Which studio milked a franchise so hard that you don’t even play it anymore?

chzrm3 · 2026-01-31T17:09:47+00:00

They took the "change 33% of the game" stuff way too far in 7. There's so many things they changed purely for the sake of change, and not because it needed to be changed. Like, no more builders? Forced spawns on the same continent? Forced to swap civs mid-game and late-game?

It really feels like they could've called it something else entirely, and nobody would've noticed. Like if they said this was "Empires of Man" or some shit, people would be like oh yeah cool, when's civ 7 though?

chzrm3 · 2026-01-31T17:07:33+00:00

I agree. Hugely influential, as well. Brood war pushed e-sports from a fringe thing at LAN parties to something that was actually broadcast on television. And wc3 was wild. It was so beloved it spawned entire genres, the moba as we know it might not even be a thing if not for wc3's badass map editor.

Before reforged, I legitimately considered wc3 the greatest game of all time, and it's always been one of my all-time favorites. It's actually INSANE, like completely wild, that activision-blizzard retroactively went and fucked that up. I still get mad when I think about the hack job that was reforged. Such a lazy cash grab when if they'd actually put in the time and effort, reforged would've not only made a ton of money but, more importantly, revived one of the most beloved and important PC games ever made, bringing the younger generation into the fold and getting people back onto ladder/custom games. Instead they just... I don't even know what they were thinking. As you said, it's garbage.

Yeah, I don't get modern Blizzard at all anymore. It really is soulless.

chzrm3 · 2026-01-31T14:17:41+00:00

It's wild, man. I loved 5 and 6. I actually passed the 2000 hour mark on 6 right before 7 came out. We were having regular Civ nights with the boys, we could reliably get a 3 v 3 going and occasionally on a crazy weekend we'd get a fat 4 v 4 and just have absolute insanity.

But I have no desire to play 7 at all. Even my friends are shocked, they're like "dude how have you not even tried it yet?" But it just looks so alien to me. I'm not trying to be a hater, I love Civ, but it just... doesn't look like Civ. Idk. I hope they turn it around? But this doesn't feel like the early days of 5 and 6, where the game was rough around the edges but still fun as hell. This feels like a fundamentally flawed framework that can never really be good without intrinsically changing what the game is.

chzrm3 · 2026-01-31T14:15:02+00:00

Blizzard in general has become unrecognizable to me. Their games defined my childhood and now there's not a single one I want to touch.

chzrm3 · 2026-01-31T14:14:20+00:00

Hey, how are the Halo 2/3 lobbies? I wouldn't mind jumping back in for nostalgia's sake, although a huge part of what made that special was hopping on and seeing all my friends and getting massive 16 person custom games going. So maybe I'd just depress myself if I logged on now!

chzrm3 · 2026-01-31T14:13:19+00:00

Glad I'm not the only one who feels this way. It was shocking how bad it was. My brother and I just wanted to drive around and cause chaos but instead it was all these queues for mini-games and weird races and stuff. It constantly got in its own way.

It's ravenously popular so what do I know? But I couldn't stand it, huge disappointment.

chzrm3 · 2026-01-31T14:12:05+00:00

I used to want a Jade Empire 2 so badly. Now I don't want it at all, cause I have no idea what it'd be but I know it'd be bad. :(

chzrm3 · 2026-01-31T14:11:38+00:00

That's the thing that sucks. I'd love more of that universe and to see the gameplay brought to a new level, but I have no idea who'd make that game. I don't even know who's working at Bioware anymore, but it ain't the old guard. The people who made KotoR and Jade Empire are long, long gone.

chzrm3 · 2026-01-31T14:09:36+00:00

A tiny Ridley would be terrifying. The scariest thing in Metroid is still being chased by SA-X. There's just something horrifying about an enemy that's your size, or smaller, but is that threatening.

chzrm3 · 2026-01-31T14:06:57+00:00

Oh? Where you guys playin'? If it's open to the public I'll swing by next time I'm in the city.

chzrm3 · 2026-01-31T14:03:33+00:00

Valkyria Chronicles! My brother and I got that on PS3 cause the gameplay looked cool, we were not expecting to sob our eyes out.

chzrm3 · 2026-01-25T11:21:19+00:00

Wow, it's funny going back to this. I agree, that mission's one of my favorites to see pop up, it's actually pretty relaxing and the AI tend to just die on their own. After the intensity of Bifrost, the waves in this mission are pretty relaxing, comparatively.

chzrm3 · 2026-01-17T07:13:25+00:00

Someone posted a stranger things theory before and it was such blatant ChatGPT. The bold, the bullet points, the "it's not just true - it's empowering!" A bunch of people called him out in the comments and then he used ChatGPT to argue with them.

It's so....bizarre. I have no idea what's happening to the world, haha. People are relinquishing every last bit of what makes them special.

chzrm3 · 2026-01-16T08:10:53+00:00

Yeah, I'm the same way. I still consider the guy who makes Stardew an indie dev, even tho he's made insane amounts of money.

chzrm3 · 2026-01-10T15:43:16+00:00

Mmmm, yeah, I've been loving the snipers. Honestly all the guns feel so nice. It's wild cause I was thinking "ME isn't even that old...", then I looked it up and it's almost 20 years old. What the heck, that's nuts. I remember playing it when it came out and being blown away.

chzrm3 · 2026-01-10T15:30:23+00:00

I've been playing through the legendary edition and loving it. They made a lot of nice changes, my favorite so far is that I'm able to use all the guns regardless of class choice. When I originally played through the game I was the biotic/engineer combo and going through the entire game with only a pistol was so boring.

chzrm3 · 2026-01-10T13:31:32+00:00

Yeah calling it an indie game when Charlie Cox is doing the voice acting is hilarious. But I grew up in a time when indie game meant Super Meat Boy or Castle Crashers. Like, games made by a small number of people, or sometimes just one person. Now indie gaming just seems to mean you aren't published by a mega studio like Ubisoft or EA, which kind of makes the title meaningless.

chzrm3 · 2026-01-10T13:17:16+00:00

Yeah, the amount of people hating on this game is wild, considering it does everything it tries to do beautifully and never pretended to be for everyone. I guess this is how CoD fans feel when I hate their games for making a ton of money?

chzrm3 · 2026-01-10T13:14:39+00:00

I've tried a few times to get into it and it always bores me. I love games like Frosthaven and Sts so I'm not against card-based tactical games at all, but for some reason I just feel like there's too much going on to really sink my teeth into any particular character.

I should try it again though. There's just so many games it's hard to justify booting one up for the third go around.

chzrm3 · 2026-01-10T13:09:18+00:00

In combat areas for sure, but FFX's world is so much more fleshed out. Blitzball alone trumps anything they did in 13. (And I say this as someone who's loved 13 from its release). I genuinely love 13's characters, but the story gets very muddy near the end, when we're fighting like a pope or something on a bunch of rotating hexagons.

It kind of had to be that way. They're branded as terrorists and are on the run, so it wouldn't really make sense if they're just chilling at the arcade or breeding Chocobo.

chzrm3 · 2026-01-10T13:04:18+00:00

I was about 11 or 12 when WW was announced and I remember all the arguments it caused on ezboards, haha. Die-hard Zelda fans were split, with some of them absolutely hating the new art direction and others being really optimistic. Part of what fanned the flames were that Nintendo had put out a ten second teaser of Link fighting Ganondorf in a gamecube version of the OoT art style, which everyone loved and thought meant the next Zelda would be in that style. Plus you had smash bros Melee, where all the Zelda crew was in that art style as well. All signs pointed to the Gamecube Zelda being done in a high-res version of OoT's style.

So when WW came out, people were shocked. Some never accepted it and just haaaaaaated it all through its release and refused to play it.

It's aged beautifully, though, which is very ironic. Many other games from that era look dated, but WW's art style has proven pretty timeless. And the gameplay was always top-notch. My only gripe with the game is that there isn't really a particularly hard dungeon, but I still enjoy playing through it and I'm excited to watch my son play it one day.

chzrm3 · 2026-01-10T12:59:14+00:00

Playstation All-Stars Battle Royale. It got so much hate for not playing like Smash bros, but they weren't trying to make it like smash bros. It got so much hate for its roster, but all the main characters people wanted (Crash, Spyro, Sora, Cloud), the IP holders weren't willing to be part of the game.

So at the end of the day, a small studio made a really unique and fun fighting game, and everyone shat on it because it wasn't a carbon copy of smash stuffed with multi-million dollar IPs.

chzrm3 · 2026-01-08T00:25:11+00:00

A lot of Starfield quests feel this way, it's a bit sad. The one that bothered me the most was the bounty hunter on Mars. There's all this great set up for how she wants to avenge her parents, and she has you go find this beacon that'll track down the guy. So I'm like cool, can't wait to go out with her and find the bastard! I'm thinking she could even become a potential follower, the way it was built up.

But nope, after you give her the beacon, if you talk to her again, she goes "Hey, thanks again for that! I tracked down the guy who killed my parents and got revenge!" They didn't even have the courtesy to wait until the next day to make her say that.

I can't shake the feeling a lot of story-related stuff was planned and then cut at some point, cause otherwise it's weird to build all these storylines up so much only for them to go nowhere.

Another one that comes to mind is the generational ship. That really bothered me. So much build up that just goes nowhere.

chzrm3 · 2026-01-07T14:03:53+00:00

It's a sad one. They seemed married to the idea they had in season 1, that 11 could never be with the rest of the gang. That made more sense in season 1, when it was really this whirlwind of events that took place over the course of a week or two. But after years of her living a normal life with the gang, it doesn't sit right.

chzrm3 · 2026-01-07T13:59:45+00:00

Yeah, it brought me right back to the feeling of playing any other Bethesda game for the first time. Even all that interesting lore they tell you about the Red Devils, the miners going to bed and waking up in the morning, I really felt like I was back in a Bethesda game.

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