Unpopular Opinions about Video Games

[LORD IMPERATOR]

Nah, I can't hold to using sales figures as a metric of how good a game is. There are plenty of games that sell like crack to crack addicts that aren't really that great.

I disagree completely. A game that sells well usually plays better than the ones that don't. It did better than Morrowind and Oblivion because it was easy to pick up and play, and its formula was so good that other games like Breath of the Wild tried to use it. When the Japs start taking notes from you, despite the fact that you're a western developer, you know you've done well.

Skyrim kept selling copious amounts of copies long after its release date. To the point where many players own it on more than one machine. I'm sure half the people who bought it for Switch already had it on another console or the PC. Morrowind never commanded that kind of power on the market.

Hard disagree on the world building being superior to Morrowind, though. Hard disagree.

Same here. Morrowind's world-building and storytelling is very mid to me. I was not impressed.

It's like... Damnit. Maybe I just wanted to be a thief, or a fighter, not pledge my soul to a daedric prince as part of your secret cult.

The Thieves Guild IS a Daedric cult. It has always been partially influenced by the Daedra.

Also, your soul cannot be pledged to a Daedra; any such promise is empty, because all Dragonborn souls go back to Akatosh upon death.

You can still practice being a thief and stealing shit from every city and town WITHOUT getting entangled with the guild. I sure as hell did.

 

[The Tall Man]

The writing was the worst with Morrowind. Skyrim's sidequests had better writing.

Let's take the thieves' guild quests for example
Thieves' guild in Skyrim end with the non thieving nightingale cringe.
Morrowind Thieves' guild ends with an epic heist.

Dagoth Ur and everything about the main quest is 100 better than that Black Dragon and his main quest.

Yes, but does that actually do anything for the gameplay, or is that just an empty bauble like riding a dragon in Skyrim?

Have you never used levitation in Morrowind? You can use it anytime, humble ground dwelling fools by gaining the high ground, get into places you shouldn't, comparing that to that contextual dragon riding garbage is completely dishonest.

Yes, and a lot of players got lost with Morrowind's directions and got pissy with it.

And people get pissy when they fall into the lava in Super Mario, does that mean it should be removed from the game?
Most players are retarded and if a dev did everything they wanted they would end up giving the player a win now button.

You know what a quest marker turns traveling the map into? Centering an icon on screen and moving forward. (A glorified padding system, why travel at all just teleport the player to the destination?)
And how does traveling following directions and a map look like? You actually get to experience the game world, you look for street signs and landmarks, you have to pay attention to the game world itself not just center an icon in the middle of you screen.

One engages the player with the UI the other with the game world.

If you fail to level certain skills as you level up, the game will kill you easily. Fail to level up enchantments as you face a boss that uses fire or ice, and you'll get killed in a single attack even if you're wearing top of the line Daedric or Dragonbone armor.

What you skill doesn't even hold a sliver of the importance it does in Morrowind.
In Morrowind you have to decide what you build, in Skyrim you don't.
In Skyrim you can become a master mage, master thief and master fighter all in one, which makes each path less important.

Your post makes me think you played Morrowind as kid when it came out 20 years ago and have forgotten all about it, because you are claiming the complete opposite of how the two games compare to each other.

 

[Prophetic Spirit]

The Thieves Guild IS a Daedric cult. It has always been partially influenced by the Daedra.

Also, your soul cannot be pledged to a Daedra; any such promise is empty, because all Dragonborn souls go back to Akatosh upon death.

You can still practice being a thief and stealing shit from every city and town WITHOUT getting entangled with the guild. I sure as hell did.

Idk about the 2nd point.
See Miraak.

 

[The Ugly One]

Isn't Skyrim the one where you could complete the wizards' guild questline without using any magic at all? I always thought that was pretty gay.

 

[Asian tech support]

Isn't Skyrim the one where you could complete the wizards' guild questline without using any magic at all? I always thought that was pretty gay.

That was Oblivion. Skyrim requires you use spells three times I think (once to enter the college, once to use a shitty ward, and once to adjust the orrery thing).

edit: 4 actually. I think it also makes you use a destruction spell to open the room when you confront Ancano at the end.

 

[Prophetic Spirit]

Isn't Skyrim the one where you could complete the wizards' guild questline without using any magic at all? I always thought that was pretty gay.

I always do that questline killing everybody with a big ass sword.
Entering is persuading the elf, the ward part is killing the fucking Nord mage, the third part is only shouting frost and the last part is only waiting.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

Idk about the 2nd point.
See Miraak.

Miraak was trapped in Apocrypha, but his soul remained his. Hence why Hermaeus Mora had him killed by you, since he was still a threat.

Let's take the thieves' guild quests for example
Thieves' guild in Skyrim end with the non thieving nightingale cringe.
Morrowind Thieves' guild ends with an epic heist.

Both are pounded into the dirt by the Oblivion Thieves' Guild quest which is stealing an Elder Scroll and cheating a god.

Dagoth Ur and everything about the main quest is 100 better than that Black Dragon and his main quest.

Nope. Again, if Dagoth Ur succeeded, I couldn't give a crap. Whereas at least I have a vested interest in stopping Alduin because he was going to end the world, and he already leveled a city, and his mates are running around setting fire to cities and towns left and right, whereas all Dagoth did is build his model kit underground and get foiled before it goes on its maiden voyage.

Have you never used levitation in Morrowind? You can use it anytime, humble ground dwelling fools by gaining the high ground, get into places you shouldn't, comparing that to that contextual dragon riding garbage is completely dishonest.

So it's just an exploit. Cute. Which again, doesn't really mean shit since you're just breaking the game for your own benefit. And at least riding a dragon is more aesthetically fun, especially when I can burn those ''humble ground-dwelling fools''.

And how does traveling following directions and a map look like? You actually get to experience the game world, you look for street signs and landmarks, you have to pay attention to the game world itself not just center an icon in the middle of you screen.

Which is nice, for the first few hours. Then the directions grow more and more vague, go north of this, go south of that, eventually they give you the wrong directions and you wind up east of something when the thing you're looking for is actually to the west.

It seems that they just overburdened the poor fool who was writing all these directions, so they said ''fuck it'' and just gave you map markers for Oblivion and Skyrim.

Since people bought Skyrim more than Morrowind, it seems that players preferred the latter over the former.

In Morrowind you have to decide what you build, in Skyrim you don't.

Which is more tedium and more annoyance. People go to games to relax, not to play bureaucrat when they do that all day in real life.

In Skyrim you can become a master mage, master thief and master fighter all in one, which makes each path less important.

It makes sense given the fact that you don't have party members to each be a master mage, thief, or fighter. Most of the time, you're alone, so it makes sense to master every skill. Also, I did the same thing in Oblivion, so it's not Skyrim's fault when Oblivion already did it.

Your post makes me think you played Morrowind as kid when it came out 20 years ago and have forgotten all about it, because you are claiming the complete opposite of how the two games compare to each other.

Why yes, I did. Back when I was a kid, I devoured every RPG I could find. Paper Mario, KOTOR, FFX, me and my friends all played Morrowind when a friend got it for his Xbox. We eventually got so bored of it we threw it away and went back to KOTOR and Paper Mario 2 instead. Then I came back and watched some guy play Morrowind online, to see if I'd fancy it. I did the same thing for Skyrim before buying it. I got bored of the former, I liked what I saw with the latter, and that's how I bought Skyrim.

 

[SSj_Ness (Yiffed)]

The GBA ports are even worse because the GBA has a better specs than the NES and worse than the SNES, so while Super Mario Bros. 3 got a great port, SMW is completely butchered with the resolution wrong, the music wrong, being too washed-out, and so on.

GBA does not have worse specs than the SNES, it's capable of full, true 3D without any additional chips, and it even looks better than what the SNES could do with the likes of the FX chip.

I'm pretty sure the resolution and color issues exist for SMB3 as well, it's just a hardware issue.

The only thing SMA2 did was change the Dragon coins into actual collectible items, and while it did give more replayability to the levels, it wasn't exactly a game-changer.

This isn't true either. Aside from reworked Dragon Coins the most notable change is Luigi's playable with his own unique characteristics, but there's several of other significant upgrades too, like how they adopted SMB3's damage system.

If it wasn't for the inherent screen resolution issues the Mario Advance series has then these enhanced ports would be superior across the board, and they're still very good regardless.

The fact of the matter is that SMB3 greatly benefits from ports and improvements that SMW never got.

The only advantage SMB3 really got over SMW was being remade on SNES, but it was a pretty faithful remake, largely cosmetic in nature. In fact, there's more substantial upgrades in SMW's GBA port than between SMB3 NES vs SNES, so it's hardly unfair that it just got an aesthetic boost.

The biggest change was the addition of a save system, but SMW's save system wasn't that great either, only saving at certain intervals. The GBA ports fixed that too, actually, I think.

So like I said, even if you want to discount the SNES version of SMB3, which is fair enough I guess, the GBA ports of the GBA games is totally fair to compare together since it's not remake vs new game and instead SNES port vs SNES port at that point.

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

Since people bought Skyrim more than Morrowind, it seems that players preferred the latter over the former.

Again, this is a bad argument. Not just because sales isn't inherently a measure of quality, but also because of pure market differences. Morrowind was the first console release, on a single console at that, of the third game in a franchise that had previously been a PC-exclusive. By Skyrim, it was a known franchise on it's fifth game, on multiple consoles. In addition, the potential market was far larger, too - back when Morrowind came out in 2002, games weres till shaking off the "video games are for kids and dweebs" stigma, and were far less of a universally consumed medium than they were when Skyrim came out in 2011.

Or, to put it another way, any given game, irrespective of quality, would sell more with a wider release, more name recognition, and a larger potential player base than it would with less of all those things.

 

[KingofSomething]

Ground pound isn't nearly as useful as temporary invincibility. If anything, Tanooki was too good. I think it even let you kill enemies you usually otherwise couldn't too. Plus it's just more visually interesting than a cape.

Both the cape and Tanooki suit were pretty broken powerups from what I remember. They both let you delete enemies that Mario normally had some difficulty dealing with, but the cape let you destroy certain projectile attacks as well. Overall I would probably have to give the win to the raccoon. Free invincibility is just too good while the strongest aspect of the cape gets stifled in any level where you can't just fly over everything or get a good angle for the slam

Let's take the thieves' guild quests for example
Thieves' guild in Skyrim end with the non thieving nightingale cringe.
Morrowind Thieves' guild ends with an epic heist.

I still hate that Skyrim drags you into the Thieves Guild questline even if you never stole shit. If my hands are clean and I'm not actively collecting info to find them, I shouldn't hear a peep out of these guys.

 

[The Tall Man]

I still hate that Skyrim drags you into the Thieves Guild questline even if you never stole shit. If my hands are clean and I'm not actively collecting info to find them, I shouldn't hear a peep out of these guys.

Devs used to have the balls to give the player the option to miss half the game.
Now they pull your camera to where you are supposed to look, because the cool thing they made is about to happen.

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

Isn't Skyrim the one where you could complete the wizards' guild questline without using any magic at all? I always thought that was pretty gay.

Only by means of really really silly exploits

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

The Thieves Guild IS a Daedric cult. It has always been partially influenced by the Daedra.

Also, your soul cannot be pledged to a Daedra; any such promise is empty, because all Dragonborn souls go back to Akatosh upon death.

You can still practice being a thief and stealing shit from every city and town WITHOUT getting entangled with the guild. I sure as hell did.

Also, since I missed this, I want to go back for a moment.

"Always" means "since Oblivion", basically, and even in Oblivion, they weren't an outright Daedric cult in the same way that the Skyrim guild was. They just viewed Nocturnal as a patron deity. A fine line, perhaps, but a line none the less.

Morrowind, despite actually being set in a land with more explicit and common daedra worship, had a (so far as I remember) secular thieves' guild. And the Daggerfall thieves' guild was just a guild of thieves, period.

And yes, some of the player characters have a get-out-of-Hell-free type gimmick. The protagonist of Daggerfall may (strong emphasis on may) have been the Shezzarine, in Morrowind you're the Nerevarine... I think the oblivion protagonist is probably fucked, or else ends up becoming the new Sheogorath.

 

[The Ugly One]

The GBA ports are even worse because the GBA has a better specs than the NES and worse than the SNES, so while Super Mario Bros. 3 got a great port, SMW is completely butchered with the resolution wrong, the music wrong, being too washed-out, and so on.

GBA does not have worse specs than the SNES, it's capable of full, true 3D without any additional chips, and it even looks better than what the SNES could do with the likes of the FX chip.

I'm pretty sure the resolution and color issues exist for SMB3 as well, it's just a hardware issue.

GBA's resolution was 240x160, while the SNES was 256x224. but the GBA could actually display more colors and had more RAM and a much more powerful CPU. Dropping asset resolution is the main thing that hurt SNES ports.

 

[mrs thickness]

"Skyrim is good" isn't even remotely an unpopular opinion and it gets posted in here every two fucking weeks

 

[Calandrino]

GBA's resolution was 240x160, while the SNES was 256x224. but the GBA could actually display more colors and had more RAM and a much more powerful CPU. Dropping asset resolution is the main thing that hurt SNES ports.

Whereas the NES -- the superior console, with the best Mario games -- was a hefty 256 x 240, hence the later ports of games like SMB3 being crippled and ruined

 

[Xarpho's Return]

GBA does not have worse specs than the SNES, it's capable of full, true 3D without any additional chips, and it even looks better than what the SNES could do with the likes of the FX chip.

Where were all these good-looking GBA games? Granted, the idea of "it's 32-bit, so it's like a PlayStation, right?" fizzled pretty quickly in my 10-year-old mind, but they didn't look much better than what the SNES had.

They never had any ports for Stunt Race FX, Star Fox, or Super Mario RPG. Sure, the GBA has a more powerful processor than the SNES and certainly produced the overall better version of Mario Kart but the processor isn't the main bottleneck, because that's how the Genesis was able to market their system as "blast processing" with a technically faster processor but inferior in every single other aspect.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

Again, this is a bad argument. Not just because sales isn't inherently a measure of quality, but also because of pure market differences. Morrowind was the first console release, on a single console at that, of the third game in a franchise that had previously been a PC-exclusive. By Skyrim, it was a known franchise on it's fifth game, on multiple consoles. In addition, the potential market was far larger, too - back when Morrowind came out in 2002, games weres till shaking off the "video games are for kids and dweebs" stigma, and were far less of a universally consumed medium than they were when Skyrim came out in 2011.

Or, to put it another way, any given game, irrespective of quality, would sell more with a wider release, more name recognition, and a larger potential player base than it would with less of all those things.

False. Morrowind was the third release in its series, and it also had a built-up fanbase from the previous games. Many of the people who bought an Xbox previously played RPG and FPS games on the PC. There was already an audience for TES games before Morrowind.

Skyrim, meanwhile, is repeatedly bought on different consoles so many times. Its enduring legacy is the fact that it's easy to pick up and play. Which explains why people bought multiple copies of it; some people even have it on the Xbox, the PC, AND the Nintendo, so they could game on the fly. Dollars to doughnuts, many folks who bought Skyrim for the Switch already played it on a previous console.

Also, really? There was a stigma for games being for kids? That died by the late 90s. Games in the late 90s had way more blood and gore than Skyrim does. You got people getting blown to giblets, players killing kids, dystopian stories full of demons and magic, there were more than enough games for grown-ups. Hell, TES Battlespire had women with bare boobs, for fuck's sake. So don't give me that excuse. It's a flimsy one, one that didn't match the atmosphere at the time where every pearl-clutching proto-SJW is crying about how games are full of things inappropriate for kids. That's the exact opposite stereotype than the one you stated.

At the end of the day, gaming IS a capitalist enterprise. And the more a game performs well, the more people buy it, and Skyrim was just that good that people kept buying it over and over again.

Also, since I missed this, I want to go back for a moment.

"Always" means "since Oblivion", basically, and even in Oblivion, they weren't an outright Daedric cult in the same way that the Skyrim guild was. They just viewed Nocturnal as a patron deity. A fine line, perhaps, but a line none the less.

That means they are a Daedric cult. They have a Daedric patron, so that means they believe and serve said patron. Do you really know what a patron deity is? It's the deity that a given culture or group believes in.

Morrowind, despite actually being set in a land with more explicit and common daedra worship, had a (so far as I remember) secular thieves' guild. And the Daggerfall thieves' guild was just a guild of thieves, period.

Then they were apostates. Or what some would call "cafeteria believers". Again, I don't see a problem. Nocturnal can't claim your soul because you are Dragonborn.

And yes, some of the player characters have a get-out-of-Hell-free type gimmick. The protagonist of Daggerfall may (strong emphasis on may) have been the Shezzarine, in Morrowind you're the Nerevarine... I think the oblivion protagonist is probably fucked, or else ends up becoming the new Sheogorath.

Oblivion guy becomes Sheogorath. Look at the Sheogorath in Skyrim and he's the standard male model in Oblivion, just aged a bit.

 

[I Know 孤独のせい]

Disciples II > HoMM 3
DLCs are great
Nintendo is worse than Hitler
No Man's Sky was fine at release
Jade Empire is Bioware's best game

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

False. Morrowind was the third release in its series, and it also had a built-up fanbase from the previous games. Many of the people who bought an Xbox previously played RPG and FPS games on the PC. There was already an audience for TES games before Morrowind.

>says Morrowind was the third game in the franchise
>gets told "false, morrowind was the third release in the series".

My evens. You have taken them all. I don't have any anymore.

I didn't say there wasn't any audience. I said there was a smaller audience.

Skyrim, meanwhile, is repeatedly bought on different consoles so many times. Its enduring legacy is the fact that it's easy to pick up and play. Which explains why people bought multiple copies of it; some people even have it on the Xbox, the PC, AND the Nintendo, so they could game on the fly. Dollars to doughnuts, many folks who bought Skyrom for the Switch already played it on a previous console.

Yeah. It's easy for Skyrim to be bought on multiple consoles. It was released on multiple consoles. Morrowind wasn't.

And I give no creedence to people who buy the same game on three different consoles, anyways. That's not three distinct people playing it, and is again not a measure of it's popularity.

Also, really? There was a stigma for games being for kids? That died by the late 90s. Games in the late 90s had way more blood and gore than Skyrim does. You got people getting blown to giblets, players killing kids, dystopian stories full of demons and magic, there were more than enough games for grown-ups. Hell, TES Battlespire had women with bare boobs, for fuck's sake. So don't give me that excuse. It's a flimsy one, one that didn't match the atmosphere at the time where every pearl-clutching proto-SJW is crying about how games are full of things inappropriate for kids. That's the exact opposite stereotype than the one you stated.

I remember those days just fine, thank you. I'm old, but not to the point my memory has started to go yet. I said was starting to crawl out of that stigma. The really big surge in console FPSes hadn't quite gotten started yet - we had Halo, but that was largely it, for example, for massively-popular cultural touchstone FPS console games. It wasn't a binary thing, where someone flipped a switch one day. But in terms of installed user base, it was absolutely a smaller market. This is not a controversial statement: Every console generation outsells the previous one. Not always within any one brand - Sega, for example - but overall.

That means they are a Daedric cult. They have a Daedric patron, so that means they believe and serve said patron. Do you really know what a patron deity is? It's the deity that a given culture or group believes in.

The extent Nocturnal was even actually their patron in any sort of two way relationship is dubious, considering the events surrounding the Grey Cowl. Namely that they stole it from Nocturnal and were cursed as a result.

In any event, "cult" in the archaic proper sense of "a faith" and "cult" as in "scary shadow group doing dark rituals and pledging their souls for magic powers" are slightly different things.

Then they were apostates. Or what some would call "cafeteria believers". Again, I don't see a problem. Nocturnal can't claim your soul because you are Dragonborn.

Or the whole "The thieves guild was ever and always a Daedric cult" is bullshit unless you retcon the first two, possibly three games out.

Oblivion guy becomes Sheogorath. Look at the Sheogorath in Skyrim and he's the standard male model in Oblivion, just aged a bit.

Probably, although mantling is apparently a destructive process for both parties, so it's questionable if you could really say he survives.