Unpopular Opinions about Video Games

[Book Thief]

I would accept that line if it was preceded by 15 years of "I want to be represented in that video game/movie."

I think a lot depends on context. For instance, if a minority character appears in a piece of historical fiction where they logically wouldn't have existed then, or if a minority character is used as a vehicle for the author's political views, then I agree that it should be labelled as "woke." However, if the minority characters are just there, and they're treated as characters beyond their minority status, then who gives a shit?

This is why I think it's dumb to call something like Half Life a "woke series," because God-forbid a bunch of black people in the modern era in the USA exist, or that the sequel has a black man and a blasian woman as characters during a post-apocalypse setting. Their race is never elaborated upon, they aren't used to spout leftist political talking points, so you're required to drag the issue into it yourself, which is just retarded.

That said, I do agree the whole "representation" argument is bullshit, because you're essentially saying that you want yourself to be in the game, and that you can't relate to anyone outside of your race, gender, or whatever the fuck you are, which is a pretty narcissistic way of looking at story-telling.

 

[4chanJanitorDefenseForce]

I think a lot depends on context. For instance, if a minority character appears in a piece of historical fiction where they logically wouldn't have existed then, or if a minority character is used as a vehicle for the author's political views, then I agree that it should be labelled as "woke." However, if the minority characters are just there, and they're treated as characters beyond their minority status, then who gives a shit?

This is why I think it's dumb to call something like Half Life a "woke series," because God-forbid a bunch of black people in the modern era in the USA exist, or that the sequel has a black man and a blasian woman as characters during a post-apocalypse setting. Their race is never elaborated upon, they aren't used to spout leftist political talking points, so you're required to drag the issue into it yourself, which is just retarded.

That said, I do agree the whole "representation" argument is bullshit, because you're essentially saying that you want yourself to be in the game, and that you can't relate to anyone outside of your race, gender, or whatever the fuck you are, which is a pretty narcissistic way of looking at story-telling.

While I agree it wasn't exactly woke, Alyx was most definitely a "you go girl" character at the core.

 

[The Ugly One]

his is why I think it's dumb to call something like Half Life a "woke series," because God-forbid a bunch of black people in the modern era in the USA exist, or that the sequel has a black man and a blasian woman as characters during a post-apocalypse setting. Their race is never elaborated upon, they aren't used to spout leftist political talking points, so you're required to drag the issue into it yourself, which is just retarded.

Half-Life 2 came out around ten years before the whole "woke" orthodoxy movement really got big. It's not "woke" for the same reason Jan Hus isn't a Protestant or Jean-Jacques Rousseau isn't a Marxist. However, if you think the reason Alyx's parents are black male/Asian female, the least common kind of human pairing there is, and she sidelined the stale pale male as the series died out, was unrelated to libtard race-fetishism, you're naive.

 

[Darksy DePhil]

Say what you want about Xbox as a brand but Xbox fanboys do admit fault, are critical of Microsoft blunders, and aren't absolute consumerist cattle like Nintendo and sony fans are.

Bro they thought Phil Spencer was going to be their savior

 

[Tenshi Eating A Corn Dog!]

Not an unpopular opinion here (I think), but an unpopular opinion in the public that I'll post here too.

I've been done blaming the industry for shitty practices for years; I've been blaming customers for a while now. Most people invested in any hobby that only requires money to get into and very little practice do not care about the hobby as much as you do and will continue to make everything worse for everyone else in that hobby by failing to have any standard for how they spend their money. 80$ games, much like battle passes, much like loot boxes, much like paid online on consoles, etc are shit tests given to consumers that they fail 99% of the time. The standards will continue to lower and you will find people with the audacity and stupidity to try to explain away why when the answer is very simple: the frog was boiled successfully and will continue to boil successfully.

 

[4chanJanitorDefenseForce]

Half-Life 2 came out around ten years before the whole "woke" orthodoxy movement really got big. It's not "woke" for the same reason Jan Hus isn't a Protestant or Jean-Jacques Rousseau isn't a Marxist. However, if you think the reason Alyx's parents are black male/Asian female, the least common kind of human pairing there is, and she sidelined the stale pale male as the series died out, was unrelated to libtard race-fetishism, you're naive.

I think her becoming more of the star was due to weirdos that were in love with her, and they just catered to them. They felt like a gimmick game would be better if you could fondle yourself as autist waifu #8432789437234.

 

[Book Thief]

While I agree it wasn't exactly woke, Alyx was most definitely a "you go girl" character at the core.

I think Alyx being a generic Action girl with the hots for Gordon is more of a function of him being a Marty Stu, as well as the story-telling of HL2 being somewhat sloppy.

The story of HL1 is pretty simple. It's more-or-less a retelling of the story of DOOM, but with (at the time) more advanced graphics, along with integrated story-telling and world-building built into the game instead of the manual. You are humble science man employed at Area 51 Black Mesa, but an experiment goes wrong and now aliens have invaded the facility. Pretty soon, the military arrives to kill the science team, so now it's a race to survive the whole disaster, eventually culminating in traveling to an alien world, beating a big-bad alien, and finally a lizard-man in a suit comes along to tuck Gordon in for bed.

In HL2, however, Gordon is treated not like an everyman, but instead some kind of messianic figure. Why? What did Gordon do to earn such a reputation? Survive Black Mesa? So did a lot of other people, considering we meet several of our former coworkers. Defeat the Nihilanth? All that did was allow the Combine to invade the Earth. Gordon was at the epicenter of not one, but two incidents that irrevocably made life on Earth a living hell, and everyone got to suffer for it while he got to take a big fat space nap for twenty years. Shouldn't people dislike or distrust Gordon because of that? Wouldn't it have been more interesting if Gordon had to earn the respect of his fellow rebels? Instead, everyone drops to their knees in hopes of sucking Gordon's cock, the random bludgeoning object you used for all of two minutes before you got a gun is treated with the same degree of reverence as The Master Sword, and the only guy who actually dislikes Gordon does so for comically petty reasons (Gordon ruined his casserole).

So yeah, Alyx being shallow waifu bait makes perfect sense, but it's far from the only flaw of that game's story. Gordon is smart, badass, everyone worships him for no discernable reason, and a woman who has never met him before immediately falls in love with him. HL2 is, in a nutshell, a teenage boy's power fantasy. But at the very least, it doesn't try to be anything more than that.

However, if you think the reason Alyx's parents are black male/Asian female, the least common kind of human pairing there is, and she sidelined the stale pale male as the series died out, was unrelated to libtard race-fetishism, you're naive.

I'm pretty certain the motivating factor behind Alyx being mixed-race is the fact that her voice actress is, and since Eli is based off the black scientist model from the first game, it would only make sense that Eli would need to have an Asian wife.

Besides, the 2000's was a much more innocent time, as far as race relations were concerned. Those of us who grew up in the 80's, 90's or 2000's will remember being taught that race didn't matter, treat people equally, character content over skin color, etc. The only people who would've cared that there were minorities and mixed-race couples in their video games back then were the hardcore racists. It wasn't until the rise of Social Justice cultists in the 2010's that people started to hyper-fixate on race, with writers getting replaced by grifters who demanded that all fiction must bend to their ideology. And since these grifters can't write characters to save their lives, of course their minority characters suck ass.

So I have to disagree with the notion that Alyx was motivated by race fetishism. People were a lot more "live-and-let-live" about race in 2004, being far more egalitarian and "anti-racist" than the keyboard warriors of today lurking on Reddit and Twitter.

 

[The Last Stand]

While I agree it wasn't exactly woke, Alyx was most definitely a "you go girl" character at the core.

Alyx should've been an older White character or modeled after a 50s style woman. There.

 

[Agent Abe Caprine]

Alyx should have been a Vortigaunt. Why? Vortigaunts are cute.

 

[Scarthew]

You're right, corporations just want entire aesthetics to be homogenized and sterilized. The worst part is this trend is synonymous with another glaring issue of trying to turn games into pseudo-movies. Nobody wants to play a game if its a cartoony rodent fighting mad scientists or if you're a space marine punching the heads of demons because they think its for kids. They want games to feel like Oscar bait now with emphasis on monologues, dramatization, long expositions and deconstructions. And to accomplish this, a game cannot look cartoony or stylized in anyway. Theres more effort to make sure Joel, Aloy or Kratos have noticeable wrinkles and spit particles then making sure the games fun.

You're like a decade behind, they don't make those anymore. They make battlepass open world slop and gacha. And DOOM is coming out this month.

The only teams still making linear story games are naughty dog and the sony team behind god of war. But even then the new god of war games are... pretty good, even if the story is in the way at times.

Also that new naughty dog game is gonna flop hard, they misread the room with that shit.

 

[BigBadBastich]

I think a lot depends on context. For instance, if a minority character appears in a piece of historical fiction where they logically wouldn't have existed then, or if a minority character is used as a vehicle for the author's political views, then I agree that it should be labelled as "woke." However, if the minority characters are just there, and they're treated as characters beyond their minority status, then who gives a shit?

Yeah its pretty much this. Nobody complains about Avery Johnson, Mace Windu or Cole Train but I'm going to roll my eyes if I see a somalian actor playing an elf in a Lord of the Rings prequel series or black Norse gods in capeshit movies.

That said, I do agree the whole "representation" argument is bullshit, because you're essentially saying that you want yourself to be in the game, and that you can't relate to anyone outside of your race, gender, or whatever the fuck you are, which is a pretty narcissistic way of looking at story-telling.

I've told people that its narcissistic to think this way and antithetical to freedom of expression. fuck I even said it might even be slightly autistic to be unable to identify with basic, universal traits like heroism, love of family, bravery etc from characters like Luke Skywalker or Superman regardless of race, and they just got upset. You can't argue with or engage these people because its never enough for them. Look at how many people were cheering on Black Panther representing black culture in a fun or cool way when Blade did it nearly 20 years earlier and saying it didn't matter because "Blade is a vampire and he isn't doing African things."

 

[Gondolindrim]

I do not mind when I play a video game and there are nonwhites in it.

Brave. No but seriously, as a nonhwhite myself. I do get fatigued when I see too many of them. Because something about the way game devs create worlds makes it really clear that they actively chose to put in blacks, mexicans and whatever else just to stand out.

That said, I do agree the whole "representation" argument is bullshit, because you're essentially saying that you want yourself to be in the game, and that you can't relate to anyone outside of your race, gender, or whatever the fuck you are, which is a pretty narcissistic way of looking at story-telling.

The problem with "representation" is that the people calling for it are usually just fucking babies about who they want specifically. I'd consider a black villain to be representation but then you get hit with cries of racism. Then it becomes clear that the "representation" is about having a perfect idol with no flaws but the skin color of your choosing.

 

[4chanJanitorDefenseForce]

The problem with "representation" is that the people calling for it are usually just fucking babies about who they want specifically. I'd consider a black villain to be representation but then you get hit with cries of racism. Then it becomes clear that the "representation" is about having a perfect idol with no flaws but the skin color of your choosing.

The bigger problem is it's not the minorities themselves that champion this, but white women making themselves the center of attention. Remember when white women cancelled Speedy Gonzales because he was offensive to Mexicans, then Mexicans were like "uh, we like him." Fluffy himself was voicing him in the shitty Space Jam movie and thought cancelling him was retarded.

 

[Calandrino]

No but seriously, as a nonhwhite myself.

Even Kiwi Farms is full of BIPOC and LGBTQ+ representation. The only way to get away from wokeshit on forums is to stick to reading usenet posts from the 1980s.

 

[Deus Exica]

Quest markers are good actually. When I decide to do a quest I don't want to have to wander the map aimlessly in search of whatever the fuck I was told to go and get. No, I don't want to have to write down an NPC's vague directions and I don't want to 'get lost' in the world. Fuck you.

 

[Fig Kommandant]

Quest markers are good actually. When I decide to do a quest I don't want to have to wander the map aimlessly in search of whatever the fuck I was told to go and get. No, I don't want to have to write down an NPC's vague directions and I don't want to 'get lost' in the world. Fuck you.

That really depends on the mood of the player and the game, but a lot of devs badly do the "no map markers, go explore". If you want no map markers, it has to be a central point to the design of the game. With good level design and proper information, you don't need markers, but levels are usually designed with a marker and NPC audio isn't enough to transfer relevant knowledge.

 

[Ibanez RG 350EX]

Quest markers are good actually. When I decide to do a quest I don't want to have to wander the map aimlessly in search of whatever the fuck I was told to go and get.

I'd argue that's typically more of an issue of poor design than a lack of quest markers.

"Getting lost in the world" and "immersion" are a faggy, pretentious way to describe it, but the issue itself is real - when you have crutches like quest markers or minimaps, it can lead to the entire game becoming a 30-hour exercise in moving the green dot toward the red dot. And then the player wonders why gameplay feels so shallow, repetitive, and unengaging.

 

[XL xQgg?QcQCaTYDMjqoDnYpG]

If anyone wants a great argument in favor of quest markers, go play Cyberpunk 2077, take the sidequest The Highwayman
Straight up impossible without a guide or external information, not a single part of the job is labeled on the map

 

[The Ugly One]

I'd argue that's typically more of an issue of poor design than a lack of quest markers.

"Getting lost in the world" and "immersion" are a faggy, pretentious way to describe it, but the issue itself is real - when you have crutches like quest markers or minimaps, it can lead to the entire game becoming a 30-hour exercise in moving the green dot toward the red dot. And then the player wonders why gameplay feels so shallow, repetitive, and unengaging.

In the real world, I'm not told to "Go Malok's Bar" and then am dependent entirely on remembering where Malok's Bar is because I started the first mission of Episode II there. And if I do sort of remember which side of Hell City it's on, I'm not wandering among a hundred identical houses with the same 8 non-interactive pedestrians instanced 256 times and wandering aimlessly.

The problem is too many games that don't have questmarkers have no way to get directions to where you're going. In the real world, I can use Google maps, or call somebody, or ask for directions. If you're not going to put quest markers in a game, you need to have a way to find things other than "memorize everything you've been told and don't ever put down the game for more than two days."

 

[Ibanez RG 350EX]

The problem is too many games that don't have questmarkers have no way to get directions to where you're going. In the real world, I can use Google maps, or call somebody, or ask for directions. If you're not going to put quest markers in a game, you need to have a way to find things other than "memorize everything you've been told and don't ever put down the game for more than two days."

Absolutely. But I think there's got to be some middle ground between being given no information at all and mindlessly following quest markers.

What's the point of having these huge, meticulously rendered worlds of modern games if you spend the whole game staring at a dot on a compass or minimap? What's the point of being able to talk to ten thousand fully-voiced NPCs with complex behavior when they're nothing more than a quest waypoint and everything they say is going to be boiled down to a cardinal direction anyway?