Unpopular Opinions about Video Games

[Dojima's Dragon]

The power to beautifully render a city and populate it with NPCs made RPGs infinitely worse, not better, and it's bad enough that it's made your average RPG a straight up bad game. "Find the random person hiding in one of these 200 buildings that you can click on so that you are allowed to play the next part of the game" is not fun, it's not a game, and your average RPG city could be replace with a menu screen with portraits of the three to five NPCs worth interacting with.

Tbf some games like yakuza need the whole populated with npcs thing given the fact its based on a real city ( kabukicho ) though thankfully aside from find that yakuza in one of these three bars there isnt too much of these substories or main and aside from that haruka's chapter in yakuza 5 made me almost quit the game it would've been nice if they removed haruka's chapter entirely

 

[I got rabies]

I started checking out the Ace Attorney series and most of the plots of Ace Attorney often only work because everyone is retarded and there are so many plot holes the size of Alaska and if this took place in real life, the suspects would be found not guilty almost instantly and it would be nothing. I get it, it is supposed to take place in Japan and their legal system is fucked up, but the localization was supposed to take place in the US which even in the first game gives problems and it really shouldn't have.

My suspension of disbelief can handle most of it but there's still some parts I can't get. Like Manfred von karma was able to walk away from a courthouse during a earthquake with a bullet in his arm? No one in the building and no emergency workers saw him and tried to help him? A handgun won't fire a shot if thrown or dropped and it won't go straight through elevator doors in one piece. Manfred can also just walk in the evidence room with a taser, steal evidence and tase people and completely gets away with it... how??? Oh, and he can tell the judge what to do and that retard just goes "uhhh I guess you're right" and Phoenix doesn't even call him out on that. He struggles, shakes, sweats and repeat "I can't do anything!" Yes you can, you can object. I know that the judge is goofy but come on, if Karma pulled that shit irl his ass would be in contempt of court real fucking quick. If that's how he got a (near) perfect record for three decades it's even more retarded.

Idk much past the first game because I hated the health mechanic and reading people's thoughts with the magic rock at the beginning of the second one.

 

[Steinercard]

This is the inherent problem with satisfying video game stories and the intractable bind writers are put into because of the constraints of the medium.

A satisfying game has a continuously increasing difficulty progression (typically alongside increasing scope and stakes) that's more like the story of a movie with a single rising action and climax, but they also are supposed to be much longer than a film - more like a season of a TV show or a mini-series that has multiple highs and lows over the course of the series, which is very hard to reconcile with that continuous difficulty progression.

So you get this endless attempt to square the circle. I think RDR2 could've been a really neat story in another medium and it was okay as is, but it had to be dragged out for the purposes of having a game of sufficient length and gradually increasing stakes.

The most satisfying video game stories are the ones you make yourself through playing the game. Not some bullshit a disgruntled and rejected Holywood writer thinks is deep. The most affecting video game story for me is the time I was a Jedi on Star Wars Galaxies pre NGE. I was a dumb kid who ran my mouth and eventually I got a bounty put on my head. An actual player bounty hunter chased me half way around Naboo for 2 fucking hours. I only lost the fucker because another player ganked the BH. And distracted him. I had to hide multiple times. It was one of the most thrilling, dynamic, and personal stories I've ever experience in a video game. And no one else will ever quite have the same experience. I could go on about my stories from games like Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld, Daggerfall, and Neverwinter Nights Persistent Worlds.

Games in general need to be going more down the immersive sim and sandbox route than the movies pretending to be games route. Instead of having a myopic main plot that takes away player agency, Give the player a bunch of options for things they can do, script some reactions, let the player outwit the developers and see what happens. Games like Deus Ex and Arx Fatalis figured this out nearly two decades ago.

 

[Super Hans]

Games in general need to be going more down the immersive sim and sandbox route than the movies pretending to be games route. Instead of having a myopic main plot that takes away player agency, Give the player a bunch of options for things they can do, script some reactions, let the player outwit the developers and see what happens. Games like Deus Ex and Arx Fatalis figured this out nearly two decades ago.

I'm not disagreeing with you, a Morrowind-like with modern day standards is my dream game, but those two things inherently contradict each other. The reason Morrowind allowed such freedom is because nothing happened without the player's permission. No NPC would move outside their designated spot unless you forced them to, so if both Vivec and Yagrum Bagarn both died, you not being able to complete the main quest was 100% on you. Oblivion needed to have the essential npc tag because unlike Morrowind, the player didn't have God-like agency and bullshit could happen like the Mythic Dawn killing everybody in the sewers, fucking the player from the get-go for a reason they couldn't control.

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

The most satisfying video game stories are the ones you make yourself through playing the game. Not some bullshit a disgruntled and rejected Holywood writer thinks is deep. The most affecting video game story for me is the time I was a Jedi on Star Wars Galaxies pre NGE. I was a dumb kid who ran my mouth and eventually I got a bounty put on my head. An actual player bounty hunter chased me half way around Naboo for 2 fucking hours. I only lost the fucker because another player ganked the BH. And distracted him. I had to hide multiple times. It was one of the most thrilling, dynamic, and personal stories I've ever experience in a video game. And no one else will ever quite have the same experience. I could go on about my stories from games like Dwarf Fortress, Rimworld, Daggerfall, and Neverwinter Nights Persistent Worlds.

Games in general need to be going more down the immersive sim and sandbox route than the movies pretending to be games route. Instead of having a myopic main plot that takes away player agency, Give the player a bunch of options for things they can do, script some reactions, let the player outwit the developers and see what happens. Games like Deus Ex and Arx Fatalis figured this out nearly two decades ago.

You need to try SS13

 

[Steinercard]

You need to try SS13

I have. I quite enjoyed it and also the Aliens mod was good too. But it's definitely past it's best days. I've got my eye on like five seperate SS13 remakes right now that all have equal chances of success or massive failure.

 

[Gender: Xenomorph]

I have. I quite enjoyed it and also the Aliens mod was good too. But it's definitely past it's best days. I've got my eye on like five seperate SS13 remakes right now that all have equal chances of success or massive failure.

I've never played SS13 in its prime.

I played on some servers before admins became power hungry play the way we want kind of people and it was complete chaos.

Fun fact, if you watch one of Null's SS13 streams, you can see my character there.

What are these remakes? I'd like to give them a try and know why they are good.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

This is like saying the only significant difference between a troon and a woman is their skeleton, musculature, DNA, and neurological profile.

The CPUs are also extremely different. The PS3 had a single general-purpose POWER core with 7 math co-processors (6 accessible to the dev). The PS4 has 8 x86 cores with your usual AVX. x86 and POWER are so different that I don't even know where to start. They don't even have the same endianness. You can't make an apples-to-apples comparison of these two chips because they're so different. In terms of overall power, though, they're not even close. The PS3's CPU actually does have more peak math throughput, but the reality is that for modern games in the post-DX8 era, more and more of the math is done on the GPU, while the CPU needs more and more general purpose compute power. So you can look up the GFLOP rating, but what actually matters is that the PS4 (and XBone for that matter) had far far more capability than the previous gen when it came to branch prediction, superscalar execution, thread parallelism, etc.

The problem with making games "greater" is that the ability to take full advantage of the machine has, with every successive generation, been limited by team size and budget. GTA5 cost $500m to make, and that was a PS3/360 game at heart.

"they don't even have the same endianness" PowerPC goes both ways. Maybe not ideal, I don't know if there's a performance hit if using one over the other.

And I'm talking performance here, not instruction set or order of execution. And if we're already talking performance then you should know that scaling a game over multiple low-power cores does not mean that it combines like a Voltron and gives you higher performance. You can't just put game state on core one and two, physics as it applies to the game state on the third, fourth and fifth, AI on the rest as it applies to and influcences game state and physics and expect it to all just scale up linearly, it does not work that way. I mean, that's the branch prediction like between many cores? Games and how they work are different in a sped kind of way.

 

[Milwaukee Macho Man]

Next wave of corporate buyouts are being teased.

This is getting worse than smash roster fagging with mystery dream line ups.

But I guess all must serve the virtuous cycle

I hope we have a Cyberpunk 2020 style Corporate War between Sony and Microsoft within the next 10 years at least.

The most satisfying video game stories are the ones you make yourself through playing the game. Not some bullshit a disgruntled and rejected Holywood writer thinks is deep.

100% agree. The problem is the average dipshit doesn't have the imagination for this these days. Or at least the AAA developers seem to think that.

I don't know if that is indeed true though, seeing the love that Skyrim gets to this day.

 

[Marissa Moira]

Games in general need to be going more down the immersive sim and sandbox route than the movies pretending to be games route. Instead of having a myopic main plot that takes away player agency, Give the player a bunch of options for things they can do, script some reactions, let the player outwit the developers and see what happens. Games like Deus Ex and Arx Fatalis figured this out nearly two decades ago.

They seem to already be moving in that direction, which is why open world games seem to be very popular. They have a main campaign with scripted events but 90% of the game is usually spent dicking around with enemies.

Death Stranding would also be another example but people didn't really graft themselves to that one.

 

[The Ugly One]

"they don't even have the same endianness" PowerPC goes both ways. Maybe not ideal, I don't know if there's a performance hit if using one over the other.

What does "goes both ways" even mean? My point is they're very different architectures, down to the byte level, so your claim that the PS4 CPU is barely changed from the PS3 CPU is nonsensical.

And I'm talking performance here, not instruction set or order of execution.

These words, in this order, don't say anything meaningful. If you're not talking about various technologies used to accelerate an execution pipeline, you're not talking about performance. Do you have some benchmarks in mind?

And if we're already talking performance then you should know that scaling a game over multiple low-power cores does not mean that it combines like a Voltron and gives you higher performance.

Have you ever used pthread, OpenMP, or TBB?

You can't just put game state on core one and two, physics as it applies to the game state on the third, fourth and fifth, AI on the rest as it applies to and influcences game state and physics and expect it to all just scale up linearly, it does not work that way. I mean, that's the branch prediction like between many cores? Games and how they work are different in a sped kind of way.

There's no such thing as multicore branch prediction. You sound like somebody who has cobbled together a completely incorrect understanding of CPU architecture and modern application design from internet posts rather than any firsthand knowledge. Developer feedback on Cell was overwhelmingly negative - they wanted more threads, not more FLOPS, and the PS4 CPU was a response to developer feedback.

 

[Alligator Alcatraz]

Athletic women, even those who are built like brick shithouses, have small boobs.

Allow me to educate you, ya stupid shit

THEY'RE WEARING SPORTS BRAS

 

[Monkey Pink]

The Darkness 2 was pretty bad compared to the first game and it made me not really want a third game ever.

They should have kept the comic and game's universes separate, the second game's tone was way too goofy as a result.

 

[Smaug's Smokey Hole]

There's no such thing as multicore branch prediction. You sound like somebody who has cobbled together a completely incorrect understanding of CPU architecture and modern application design from internet posts rather than any firsthand knowledge. Developer feedback on Cell was overwhelmingly negative - they wanted more threads, not more FLOPS, and the PS4 CPU was a response to developer feedback.

That was a joke question on my part because branch prediction between cores is just so absurd. And are you talking about hardware threads or software threads? I know the answer, but still... The followup question to that is how would CELL have been different if they got that advice in the past? This isn't a trick question or anything, I would honestly like to know what you think. How would they have designed it at that point and what difference would it have made?

These words, in this order, don't say anything meaningful. If you're not talking about various technologies used to accelerate an execution pipeline, you're not talking about performance. Do you have some benchmarks in mind?

Do you know what accelerates an execution pipeline? I'm going to bounce the question back to you again because you seem to know what IS a relevant benchmark for a cpu when the GPU is not involved. Don't say IPC, cache size, type of RAM or clock speed.

To be frank, as a programmer I left all of this going into DX9 times.

 

[Wesker]

Resident Evil has been getting shittier and shitter from Resident Evil 4 onward, which is nearly 20 years now. This includes Remake 2 (so fucking overrated) and Remake 3 is jokes with how hard that was phoned in. It was like the developers didn't even play the original.

Resident Evil 7 fucking STINKS. I don't care what Capcom claims that it was always first person. They saw PT become a hit and they opted for that in midstream. RE7 is kitchen sink horror where they throw every major western horror film into one game. For whatever reason, they've chosen RE as the testing ground for new IPs that masquerade as RE.

I didn't bother with RE8, but from what I've heard, it's got all the problems of RE8 but worse.

 

[Quijibo69]

All Kirby games are baby's first platformer. It's too easy.

 

[Heavy Duty Boots]

All Kirby games are baby's first platformer. It's too easy.

Yeah, they're supposed to

Resident Evil has been getting shittier and shitter from Resident Evil 4 onward, which is nearly 20 years now. This includes Remake 2 (so fucking overrated) and Remake 3 is jokes with how hard that was phoned in. It was like the developers didn't even play the original.

The horror genre as a whole died.
The best horror experience I've had in the last 10 years or so was this rpg maker looking ass called Ib

 

[Ughubughughughughughghlug]

Red dead 2 is so vastly overrated even now, I am blown away by all the 10s and journalists sucking the games dick, it’s good maybe even great at times, but gameplay wise it’s at best an 8 and a 5 at worst. There’s just nowhere near as much content as previous GTA titles and the story is dragged out af. it’s amazing how stripped down it is compared to even the first Red Dead. The game looks beautiful but which game doesn’t now? I know
I’m repeating old news but it’s still true even now.

How is it stripped down compared to RDR1? You have a more detailed hunting and foraging (and foraging is actually useful for something) model, plus you gain fishing. The gambling games are a little different (shittier, I'd much rather have Liar's Dice than that really shitty board game). The only thing I remember RDR1 having that RDR2 doesn't is it had the randomly generated bounty hunts and the town watch, which I miss, but the Random Encounters/scripted events are so much more detailed and common that I feel like it makes up for it mostly. You can also fence horses and stagecoaches (trying to rob anything else sucks because of the awful wanted system).

I do think it sucks that they never added "jobs" like GTA games had, particularly ranching, though everybody bitched so much about cattle herding in RDR1 (I liked it) so that's probably why. I wish somebody would make a Fallout/Elder Scrolls style RPG in a pioneer setting.

 

[Wesker]

Yeah, they're supposed to


The horror genre as a whole died.
The best horror experience I've had in the last 10 years or so was this rpg maker looking ass called Ib

Yeah you could throw them all in the same box in that regard. The last one I liked was Alien: Isolation. Took me off guard how well it was made. Very simple AI, but how aggressive it was made almost every moment of it tense. Although I think it was a tad too long and should of only had one Xeno and not a colony.

Still the best horror game ever is Silent Hill 2. There's not even a close second with how much effort went into that the player doesn't even notice.

 

[The Ugly One]

That was a joke question on my part because branch prediction between cores is just so absurd. And are you talking about hardware threads or software threads? I know the answer, but still... The followup question to that is how would CELL have been different if they got that advice in the past? This isn't a trick question or anything, I would honestly like to know what you think. How would they have designed it at that point and what difference would it have made?

Serious answer: If Sony had paid attention to the last 5 or 6 years of hardware evolution, they would have cut a deal with Intel for a dual or quad-core x86 (quad may have been unrealistic at the time) or did what Microsoft did and just stick three of those Power cores on the die. The Xbox 360 might have been manufactured by gremlins in caves, but the overall system architecture was the right design for the time.

The biggest difference it would have made is the PS3's operating system wouldn't have been absolute dog shit, and its online store wouldn't have choked on itself constantly. I'm not sure the PS3 could have even handled something like Xbox Live if Sony had wanted to do it. You have a single, dual-threaded core that has to do everything other than linear algebra, and Live by the end of the 360's life was a fairly sophisticated service. Oh, and Sony wouldn't have lost a billion dollars on R&D for a backward-looking CPU design that they couldn't sell outside of Playstations.

Do you know what accelerates an execution pipeline? I'm going to bounce the question back to you again because you seem to know what IS a relevant benchmark for a cpu when the GPU is not involved. Don't say IPC, cache size, type of RAM or clock speed.

Yes. There is an array of technologies - memory prefetching, speculative execution, superscalar execution, etc that make an enormous difference in CPU performance, and those technologies get more sophisticated from one generation to the next, which is why coarse metrics like GHz and core count don't tell you a lot.

BTW, once CPUs got so many hardware threads that you couldn't really dedicate every single thread to a specific thing (e.g. "this thread is for I/O, this thread is for network, etc"), we've had to rely heavily on task based parallelism. Basically you put everything into a queue and a runtime dispatcher assigns work to threads as they become available. By the end of life, the PS4 had 7 cores available to devs, so that's up to 14 hardware threads. You can't realistically use all that unless you've mastered task-based parallelism.