There’s a lot of both. No wonder it’s a running joke in the Genshin community how many designs have “coochie flaps”, detached sleeves or thigh straps. Or the ever-present high heels on female characters, no matter if she’s a jungle explorer or a desert warrior.

Also, just don’t spend money if you don’t want to. It’s not hard. Nobody forces you to spend money on any game with a gun to your head (hopefully). Just have self-control, it’s easy. And if for some reason you don’t have self-control, work on it. Improve yourself.

It’s not hard for you. But many people are wired in a way that makes it exceptionally hard for them to resist these kind of psychological dark patterns. These are innate characteristics, with some overlap with ADHD and other neurodiversity, not necessarily something one can “work on”. And there’s a reason why these dark patterns are in the games, because they work in extracting more money from players than they would otherwise give.

Stephanie Sterling made a video a few years ago where they go into detail how modern games prey on vulnerable people: The Addictive Cost Of Predatory Videogame Monetization (The Jimquisition)

Saaame, I love games with a ton of dialogue, hell one of my favourite games ever is Disco Elysium. And it’s not even that Genshin’s story is that bad, but it is told and localised very badly. It’s basically the trope of r/Im14andthisisdeep - an overall pretty shallow and meandering story (probably due to its gacha nature), often told using such an extremely dry and ornate language (probably due to direct translation from Chinese) with tons of characters and concepts thrown in in the attempt to pretend it’s something epic and profound, that the end result feels really disjointed. Also Paimon’s constant inane intrusions and hogging of the Traveler’s role is just actively bad storytelling.

Eh idk, I play Genshin for the open-world exploration, which I find really enjoyable. Also love the landscapes and music. The combat is alright too, but the story is below mediocre, and the monetisation is predatory af.

trying to make positive changes in a Sims life, and it only makes me feel worse about trying to improve my own situation.

Haha same, whenever I was working on improving their life, I was always acutely aware that I could be spending that time improving my own :D I guess there was some satisfaction from wish fulfilment (they own a house, wow), but yea I always spent an afternoon setting up mods, another day or 2 playing, then just got bored. Rinse and repeat every couple years. (Though I haven’t touched Sims 3 since the pandemic, and never tried Sims 4 so whatevs xd)

Guild Wars 2 is 14 years old this year, and you could argue that Guild Wars 1 is having a new renaissance after 21 years :)

Yeah I hate voxel graphics, so it never worked for me.

Also not into creative sandbox games. Give me a problem to solve or situation to improve, and I’ll have fun. Give me a big sandbox with no goals, and I just get bored 😅 (Same with Sims and other life simulators. I’d much rather play stories other people wrote, than come up with my own.)

Incremental games are that kind of braindead thing I can play for 5-10 mins at a time, when I’m too tired for proper games :)

But only with an autoclicker, otherwise it’s pure torture.

Yeah, I put 2000+ hours into Genshin over 4 years and have like 75 characters without ever spending any money. But the game is still so full of psychological dark patterns that would squeeze out the last penny from those whose personality or neurodiversity makes them vulnerable against such manipulation.

And yet again, the core of the issue of capitalism. As Stephanie Sterling put it many a time, the companies’ attitude is “Why be satisfied with a lot of money, when we could have all the money.”

When I went on the main Genshin subreddit, I was so baffled that people do little pulling rituals, and even do parties with thematic food and decoration for characters to influence their gacha luck 😵‍💫 Maybe they didn’t take it that seriously, but it still felt like a very unhealthy attitude towards such a predatory game.

As someone with 2000+ hours in Genshin, I completely agree 😆 I only play for exploration nowadays because the story actively pushed me away, while the gambling never appealed to me. I wish we could just unlock characters via quests. I get no joy from a lucky draw, so I just treat gacha pulls in batches of guaranteed unlocks, like the price of this character is 160 pulls and that’s it. But the whole monetisation is disgustingly predatory for those who are even a little susceptible to it.

I had to convert that to hours to make it comparable, holy fuck that’s almost 88,000 hours 😵

1. Guild Wars 2 with 5,004 hours since 2015 :)
2. Guild Wars 1 with 2,507 hours since 2018 (yes, I started it after sequel; also spent a few weeks afk farming, so probably a few hundred hours less)
3. Genshin with 2,248 hours since 2021

I love open worlds, but I need some sort of goal / completionist aspect going on to actually have fun. Because yes, just wandering around quickly wears thin, unless a game map is exceptionally beautiful or has good environmental storytelling.

A goal for me might be a % map completion, collecting certain items, finding steps of a side quest - I guess just something to be able to say, ok I’m done, I explored/completed it all.

My thought is that if one of the main appeals of the game is (meant to be) the story, the story better be both good and well-told (which I learnt is not the same, see Genshin). For games where the main appeal is the gameplay, I’m more inclined to tolerate a barebones or trope-fest story.

What are some games you bounced off of, that you think may have been because they were missing motivation?

I think I only experienced this in point & click adventure games, where the story must be good to prop up the enjoyment value along the more lightweight gameplay.

What games found you putting up with a mediocre gameplay experience because you were invested in the given story turnout?

I think it’s usually the other way around for me lol, where I put up with a below-mediocre story bc the gameplay is fun. Usually if the story is so well-written that I really want to see how it ends, the devs put effort into making the game’s other aspects good too, so I haven’t seen the kind of imbalance you speak of in the genres I play. Maybe if I played shooters, it would be more prevalent 🤷

Sunless Sea. Neat setting and writing. I don’t like the gameplay — simple combat, not very interesting choices, hunt-the-item stuff.

Oh I forgot about Sunless Sea. I played the hell out of Fallen London, but the switch to real-time gameplay was stressful enough that not even the worldbuilding and writing could make up for it.

BioShock and any other narrative-heavy games with a shooter/action gameplay. I love lore and worldbuilding, but I really hate shooter gameplay, even more so in first person. If they were, say, turn-based RPGs, I would absolutely play them.

I went through my curator list just now; these are the largest/most active ones:

• Game uses Ai - 961 reviews - last update: 2026-03-27
• Is it AI? - 774 reviews - last update: 2026-03-26
• AI_games_flag - 1,998 reviews - last update: 2026-03-17
• AI Check - 2,000 reviews - last update: 2025-12-23
• The Curator Page I Made to Flag AI Slop - 383 reviews - last update: 2026-02-13
• Ai? No buy! - 343 reviews - last update: 2026-03-23
• Does This Game Use GenAI? - 193 reviews - last update: 2026-03-27
• NO AI #HumanArtists - 119 reviews - last update: 2026-03-25
• AI Check 2 - 86 reviews - last update: 2026-03-23

Same. Steam is so inundated with AI slop that I’m now following like a dozen different curators that flag AI usage, for the cases when the developers “forget” to fill out their AI disclosure field D: (which I’ve restyled to be red and on the top of the page)

Sid Meier’s Civ 5, and I was 24 😆 (growing up, my family was piracy-only, so this was the first game I actually bought)

and was absolutely worth it :) I paid ~15 GBP for the base game + some expansions and DLC, and so far put 500+ hours into the game. I still reinstall it every few years.

Every other commenter under this seems to forget that stock assets exist and worked fine for decades without involving AI slop.

not sure if this is the reason, but around its release there was some controversy (link 1, link 2) related to the studio founder’s sexist remarks and some bizarre streaming restrictions (don’t mention violence, “feminist propaganda” or covid), so some people might still reflexively downvote anything related to the game

ahh the schadenfreude… 😈

yes, it’s definitely the kind of humour that people either really love or really hate :D

Deponia just has such an unlikeable protagonist, that I bounced off, even though I’m a fan of point & click adventures.

Reus is too complex and grindy. I liked the premise, but in practice it wasn’t fun to play.

Sims 3 I kept returning to every few years, but each time I quickly got bored of the daily life management gameplay. I like to experience stories other people wrote, not come up with my own.

Ah I ended up hating Stanley Parable, but mostly because the developer is a troll. I admit, on a meta level it fits the game’s theme, but as an achi hunter it felt insulting to come across comments of him laughing at players who couldn’t figure out what made specific achievements trigger, when behind the scenes he kept changing the criteria week to week just to mess with his players…

PvP in any context. I find going against other players very stressful, and even when I’m winning, I know I just made the day of other players a little bit worse, and that just sours the experience.

the guy’s face looks so airbrushed on that photo

The US Guardian is strongly pro-trans, while the UK Guardian is more mixed. It had (maybe still has?) some TERFs in prominent positions for a very long time, and they kept churning out their transphobic opinion pieces week after week.

There was even an intra-Guardian clash about this in 2018, when their US reporters called out their UK colleagues: Why we take issue with the Guardian’s stance on trans rights in the UK

Hey, you might want to contact the Sentinels of the Store group about this - they do reports on Steam’s developer and customer issues, and occasionally have direct communication with Valve.

In fact they covered this article in a recent post: SteamWatch - Developers Accuse Steam of Failing to Tackle Bigotry

mark reviews as being irrelevant to be scrubbed

as the article details, in the case of reviews flagged by devs, Steam gets to decide if they want to remove them or not, and often they don’t, even when they contain open bigotry or personal attacks towards the developer

This is why I always look at negative reviews. I often come across “downsides” that aren’t downsides to me or outright appealing.

Just constant “Is this AI?”

Tbf a ton of games with AI-generated graphics are not flagged as that despite Steam’s rules, so I’m not surprised that people want more reassurance.

Devs can moderate their forums, but not their reviews. They can only flag those for Steam to look at, but Steam is extremely hands-off with its moderation, see the examples listed in the article.

Are these games you fell out of love with? That Rainsdowne Players looks interesting, thanks for the rec :)

Maybe Reus? I enjoyed the basic premise and the first few hours, but then the game’s flaws started to become more apparent (e.g. repetitiveness, upgrade chains becoming unmemorisably complex) and I put it down around 12% of full completion.

good!

To me it seems the main issue is not even AI, it’s capitalism. If artists didn’t need to sell their art to survive, we wouldn’t even have this discussion.

Absolutely. It seems like 90% of the issues we have in society is because of this fucked-up economic system :/

That was the point I was trying to make too. The question of “is it theft” is moot, it still causes harm.

For me it boils down to: were the artists, whose work was used to build the large commercial models, asked about this and agreed to it? No.

Piracy only affects existing work, genAI affects all the future artwork they would try to make a living from. See AI hitting cultural sector hard: Fifth of freelance artists have lost income, work | NL Times