Unpopular Opinions about Video Games

[I Know 孤独のせい]

I think people who have qualms with savescumming are morons, because playing video games isn't a matter of honor, and you are a rube if you willingly let a game take hours of work away from your life because of terrible design.

Depends on the game. Sometimes fuckups make for a more enjoyable experience, when you suddenly have to improvise to salvage a situation and have to play with the ramifications of that later on.

 

[Pissmaster]

Depends on the game. Sometimes fuckups make for a more enjoyable experience, when you suddenly have to improvise to salvage a situation and have to play with the ramifications of that later on.

That's true, though what I had in mind were tactical games like Xcom and Fire Emblem, where losing a unit means losing a whole lot of progress or potential content permanently. Savescumming's sort of expected of those kinds of games, to where Xcom has Ironman Mode, where it just autosaves on every action and you're intended to not be able to savescum.

 

[cia-log]

That's true, though what I had in mind were tactical games like Xcom and Fire Emblem, where losing a unit means losing a whole lot of progress or potential content permanently. Savescumming's sort of expected of those kinds of games, to where Xcom has Ironman Mode, where it just autosaves on every action and you're intended to not be able to savescum.

Even those games make the setting with their difficulty and how far you can get knocked back by the enemy. IMO old games with jumping puzzles that make you lose tons of progress if you miss or games like Blood where if you hit a wrong switch you instantly get blown up are meant for savescumming. Like it doesn't add to the depth or the tone of the game for this to be here, it's just threatening to waste my time.

 

[The Ugly One]

That's true, though what I had in mind were tactical games like Xcom and Fire Emblem, where losing a unit means losing a whole lot of progress or potential content permanently. Savescumming's sort of expected of those kinds of games, to where Xcom has Ironman Mode, where it just autosaves on every action and you're intended to not be able to savescum.

I really dislike units that gain experience being lost permanently, because it puts you at such a disadvantage late game to let any units die at all that it heavily encourages savescumming. Panzer General and its descendants have the same problem. It would be better for knocked-out units to just go into reserve with zero health and maybe have to sit out next mission while they recover.

 

[xXx: State of the Union]

I cannot think of a single aspect to any of their games where a build choice is completely invalidated at any point

You can get really fucked over no matter what if you level too fast without optimizing for your build in Oblivion, I'm pretty sure.

I mean, you can just lower the difficulty slider all the way down to "fix" it I guess, but it's still really shit game design.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

I specifically said games you played when you were 12 to 16...

Exactly. 12-16. I was playing KOTOR, Paper Mario 2, Morrowind, and Jade Empire when I was 11.

Also, Star Wars basically encompasses my opinion perfectly. Why else is it that every new generation thinks the incarnation of Star Wars they grew up with is some high level masterpiece? Because it was the shit they watched when they were 12.

Not really. I watched the OG Star Wars, then Phantom Menace, then I got a boatload of EU content along with the rest of the Prequels. I take SW as a whole, and see it as a masterpiece with flaws. Each of the prospective series has flaws.

The OT was making mistakes in the third movie as they rushed to finish it, to the point where the novels had to invent a reason why the massive Imperial fleet lost at Endor, instead of the logical conclusion where they curbstomp the outnumbered Rebels. The PT had some mistakes with presentation and some ideas could've been communicated better. And the KOTOR series' worst flaw was making us wait 7 fucking years after KOTOR 2 for a sequel. That, and how they handled some of the characters in between K2 and SWTOR. The Revan novel was so sloppy that it boggles the mind that the same dude wrote KOTOR 1, SWTOR, the Darth Bane books, Mass Effect 1, and Mass Effect 2. But I suppose there are just days where someone turns in subpar work; I mean, I loved Skyrim's side stories, but Starfield and Fallout 4 were rather subpar in the story department.

Talking character level, not skill level. At 10th level, the game expects all your gear to be dwarven or better. Past 25th level, everything you have needs to be daedric. For an archer, the only purchasable arrows being 10th-level is borderline game-breaking. I played the game over 15 years ago, but I remember once I got to the point where daedric gear was required, I avoided combat almost entirely and just sprinted/sneaked everywhere. I did the last 5 or 6 Oblivion portals by running to the top and grabbing the gem. Then I ran past the final boss.

I grinded the shit out of all the skills before I went off on the guild quests and DLC quests, then the main quest. By the time I finished my first guild quest, I could already conjure Daedric weapons and armor out of thin air, and by the time I started the main story, daedric gear wasn't that rare to find.

KOTOR, like other D&D-based games, can really fuck you up if you don't realize how important your to-hit stat is, and that constantly escalating skill DCs mean if you try to build a jack of all trades character, you'll end up with an incompetent oaf who can't do anything at all. If you don't make those two mistakes, though, yes, it's easy.

Basically, I just make my character into a gore machine with high strength and decent stats with speed, constitution, wisdom, and charisma. Every other stat, my party can fill up. That's what makes a DnD-based game work; each party member has a skill to his own, and having them all work together to accomplish a common goal. When I build up a party, I have myself as the gore machine, someone that can hack computers or open doors, and someone who can heal and buff up the party.

Haven't been in the griefing thread for a while, so it's nice to see you still sperging about how kotor is some unparalleled classic peice of literature that nothing could ever compare to despite being a pretty fucking middle of the road star wars story that didn't really have much of a true impact on the franchise. Especially when you consider that the best story to come from that general era of the universe is Bane, a character with a rough outline that was created by Lucas ironically. But at least you're jerking off 1 and not 2 this time, since 1 does have a better story going for it all things considered

You do realize that despite the general outline being written by Lucas, the Darth Bane novels were written by the same dude who wrote KOTOR, with a story path that was just the reverse of the KOTOR main character's path. That, and Bane's story even latches on to KOTOR; Bane sees a holocron of Revan, who advises his Sith to only have one apprentice each, and that's when Bane hits upon the idea of the Rule of Two. Bane's story literally builds upon the legacy of KOTOR, and the novels were made for KOTOR fans. Bane even duels a powerful Sith in the same Rakatan Temple where the main character of KOTOR faced a brainwashed and evil Bastila.

And yes, compared to most SW stories, KOTOR 1 and 2 were some of the best the franchise could offer. Most other novels and stories in the franchise were rather basic and easy to predict; some did well in looking at the politics and philosophy of Star Wars, others showed a gritty universe where people live a hard life all around, but many other stories were basic do-gooder stories with barely any depth to them outside of just smacking around the bad guys, and other stories got way out of whack because the author wanted to fanboy over one faction or another.

KOTOR, especially K2, was more than happy to show that ALL SW factions were flawed one way or another, they all have their advantages and disadvantages, which is a breath of fresh air when you compare that to say, the Republic Commando novels, where the Jedi are incompetent baboons who are also baby-stealing demons, the Mandalorians are super-honorable and could do no wrong, and if you disagree, the author calls you a Nazi.

Just cause you don't like it doesn't mean the option shouldn't be given to the player.

Given how many people bought Skyrim over Morrowind, it's an option most people don't want.

I mean, sure, I can put in an option in my game that lets you kill children, lots of Fallout fans who hate FO3 miss that, but that adds nothing but semantics. Other great masterpieces like Mass Effect 1 and 2, FF6 and 7, and Witchers 2 and 3 never needed that and still got the praise of the gaming community at large.

You can get really fucked over no matter what if you level too fast without optimizing for your build in Oblivion, I'm pretty sure.

That was Oblivion's greatest flaw. The more time you give to the game, the harder it gets, and the easiest way to beat it is to be a low-level jabroni who just runs past everything.

 

[KingofSomething]

You can get really fucked over no matter what if you level too fast without optimizing for your build in Oblivion, I'm pretty sure.

Yeah depending on the main skills you pick, you can accidentally level too fast and have to deal thugs wearing glass and dwarven gear while you're stuck with rusted or iron gear. Happened to me the first time I played and made shit really fucking annoying. You can eventually unfuck it by working on your other skills, but traveling around is gonna be a pain until you do.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

Yeah depending on the main skills you pick, you can accidentally level too fast and have to deal thugs wearing glass and dwarven gear while you're stuck with rusted or iron gear. Happened to me the first time I played and made shit really fucking annoying. You can eventually unfuck it by working on your other skills, but traveling around is gonna be a pain until you do.

Level up your combat skills first. Peripheral skills later. That way, you can hit hard and fast even in the early levels, so by the time you reach the later levels, you're ready for bandits with glass armor.

 

[Asian tech support]

Given how many people bought Skyrim over Morrowind, it's an option most people don't want.

Yeah, people definitely prefer Skyrim over Morrowind because of all the essential npcs.
Essential npcs has been one of the most criticized features in both Oblivion and Skyrim for longer than I can remember. This is a stupid argument and you should feel ashamed for making it.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

Yeah, people definitely prefer Skyrim over Morrowind because of all the essential npcs.
Essential npcs has been one of the most criticized features in both Oblivion and Skyrim for longer than I can remember. This is a stupid argument and you should feel ashamed for making it.

Not really. Most people don't really care about having essential NPCs. All they want is fun combat, cool things to look at, and a world to explore and have fun with. Most of them don't care that you can't kill essential NPCs. That, and even back then when we did have games like Morrowind where you can kill essential NPCs, it just ends with 3 minutes of laughter followed by us loading back because the game soft-locked itself and told us that we just fucked the story. So they might as well make such characters essential so that the player can't fuck the story in the ass.

 

[cia-log]

I really dislike units that gain experience being lost permanently, because it puts you at such a disadvantage late game to let any units die at all that it heavily encourages savescumming. Panzer General and its descendants have the same problem. It would be better for knocked-out units to just go into reserve with zero health and maybe have to sit out next mission while they recover.

That's just how war works. You can't decide if your ace pilots get shot down, your billion dollar carrier gets torpedoed, your most experienced sergeants get hit by indirect fire, that's just part of the frustration of running a war. The real issue is that your top soldiers can't do anything except die in frontline combat in a lot of tactical games. You should be allowed to rotate your most experienced men out to help train new recruits, give them extra training to fulfill specialized roles, and then send them on very critical missions where the importance of success outweighs any potential cost in terms of loss of equipment or personnel. In X-COM I often wanted to save my most skilled men for a Doolittle style raid instead of dying to defend some shithole neighborhood in bumfuck Australia I don't care about, but if you don't send them out they just languish in the barracks doing nothing. Still, the idea that you can lose important assets permanently is good and raises the stakes, it just needs to be implemented half-decently.

Not really. Most people don't really care about having essential NPCs. All they want is fun combat, cool things to look at, and a world to explore and have fun with. Most of them don't care that you can't kill essential NPCs. That, and even back then when we did have games like Morrowind where you can kill essential NPCs, it just ends with 3 minutes of laughter followed by us loading back because the game soft-locked itself and told us that we just fucked the story. So they might as well make such characters essential so that the player can't fuck the story in the ass.

Essential NPCs do suck and they have been roundly criticized for years. It's really shitty conveyance only meant to prop up Bethesda's lazy storytelling and nothing else. If you don't want me to kill the king, don't put me fully armed within stabbing distance of the asshole and then expect me not to do the one thing I want to do to him. Hell, every TES game has you playing some guy on death row whose only real proficiency is stabsmanship, so presumably I'm a violent criminal, and yet I'm supposed to also be the kind of guy who blindly obeys authority and has no impulse for scheming or cheating? This is supposed to be a series of roleplaying games?

If you don't want me to kill the quest giver so that the game doesn't softlock, don't put me within murdering distance of the man, fully armed (even just being allowed to meet with a high-ranking character as some random nobody while openly carrying already breaks immersion) instead of having him pop right back up and explaining he has an everything=proof shield so cutting his head off doesn't count like some little kid playing pretend.

Make him send a messenger that can be killed without derailing the story. Give the player the option to reach out for work, so at least their willingness to follow orders is in character. Make it so the character's a schizo who receives messages from god written in blood on his bedroom walls. Make the angel Gabriel come down and tell him to impregnate a virgin so she can give birth to the son of God, there's any number of ways to convey the story to the player without resorting to the shittiest NPC dialogue system ever made just so you don't have to make it make any sense. Fucking Brotherhood of Steel just lets you waltz up and they start bossing you around like you ever consented to be a part of their shitty cartel and you effectively have no recourse because they're "essential" to the story. It's bad and lazy design. The fact that they fucked it up in Morrowind too doesn't make it good.

 

[Super Hans v2]

The fact that they fucked it up in Morrowind too doesn't make it good.

To push back slightly against what you and others are saying, because while the following is true taking this route makes completely the main quest a pain in the ass even if with the proper foreknowledge, but only one NPC is truly essential, despite the dozens of others marked as such and popping the message when killed.

https://en.uesp.net/wiki/Morrowind:Yagrum_Bagarn_and_Wraithguard

 

[The Ugly One]

That's just how war works. You can't decide if your ace pilots get shot down, your billion dollar carrier gets torpedoed, your most experienced sergeants get hit by indirect fire, that's just part of the frustration of running a war.

War doesn't let me hit F7 right before I commit my troops and then hit F9 to take a do-over if I made a bad decision. So either hardcode Iron Man mode or lower the stakes associated with losing a unit. In an actual war, an ace pilot going down doesn't mean you'll lose the war later on.

 

[Pissmaster]

Is this a good time to repeat my unpopular opinion of your favorite game probably wasn't *that* good and you were just 12 to 16 when you played it?

Cause all this Kotor talk is really making me think back to it.

Chrono Cross and Mega Man Battle Network fit perfectly into this category for me. Both are nice looking games with neat ideas, but are total slogs to play through.

Though I first played Kotor at age 16 and didn't like it at all. It was ugly and the combat was slow, and that was before I completely lost all interest in Star Wars forever.

I really dislike units that gain experience being lost permanently, because it puts you at such a disadvantage late game to let any units die at all that it heavily encourages savescumming. Panzer General and its descendants have the same problem. It would be better for knocked-out units to just go into reserve with zero health and maybe have to sit out next mission while they recover.

Yeah, that's a pretty major reason why I couldn't get into Fire Emblem. After playing a lot of Advance Wars, a game where you're intended to treat your units as disposable by stuffing the cheapest ones into chokepoints and letting the enemy chip away at them, I sure didn't like how everyone on your team in Fire Emblem had a name and a plot and if they die, they're gone for good, and you miss out on little plotlines and stuff. Then I find that they just get knocked out if you set it to casual difficulty, but that makes everything else braindead simple. And I really don't like the whole thing where you have to foster relationships and play cupid with your party members. We're in constant combat situations, can we please maybe not play matchmaker?

 

[The Ugly One]

Panzer Corps 2 actually has built-in savescumming. It autosaves the end of every turn, so you can rewind to whatever turn you want if you really screwed up. You can still save within the turn if you want, but I find that this is frequent enough for me.

 

[cia-log]

War doesn't let me hit F7 right before I commit my troops and then hit F9 to take a do-over if I made a bad decision. So either hardcode Iron Man mode or lower the stakes associated with losing a unit.

I think we both agree that having an entire war fought with like fifteen dudes is a little weird. I get that in X-COM (I've never played Fire Emblem but I assume it's similar) you're supposed to be commanding a kind of special operations organization so your candidate pool is much narrower than that of a regular military unit, still, you'd think guys coming into the unit would be handpicked to be the most elite fighting men money can buy.

In an actual war, an ace pilot going down doesn't mean you'll lose the war later on.

Right. I don't think having to deal with a loss of manpower or production capacity is out of place in a strategy game (if you don't like it play another genre), instead they should be made more interesting to play through. If too many losses means countries don't want to fund your incompetent ass and they pull out of the X-COM program, you should be given the option to use hit and run guerilla tactics to steal equipment from aliens (or even humans) Your men should already be the cream of the crop, so losing one man shouldn't mean you have to hire Joe Dumbfuck to replace him, but rather you have to spend an increasing amount of money to replace him (as more losses would damage your reputation and make experienced soldiers less willing to accept your command)

These are just some ideas, but you get my meaning. If you have to replay turns in a mission over and over so the whole war goes in your favor from start to finish, the game just gets boring. The whole point of a strategy game is that there are shades of grey to winning and losing, and being stuck in any of the possible outcomes should give you an opportunity to think your way through it. That's the entire fun of the genre, without it there's nothing.

 

[The Last Stand]

I prefer tailing missions over escort missions. I hate having to protect somebody.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

Essential NPCs do suck and they have been roundly criticized for years.

Then explain to me all the RPG games where you can't kill civilian NPCs and questgivers becoming beloved by the masses, from Final Fantasy, the Mario RPGs, the KOTOR/Mass Effect games, the Witcher games, among other things, these are all RPGs that the masses have all crowned as classics of the RPG genre, and yet they don't let you run around like a maniac killing everyone you meet, let alone questgivers.

It seems to me that if such games are heralded by RPG fans and players as classics despite not letting you kill questgivers and other NPCs, then the people whining about not being able to kill Jarl Balgruuf in Skyrim and the kids in FO3 are but a minority. A loud one, but a minority nonetheless, especially with Skyrim becoming so successful and popular that the fucking Japanese devs started copying it, and Fallout 3 got so successful they made FNV as a cash-grab to capitalize on FO3's popularity.

It's only the people who play Bethesda games who bitch about such things; something which I've never understood. I mean, outside of Skyrim, the most popular RPG is fucking WoW, and you sure as fuck can't kill questgivers there unless the game makes one an enemy.

To wrap up this whole Morrowind shit so that people can fucking move on, my final verdict on Morrowind is that, there's a good game buried underneath all the jank and shit. It's got great potential, but the kinks are still there stinking it up. As in, if someone ironed out the game, made several tweaks to the combat, the story, and the graphics, it would've been an undeniable classic in the same vein as FF7, KOTOR 1, Mass Effect, or Witcher 3. Instead, Morrowind will have to be listed as one of those games that was almost good, rather than actually being good. The people who love it ignore its massive flaws, but they did see something good within that pile of shit, so that's worth keeping in mind.

It reminds me of games like Shadow the Hedgehog, a game where yes, you can kill your fucking questgivers, it's got multiple endings based on who you side with, and it's a platformer with a moral choice dynamic that determines the next level you play based on the moral choices you make. An amazing concept, except the game can be clunky at times, which limits the potential of the game. I'm one of those people who will defend this game as being something worthwhile because of its potential, but I sure as hell won't say that it's better than Sonic Generations or Sonic Adventure 2. It's got great potential, but its flaws drag down an otherwise amazing concept of a game.

 

[NPZCC]

people whining about not being able to kill Jarl Balgruuf in Skyrim

Why can't you kill Jarl Balgruuf in Skyrim?

explain to me all the RPG games where you can't kill civilian NPCs and questgivers becoming beloved by the masses

If every NPC in Skyrim was essential, would it be a better game?

 

[cia-log]

Then explain to me all the RPG games where you can't kill civilian NPCs and questgivers becoming beloved by the masses

This is such a dumb question I'm not even gonna answer it. Why do games with lootboxes sell, why do always online games sell, what does the word "despite" mean. Use your head.