Unpopular Opinions about Video Games

[Megaton Punch]

I guess but they literally just took GTA and said "Let's make GTA but with University".

Yeah. And 20 years ago that was new territory which had everyone shitting themselves. Harry Potter is just "wizards but with University" and it has thus far made 72 quadrillion dollars. You don't have to be great, you just have to be first.

Unreal and Warcraft 1 were good games, though.

Were, but not are. They've aged terribly. I grew up with both and don't really like either any more. Unreal's prologue is still iconic and really well made, but the gameplay itself is just not fun. WC1 is just WC2 but bad.

 

[The Ugly One]

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This statement was my "go to cope", that picrel is just a cherry picked few, but with the years I seriously doubt if this is true. I honestly think the demographics for a Nintendo consumer is most likely +18.

Online forums where you find pictures like this are a tiny, tiny, self-selecting portion of the population that are not representative of the user base as a whole. They're not a random sample and tell you nothing. The average 9-year-old doesn't post selfies on Reddit. All the children in my social circle have Switches. They don't, to my knowledge, post on Kiwi Farms, Reddit, NeoGAF, or Reset Era. They're invisible online. That doesn't mean they don't exist or that none of the 146 million Switches Nintendo has moved are in their hands.

In general, assuming that what you see posted online represents the average person is a huge mistake. Online posters self-select for the most obsessed adults. It's like how back in 2015, the alt-right thought they were far larger than they were just because they were the loudest online. Turns out that a few tens of thousands of extremely online young men are in no way reprsentative of the tens of millions of Americans who voted Trump.

Were, but not are. They've aged terribly. I grew up with both and don't really like either any more. Unreal's prologue is still iconic and really well made, but the gameplay itself is just not fun. WC1 is just WC2 but bad.

I played them both in the last year. They were a lot of fun. Unreal 2, however, is awful.

 

[Xarpho's Return]

Roguelikes at their best are about emergent gameplay and resource management. If I leave this section of the dungeon, will I ever be back? Is it worth delving deeper here only to get smoked? The idea is that you're constantly running a risk-reward equation versus the idea in a non-roguelike where the dungeon will always be there and overcoming it is a matter of time.

I'm not saying roguelikes can't improved upon and do something fun and new with the genre, every once in a while someone comes up with some old, outdated concept and does something interesting with it, and I'm sure there are games like that.

However, my main gripe comes in the form of something like The Binding of Isaac, losing and then having everything reset, new rooms, new layouts, new monsters, so in the midst of getting wiped out by flesh monsters I can't think how to avoid them next time around. Even before Super Meat Boy's levels became too ridiculous to complete and be fun at the same time, there was the resets and timing, and seeing all your previous attempts end in failure. For Hotline Miami it was the fact that I KNEW that sniper/dog was hiding out in that one corner so remembering to dispatch them quickly. Even going back to something like VVVVVV there was knowing how I fucked up and how to overcome it. It's what makes video games the thing they are.

Even then, TBoI is still looked on favorably, there are lots of games being roguelikes absolutely do not work in their favor.

 

[snowdunes]

In general, assuming that what you see posted online represents the average person is a huge mistake. Online posters self-select for the most obsessed adults.

This is might sound like I'm making shit up (source? what's your source!?), but I'm actually looking at other students at my and other universities and people on vacation, a big chunk of the guys (and a few women as well) got these Switches (context: most are under 30, with some exceptions maybe a few over 30... again mostly zoomers and under). In my observation, parents give their kids a tablet in most cases, not a dedicated console (cheap all around device), but adults got the "spare money" for such a dedicated device (a specific game device). I hope it's them just maybe borrowing their younger siblings Switches, but seeing them using them more than the kids sets of some warnig flags that the infantilization is worse than you might think.

I took the meme image as a meme, but considering that more and more toys are bought as collection items rather than actual toys should maybe shed some light on my original comment. Hint: Look at how toys are designed, are they really designed to be played with or to be on a shelf?

 

[The Ugly One]

I hope it's them just maybe borrowing their younger siblings Switches, but seeing them using them more than the kids sets of some warnig flags that the infantilization is worse than you might think.

Think through this. How did the manchildren around you get into Nintendo in the first place? Because they played with Nintendo products as children. Young adult Nintendo owners are downstream of the child market. The adult market degrades by attrition. There are fewer 20-year-olds playing with Nintendo products than 15-year-olds, fewer still at 25, and on and on, each year shedding players until finally, in your forties, virtually nobody is buying Nintendo products unless it's for their children.

 

[parapondiallia]

Yeah. And 20 years ago that was new territory which had everyone shitting themselves. Harry Potter is just "wizards but with University" and it has thus far made 72 quadrillion dollars. You don't have to be great, you just have to be first. ...first.

You can be first but most of the time, you need to be wary of the copycats that might produce, cause you know, once something grows big enough, it'll gain copies of it soon enough.

 

[Lance 45]

Tried playing through Wolfenstein: The New Order for the first time on Uber difficulty and its really making me think maybe the nazi's weren't nearly as bad as the SJW crowd made them out to be. All these niggers and butch dykes do is boss BJ Blaskowitz around with fetch quests in the "resistance" hq and commit actual acts of terrorism that give their adversaries good reason to have locked them away to begin with.

Ended up uninstalling after the "resistance" did a suicide car bomb attack on the science museum part of the research facility level right after the prison break. There were civilians in there and we could see them on the streets on the way there. SJWs are actual terrorists. I don't care what political boogeyman ideology might have been working in there. There is never any excuse to harm civilians as collateral damage. This isn't GTA.

I expected something like "return to castle wolfenstein" where you get to shoot armed combatant nazis like a normal person and sneak around a bit with the stealth mechanics they kept undermining with annoying call of duty segments. But was met with a bait and switch about how white people are "nazis" and evil. While they have their white manservant supercommando BJ Blaskowitz do their bidding. I will NEVER play another machinegames developed game ever again.

 

[Green Man]

I don't, and never asked to be able to take a break from hunting down a mystical artifact to slay an ancient demon so that I can impregnate the party's lockpicking expert. It would be great for this shit to just not exist.

It can be okay I guess but I have never understood why romance options are like a given now in most RPGs, even when it doesn't really make that much sense. I suppose Mass Effect probably started this shit and it seemed relatively out of place there as well. "Hey guys we have this relatively unknown ancient force that's trying to destroy the entire fucking universe, but yeah I guess we can take a break to bone for a while."

It's now sort of treated like a prerequisite for any RPG to have companions you can eventually bang and it usually doesn't culminate in any actual good plot threads or conflicts because obviously not every player is going to pick the same party member and they're not going to put significant dev time into making a different outcome dependent on who you boned, so it usually just culminates in an unintentionally cringe cutscene to sit through and most of the time they're still scared to have a single tit and/or nipple make an appearance anyway, so what's the point? That sort of shit always has worked better in more linear games.

I always liked the juxtaposition though of playing these games and having my character be this stalwart fucking paragon who is like a brick wall in the face of romantic intent. It's kind of funny to just shut down these characters right off the rip.

 

[Jace on ice]

Tried playing through Wolfenstein: The New Order for the first time on Uber difficulty and its really making me think maybe the nazi's weren't nearly as bad as the SJW crowd made them out to be. All these niggers and butch dykes do is boss BJ Blaskowitz around with fetch quests in the "resistance" hq and commit actual acts of terrorism that give their adversaries good reason to have locked them away to begin with.

Ended up uninstalling after the "resistance" did a suicide car bomb attack on the science museum part of the research facility level right after the prison break. There were civilians in there and we could see them on the streets on the way there. SJWs are actual terrorists. I don't care what political boogeyman ideology might have been working in there. There is never any excuse to harm civilians as collateral damage. This isn't GTA.

I expected something like "return to castle wolfenstein" where you get to shoot armed combatant nazis like a normal person and sneak around a bit with the stealth mechanics they kept undermining with annoying call of duty segments. But was met with a bait and switch about how white people are "nazis" and evil. While they have their white manservant supercommando BJ Blaskowitz do their bidding. I will NEVER play another machinegames developed game ever again.

You're not alone, a lot of people have pointed out that the "Nazi Dyatopia" in the Machine Games Wolfensteins is portrayed as technically advanced, clean, crime free, orderly.

And the good guys are dirty Communists squatting in sewers bombing civilians.

It's very very odd and many people think that it unintentionally makes the Nazis look like the good guys.

 

[PunkinMan]

Graphics for gaming peaked after we got rtx, I'm mostly just mati we will never have real gore simulated, being able to see skin flayed, flesh torn from bone and accurate fat deposits and real fracture and bone deformation. Cs2 tried with parallax bullet wounds but it looks like shit tbh, not only that but it's not even the first game to do it.

 

[X Prime]

It's now sort of treated like a prerequisite for any RPG to have companions you can eventually bang and it usually doesn't culminate in any actual good plot threads or conflicts because obviously not every player is going to pick the same party member and they're not going to put significant dev time into making a different outcome dependent on who you boned, so it usually just culminates in an unintentionally cringe cutscene to sit through and most of the time they're still scared to have a single tit and/or nipple make an appearance anyway, so what's the point? That sort of shit always has worked better in more linear games.

It's even worse now that Japanese games do it.

Trails of Cold Steel has this sort of thing and since none of it could matter or be made canon because somebody would get upset, it basically ended up amounting to wasted dev time and aspects of those romancable female characters ending up in a sort of time freeze.

 

[The Last Stand]

Vice City had charm out the ass, but GTA V was basically just a scaled-down photocopy of L.A which is neat to see in a videogame but the real place doesn't have much fucking charm either. So in that aspect, I suppose that it's a realistic portrayal of L.A. Likewise a lot of the people who were responsible for much of that charm in previous installments are no longer with the company.

Do real life approximations of cities in games nowadays impress anymore? Many of them just blur together. Art direction is what brings a player into your world. That has been deprioritized in favor of graphics and filler content.

 

[3deadniggers]

It can be okay I guess but I have never understood why romance options are like a given now in most RPGs, even when it doesn't really make that much sense.

Women will buy products for the romance options. The Tumblr shipping crowd impacted a lot of media and continues to be a base you can appeal to with minimal effort. Record a few extra lines of dialog and fade to black and you have a new audience talking about your game and making fan art.

Lonely men see it as essential to RPGs and want to do them as challenges. Doesn't seem very interesting to me but consider it a form of softcore pornography hidden in games and think how many of us played Duke 3D to see the strippers.

 

[piombo]

You're not alone, a lot of people have pointed out that the "Nazi Dyatopia" in the Machine Games Wolfensteins is portrayed as technically advanced, clean, crime free, orderly.

And the good guys are dirty Communists squatting in sewers bombing civilians.

It's very very odd and many people think that it unintentionally makes the Nazis look like the good guys.

no you see they're not the good guys because it's all stolen from the forgotten jewish technologies! if these filthy nathzees weren't here then it would have been the oppressed jewish ubermench that would have brought the next utopia!

machinegames lucked out with this game since people wanted a fun wolfenstein game, and they did deliver with this and old blood (despite the plot of both games), but i don't understand the terminal brainrot that crams jewsperging in these games when RTCW and 2009 didn't have anything even remotely associated with them.

 

[The Ugly One]

Women will buy products for the romance options.

That, and they put women in charge of writing most of these games. Since women can't code, they hit DEI targets by hiring women writers. Women pretty much always saturate their stories with romance and sex. Look what happened to Warframe. They put a female writer in charge, and her first idea was to defeat an intergalactic war robot by reading gay buttsex love poems to it.

 

[Calandrino]

I'm not saying roguelikes can't improved upon and do something fun and new with the genre, every once in a while someone comes up with some old, outdated concept and does something interesting with it, and I'm sure there are games like that.

However, my main gripe comes in the form of something like The Binding of Isaac, losing and then having everything reset, new rooms, new layouts, new monsters, so in the midst of getting wiped out by flesh monsters I can't think how to avoid them next time around. Even before Super Meat Boy's levels became too ridiculous to complete and be fun at the same time, there was the resets and timing, and seeing all your previous attempts end in failure. For Hotline Miami it was the fact that I KNEW that sniper/dog was hiding out in that one corner so remembering to dispatch them quickly. Even going back to something like VVVVVV there was knowing how I fucked up and how to overcome it. It's what makes video games the thing they are.

Even then, TBoI is still looked on favorably, there are lots of games being roguelikes absolutely do not work in their favor.

Binding of Isaac isn't a real roguelike, and although I haven't played it I can tell that it clearly sucks.

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I honestly think the demographics for a Nintendo consumer is most likely +18.

Yeah, and it's gonna stay that way until we fix all the bleeding heart child labor laws and make kids buy their own damn video games.

 

[Green Man]

Women will buy products for the romance options. The Tumblr shipping crowd impacted a lot of media and continues to be a base you can appeal to with minimal effort. Record a few extra lines of dialog and fade to black and you have a new audience talking about your game and making fan art.

Lonely men see it as essential to RPGs and want to do them as challenges. Doesn't seem very interesting to me but consider it a form of softcore pornography hidden in games and think how many of us played Duke 3D to see the strippers.

True, I did sort of forget about the "shipping community" which is honestly for the best for my wellbeing, considering how fucking absolutely deranged those people get over fictional characters. I remember reading an article about the devs of whatever the fuck iteration of Life is Strange those French fucks are on now getting death threats because they made a narrative decision that pissed off the Tumblr dykes who obsess over the characters. That shit honestly probably is a money printer for "choice-based storytelling" [basically a choose your own adventure book, being an actual game is kinda dubious] which in that case I'm fine with it because I very likely won't play it anyway.

 

[The Ugly One]

Apparently this is an unpopular opinion, but Warcraft 1 was a good game. I played through the campaign recently for the first time and enjoyed it quite a bit.

The game came out well before online multiplayer was the center of the RTS experience, much less the gaming experience overall, and before Koreans had figured out the meta in RTS is to maximize your apm. It's really not designed to reward ultra-fast clicking and mass unit generation, instead expecting the player to more directly control small numbers of units. I found the campaign to be fun and charming and played both the orc and human campaigns through to the end.

If anything, the game made me miss the days when single-player campaigns dominated the gaming experience rather the endless battlepass treadmills you see everywhere now.

 

[Judge Dredd]

Not all Roguelikes are created equal and not all Rogue-lites should be called Roguelikes.

Roguelikes at their best are about emergent gameplay and resource management. If I leave this section of the dungeon, will I ever be back? Is it worth delving deeper here only to get smoked? The idea is that you're constantly running a risk-reward equation versus the idea in a non-roguelike where the dungeon will always be there and overcoming it is a matter of time.

I think there's a lot of value in that but many games that have "roguelike" elements actually just give you two random choices as you "explore" predetermined modular rooms. Not really actually roguelike at all.

For me the biggest issue is that, no matter how times I hear a roguelike is "skill based", it almost never is. It all comes down to luck. Even "easy" games like Everspace I play on the lowest difficulty, and still lost runs due to no fuel spawning.

Oddly enough, the best roguelikes, aren't considered roguelikes. NuXcom being one. It changes every run, but at the same time there's enough of a baseline for you to get good at the game. The randomness results in emergent situations that you have to play around.

It's like how I hate JRPGs, and hate the "it gets good 15 hours in" mentality, and how fans will say "there's no grinding" turns into "It's only a couple of hours of grinding. Just put on a podcast and you'll burn through it in no time." once I'm 20 hours in and hit a brick wall where I'm getting one shotted constantly.

Or how RTS games are always sold as being tactical games, but in practice it comes down to knowing the handful of "meta strats" and who can micro better. And these "meta strats" are usually no fun at all, like "com bombing" in Supreme Commander, or Warthog rush in Halo Wars.

 

[The Ugly One]

For me the biggest issue is that, no matter how times I hear a roguelike is "skill based", it almost never is.

I got Slay the Spire on my phone because it's supposedly good. It comes almost entirely down to which 5 or 6 cards you get first in your deck. Roll the right cards, and you're on easy street.