Which game backdrop/setting are you tired of

[Mangod]

the "grim, bleak world that doesn't care about you, reality isn't fair and life is hard and difficult and heroism is only naivety at play.".

how about we play an all around good-guy again, a heroic individual that deals with situations rationally and fairly with a good deal of idealism.
A paladin arche-type, but of the lawful-good persuation, not the lawful-stupid one.

Ah, yes. "Grimdark". Honestly, so many modern games go out of their way to be dark, dreary and "mature", with the end result that the player questions why the main character hasn't stuffed three different handguns in his mouth and pulled the triggers simultaniously.

Let us have some fun, damnit! I don't care how sad your f***ing characters are if I've never seen them happy first!

 

[Aedwynn]

More a tabletop game thing, but Steampunk. I like steampunk stuff, but seemingly EVERY miniatures game released seems to have to incorporate at least some steampunk themes or art design these days.

Eldritch or Cosmic horror is a close second.

 

[lord.jeff]

High fantasy, I like fantasy but I hate the fact that a genre that's supposed to be about letting your imagination run wild and where anything can happen but yet it is constantly recycling the same races of human, elf, orc, and dwarf all playing one of three roles; rogue, wizard, warrior and always in a medieval setting, I'd love a little more variety.

 

[HardkorSB]

Dudes in power armor.

Any scenario where someone talks to you on the radio like: "Alpha Team! Meet up with Bravo at Delta point ETA 900 hours!" and then the guy standing next to you grunts and tells you to "Stay frosty".

 

[Hero of Lime]

Zombies, I enjoyed the Last of Us, but that setting can never feel unique especially when the Last of Us was filled with so many Zombie story cliches. Changing the reason the zombies appear does not make an interesting Zombie story. The setting are never unique with exception to the likes of Resident Evil 4, there were zombies, but the setting and characters were a bit independent of the shambling zombies.

Even if a real zombie apocalypse would probably show that humanity is the real monster mumbo jumbo, try to come up with new themes for zombie stories if you can.

 

[Zhukov]

ZOMBIE APO... oh. You already got that. Well, yeah, seconded then. It's just been doe to death.

Although I still really enjoyed Day Z, The Walking Dead and The Last of Us. However, I think all those games could have been just as good in a different setting. They all required a disaster of some kind, but it didn't need to be fucking zombies again.

Also, the Totally-Not-Lord-of-the-Rings setting.

Seriously, please fuck off with your short stocky guys who live underground and like mining. Fuck off with your tall pointy eared people who live in forests and like bows. Fuck off with your magic that always boils down to shooting bright stuff out of your hands.

...

...and then the guy standing next to you grunts and tells you to "Stay frosty".

Okay, that cracked me up.

So true.

 

[shootthebandit]

...and then the guy standing next to you grunts and tells you to "Stay frosty".

Okay, that cracked me up.

So true.

look what i found on the interwebs

 

[Xpwn3ntial]

Since it hasn't been said yet, space fantasy.


Especially space magic. Call it whatever you want. Psychic powers, biotics, the Force, spice, etc. It's still space magic.

Each race is the equivalent of a small kingdom for all the variation they show you within the race. And most of them fall into the "space elf, space dwarf, space orc" bit.

Maybe it's just me, but fantasy with lasers is quite tiresome.

 

[Blaster395]

Settings where every character is supposed to be morally ambiguous. Regardless of how much they aim to hit that "Ambiguous" bit, my reaction tends to lean towards them all being insane and/or evil.

The best example of this is Witcher 2, where every single male character I met was so morally repulsive that I found it impossible to attach myself to the game, while the female characters were less morally repulsive only by virtue of half of them never even doing anything. It wasn't even a case of "Well people used to think like that" because the way any of the characters acted required them to just be deliberately stupid.

 

[spartan231490]

There are no new ideas. Really. If you want to look hard enough, it's all been done before. That doesn't mean the experience can't be novel and fun. That said, I'm not really "sick" of any setting. I've never been a big fan of futuristic sci-fi, but that's not the same. Then again, I do think that near-future settings are under-utilized.

 

[Candlejack000]

I have gotten tired of High Fantasy settings. That is to say I am fine with elves who love trees, dwarves who drink and fight, and humans whose only racial trait is the ability to breed like crazy. But when the game starts expecting me to remember 25 different family trees and the relations between every nation in existence I give up. I just want a setting where a town, village, or kingdom is being attacked by something and you are someone who kills that something.

 

[The White Hunter]

Modern shooters where you play as MURICANS. Dunno why but it's really starting to grate on me, at least when we had WW2 there was a variety of settings and a variety of nations to play as.

I'd love a return to WW2 for a bit, just to play as a british soldier fighting the italians in africa or something.

 

[Casual Shinji]

The quirky for the sake of quirky setting. Basically every Suda51 game.

The zombie and high fantasy setting already have enough criticism to hold them in place, but the "oh look at me, I'm soooo quirky" shtick seems to dodge that bullet. Afterall, if people don't know what the hell they're looking at it must be good.

 

[Jared Jeanquart]

I have officially checked out of High Fantasy settings; the last one I gave a shit about was Dragon Age, and that wasn't particularly high. I want Swords And Sorcery back. Humans and monsters only, thieves guilds, mercs, dark wizards, decadent city-states. No damn ELF's.

For a while, I was getting sick of "generic military space setting" like Killzone or whatever. Now I'm just sick of modern military.

But I'm NOT sick of post-apoc. Zombies are overdone, yes, but look at Enslaved or Resistance 3 (half life, basically). There's so much ground to explore, and post-apoc future earth of some variety or other is a good starting point for any sci-fi story that doesn't want to go into space.

No more zombies, though.

 

[Combustion Kevin]

the "grim, bleak world that doesn't care about you, reality isn't fair and life is hard and difficult and heroism is only naivety at play.".

how about we play an all around good-guy again, a heroic individual that deals with situations rationally and fairly with a good deal of idealism.
A paladin arche-type, but of the lawful-good persuation, not the lawful-stupid one.

Ah, yes. "Grimdark". Honestly, so many modern games go out of their way to be dark, dreary and "mature", with the end result that the player questions why the main character hasn't stuffed three different handguns in his mouth and pulled the triggers simultaniously.

Because the starter handgun sucks and the other two are expensive DLC. ^^

Come to think of it, bioware did a well enough job of doing that, DA Origins and mass effect let's you play out just that, if you choose to, and most of the time shows you the consequences of your actions on a smaller scale(often because your choices were often small scale).

 

[Pink Gregory]

The quirky for the sake of quirky setting. Basically every Suda51 game.

The zombie and high fantasy setting already have enough criticism to hold them in place, but the "oh look at me, I'm soooo quirky" shtick seems to dodge that bullet. Afterall, if people don't know what the hell they're looking at it must be good.

Isn't that more about the art style and content than the setting, though? In the case of Suda51 at least.

I 'unno, I can forgive a 'cliched' setting if the game's interesting. There are such things as refinement of ideas.

 

[loc978]

*edit* Medieval fantasy versions of the British Isles. Done to death in all forms of media for a good century now. It can still be done well enough to make a playable game, but standing out from the crowd enough to be interesting takes a massive amount of talent.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

I'd like to be nitpicky and point out "zombie games... where zombies wield weapons". Zombies aren't supposed to have fine motor skill you devs, stop giving them sticks and guns! This goes to every Resident Evil made after Code Veronica, where we invariably come across some sort of virus that doesn't KILL the infected, it just sprouts them an extra limb and make them really angry. Also Dead Island.

 

[RariShyZealot]

Post apocalyptic, I'm just sick and tired of cobbled together houses and rusty plates of metal used to cover up holes and all that. I make up my own settings as a hobby, and the closest I've ever gotten to post-apoc was a fantasy setting set 5000 years after a big end-of-the-world scenario leaving a ton of magitech lying around...

 

[Ishal]

Feel like I should be that guy and point out that elves didn't just come from Tolkien... they've been around way before that as part of scandinavian and germanic myth... which some even predates christian mythology. So yeah, not really a problem with tolkien fantasy.

Besides, woe be it for a dev to come up with some cool new story featuring new races. They'll either be 1) comapared to elves and dwarves 2) ridiculed for being stupid or some shit. It's like that marketing thing a while back. People say they want the black coffee, but they don't, they buy the brown coffee with the creamer.

OT: Don't mind a lot of settings in games. It's all in the execution. Only thing I'd say I'm not interested in is cityscape sandboxes. GTA, Saints Row, Watchdogs... MEH. City/detective/cop schlock doesn't interest me in the slightest. I suppose some military shooters get tired after a while, but I just don't care about them as much.