What games have you played due to FOMO?
What games have you played due to FOMO?
FOMO stands for Fear Of Missing Out.
I've tried playing some JRPGS because they are considered classics and detective games like LA Noire before realizing the genre just wasn't for me.
I've also been stuck in the mentality of if I want to play a game in a series I need to play the prior games. I'm doing this currently for Deus Ex, the Witcher, and Splinter Cell. I guess I'd consider that FOMO to a degree.
Edit: I meant FOMO as in the fear of missing out on something relevant. Not necessarily something that is intentionally being time limited like raids or micro transactions.
Umm. It sounds more like that you are just trying out new things and genres and finding that it's not always a hit with you. That's healthy.
When you put it like that yeah but I was forcing myself through games I wasn't necessarily enjoying.
There's an important moment where you have to ask yourself...
"Is this story so bad I'm not invested in it anymore?"
"Is the gameplay bothering me so much that it feels bad or unfun to me?"
If the answer is yes to both of those, you may feel free to drop the game with full confidence you're not gonna play it again.
It's okay to stop playing a game after you've played enough of it to understand it isn't for you.
I think I had about 10~12 hours played of Diablo 4 before I noticed it wasn't for me and stopped. Still enjoyed what little I played of it, but wasn't motivated to continue.
Surprisingly, Baldur's Gate 3. I absolutely love D&D, but I tried playing through the Pathfinder video games, Pillars of Eternity, Divinity: Original Sin 2, and nothing stuck with me. I just wasn't a fan of the CRPG genre, despite me playing in-person tabletop RPGs multiple times a week.
I bought BG3 thinking I probably wouldn't get hooked, but I didn't want to miss out when literally every one of my friends is playing it. Well, I am absolutely hooked and have 40 hours in the game and will likely do multiple playthroughs, and I kind of "get" the genre now. I know PoE, PF, or DOS2 may not be as good, but I feel a lot more confident at the prospect of playing them now.
So in this case, FOMO helped me a great deal.
I'm in the same boat, I've been playing Death Stranding and a few other indie games once every weekend or two... or three. Now every one of my friends and coworkers are talking about hundreds of hours in BG3, I've bought and downloaded it last night to catch up.
The genre itself appeals to me, but the amount of time and concentration it takes me to get into a game nowadays, maybe this gets a kick start.
Mass Effect Andromeda. The reviews convinced me I'd hate it, but I couldn't stand the thought of possibly missing some lore after I loved the first 3 so much. Turns out it was actually pretty good.
No Man's Sky. It looked slow and grindy but people kept hyping it up. I caved, and forced myself to play 20 hours trying to find the good bits. I never found them.
I think the hate for Andromeda was a little overblown. I enjoyed the heck out of the game, regardless of any weird facial expressions! It of course was never going to live up to the original trilogy but it stood out on its own in a lot of positive ways
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Flying around in VR in space in NMS is amazing. I think I lost interest because of the unnecessarily cumbersome crafting and item management though.
No Man's Sky. It looked slow and grindy but people kept hyping it up. I caved, and forced myself to play 20 hours trying to find the good bits. I never found them.
That's a game I tried as well but I feel like I set myself up for failure by trying to see everything the beginning of the game had to offer versus exploring naturally.
Cyberpunk 2077. I was pretty skeptical of it before it came out (didn't really feel like it was doing anything unique), but it was such a big release I picked it up to have an opinion on it.
Don't think I'm gonna do the same for Starfield, though, that's just a pass
I think for me it's going to end up depending on the modding community and how linear the game feels.
I played The Outer Worlds due to the hype around Obsidian releasing a game but it just felt kind of flat and lifeless. Maybe it's just because it seems similar in atmosphere but I'm worried Starfield is going to end up feeling the same.
Even though I agree for the most part about Cyberpunk,I did finish it ,but skipped parts of story by doing the worse ending. I intend to start a new game after Phantom Liberty dlc comes out just cause I'm curious about the improvements.
Starfield... Now I never liked Bethesda games and could never finish most. I did finish FO4,but was very very bored by the end and rushed it. Starfield is just so bland and has so many mixed ideas and mechanics from other games it just feels like it can't make up its mind what it wants to be. And the combat... Cyberpunk feels like a combat masterpiece compared to Starfield and Star Citizen the same (despite all issues) for the space part. Starfield just can't draw me in.
Edit: autocorrect
Cuphead and I fucking hated it. Lovely art style and retro feel but my god. I play video games to unwind and have fun. What the hell maaaaaaaaaan.
I recently removed it from my wishlist because of this, loved the artstyle and had seen a lot of praise, but gameplay wise looked 100% like something not for me, i had just wishlisted it bc of it's reputation.
Elden Ring
The glowing review and how people say its the best time to try a souls game made me buy it.
Not a game for me.
(Just in case people start saying I need to get good. It has nothing to do with the difficulty. I am thoroughly enjoying AC6 now.)
No worries! I'm a big fan of FROM and you are absolutely right, they just aren't for everyone. I honestly wish more people would see that a game can be good but you don't have to enjoy it. That's me and a lot of strategy games like Crusader Kings.
Minecraft.
Way back in its beta days, a couple of mates couldn't put it down. They couldn't explain why digging holes was fun nor placing cubes. I really didn't get it after a demonstration from them. Eventually had a LAN with a mate that was vaguely curious but also didn't think it was going to be interesting.
We didn't sleep for the next 36hrs, nor notice it was a new day until my family got up and started making breakfast.
Did you two play much afterwards? I've played a few times with friends but I find it usually fizzles out after a couple months then it's just me who hosts occasionally messing around.
Fully the same here. Sometimes I get bouts of inspiration to hop on the server or organize to do something with the group we have, but always fizzles out after a few months as you say. Which is fine really, a lot of other good games I tend to circle back to over time just like minecraft.
Diablo 4. Played it for 10hrs then I got bored of running 30m, fighting a group of demons, running 30m, fight demons, repeat. Haven't touched it since.
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They've improved monster density, but it's still just... meh. I picked it up because I didn't want to miss season 1. I was seriously forcing myself to play it and decided to just quit.
That's not what fomo means. I have a bad case of FOMO right now with Genshin Impact. I genuinely like the game, but it forces me to login twice a day with the resin system (basically energy that accumulates over time), otherwise it caps and I lose progress. Also a lot of their content is in the form of limited time events. They do this for the obvious reason of it being extremely profitable. This is why you should be very cautious about getting into live service games.
Welp, I was interested in trying GI until reading this.
Yeah it's a legitimately a really good game and still has a huge amount of permanent content, but that's the nature of live service games. They need that constant engagement to survive. A game like Baulders gate, you buy it and the devs are paid regardless of how much or how little you play, not really the case with live service.
Oh and GI is gacha which isn't good either. But then they do cool stuff like make a really good card game in game that's completely free with zero paid stuff, and even hold irl tourneys with big prize pools.
The only live service game I have and likely will ever allow myself to play is Another Eden, ostensibly a mobile gacha but unlike any others in that genre (and yet... not entirely if you know what I mean:-D - it is less predatory than any modern game that allows in-app purchases that I've ever even heard of but that aspect is not entirely absent from it). It hits the JRPG nostalgia feel for being a spiritual successor to Chrono Trigger and Cross, made by some of the same developers actually, and the artwork and music especially are just gorgeous.:-D
And ironically, many people complain bitterly that they want it to be more like GI, with a pity system. Never mind that the gacha can be irrelevant here as you can do everything purely with the free characters (and more effort, especially JP-style i.e. heavy grinding), the FOMO salt is real, and I see now that games are just giving the people what they want, regardless of whether that's good for them or not. On the one hand it keeps further game development going, and people are free to spend how they please, while on the other there are horror stories of people dropping hundreds or even thousands of dollars (I think even USD $ currency), while having little to show for it in the end.
Predatory is predatory, and while on the one hand I'd love to check out GI someday, on the other I just don't think I could stand the gacha elements in it. It warps and twists EVERYTHING it touches, e.g. increasing pressure to make waifu/husbando portraits that objectify both women and men in it, and leads to content that looks visually appealing but in Another Eden at least, has not been tested and is not "fun" to play.
The funny part is that originally I had to choose between GI and AE, and I am so glad that I went the way that I did. Although probably better to avoid any such gacha at all in the future.:-|
To be fair, a pity system should definitely be a thing if there's any sort of gamba. That way there's at least a hard limit on what you can waste your money on until it's guaranteed. I at least find GI characters not to be too predatory, you mostly pull them for fun. In fact some of the best characters are the starting 4 stars lol, and you pull cuz you like the character a lot. They really develop the characters a lot, and if you've seen any comic cons or anime conventions, you'll see an insane amount of Genshin cosplays cuz they suck you in by really loving the characters. The gameplay is honestly so easy you absolutely don't need a good character, and it's actually incredibly balanced. The earliest characters released are actually still S tier because they fucked up the balance a bit with them so the new characters are still good but more niche focused, so everything is still relevant.
The only hard content is what's called the spiral abyss, which is a completely optional dungeon that rotates every 2 weeks and 100% clearing it gives you like 5 free gacha rolls, so people really just use it to bench mark characters since nothing else in the game is remotely challenging, nor is there any pvp aspect or anything.
But yeah, also Gacha and live service games tend to be a drug, once they have you hooked it's hard to quit. Sunk cost fallacy is real hard to overcome in gacha games.
You really don't "need" to login twice a day. A single extra domain/boss drop isn't going to completely make or break any content in the game. Even spiral abyss is only 2ish extra gacha pulls if you are really pushing it. Which again, won't make or break any content in the game.
A huge amount of the event stuff is totally skippable, some minor lore here and there can be watched on YouTube, there are sometimes event weapons, but the majority of those aren't even that much better than other permanently avaible ones, and certainly not over weapon banners.
I've been playing GI for almost a year, and it has been an absolute blast. I do the content I care about, skip stuff I dont. Its a fantastically fun game, that I can pop in go hunting for chests for an hour or two, maybe do some event minigames for pulls. If you have low self control and cannot bare to be 5% less effective in combat where you one shot everything with a single burst then it might not be a game you want to play, but for casual playing around and exploring the world fighting random monsters for happy treasure chest sounds, it has been an absolute delight.
A lot of the Zelda games, for me. I tried Ocarina of Time and Majora’s Mask and they were not my thing. A lot of people raved about those games but I couldn’t get into them. Then there were a couple on the DS that I couldn’t get into, either.
But then I found Wind Waker and absolutely loved it, and then loved Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom (so far), too!
Among Us. But it was free and I only needed a couple of rounds to figure out I don't enjoy it much
Subnautica, because lots of people said it was a great game and there were things that could be spoiled, so that indicated a neat story. The beginning was freaking awesome! But I hate crafting survival games, so I didn't play for very long.
The grind and particularly the inventory management make me never want to play Subnautica games again despite loving the first one. I hope they sort this out for the next game in this style if they do it again. The base needs to have a shared inventory that it pulls from when crafting, and preferably stacks of items are shown instead of individual items.
That said, I don't know if they'll do another survival game again. They made Natural Selection before it (which is awesome and still has a community) and have made Moonbreaker now. They tend to jump around to a ton of different styles of games.
Fallout 3 was one. I had just transferred to a new college and was dorming. Several of the guys were playing FO3, so I decided to get it, even though I knew almost nothing about FO games. But I knew it'd be something to talk about with people. And it worked, even though I didn't get that far into the game. Made friends; some that 15yrs later I still talk to on occasion. As far as the game itself, I haven't played another FO since; just generally not my kinda game.
My gaming buddies now, who I've known them for several years, have the attention span of goldfish, so I've largely stopped FOMO games purchases. I can't keep spending money on games they'll play for a week or two, or less. Though if it appears there's some longevity, then maybe I'll jump in. Barotrauma and Project Zomboid are a couple where the FOMO eventually won out, but it did pay off. We've sunk hundreds of hours into each game over the last 2-3yrs.
Fallout 1 and 2 are 2D isometric turn based games, while 3 and later move to a first person perspective so you might enjoy the classics... Unless you just don't enjoy the setting - in which case fair enough.
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FO76 and had paid the pre order and I was hoping to do roleplaying but it was so buggy and the controversies made me no longer play it.
Have you played since the release of the Wastelanders DLC? I've heard that was the turning point for a lot of people
Only multiplayer games, since a single player game is usually available forever someway or another. Multiplayer games live and die based on popularity. No players = no game. And the longer the game is around, the fewer players it generally has so I like to get in right when they come out if I'm interested at all.
There's no single player game you played because your friends were hyping it up?
Nier Automata. I really hated the replaying it part. The combat gets incredibly boring after the first two playthroughs. I also found the supposedly "deep" story to be extremely lacking, very on the nose and, like way too much japanese entertainment, bipolar when it comes to emotions.
Valorant, Fortnite
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For what it's worth, I'd say Bloodborne is like Dark Souls but with less variety. There are a bunch of play styles you can utilize in Dark Souls and Elden Ring, but Bloodborne really only lets you use one.
What did you hate about it? That series is great for the people it clicks with and fans are very vocal about it, so I totally understand.
I went the opposite direction in that it took Bloodborne for the series to click with me. The other games (this was pre DS3) didn't resonate until after Bloodborne.
Yeah, I've got the same thing with playing previous games in the series. This summer I've tried playing BG1 and then BG2 prior to BG3's release - and I did not go very far (did not like the UI).
Warhammer 40,000 Darktide
I really wanted to be in on it from the beginning to be along for the entire story as it develops, and ooh boy was that a mistake. Haven't played it since January and looking at the progress since then there isn't really much to draw me back in.
Those aren't really FOMO in my opinion, more like being curious about what the praise was about. It's trying new stuff, and rather healthy I'd say, even if you realize some of those really weren't for you in the end. Yeah, I had quite a few of those too.
To me, FOMO would be anxiety about stuff that you really can miss "forever" and regret afterwhile.
In games, it's weaponized with artificially limited stuff because whoever is pulling the string wants you to fear a missed opportunity and make an impulse decision.
It's stuff like preorder "bonuses" you will never have another chance to get otherwise, time-limited content, battlepasses, daily rewards etc.
One of the most pathetic recent example I can think of being Nintendo making the translation of a 1990 Famicom game available only for a couple months. "Quick, buy Fire Emblem now, before it disappears forever!!!"
Even then I'd argue the lines are blurred with so many online marketplaces going down and how secondhand games have exponentially increased in price.
As far as I'm concerned emulation is the solution to this but I could see it being a hurdle for those that do want to play them legitimately
Breath of the Wild. My first Zelda game. Not one single regret.
My first was the original game on NES.
I don't hate Breath of the Wild (or Tears) but I don't think the series needed to go in that direction.
I thought BotW was quite like the original, with how open and non-linear it is.
None, fomo is a bullshit marketing word
Wow, so edgy and cool. But come-on, certainly there's a game you've tried out because of all the hype around it
If you think its cool then follow suite youll find yourself better off. When I was younger I'd bought trash games as friends where playing online, I don't do hype any more, if anything when I see a large marketing push I question the monitory input that's been diverted from the development
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I think the last game I bought out of fomo was the og COD WM2 on 360. I didn't have much money for games until like two years ago so I really only bought what I knew and only took a chance on games I knew were hyped and looked like something I was into (ie Skyrim).
I don't really care about what's new if it doesn't interest me. Bought BG3 cause it got a lot of hype and I've airways wanted to get into DnD and this looked like a good way. Don't think I'm going to buy Starfield, at least not at release.
I think a handful apply for me, but the biggest case is probably WoW Classic. It felt like a can't miss, lightning in a bottle kind of moment, so I absolutely had to be there. I'm glad I did, as it reminded me both why I love the game so much, as well as why I don't play it anymore.
Overwatch was basically the only way I could socialize with my friends for a while, even though nothing about it really spoke to me. I thought for sure the allure would wear off with my friends quickly, but they stuck with it for a long, long time, until after it became Overwatch 2, though the sentiment had turned on it before that.
I’ve also been stuck in the mentality of if I want to play a game in a series I need to play the prior games.
I do this too. I just played through Baldur's Gate 1 and 2 before starting 3, and I already know there's at least one recurring character who will show up in this new one; it's that kind of thing that makes me want to see what came before. However, if I was playing Armored Core 6 right now (which I'm not, but if I find the time, maybe I will), I won't be compelled to play the earlier games in the series. I tried Armored Core 4 back in the day, and the story is as much as "you're a mercenary; shoot stuff". Not a whole lot lost there, and that means that the sequel is more of an upgrade to the software than it is a totally different chapter in a continuing story.
Pretty much any game made by Valve. I have a bunch of friends that are really fans of them and I gradually started enjoying them as well.
Nice. That's one of those games I wish I got into at the same time as my friends. Portal co-op looks like a lot of fun
Just getting back into gaming after eons. First up was Witcher 3... still working on it but damn glad I didn't miss out on it. It's been everything I had hoped for.
RDR2 is next. I started it. Not sure.
Stellaris was lauded on Reddit. Excellent game.
I have been wanting to play half life 2 since I first saw it but also never played the first. Am working thru that too. It's been awesome.
X com UFO Defense is one I played but never finished. Tried to. Fuck that game lol
Half Life 2 doesn't truly need the first one. It adds some context and there's some callbacks, but you can totally start with 2.
Avoiding spoilers as much as possible, in HL1 something goes wrong at a research facility. Main character fights his way through then gets "knocked out" at the end. HL2 picks up ~20 years later after an entirely new big bad took advantage of the events in HL1 and conquered the world. MC "wakes up" and is dropped right in on a train into an occupied city.
There's decent plot connections, but you aren't missing out on anything gameplay wise or largely plot impacting, as the game world has changed so drastically.
All that said, if you want to play HL1 and aren't interested in it in terms of it as a tech marvel of the time it was created, you can just play Black Mesa. It's a fan remake that got the greenlight from the original creators to be sold, and by most accounts is a better experience for modern gamers.
Agree with other commenters: this is healthy.
For me, I bought Elden Ring day one because the hype was real. It's a good game -- but not really my jam.
I explored the Yakuza series for a similar reason, and I've absolutely loved that. I really want to try Ishin.
I bought a PS4 Pro for RDR2. I stand by that decision, but I probably wouldn't go that far again.
Final Fantasy VII. I love the franchise, but never got far into VII. Played through it so I could have an opinion on it, so I could see what I was missing. I ended up very disappointed.
I'll forget I'm a hyper intelligent demigod for a moment and slum it with you mortals over this jovial exercise.
Mine was Diablo IV. Thought it would rekindle my memories of rotting away at Diablo for significant parts of my life, and if I didn't buy it at release I'd miss all the comradery and special events...biggest gaming purchase regret of recent memory. Of course I'm the type to not give up on something, so I blew past the playtime return window just enough to realize it's the same addiction of lacklustre gameplay bolstered by occasional dopamine hits that I have to kick every time a new Diablo game gets released.
Uh, yeah, sure about Diablo and whatever. But, uh, what the fuck is this
I'll forget I'm a hyper intelligent demigod for a moment and slum it with you mortals over this jovial exercise.
It was meant to mock the posts explaining how OP misused the term fomo, but it clearly didn't land the way I expected it to at the time. I might have been tipsy.