Unpopular Opinions about Video Games

[Calandrino]

What, exactly, defines success?

To crush your enemies


see them driven before you


and to hear the lamentations of their women

 

[Wesker]

Answer the question, please.

No.

You're trying to argue a point I wasn't even disagreeing with.

 

[Pumpkin Girl IRL]

No.

You're trying to argue a point I wasn't even disagreeing with.

Yet you dismissed public opinion and sales, offering zero idea of what does make something successful. Its a simple question but nobody is apparently capable of answering.

Edit: Starting to feel like I'm asking trannies how they define a woman.

 

[Scarthew]

Why are RE4 onwards praised for being good games?

They were literally made with the (incorrect) assumption that horror is an obsolete genre and they need to be more like CoD; shooty shooty bang bang.

People hated them.

Because theyre not only great games but theyre a completely unique sub-genre of their own of third person shooters that focus around using guns for hitstun for melee followups. If you enjoy their gameplay loop you only have 6 (7 if we include the re4 remake) games that play like that and they're all called resident evil.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Ladies, you're all wrong. Allow me to tell you correct opinion.

The discourse was around AAA devs who decided the horror genre is dead. I remember a lot of AAA companies decided to make shooty shooty bang bang games with brownish aesthetic because CoD made money. RE was one of those franchises. RE3 is all dark and gritty; RE4 has that on-brand yellow color palette specific to that era.

That came later. RE4 was Gamecube, the CoD chasing started on the 360 after the success of CoD 3 followed by the massive success of CoD 4.

Resident Evil 3 was originally intended to spin off game. At the time, the fixed camera tank control game was long in the tooth and they were desperate to mix it up somehow. That explains why RE4 had so many prototypes, and why RE had so many spin offs.

The discourse that "horror was dead" came sometime after RE4, perhaps because of it. I remember it becoming a thing around the release of Dead Space, which was seen as an anomaly. Dead Space 2 continued it's success, but Dead Space 3 had to be a co-op TPS to cash in on the Gears of War trend.

Seriously. If you disregard financial and critical success, while shunting aside the size of a product's fan base, what exactly is the measurement being used?

"Oh it made money, but so did this slop..."

"Oh it reviewed well, but so did this slop..."

"Oh it has a strong fan base, so does this slop..."

At some point you have to accept that what's successful isn't isn't decided by what you personally like.

Correct, but this also cuts both ways.

Let's use money, as it's an easy, objective measure. Some films spend more money than they make. Rodger Corman was known as the b-movie king. His movies made a profit because he made them fast and cheap. Blumhouse is a modern equivalent. Complete slop, but the budgets are so low they make their money back. Adam Sandler movies are natoriously bad, but they're payed for by the ads within the film.

Then there's circumstances of release. I mentioned Titanfall 2 getting fucked by releasing between the two biggest games of the year. The Thing getting fucked by being a year of legendary films and the audience not having an appetite for horror at the time. A game example might be how anthro characters used to be common. Banjo Kazooie, Starfox, Crash Bandicoot, Sonic, and so on. Now when a game has anthro characters there's a sizable portion of always online channer types who will flood any discussion with claims how it's furfag shit for furries. These aren't "wrong", but tastes change.

Then there's niches and goals. Horror is a reliable money maker despite not being mainstream. Netflix deliberately makes films to be bland and obvious because market research shows that the best way to keep a customer is to have content that is interesting enough to keep engaged, but not so interesting that it distracts them from their phones.


And these are the easy metrics. Critical acclaim and fan support are more vague. Critical acclaim used to be valuable until journos started trading sex and favours for positive coverage. Fans can be good, or so autistic as to be a liability. Mario 64 was amazing in it's day. If it were released now, you'd have an online fanbase claiming it ruined the series forever and that Mario should only be 2D.

I have a love hate relationship with it. While on it's own, it's legendary. But I don't like that every game following has the over the shoulder slop that now every other game has to have to. RE4 still at least felt very creepy with astounding atmosphere. Neither were replicated in the mid remake.

As always, AAA took the wrong lessons from it.

I think you've nailed what that common thread is in RE games. It's not just "zombies are scary." It's how you progress in the game from being a pants-pissing weakling to being armed to the teeth. The problem comes in when an RE game starts you out with too much ass-kicking right away. It's fine to finish the game as Rambo, but in the first 1/3 of the game or so, you need to be running away more than you're dumping out ordnance.

This isn't just limited to a single game, but multiple games. As you get older, you've seen it done before, done better. Famous film example. The Exorcist was considered the scariest film ever made at release. When they re-released it in the 2000s, audiences were laughing at it. I've seen something similar with classic RE, people mocking the over the top acting and cheesy monsters.

 

[Pig Boss]

shooty shooty bang bang.

shooty shooty bang bang

shooty shooty bang bang

Shooty shooty bang bangs

Ebin joke

 

[Wesker]

Mario 64 was amazing in it's day. If it were released now, you'd have an online fanbase claiming it ruined the series forever and that Mario should only be 2D.

I don't think I'd mind the new approach to RE's gameplay, if it had actual talent behind it so it didn't feel like generic shooters that happen to have monsters in them.

4make felt like a flicker of what RE should be in the modern age, but it's not without major flaws.

 

[Pumpkin Girl IRL]

OK, but Dredd, how do you define success if none of those three metrics are reliable? We're not talking about someone merely stating their own opinion, we're talking claims that "people hate" a product...despite no offered measurement actually suggesting that.

Financial, critical and fan related acclaim have a degree of tangibility. I'm seeing these things get dismissed with zero alternatives brought up.

 

[WEEKEND]

Ocarina of Time never had much of an impact on me as a kid. I never owned an N64 but I did play it a lot at my cousins (they even let me borrow the system a few times) and I played OoT to completion and then went back to Tony Hawk and AoE and forgot about Zelda completely. I've replayed the game as an adult and I still don't feel like it's anything special. Don't get me wrong, it's a good game and I can appreciate what a technical achievement it was on the N64 but it isn't the GOAT.

 

[Gondolindrim]

Why are RE4 onwards praised for being good games?

They were literally made with the (incorrect) assumption that horror is an obsolete genre and they need to be more like CoD; shooty shooty bang bang.

People hated them.

It's funny how things change over time. Resident Evil used to be all zombies and mutants, then they phased out the zombies and upped the gunplay. And now enough time has passed that people think RE5 was everyone's favorite when it was super divisive at the time.

 

[Mr. 0]

leon kennedy is totally not gay

 

[Calandrino]

OK, but Dredd, how do you define success if none of those three metrics are reliable? We're not talking about someone merely stating their own opinion, we're talking claims that "people hate" a product...despite no offered measurement actually suggesting that.

Financial, critical and fan related acclaim have a degree of tangibility. I'm seeing these things get dismissed with zero alternatives brought up.

He already explained how to measure success:

Ladies, you're all wrong. Allow me to tell you correct opinion.

 

[Chunky Salsa]

No online minimal story looter shoots have been good; any that have a good premise waste it on a dreary skinner box designed to maximise time wasted. Said because that Forever Winter one looked to have a unique and interesting setting that it pissed up the wall. What a waste.

 

[Judge Dredd]

OK, but Dredd, how do you define success if none of those three metrics are reliable? We're not talking about someone merely stating their own opinion, we're talking claims that "people hate" a product...despite no offered measurement actually suggesting that.

Financial, critical and fan related acclaim have a degree of tangibility. I'm seeing these things get dismissed with zero alternatives brought up.

It depends on the success you're talking about.

Again, Titanfall 2. Financial failure, critical and fan success. Beyond Good and Evil. Okami. Same thing.

When it comes to RE4, it should be obvious, but people are talking about fan success. The general consensus.

Ocarina of Time never had much of an impact on me as a kid. I never owned an N64 but I did play it a lot at my cousins (they even let me borrow the system a few times) and I played OoT to completion and then went back to Tony Hawk and AoE and forgot about Zelda completely. I've replayed the game as an adult and I still don't feel like it's anything special. Don't get me wrong, it's a good game and I can appreciate what a technical achievement it was on the N64 but it isn't the GOAT.

Agreed. It seems you had to be at a specific age when you played it for the first time.

No online minimal story looter shoots have been good; any that have a good premise waste it on a dreary skinner box designed to maximise time wasted. Said because that Forever Winter one looked to have a unique and interesting setting that it pissed up the wall. What a waste.

I'd love to play that pre-beta version of Destiny that was supposedly amazing, with deep lore and story, before it was gutted shortly before release. All the others since have been chasing what Destiny promised.

 

[Light blue notebook]

Elden ring.

When I played it, I got the same feeling as when I played Dragon age 2 based upon the dungeon layout.

Main areas got variations, but the side areas is just the same 2-3 layouts with different areas shut off with the same reused boss at the end.
That dungeon that just stacked three dungeons on top of each other was just a slap to the face.

And the way to big open world killed any enthusiasm i had of that game, I place it above dark souls 2 at least in the ranking.

I still don't get all the praise that game gets.

 

[Frederica Bernkastel]

I still don't get all the praise that game gets.

BOTW was the better open world game

 

[X Prime]

Ladies, you're all wrong. Allow me to tell you correct opinion.

I would have went with "it's a failure if I think it sucks."

 

[Pumpkin Girl IRL]

It depends on the success you're talking about.

You keep deflecting and avoiding the question. How are you measuring "fan success" and "general consensus" if critical and financial acclaim are being discarded?

This shouldn't be so difficult to answer, yet it's *still* being given the run around several pages later.

 

[Richter Belmont]

Does anyone else also feel that Serious Sam games (all of em) feel and look like those fake games ya only see in movies and tv. I still find it a fun series but it feels like it shouldn't exist and everything always felt... off.

 

[Fig Kommandant]

Does anyone else also feel that Serious Sam games (all of em) feel and look like those fake games

I think it's the randomness of the setting and enemies. Serious Sam and those mobile ads are both so incoherent. Definitely agree with feeling off too. Games that are as polished as that usually have a sense of progression or a coherent setting.