Unpopular Opinions about Video Games

[LORD IMPERATOR]

Fallout:Tactics would like a word

That's the point. I didn't mention Fallout Tactics, I mentioned Fallout 1 and 2.

 

[Whoopsie Daisy]

That's the point. I didn't mention Fallout Tactics, I mentioned Fallout 1 and 2.

Fallout 1 and 2 aren't team-based. It's a solo game, you're meant to feel alone and helpless

 

[This Is Violence Now]

Jingle Jangle Jingle is practically one of the highlights of FNV

Jingle Jangle is all that fucking game has, compared to all the kino songs from Fallout 3, such a joke. I've finished it and all the dlc and I don't even remember Big Iron playing, all I remember is that song.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

Fallout 1 and 2 aren't team-based. It's a solo game, you're meant to feel alone and helpless

Indeed, but it basically just lends itself to a power fantasy when a player responds to the situation by juicing and grabbing all the good loot.

Jingle Jangle is all that fucking game has, compared to all the kino songs from Fallout 3, such a joke. I've finished it and all the dlc and I don't even remember Big Iron playing, all I remember is that song.

Funny. I heard Big Iron a lot of times, especially when I cleared Camp Golf of all the Rangers when I played for the Legion.

 

[Whoopsie Daisy]

Indeed, but it basically just lends itself to a power fantasy when a player responds to the situation by juicing and grabbing all the good loot.

Where's the down-side? Fallout winners don't take drugs.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

Where's the down-side? Fallout winners don't take drugs.

Then explain New Reno.

 

[Judge Dredd]

I'm fully convinced here that most people have never heard about the concept of "show, don't tell".

If something is not included in the lore and codex dump, then it never happened.

It's not that they haven't heard of it. It's that the writers are either hacks, or have to pander to internet autists.

In the case of the former, the dumb dumb idiot players might not understand, or worse might misinterpret, the message.

In the latter, autists complain when something doesn't have a Star Trek technically manual lore explanation. Look at how the last few pages with arguments about the Fallout timeline. The idea that something is unimportant, or worse, is important but unexplained doesn't fly in the age of the internet.

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

I'm fully convinced here that most people have never heard about the concept of "show, don't tell".

If something is not included in the lore and codex dump, then it never happened.

That phrase. I do not think it means what you think it means.

"Show, not tell" is explicitly not about codex entries and shit.

 

[Ser Prize]

Fallout 1 and 2 aren't team-based. It's a solo game, you're meant to feel alone and helpless

That's incorrect. Fallout 1 and especially 2 have a bunch of followers.

This is what gets me about Fallout fans. We know that Fallout was meant to be Wasteland. We see from the art that Fallout had very pulp sensibilities. Yet people like to harp on about how 'dude fallout 1 was so bleak and oppressive bro not like that casualized trash'

Fallout 1 had gigantic psychic rats. Fallout 1 almost had a town of sentient irradiated raccoons. Fallout may not be Gamma World levels of silly, but Fallout always had that streak of silly to some extent. It was to accent the bleak setting and work in dark humour.

This is why I find Fallout discourse so tiring. Yes the Beth games have their flaws, God know. But you can criticize them without wholesale making shit up. Fuck, even Fallout 1 vs 2 fell prey to this and those we both made by the same people. You saw oldfags bitching about how silly shit got in 2.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

What really makes me laugh about the modern discourse for RPG games is that now, you have a lot of whiny assholes who focus on RPG mechanics over everything, acting as if games like Mass Effect 2 or Fallout 3 betrayed the genre by being Halo with experience points, but during the late 2000s, those games were very popular. To the point where they achieved what older CRPGs in the 90s did not and dethroned the JRPGs from the RPG pecking order. A game like Fallout 1 or 2 would've been forgotten by the general public as they sang praises to Final Fantasy 6, 7, or 10, but a game like Fallout 3 became Game of the Year one year after Halo 3 came out and took the same award, while Mass Effect 2 was hailed as a watershed accomplishment for WRPGs.

Western RPGs didn't become mainstream until KOTOR and Oblivion sauntered into the scene, and many RPG-diehards really love to heap praises on 90s CRPGs while ignoring the fact that said games weren't that popular and barely hit over 100K sales, whereas a game like Fallout 3 or Skyrim sells millions of copies. To the point where the Japs started copying Skyrim because it was so successful. But oh, no, Fallout 3 isn't a real Fallout game, and Skyrim isn't a real RPG. The real RPGs were the obscure-as-fuck games from the 90s that were barely a blip on the radar, despite the fact that even among RPGs, barely a few people heard about them as most RPG fans in the late 90s were too busy getting wet over FF7.

Like I said before, the real reason why western RPGs declined wasn't because they abandoned the role-playing mechanics of early WRPGs, but because their storytellers got lazy. ME3's ending and ME Andromeda are perfect examples. Fallout 4's story has the factions doing things that don't make sense. Outer Worlds has the bad guys be stupid evil capitalists whose actions also make no sense whatsoever. SWTOR's expansions nonsensically padded out a story that should've ended a long time ago. WRPGs rose on the back of well-written stories like KOTOR, ME2, and FNV, and when those stories started to decline, the genre declined as a result.

That's incorrect. Fallout 1 and especially 2 have a bunch of followers.

You have to recruit them one at a time. I remember one of the FO2 followers showing up in FNV in the resort hotel taken over by mutants. Dude makes a reasoned critique of the Legion. But most of the game, you're alone.

This is what gets me about Fallout fans. We know that Fallout was meant to be Wasteland. We see from the art that Fallout had very pulp sensibilities. Yet people like to harp on about how 'dude fallout 1 was so bleak and oppressive bro not like that casualized trash'

Fallout 1 had gigantic psychic rats. Fallout 1 almost had a town of sentient irradiated raccoons. Fallout may not be Gamma World levels of silly, but Fallout always had that streak of silly to some extent. It was to accent the bleak setting and work in dark humour.

This is why I find Fallout discourse so tiring. Yes the Beth games have their flaws, God know. But you can criticize them without wholesale making shit up. Fuck, even Fallout 1 vs 2 fell prey to this and those we both made by the same people. You saw oldfags bitching about how silly shit got in 2.

My favorite silly moment was the part where if you lose an arm-wrestling contest, the Super Mutant makes you his gimp for the night. Second is when the guy who invents Jet date-rapes a female PC who's stupid. Third is when the President yells that a retard is in his office and it's not the Vice-President. Fourth would be Sgt. Dornan going apeshit over you showing up without power armor. FO2 was silly as fuck, which makes the oldfags bitching about Little Lamplight look like morons.

 

[Ser Prize]

@LORD IMPERATOR

Little Lamplight is an interesting case because while it's a throwback to Thunderdome and Peter Pan there are ways to write it where it wouldn't piss off people as much.

They establish that they subsist off of mutant fungi but IIRC besides rifles and the gates they never address how the kids stay safe. You could have had some type of robot keeping them safe because it's programmed to be a nanny bot or something. You could even extend this to explaining why adults get exiled the big town: once you reach a certain age the robot starts recognizing you as a threat.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

@LORD IMPERATOR

Little Lamplight is an interesting case because while it's a throwback to Thunderdome and Peter Pan there are ways to write it where it wouldn't piss off people as much.

They establish that they subsist off of mutant fungi but IIRC besides rifles and the gates they never address how the kids stay safe. You could have had some type of robot keeping them safe because it's programmed to be a nanny bot or something. You could even extend this to explaining why adults get exiled the big town: once you reach a certain age the robot starts recognizing you as a threat.

It's basically a joke episode. Like how Old World Blues never explains how you can function without a brain and how your brain can talk to you. It's not meant to be taken seriously, and the people who take it seriously are just grasping at straws acting like autistic retards when Little Lamplight is a tiny part of the game's story.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

@LORD IMPERATOR

The death of WRPG was because both the devs and fanbases for those games were (and continue to be) stuck up. You can't just have an adventure murder hoboing and leveling up, you need to have entire book worth of lore to add to it, plus "choices", plus ridiculous gameplay complexity.

This meant every WRPG without ridiculous investment got ignored or denounced as "not a real WRPG". And only once in a blue moon you actually manage to hit the scope and writing level for a game that is actually sort of playable (after a billion fan patches because it's still broken at launch and the devs went immediately bankrupt).

People like Witcher 3 and Mass Effect 2 because the world might be vast, but the plot can be summarised in a sentence "gruff guy saves his daughter figure"/"making an A team to kill aliens". Meanwhile jrpgs are still popular because they are honest that you want an adventure rather than a glorified book.

 

[Ser Prize]

@LORD IMPERATOR

The death of WRPG was because both the devs and fanbases for those games were (and continue to be) stuck up. You can't just have an adventure murder hoboing and leveling up, you need to have entire book worth of lore to add to it, plus "choices", plus ridiculous gameplay complexity.

This meant every WRPG without ridiculous investment got ignored or denounced as "not a real WRPG". And only once in a blue moon you actually manage to hit the scope and writing level for a game that is actually sort of playable (after a billion fan patches because it's still broken at launch and the devs went immediately bankrupt).

People like Witcher 3 and Mass Effect 2 because the world might be vast, but the plot can be summarised in a sentence "gruff guy saves his daughter figure"/"making an A team to kill aliens". Meanwhile jrpgs are still popular because they are honest that you want an adventure rather than a glorified book.

I feel like Pillars of Eternity is the peak of "bullshit complex lore nobody cares about" vs actually having a fun plot and characters.

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

The death of WRPG was because both the devs and fanbases for those games were (and continue to be) stuck up. You can't just have an adventure murder hoboing and leveling up, you need to have entire book worth of lore to add to it, plus "choices", plus ridiculous gameplay complexity.

Gosh, it's so fucking stuck up of RPG players to want an RPG in their RPG.

 

[Forgotten Beast]

I feel like Pillars of Eternity is the peak of "bullshit complex lore nobody cares about" vs actually having a fun plot and characters.

I think Torment: Tides of Numenera is even worse in that regard, but nobody cares about that one.
In my opinion there are many games that have worse lore than PoE, but there's very few that manage to dump it more clumsily on the player's head or at a worse time.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

@LORD IMPERATOR

The death of WRPG was because both the devs and fanbases for those games were (and continue to be) stuck up. You can't just have an adventure murder hoboing and leveling up, you need to have entire book worth of lore to add to it, plus "choices", plus ridiculous gameplay complexity.

This meant every WRPG without ridiculous investment got ignored or denounced as "not a real WRPG". And only once in a blue moon you actually manage to hit the scope and writing level for a game that is actually sort of playable (after a billion fan patches because it's still broken at launch and the devs went immediately bankrupt).

And that's the problem. They become inaccessible to the average pleb who prefers a game where you go full murder hobo like Fallout 3, or Gears of War with experience points like ME2. A lot of the ''real WRPGs'' that these people fap over, like the 90s CRPGs, were niche classics that were shoved to the side as most gamers thought of Final Fantasy whenever you bring up the RPG term to them, since millions of SNES and PS1 fans played FF6 and FF7, yet you'd be lucky if a CRPG like FO2 had over a hundred thousand fans.

People like Witcher 3 and Mass Effect 2 because the world might be vast, but the plot can be summarised in a sentence "gruff guy saves his daughter figure"/"making an A team to kill aliens". Meanwhile jrpgs are still popular because they are honest that you want an adventure rather than a glorified book.

I'm not so sure. Witcher 3 and ME2 had a Bible's worth of complex lore, politcs, and characterization; it was how they presented this stuff to the player that made those games great. As for JRPGs, they have some popularity, but not the kind of rock-star popularity they had back in the late 90s and early 2000s during the heyday of the PS2. Most people running to JRPGs now are refugees who are fleeing the increasing politicization of western gaming and thinking that games with unapologetic anime waifu tits are the cure.

Gosh, it's so fucking stuck up of RPG players to want an RPG in their RPG.

But what defines an RPG? Some people think it has to be a digital DnD simulator. Others think it has to have moral choices. Others think it has to have multiple factions/endings you can choose. RPG is such a nebulous term that many classic RPGs that scored the most money and popularity would be spat upon as casual filth by many WRPG purists, even though they were worshiped back in the day when they first came out.

 

[Just Some Other Guy]

Gosh, it's so fucking stuck up of RPG players to want an RPG in their RPG.

Nope. Gotta lower the bar for the peasants. Can't be reading more than a single sentence on the screen.

Funny thing is it's perfectly possible to enjoy crpgs, jrpgs, and 1st person shooter wrpgs....well as long as you're not too autistic.

 

[wtfNeedSignUp]

Gosh, it's so fucking stuck up of RPG players to want an RPG in their RPG.

The same way I can call out AAA devs and fans for wanting to make video games a film, I can criticize WRPG devs and fans for wanting to make their games a book. And like I said, there's a reason why when you talk about the best WRPGs you get 10-20 year old games.

I'm not so sure. Witcher 3 and ME2 had a Bible's worth of complex lore, politcs, and characterization; it was how they presented this stuff to the player that made those games great. As for JRPGs, they have some popularity, but not the kind of rock-star popularity they had back in the late 90s and early 2000s during the heyday of the PS2. Most people running to JRPGs now are refugees who are fleeing the increasing politicization of western gaming and thinking that games with unapologetic anime waifu tits are the cure.

The appeal is like in Dark Souls, the content is as deep as the player wants to put effort into. The issue is when your basic story needs an in-game encyclopedia to keep track of.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

The same way I can call out AAA devs and fans for wanting to make video games a film, I can criticize WRPG devs and fans for wanting to make their games a book. And like I said, there's a reason why when you talk about the best WRPGs you get 10-20 year old games.

That, and most of the best-selling WRPGs are seen by WRPG fans as games not to emulate, yet it looks fucking silly when games like ME2 and FO3 outsold ''true RPGs'' like FO1 and FO2 by a country mile. That doesn't make the latter two games bad, but it just makes them niche in comparison to the RPG games that WRPG fans despise.

The appeal is like in Dark Souls, the content is as deep as the player wants to put effort into. The issue is when your basic story needs an in-game encyclopedia to keep track of.

Like I said, it's how you present the lore that makes it work. ME2 had you go balls-deep into the characterization and ethos of your party members, which got a lot of people invested in the party members, even though the main battle with the Collectors is about as basic as the Commando movie starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. Some jabronis kidnapped our guys, go fucking blow them up. ME2 was like, what if you have the Expendables, but each and every member gets an hour of game time for them to bare their souls to you, making it far more emotionally involving when one of them dies because you made a mistake in the final battle.