Okay let me start with two heavy hitters right from the get go and don’t forget these are only personal oppinions and I absolute understand if you like those games. Good for you!
Zelda: Breath of the Wild - Not a bad game per se, but I don’t get the hype behind it. Sure the dungeons are fun but the world is so lifeless, the story non existent, the combat pretty shallow, the tower climbing is very much like FarCry but for some reasons it’s okay here while Ubisoft gets the blame…like I said I dont get why the game is so beloved. Never finished it after the 20 hour mark and probably never will.
Red Dead Redemption 2 - Just like Zelda not a bad game, but imho highly overrated. Graphics and and atmosphere are amazing but the controls are clunky and overloaded, nearly everybody is an unlikable douchebag who I would love to shoot myself at the first opportunity (maybe except Jack and Abigail) but I have to root and care for them. The game is just so long and feels very stretched, you already know that you won’t get Dutch because it’s a prequel and for an open world game you often get handholded in your weapon selection or things you can do because you have to wait for them to be unlocked by the game. I’m now nearly done with the game, playing the epilogue at the moment and I would say the last chapters are more entertaining than the rest of the game, but I still can’t understand why this game was on so many game of the year lists and I really wanted to put the controller down a dozen times.
So there they are, two highly controversial oppinions by me and now I’m really curios what your takes are and how highly I get downvoted into oblivion 😂
TL;DR - I’m a fan of tighter, focused experiences with a strong element of puzzle solving, and I’m generally not a fan of sandbox-y experiences.
Some of my favorite games are Zelda, Ys, or Half Life. Loot in those games is typically an intentional part of the progression, and the gameplay feels like an action-y puzzle. Resources have a specific purpose, and wasting them has consequences.
Using a slightly different weapon, item, cosmetic, etc doesn’t excite me at all, I am mostly there for the story and gameplay. To me, shopping feels like poor game design and essentially covering for the player missing something important. So games with extensive store/inventory mechanics feel poorly designed, on average.
There’s one big exception here: if the economy of the game is integral to the core loop. For example, I love Recettear, which makes loot and inventory management a core mechanic in an interesting way. I’m also working on my own game with a player-driven economy (e.g. if you sell a lot of something, you get less for each additional one, it’s cheaper for AI/other players to buy, and NPCs will slowly distribute the items around the game world).
On those same lines, I generally don’t like things with crafting, enchanting, etc, unless it’s an interesting, core gameplay mechanic. I’m very goal oriented, so the journey is less important than the destination, so I like constant “mini-destinations” (boss fights, puzzles, etc). I almost never replay games, unless there’s a different set of challenges to explore (e.g. I loved each of the three characters in Ys Origin, but won’t bother playing Morrowind twice).
Yeah, I’m not a fan of loot that offers incremental benefit, but I do enjoy loot that offers a meaningfully different way to engage with the game (be that a new ability in a metroidvania or some new weapon in a soulslike)
Yup, I love the ability-based progression in Zelda, older Ys, Metroidvanias like Ori and Hollow Knight, etc.
I don’t like loot for the sake of loot. For example, Borderlands prides itself on having 16-17M weapons (they’re procedurally generated). That’s not interesting to me, that’s tedious. I much prefer the Half-Life approach (14 in original, 10 in Half Life 2), where each weapon fills a niche and you pick based on what you need.
A lot of people love loot in games, such as in MMORPGs, Bethesda-style RPGs, and Diablo-style RPGs. The latter is the most frustrating because many people mean Diablo-style when they say “ARPG,” whereas I mean Zelda/Ys-style.