks notes again ... feathers, flags, and sea shanty song pages.
AC3 was my breaking point, but it was primarily the online play. One night while grinding I realized that this was my third outing of going through the exact same progression system with little to no improvements, innovations, or worthwhile incentives. I closed the game and never opened it again. Funnily enough, my favorite aspect of AC3 was the ship combat and remembered saying that I would gladly pay for a standalone pirate game with the same mechanics so long as they didn't slap the Assassin's Creed logo on it.
Suffice it to say, I have never played Black Flag, and I will never play Black Flag on principle. I don't care how "good" it is.
It's so atrocious!!!!!!!!!!!!! Asked my friend with SHIT taste in games whether the hype was true and he lied to me that it was a great game.
I had completed every film except episode 9 (the wound of actually watching it was still too tender). So i focused on levelling up character abilities and doing quests. When I was outside a planet, getting shot at as usual, I realised every single planet had the same copy and paste battle event, and I'd have to do this for all 30 something of the planets in the game. It made me angry that it was so full of time wasting activities. I uninstalled.
They also dismantled a formula which worked very well, to make that game. And to make lego the incredibles and lego indiana Jones 2 (arguably less so. That one is really fun); these three all have abnormally short levels. It's lazy. Nobody would have complained if they just released the same levels from the complete saga but slightly expanded, accommodating new character abilities and mini kit puzzles, and focused on making character movement and combat more fluid (the one thing they did achieve)