i keep buying games and they're not what i expected.

for a while now, i've been in search of something new to play, and haven't been having any luck.

i've gotten a number of games only to discover they weren't what i expected.

in no particular order:

fallout 3 - not nearly as playable as a straight rpg as elder scrolls. rather short main quest line too. i'm looking for something more than a 10-20 hour storyline based shooter. IE its not exactly a game world one could spend hundreds of hours in. is it?

farcry 1 - not an open world, just a mission based shooter with big level maps. apparently the open world stuff didn't really hit til farcry 3?

mount & blade warband - only combat and building interiors are fps? the rest is like the strategic map in total war (but realtime)?

railroad tycoon 2, 3 & sid meiers' railroads! - trains are cool, but it doesn't seem that realistic - construction takes zero time, trains take games days weeks or months to run their route. whats up with that?

simcity 4 - ok, i hadn't played since v1.0. i'd heard it hadn't aged well, but... yeah , it didn't age well.

morrowwind - i hoped for better dungeon crawling - instead its seems to have more text - never even found a dungeon - but then i'm not really looking to explore, i'm just looking for action.

and just today - knights of the old republic. in my desperation for a scifi rpg, i decided to try a 3pv only game. so the game pauses when combat starts. you do a menu pick, then watch an animation? THATS COMBAT?

decent freespace - i've played a LOT of flight sims - these ships seem to be flying at about 40 MPH !?!?!? closing speeds in Jet by SubLogic (1985) were easily an order of magnitude faster - and those were just F16's and Migs.

C&C red alert yuri's revenge was a freebie - so it doesn't really count - but sometimes i can't believe what passes for a game. maybe it was more impressive in its day. wasn't quite warcraft or AOE, or even Alien Nations (Westwood Studios) for that matter.

is this really what these games are like? or do i need to give them more of a chance?

fallout new vegas was the other option besides KOTOR. i've read things both good (sandbox) and bad (not truly open world) about it. having played fallout 3, i sort of know what to expect, and also to not get my hopes up too much (it is a bethesda IP after all, even if Obsidian did the title). time to pay to find out if its all that or not.

only two recent purchases were what i expected: silent hunter 5 (i had silent hunter 4 already), and shogun 2 total war (i had rome 1, medieval 1, and rome 2 already).

any way i can improve my vetting process so i don't keep buying these "not exactly what i expected" games?

any way i can improve my vetting process so i don't keep buying these "not exactly what i expected" games?

Watch footage of people playing them on YouTube / twitch. There's a whole genre called "Let's play" these days.

Morrowind is/was great. Combat is a bit meh - they've slowly improved it in Oblivion/Skyrim, but IMHO the Morrowind world is far more interesting than the new ones.

There's dungeon crawling once you start doing quests (lots of people will send you off into caves to find things...) but they're usually quite short and linear. It probably also takes 100 hours to fully complete. It's also quite easy to stray into areas that you're really not strong enough to be in yet (something Oblivion fumbled), making some quests really feel like big adventures, where you'd spend just as long preparing your inventory beforehand as doing the quest.

Sim City 4 is still the best sim city game. IMHO it's aged pretty well, especially when compared to any of the previous installments :lol:

Farcry 2 is pretty much "open world". FC1 was CryTek, but after that, they're all Ubisoft games.

Yuri's revenge was really fun in multiplayer. It was popular at LAN parties back in my day :cool:

Seems you are on the verge of blasphemy :/

Among Railroad series, Railroad Tycoon 2 (preferably Platinum edition) is the best game. And it is an amazing game not deserving to be stoned due to these expectations, I still play it :)

KOTOR is the first RPG game I played and it is a legend, both game and story wise. And yes that's combat :) , you can pause anytime and give orders to any party member. If you seek an FPS experience, you can look at ancient Jedi Knight series (especially JK:II and JK:Academy)

And for Simcity 4, I still believe that it's the best game in known universe and no better game will come in next x (x >= 10 no matter which year we are in) years. After 13 years, it aged ofc but especially with lots/plugins it is an endless game. Btw, I assume that you already handled custom resolution and hardware renderer from command line so refer other things by aging.

Finally, if you won't find things to be disappointed :) , I can recommend openTTD (open source as name implies) , Capitalism Plus (oldie but goldie) , Time Commando (ancient graphics but good game) , Fragile Allegiance, TransOcean and Medital Total War 2 (if you didn't play before, I didn't like regional management of Rome 2)

Disclaimer : Please watch gameplay videos , reviews etc before so don't swear at me after :)

i keep buying games and they're not what i expected.

I am too old to remember about Simcity 3000 (but I remember that I like one city challenge instead of region logic) but at Simcity 4,

You don't have to provide water (which limits growth) and never seen anyone rioting. You also don't have to lay pipe to every house, pipe has effective area just like electricity. And if water services funding is less than ideal, you experience pipe issues time to time.

It is easy to bankrupt if you don't micromanage your services (fine tune school funding, delay services like police, firefighters etc until it's a real issue) and expand quickly without human capital infrastructure. And game offers you options to get out of debt (casino, missile ground, military base, maximum security prison etc buildings with monthly income but with negative effects)

And yes,

Simcity 2013 was a bad game in city building game standards imo , after online playing experience EA later changed game also allowing single player in few time after saying that "It is impossible to make single player because it uses too much element from serverside" :) Problem with SC2013 is it was classic EA game, not a Maxis one, people didn't like very small space at first and DLC oriented logic.