The type of game that when you recommend it, you have to clarify they need to play a few hours before they'll understand.
To me, many JRPGs have this problem. Xenoblade, Final Fantasy (14 especially), Tales, Kiseki, etc all take forever to get interesting.
Microsoft Flight Simulator. Fuck your tutorials and flying through rings bullshit I just want to fly a jetliner upside down through a trench of the Grand Canyon.
pillars of eternity is like a masterclass in making your game as completely fucking inaccessible as possible. it has a particularly bad case of rpg character creator syndrome with a million poorly-explained stats you have to pick off the bat, and then once you've struggled through that it does a series of the biggest wall-of-text lore dumps ive seen in any game, and if you miss any of it at the start youre gonna have no idea about whats going on for the rest of the game. basically perfectly designed to make you restart or quit after a couple of hours once you realise your character is useless cos you picked the wrong stats and also you have no idea whats going on. great game after that though
I'm not a huge fan of Fallout 2 in the first place, but the Temple of Trials is an objectively bad tutorial that punishes you for not picking the certain skills and noticeably bad design compared to the rest of the game.
The first game puts you in a cave with rats but at least you'll have a gun and a knife so you can deal with them depending on skills. If you decided to pick Guns in 2 then you're fucked in the tutorial.
Yeah, my first time in Fallout 2, I picked as my tag skills Science, Repair, and Energy Weapons. I don't think I could've picked a worse set of early-game skills if I'd tried.
Dragon's Dogma.
So much of the early game tricks you into thinking that you're playing a pretty run of the mill RPG (if admittedly kinda boring), so very few players get to the later parts were it goes fully off the rails.
Yeah dragons dogma felt like a prototype for a real game. I have trouble getting into it for a lot of reasons, though from what I've seen the late game seems to be way more dungeon crawly and atmospheric than the walking across the open-world forever.
This might just be me misinterpreting the story, but I always thought the bit at the end where
spoiler
You kill god during a fight where he reveals that everyone you met during your adventures are just as mindless as the pawns ultimately.
Was kinda getting at the plot twist that you were expecting.
Final Fantasy XIII is a goddamned hallway simulator for the first 20 hours of the game. By the time you're out of the "tutorial" and reach the open-world part, you just have the final boss left and maybe an optional sidequest or two.
My first Oblivion playthrough went a little like you described, too -- sneaking through a sewer and killing rats for a damned hour and a half to get back to Emperor Picard because I refused to stop picking up every item that dropped (what if I need these brooms for the broom dungeon?!), etc.
Star War Jedi Knight II: Jedi Outcast: Way too many levels before you get your lightsaber in a game engine where the lightsaber combat is the most fun thing you can do. It's possible to play for hours and put it away concluding that it's just a run of the mill shooter, but that would be a big mistake.
Also both Knights of the Old Republic games take a long time to get to the good stuff. KOTOR I has Taris and Dantooine, KOTOR II has Peragus and Telos. It just takes a long time for those games to set up their main conflict, so a lot of the stuff you do on those first planets feels a bit aimless at the time you're doing it and pointless by the time you're done.
Final Fantasy XII is yet another JRPG that has this problem. The very first scene/tutorial level is actually pretty great - you see some politics happen, a betrayal, and it's all in media res while you learn the game's strange but fun combat system. Then you switch to the actual main character Vaan and it takes like six hours for the game to get interesting again.
I like Taris a hell of a lot more than Peragus. At least there's quests and such on Taris, a bit of variety.
Oh yeah total agreement. The other planets are a bit slow, but Peragus is an actual slog.
A lot of old mmorpgs that took inspiration from Everquest. The beginning is a slog of killing 15 rats for pelts and turning them in or flat out grinding in boring zones for 10 levels. Things don't start to pick up until you become a lowbie and start getting into lowbie groups.
oblivion and skyrim both have incredibly boring intros. being in jail fucking sucks imo
Skyrim has about the most interesting intro to any game I've played. A lot of games start off with some extremely boring tutorial junk. And then when you leave the fort and the game just opens up :stalin-feels-good:
Both Dishonored games. Not really from a gameplay perspective, but narratively - and it's actually somewhat of an opposite problem to the JRPG one, where the games are in so much of a rush to get to the "interesting" parts (the eponymous dishonoring), that they speedrun the part where you're actually introduced to the characters you're supposed to care about.
If the first game actually had been about the "Revenge solves everything" tagline that some guy in Bethesda Marketing came up with, then it'd be fine - you quickly establish that the guy who looks like this is evil, and move on to the part where you brutally carve a path through his various associates and allies until you get to him. But that's not what the story actually is (although honestly, it may have been better in that format, but maybe that's just the bad execution of the real thing coloring my opinions).
And it's really disappointing that the second game does the same thing - I would have actually been really into the idea of getting to spend more time with Emily as an actual empress (and you could still fit in gameplay bits in this - the tutorial establishes that Emily and Corvo would go to the city to train, you could have that be in the main story rather than something separately accessed from the menu, and maybe have some extra bits of that), and getting some idea for how things are going politically, maybe even putting some effort into justifying her neglectful rule (from a character motivation perspective at least).
But no - we have to get dishonored in like 5 minutes, and you're now supposed to care that this character who you've known for less than a minute and has like 2 lines is dead.
Yeah it would have been cool if 2 started off with something similar to when you land in that whaling town where there's a bunch of people you can talk to but the game kind of prefers a "fill in the details as you progress" kind of story rather than up front exposition. I think you're supposed to basically get a tour of the empire that you've neglected in an undercover boss fashion as it goes along. Because an Empress can't exactly get a fair reading of the situation when not disguised. Woulda been funny if everyone was extremely nice to Emily and supportive and then you land in the whaling area and everyone's talking smack about the Empress. Can't really remember how much people actually talk about the government though.
Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous starts with going through a boring cave with boringly easy centipede enemies you fought maybe 500 of in the previous game. Then you meet a character with the most Marvel-ass quippy dialogue, the game has some good writing, just not in that cave. Then, before the game has given you a chance to start caring about it, it hits you with a knockout punch of a page full of text about something boring, I just quit playing there when I tried it the first time.
Life. Like I get that we're late-game carries, but ffs we don't even start with the ability to move
Persona 4, for the same reason as the other RPGs. But also because it puts the worst foot forward for most of the characters.
Knights of the Old Republic II, the Witcher 1 (which itself is decent, but a long not-as-good preamble to the other two games), RPG's are bad for slow starts
The beginning of Oblivion sucks not a huge fan of the way skyrim starts either. I always get mods that lets you skip the first hour or so where you're on rails.
I feel like this is any game longer than 5 hrs. Press WASD to move. Use the camera to look around! I understand not everyone has played a game before, but like come on
