Unpopular Opinions about Video Games

[WULULULULU]

eSports is ruining competitive gaming. Gaming in general. The current philosophy for fighting games or shooters is to cater to that demographic while ignoring those who don't care about rank.

Halo 3 perfected that system 14 years ago with Trueskill. Now it's an arbitrary system often abused by tryhards and DDOSERS.

Whats funny is that there are games that released in the 2010s that had casual functions as well. CSGO, for all the eSports flair it has, has a ton of casual servers. You can't say the same to shit like Overwatch though so good luck lol.

 

[The Ugly One]

Personally, I just couldn't get into Skyrim and it has nothing to do with "durr it's not real role-playing" or that shit.

My problem is the quests. They're all so mechanical, so predictable, so perfunctory and utterly bereft of fun or surprise that I just lost interest. Do literally one guild or any other long set of quests in Skyrim and you've effectively seen the entire game: go to a specified place, kill a bunch of dudes in a cave, kill a cookie-cutter big bad or retrieve an item, return for reward.

Oblivion, for its many faults, was continuously mixing things up. Quests very, very often had some small but unique twist: a quest giver who lied to the player, an interested third party who gives a counter-offer, an ambush, an NPC warning the player of the ambush or a million other little things that breathed some modicum of life into the world.

It was fun to see what unexpected thing might happen during a quest, as opposed to Skyrim where you could set your watch to the quest playing out precisely as your journal described.

Oblivion's a shit game though. The visual design is shit. The controls are shit. The underlying RPG/character build system is shit (durrrr but it has more [trap] options than Skyrim it's so deeeeep...how about don't design your game by ripping off mechanics that were not designed for open-world games). The dungeon design is the laziest bullshit in a game I've ever seen. The difficulty system is based on the remainder of your level divided by four, which is pants-on-head retarded. Skyrim's the first ES game I played where the underlying game wasn't such a trash fire of half-implemented, broken ideas that I actually enjoyed playing it.

 

[Kulee Baba]

It urks me to no end that Shotguns get continually treated as trash, a glorified melee weapon in a large percentage of video games. Shotguns should decimate any target that's within 4 meters distance, one double-aught buckshot shell is effectively the same as firing 9 MM but at once.

But game balance you say? Okay then have the game be that only break action shotguns are in the game world. If you flub your 1 or 2 shots you have to deal with a lengthy reload time. Or just have ammo for Shotguns be very rare. Whatever you do don't make the shotgun feel like shit because if you do I'm more likely to be annoyed by your game.

Shotguns simply are the coolest kind of gun. It's why a shotgun is Ash Williams iconic weapon besides the chainsaw. If it's in a game I better be able to have fun with it or the devs fucked up.

 

[fartsnstuf]

eSports is ruining competitive gaming. Gaming in general. The current philosophy for fighting games or shooters is to cater to that demographic while ignoring those who don't care about rank.

Halo 3 perfected that system 14 years ago with Trueskill. Now it's an arbitrary system often abused by tryhards and DDOSERS.

its what truly raped Team Fortress 2's fun tbh

 

[Colonel Tubarov]

My unpopular opinion is very spergy.
I vehemently despise NieR Automata’s sacred cow ending E.

Gameplay-wise, it is just drawn-out and annoying to complete without the “prayer.”
The emotional sediment dies very quickly if you try to do this offline, and asking you to say yes to the “prayer” is insulting when you die. So, in terms of game perseverance, what is supposed to be this meaningful ending ends up being a troll insult for those who want to finish the game.

I hate any story that gives this propaganda that “people you never met just care about you.” The world is cruel and ruthless. This ending gives people the wrong impression that strangers will be there for you when in need. They most likely won’t; the bystander effect exists for a reason. Most strangers will take out their phones while you are being gang-raped and killed in a crowded street. Look at the shit show in Europe, for example.
Lastly, it renders the whole story a pointless exercise. Any growth to these characters goes down the shitter at the expense of giving them a “second chance.”

Spoiler: References

https://www.indiatimes.com/news/wor...-that-is-spreading-across-europe-249466.html/

https://sites.psu.edu/aspsy/2018/04/17/the-bystander-effect-and-sexual-assault/

Maybe, I can break down the general story and explain how frustrating it is for me if anyone else feels my frustration and is interested in talking about it. But in short, if the characters communicated like intelligent beings in the story, it wouldn’t be so trash.

Anyhoot, thank you for enduring my rant.

 

[Kulee Baba]

eSports is ruining competitive gaming. Gaming in general. The current philosophy for fighting games or shooters is to cater to that demographic while ignoring those who don't care about rank.

Halo 3 perfected that system 14 years ago with Trueskill. Now it's an arbitrary system often abused by tryhards and DDOSERS.

Here's the problem with Fighting games and why it's going to stay a niche genre for the foreseeable future.

What's the most popular kinds of online games? Games that are team based. And the beauty of a team based game is that a player can usually feel they're having fun for the most part. Case in point does anyone really feel mad if their team loses in Call of Duty TDM? No what I and the majority of players care about is that our Kill/Death Ratio is in a spot we find satisfaction in. I always came into Counter-Strike feeling I did good if I took down at least one bastard before I got sniped.

Fighting games along with traditional RTS. That's 1v1 and sometimes 2v2. If you lose well that shit falls on you. And there's nothing worse than spending a night and just getting slapped around by every other online player. It's humiliating.

This is why Sakurai made Smash Brothers and didn't embrace the stinky E-Sports players until late in the series lifespan. With Smash Bros randomness a lousier player can squeak out some wins.

If I were Capcom (and I know fans would hate it beyond belief) I would actually pull the bullshit that Fortnite does and have bots online that would be purposely designed to lose fights to the player. A sort of buffer to make newbies not feel the wall to Gitting Gud is impossible. That's the only idea I have to decrease players from being discouraged.

Also I really wish someone would try to crack that nut and make a Fighting Game that also had a decent Brawler campaign. I honestly don't see why it can't be done and to my knowledge only some of the older Tekkens tried but it never felt right. That would be way better than some story mode you play once and never touch again.

 

[The Ugly One]

It urks me to no end that Shotguns get continually treated as trash, a glorified melee weapon in a large percentage of video games. Shotguns should decimate any target that's within 4 meters distance, one double-aught buckshot shell is effectively the same as firing 9 MM but at once.

But game balance you say? Okay then have the game be that only break action shotguns are in the game world. If you flub your 1 or 2 shots you have to deal with a lengthy reload time. Or just have ammo for Shotguns be very rare. Whatever you do don't make the shotgun feel like shit because if you do I'm more likely to be annoyed by your game.

Shotguns simply are the coolest kind of gun. It's why a shotgun is Ash Williams iconic weapon besides the chainsaw. If it's in a game I better be able to have fun with it or the devs fucked up.

Part of the reason for this is the scales of most modern FPS maps are mostly designed for competitive play. That means you need to be no more than a quarter second away from a potential combat at all times. There used to be a huge range of map scales in games, from the rapid smash-mouth close-quarters scrums to big, open maps where dying was a significant setback for the sole reason that it might take you a bit to find the action. Ever since Black Ops, there is a sizeable, very vocal contingent of players who cry and wail when a map is larger than Nuketown.

You can't have all the weapons players demand, the tiny maps they demand, and have shotguns be useful past about 25 ft. In COD these days, weapon ranges are comically reduced to fit everything into tiny maps, so most assault rifles are useless past about 35-40m.

 

[Matt Damon]

The visual design is shit. The controls are shit. The underlying RPG/character build system is shit (durrrr but it has more [trap] options than Skyrim it's so deeeeep...how about don't design your game by ripping off mechanics that were not designed for open-world games). The dungeon design is the laziest bullshit in a game I've ever seen. The difficulty system is based on the remainder of your level divided by four, which is pants-on-head retarded.

All very true, except I'd argue the visual design was quite nice for its time outside of the hideous character models.

But even a mechanically flawless game (which Skyrim is far from) isn't sufficient if the game surrounding those mechanics is boring. I'd rather play something totally unbalanced but continuous engaging than a game where you perform two or three rote chores over and over in a mechanically superior way.

If an inexhaustible string of long dungeon crawls is what you're looking for, Skyrim is definitely better. But that makes simulating a big fantastical world seem like such a waste.

 

[The Ugly One]

All very true, except I'd argue the visual design was quite nice for its time outside of the hideous character models.

But even a mechanically flawless game (which Skyrim is far from) isn't sufficient if the game surrounding those mechanics is boring. I'd rather play something totally unbalanced but continuous engaging than a game where you perform two or three rote chores over and over in a mechanically superior way.

If an inexhaustible string of long dungeon crawls is what you're looking for, Skyrim is definitely better. But that makes simulating a big fantastical world seem like such a waste.

I wouldn't call Skyrim flawless; it was just the first one I played that wasn't ugly as shit + borderline unplayably broken. Oblivion is the first one I managed to drag myself across the finish line for, but lmao at everything else. The visual design made my eyes hurt. The Aeleid (sp?) ruins were cool the first two times, though.

I had fun. I shouted people off cliffs. I killed some zombies. I BTFO the Stormcloaks because they were gay. I forged a big hammer and smacked people in the face. There were some steps backward in design - I think making it possible to do every guild quest (I did...uh...whatever that mercenary group was) in the same playthrough is dumb. If you statmaxxx thieving then the wizards' guild should tell you fuck off. But overall, I didn't notice it being significantly more "go to place, kill things, get widget, read text/watch cutscene" than other games.

 

[The Last Stand]

What's the most popular kinds of online games? Games that are team based. And the beauty of a team based game is that a player can usually feel they're having fun for the most part. Case in point does anyone really feel mad if their team loses in Call of Duty TDM? No what I and the majority of players care about is that our Kill/Death Ratio is in a spot we find satisfaction in. I always came into Counter-Strike feeling I did good if I took down at least one bastard before I got sniped.

Shooters like CoD, even Battlefield succeed because of their TTK and weapon balance. It's an intentional design choice to keep matches fast, frantic and frequent.

That TTK is counterintuitive for competitive play as it'll reduce play to spawn killing, "meta" classes and lack of strategy.

 

[The Ugly One]

Shooters like CoD, even Battlefield succeed because of their TTK and weapon balance. It's an intentional design choice to keep matches fast, frantic and frequent.

That TTK is counterintuitive for competitive play as it'll reduce play to spawn killing, "meta" classes and lack of strategy.

eSports players hate to hear it, but competitive play design peaked with UT & Quake III.

COD and the like are designed for competitive play to be exciting to watch, and to keep frequent dopamine hits coming to the masses as they iterate through the Skinner Box of unlockables.

 

[Kulee Baba]

Shooters like CoD, even Battlefield succeed because of their TTK and weapon balance. It's an intentional design choice to keep matches fast, frantic and frequent.

That TTK is counterintuitive for competitive play as it'll reduce play to spawn killing, "meta" classes and lack of strategy.

Well Counter-Strike also has low TTK, and it's one of the oldest ongoing ESports alongside StarCraft.

But my point is on a casual level you can play COD or CS for that matter and have fun reliably. Whereas Fighting Games if you're not natural at the genre or willing to put in the training time you are going to be at the bottom of the barrel, everyone else will know how to kick your ass.

And that skill gap is what keeps fighting games niche.

I think the dumbest thing Street Fighter V did was actually rank players with Bronze, Silver, Gold. It only added to feeling that you sucked at the game. Starcraft 2 made the same absurd mistake. Devs need to hide that shit and make most players feel they're competent at the game they obsess over.

 

[The Ugly One]

Well Counter-Strike also has low TTK, and it's one of the oldest ongoing ESports alongside StarCraft.

But my point is on a casual level you can play COD or CS for that matter and have fun reliably. Whereas Fighting Games if you're not natural at the genre or willing to put in the training time you are going to be at the bottom of the barrel, everyone else will know how to kick your ass.

And that skill gap is what keeps fighting games niche.

I think the dumbest thing Street Fighter V did was actually rank players with Bronze, Silver, Gold. It only added to feeling that you sucked at the game. Starcraft 2 made the same absurd mistake. Devs need to hide that shit and make most players feel they're competent at the game they obsess over.

Developer: We're going to make this game a miserable experience for all except 10,000 people.
Same Developer: It's just not fair that we can't move 10 million units of this game like COD does.

 

[ScurvyRat]

It urks me to no end that Shotguns get continually treated as trash, a glorified melee weapon in a large percentage of video games. Shotguns should decimate any target that's within 4 meters distance, one double-aught buckshot shell is effectively the same as firing 9 MM but at once.

But game balance you say? Okay then have the game be that only break action shotguns are in the game world. If you flub your 1 or 2 shots you have to deal with a lengthy reload time. Or just have ammo for Shotguns be very rare. Whatever you do don't make the shotgun feel like shit because if you do I'm more likely to be annoyed by your game.

Shotguns simply are the coolest kind of gun. It's why a shotgun is Ash Williams iconic weapon besides the chainsaw. If it's in a game I better be able to have fun with it or the devs fucked up.

If you haven't checked out Escape From Tarkov, they're the one game that does shotguns justice IMO. Not only are they effective at range, but you can literally snipe with the slugs in that game.

Not to mention the inclusion of the KS-23 which will one shot a player up to 25 yards away if you hit him in the legs. Balanced? Fuck no. Fun? Absolutely

 

[The handsome tard]

Some games really just should get remade or maybe a simple HD upgrade. Silent Hill 3 came out almost 20 years ago. Maybe today's 17-year-olds would like a crack at it.

Konami did that and it was god awful, especially since, I shit you not, they lost the source code for SH 2 (HOW THE FUCK YOU CAN LOSE THAT? NOT A SINGLE COMPUTER ON THE ENTIRE BUILDING KEPT IT STORED?!)

Not to mention they changed the voice actors and removed the choice between picking the original ones in SH 3. Not to mention the lack of SH 1, 4 and even Origins

It was an overall disaster.

If you want to play these games in proper HD, you gotta do it the old fashioned manual way by following guides online and do all the downloading and file moving around yourself.

It urks me to no end that Shotguns get continually treated as trash, a glorified melee weapon in a large percentage of video games. Shotguns should decimate any target that's within 4 meters distance, one double-aught buckshot shell is effectively the same as firing 9 MM but at once.

But game balance you say? Okay then have the game be that only break action shotguns are in the game world. If you flub your 1 or 2 shots you have to deal with a lengthy reload time. Or just have ammo for Shotguns be very rare. Whatever you do don't make the shotgun feel like shit because if you do I'm more likely to be annoyed by your game.

Shotguns simply are the coolest kind of gun. It's why a shotgun is Ash Williams iconic weapon besides the chainsaw. If it's in a game I better be able to have fun with it or the devs fucked up.

Thats why boomer shooters mostly treat shotguns with respect that they deserve. In Doom, the shotgun is practically your workhorse weapon through most of the game. Dont get me started once the Super Shotgun comes into the scene in 2.

The term "role-playing game" has no utility anymore. It started out as an extremely vague catch-all description of pen-and-paper games and has only gotten worse over time.

At this point, it seems to be something like "game where player is explicitly presented with some numbers of some kind, which usually increase over time" and nothing more.

Thats because most earlier games were digital DnD campaigns and nothing more (didnt need to, tho). As games grew more mainstream, nobody wanted to get into this nerd shit and simply wanted to get into the action already.

People see stuff like in Fallout 1-NV and are like "urrgh, numbers, dont care about numbers, just want to start shooting shit!".

Tho I will admit there are older games that are very tediously RPG (like the original wasteland, yeah, fight me. That game didnt age well and the remaster hasnt fixed shit).

There is a balance between keeping the player engaged properly.

But yeah, most devs nowadays arent from the DnD generation sot they dont even know where to start. And even if they did, the demographics and game styles nowadays just dont fit that level of complexity anymore.

 

[Dysnomia]

I'm on the fence about save points. On one hand it makes you think about what might be up ahead and actually try to prepare for it. When you see a save point in an ominous place there's usually something horrible waiting for you and it adds to the anticipation. It also helps to remind you to save when you see them. You don't want to backtrack an hour because you forgot to save. Sometimes having a big, glowing thingy in the middle of a hallway to access your files is helpful.

But it's super convenient to save whenever you want to. Some older games have ridiculously scarce save points or would only let you save in towns or the overworld. Early battery backup carts were guilty of this. But it's more understandable. Still annoying. In Faria you had to go to a specific house in towns and you'd be prompted to hold in the reset button while powering off. The dungeons in that game were long and confusing and lacked maps. A lot of teleporter nonsense going on too. Even with a map I had trouble because of all the secret rooms.

One of those games that make you thank God for savestates.

I think there might have been a town or two where you actually couldn't save.

 

[I'd abeeb bear]

Thats because most earlier games were digital DnD campaigns and nothing more (didnt need to, tho). As games grew more mainstream, nobody wanted to get into this nerd shit and simply wanted to get into the action already.

People see stuff like in Fallout 1-NV and are like "urrgh, numbers, dont care about numbers, just want to start shooting shit!".

Tho I will admit there are older games that are very tediously RPG (like the original wasteland, yeah, fight me. That game didnt age well and the remaster hasnt fixed shit).

There is a balance between keeping the player engaged properly.

It's very difficult for me to get engaged in a game that dumps me into a character creator with 500 options, most of dubious worth, before I even get to move around the game world. The whole spreadsheet creation of my character feels like they're purposefully trapping me before I even get to begin. It'd be so much better if a game like Fallout didn't expect me to just guess which skills would be good or bad. Gothic, for example, hooked me much better because I got to feel what the game was like and decide where to spend my LP. Knowing the sheer amount of locked chests I could get into with lockpicking made me realize how it would be worth it.

In a game like Fallout, though, I wind up not knowing until after I've made my first character whether my skills are completely and totally worthless, or barely applicable, or game changingly important. Gothic has useless skills too, but you can figure out which are the noob traps if you think about it, where you might have a gimped character before even playing the actual game in other, more traditional DND styled campaign games.

It's a super fine line between keeping people engaged but giving them player choice that actually matters. I want mechanical depth, but I don't want it to be so frontloaded that I'll probably restart my character a few times before finishing the game.

 

[Overcast]

Konami did that and it was god awful, especially since, I shit you not, they lost the source code for SH 2 (HOW THE FUCK YOU CAN LOSE THAT? NOT A SINGLE COMPUTER ON THE ENTIRE BUILDING KEPT IT STORED?!)

That's an unfortunate reality with the gaming industry. Very few people actually keep the source code for their games. It's like how back when the movie industry was just starting out, many of the original film reels to old movies were essentially left to rot because "No one's gonna watch this in the future!" Hell, STAR WARS of all things was almost a victim of this. Hence why it's so hard to find the original versions of the movies.

 

[BScCollateral]

That's an unfortunate reality with the gaming industry. Very few people actually keep the source code for their games. It's like how back when the movie industry was just starting out, many of the original film reels to old movies were essentially left to rot because "No one's gonna watch this in the future!" Hell, STAR WARS of all things was almost a victim of this. Hence why it's so hard to find the original versions of the movies.

It's sad, especially when you consider how easy it is to back things up nowadays. People do not pay enough attention to backups. Just ask yourself: what happens to my data if my house burns down? How long will it take to find your favorite porn again?

 

[The Ugly One]

That's an unfortunate reality with the gaming industry. Very few people actually keep the source code for their games. It's like how back when the movie industry was just starting out, many of the original film reels to old movies were essentially left to rot because "No one's gonna watch this in the future!" Hell, STAR WARS of all things was almost a victim of this. Hence why it's so hard to find the original versions of the movies.

It's especially true of anything developed before git and archiving everything was ubiquitous.

It's very difficult for me to get engaged in a game that dumps me into a character creator with 500 options, most of dubious worth, before I even get to move around the game world. The whole spreadsheet creation of my character feels like they're purposefully trapping me before I even get to begin. It'd be so much better if a game like Fallout didn't expect me to just guess which skills would be good or bad. Gothic, for example, hooked me much better because I got to feel what the game was like and decide where to spend my LP. Knowing the sheer amount of locked chests I could get into with lockpicking made me realize how it would be worth it.

In a game like Fallout, though, I wind up not knowing until after I've made my first character whether my skills are completely and totally worthless, or barely applicable, or game changingly important. Gothic has useless skills too, but you can figure out which are the noob traps if you think about it, where you might have a gimped character before even playing the actual game in other, more traditional DND styled campaign games.

It's a super fine line between keeping people engaged but giving them player choice that actually matters. I want mechanical depth, but I don't want it to be so frontloaded that I'll probably restart my character a few times before finishing the game.

Video game RPGs mostly have no idea what to do with a system and tend to brainlessly copy things from D&D. Just the whole conceit of leveling up HP and damage doesn't actually make sense for most video games.