I must begrudgingly give this a vote since it's the only opinion in here (thus far) that caught me off guard and I completely disagree with. That said, I don't approve of yucking someone's yum.
I must begrudgingly give this a vote since it's the only opinion in here (thus far) that caught me off guard and I completely disagree with. That said, I don't approve of yucking someone's yum.
Honestly it takes so much investment to get into them or get anywhere with them these days that many of the most popular ones are just not worth it if you need to juggle a social life and other...
Honestly it takes so much investment to get into them or get anywhere with them these days that many of the most popular ones are just not worth it if you need to juggle a social life and other responsibilities.
There are treasures out there, like Stardew Valley, though.
Curious, why do you think it's impossible to play video games and live a life? Is there a cutoff you have in mind for how much video games are acceptable to play? Why are video games any different...
Curious, why do you think it's impossible to play video games and live a life? Is there a cutoff you have in mind for how much video games are acceptable to play? Why are video games any different than other media like consuming music, movies, or TV?
Because it's for children. Only children can play it. Adults should do adult things, like adulting... ...sorry, had to let it out. My mother's like that. She doesn't understand the appeal of video...
Because it's for children. Only children can play it. Adults should do adult things, like adulting...
...sorry, had to let it out.
My mother's like that. She doesn't understand the appeal of video games at all, so whenever father and I talk about the next game – one of the new STALKER mods he's playing, most often – she chimes in to remind us how lowly that whole affair of gaming is.
But whenever I say something negative about the trashy melodramas she enjoys so much, she replies with incredulity at my offense: "But this is life! Not like one of your little toys..."
You might be pleased to hear a not-all-mothers instance. My mom still plays vidya games. Mainly console RPGs, final fantasy, HZD, stuff like that. She just started playing witcher 3 last week....
You might be pleased to hear a not-all-mothers instance. My mom still plays vidya games. Mainly console RPGs, final fantasy, HZD, stuff like that. She just started playing witcher 3 last week. She's in her late 60s, and learning new control schemes can be a bit slow, but damn if it isn't fun going through a game with her.
She doesn't always play games though. I think she feels a little too engrossed by them and backs off for a while. Instead, she ends up watching detective shows that are difficult to describe in any way except "mind numbing". And she definitely can take games to the point of being mind numbing. She racks up hundreds of hours across multiple playthroughs of the same game, and it all pretty much runs on auto pilot. But at least it's an auto pilot that you engage with instead of passively zoning out at.
Games are just another form of entertainment, another flavor of escapism. So I'll throw in my unpopular opinion at this point: Show me a person who has no need of escapism and I'll show you a person who lacks empathy. Because I honestly can't see how someone can live in this world, grapple with the challenges it presents, and not have the need to step away occasionally to give the echoes of bombardment a moment to fade into the distance.
It's really cool that your mother enjoys video games so much. How do you figure it's empathy they're lacking? I thought empathy is the ability to correctly recognize and respond to others' feelings.
It's really cool that your mother enjoys video games so much.
How do you figure it's empathy they're lacking? I thought empathy is the ability to correctly recognize and respond to others' feelings.
I think of empathy more along the lines of allowing the experience or current emotional state of another to affect one's own experience or mental state (granted, it's limited to one's perception...
I think of empathy more along the lines of allowing the experience or current emotional state of another to affect one's own experience or mental state (granted, it's limited to one's perception of another's state, which may or may not ring true). Probably even a bit more broadly than that. Basically the internalization of external frames of reference. The process of allowing oneself to be altered moment to moment by other consciousnesses around them can be boiled down to recognizing and responding to feelings, but I feel like there's a whole lot more to it than that.
That whole mechanism can have a pretty large impact, good or bad or anywhere in between. And with the tightly-wound state of affairs of modern society, allowing such fundamental shifts can hit with a pretty heavy dose from time to time. Consequently, it becomes a necessity to escape, from time to time, the constant bombardment of the myriad external frames of reference that bear down on those who are susceptible to being affected by them. Whether that escape is through video games, drinking, hobbies, reading, tv, exercise... you name it, there's probably someone out there that uses a form of it as an escape.
That's my take on it anyways. Probably not as much of an absolute as I presented it as, more like a working theory that only takes into account a small facet of behavior and tries to boil it down to a pithy statement for the hell of it.
He's the kind of a player that tries few games, likes even fewer, and the ones he likes, he sticks with. I think he's drawn in on a particular set of experiences, and wants to explore them from as...
He's the kind of a player that tries few games, likes even fewer, and the ones he likes, he sticks with.
I think he's drawn in on a particular set of experiences, and wants to explore them from as many different angles as possible. He curses some of the mods he plays – yet he plays them through unless they're so broken it's impossible. I have that with music: I seek out all the remixes of a song I like, because the song was great and the takes it could be viewed from could be even greater.
The other game he likes is MechCommander 2. We had a CD of it at some point, and my father replayed it every few years. The CD broke, so I had to find a disk image online: if he wants to play it, he wants to play it – and I get that.
There are other games he enjoyed – like the Metro series, unsurprisingly – but none he actively returns to so often. STALKER is by far the most played game of his if you include all the modded versions: probably hundreds of hours.
Def not impossible to play video games and live life. Though, I feel like an increasing amount of exploitative video games are trying to make them life. In the sense that you invest more and more...
Def not impossible to play video games and live life. Though, I feel like an increasing amount of exploitative video games are trying to make them life. In the sense that you invest more and more hours for the next trinket. (much like life, hehe). Assuming you sleep and work for 8 hours, that leaves 8 hours of "free time." Spend how you will, of course.
Why are video games any different than other media like consuming music, movies, or TV?
I would say they're not, except that the finding "artistic merit" in video games is harder than in those other forms of media, I think.
Saw 2 interesting things related to this today. No BS games - a list of games with no ads and no in-app purchase (I believe there's an exception for demo games that allow you to in-app purchase...
I feel like an increasing amount of exploitative video games are trying to make them life.
Saw 2 interesting things related to this today.
No BS games - a list of games with no ads and no in-app purchase (I believe there's an exception for demo games that allow you to in-app purchase the full game)
Dark Patterns of Games - a list of the types of dark patterns that games try to use along with naming and shaming games that use them
IMO merely consuming media doesn't lead to a fullfilling life. Lose the games, stop watching TV, stop browsing so much internet. Fill the void with creation. Create art. Create a new business....
IMO merely consuming media doesn't lead to a fullfilling life. Lose the games, stop watching TV, stop browsing so much internet.
Fill the void with creation. Create art. Create a new business. Volunteer. Create or take care of children. Join a political movement. Help solve the world's problems. Stop being a consumer.
Enjoyment of recreational activities might be fine in small doses. Many video games are like jobs, and are designed to be addictive and suck away your time.
I don't like starting new games, or new TV shows, because of their addictiveness and huge time requirements.
It's kind of the other way around, isn't it? You have to have lived life for media to have an affect on you. If you show a kid a melodrama about a woman coming to terms with a stillbirth, you'll...
IMO merely consuming media doesn't lead to a fullfilling life. Lose the games, stop watching TV, stop browsing so much internet.
It's kind of the other way around, isn't it? You have to have lived life for media to have an affect on you. If you show a kid a melodrama about a woman coming to terms with a stillbirth, you'll bore them to tears. If you show them the same melodrama years later after they have kids of their own, it's going to be a different kind of tears.
In any case, I think you are too dismissive of the value of media, and perhaps of art in general. The point of art is to assert meaning to it's viewers. Art can convey messages that are so fundamental that they cannot be meaningfully taught by words. Without art there is no culture, no philosophy, and no society. It is the single most valuable invention in humankind's history.
I wish it were that easy because I really do struggle to do more productive things when given the choice to game. Not that there isn't room in everyone's lives for unproductive things, but it's...
I wish it were that easy because I really do struggle to do more productive things when given the choice to game. Not that there isn't room in everyone's lives for unproductive things, but it's kind of a hobby that dominates for me. Why write, read, paint miniatures, etc. during my freetime when I could just sit on my ass and play games?
It occurred to me one day that I may die having never accomplished the things my inner drive pushes me to. That thought terrifies me every time. I used to play games every fucking day, for hours...
It occurred to me one day that I may die having never accomplished the things my inner drive pushes me to. That thought terrifies me every time.
I used to play games every fucking day, for hours on end, because I never had an aim in life. The only thing I saw on my path was one step forward, on the same road I was walking for years. It took an existential crisis – finding myself at a loss for purpose and questioning my very existence – to shake things up enough to get me off my feet.
I play games, and I enjoy them all the same – but today they are a source of active rest, rather than the day's bounty. I find great satisfaction in making my plans come to life – something I never thought I'd have.
As someone who almost never plays games (because my phone has very little room for games and almost all the games I like are on PC for performance reasons anyways and because noone makes games for...
As someone who almost never plays games (because my phone has very little room for games and almost all the games I like are on PC for performance reasons anyways and because noone makes games for PS3s and my parents wouldn't really buy them anyway)
I just spend my life on social media instead.
I don't know that there is a specific age above which you shouldn't play them or anything - I don't have a strong opinion about it. I can just speak for myself and my own personal experience and...
I don't know that there is a specific age above which you shouldn't play them or anything - I don't have a strong opinion about it. I can just speak for myself and my own personal experience and say that I definitely feel like I've missed out on a lot in my life because I spent such a ridiculous amount of time playing games. I gained (and lost) friends around the world, but I don't know that it was worth it - friends online never did the same things for my mood as friends in real life did.
I may just be saying this because I'm burnt out though. I haven't played anything for several months outside of AFK Arena on my phone lol
Dark Souls isn't hard. It's just badly broken. Broken controls, broken camera, broken movement, broken combat. The game punishes you just for trying to move around and interact with the world....
Dark Souls isn't hard. It's just badly broken. Broken controls, broken camera, broken movement, broken combat. The game punishes you just for trying to move around and interact with the world. Difficulty should come from level design, interesting enemies, coöperating enemies, clever enemies.
For what it's worth, that is an unpopular opinion. :p Oddly enough, I felt that way the first time I played Dark Souls, but when I tried it again, I actually managed to get the hang of it. It just...
For what it's worth, that is an unpopular opinion. :p
Oddly enough, I felt that way the first time I played Dark Souls, but when I tried it again, I actually managed to get the hang of it. It just plays differently, and things like weapon speed can, at first, come across as laggy.
That's by no means saying that the game is for everyone, but if you get the chance to try it, or snag it during a good sale, I'd still recommend it. :)
I never got gud, but after a few hours, I at least understood how it works... or at least, that it works. :p If it were actually broken, it wouldn't be the kind of game that rewards experience as...
I never got gud, but after a few hours, I at least understood how it works... or at least, that it works. :p If it were actually broken, it wouldn't be the kind of game that rewards experience as much as it does. The mechanics are just different from other hack & slash games. Honestly, I wish more games had that kind of combat, and I'm glad that more are at least taking bits and pieces of it.
...I will say, though, that I take great issue when people say Dark Souls is so fair that every death is your fault. There are still plenty of times where the game goes "HAHA GOTCHA! That'll show you to turn a corner with only mild caution, ya stupid." The second time you go at it you'll know what to expect, and as you get better you'll be able to overcome things, but there are absolutely areas designed to kill you completely by surprise with little to no way to see it coming. (On the flip side, I also think the game doesn't punish death nearly as much as some people make it out; you never lose gear or spent experience. It's not a roguelike, even if it scratches a similar itch.)
Oh yeah, people who think Dark Souls is perfectly designed have some very rosy glasses on. There's a lot about the original Dark Souls' design that was janky and half-baked to say the least,...
Oh yeah, people who think Dark Souls is perfectly designed have some very rosy glasses on. There's a lot about the original Dark Souls' design that was janky and half-baked to say the least, including a whole area (Lost Izalith). It's a great game to play because the mechanics are so good, and I really came around to enjoy the progression systems, but there's a lot about the world design that was improved with later Soulsborne games.
Oh my god, please don't. Dark Souls 1 was on my "to play, maybe, eventually" list for years before I gave it a try. Now I revisit it every few months because it's just such an amazing game. The...
Oh my god, please don't. Dark Souls 1 was on my "to play, maybe, eventually" list for years before I gave it a try. Now I revisit it every few months because it's just such an amazing game. The level of depth to its mechanics and world are unparalleled.
If it helps, this thread's OP conflated dying with punishment. Any good Soulsbourne player will rebut that, saying instead that dying is a learning experience. An opportunity to try a different...
If it helps, this thread's OP conflated dying with punishment. Any good Soulsbourne player will rebut that, saying instead that dying is a learning experience. An opportunity to try a different approach.
You will die a lot, but in Soulsbourne it is always worth asking "why?" you died.
Well then. Spec Ops: the Line isn't as good as its reputation it suggests and a lot of what it did aim for was done better by Metal Gear Solid 2. COD Modern Warfare 2 has one of the worst stories...
Well then.
Spec Ops: the Line isn't as good as its reputation it suggests and a lot of what it did aim for was done better by Metal Gear Solid 2.
COD Modern Warfare 2 has one of the worst stories in gaming.
Platform party chat killed an important aspect of multiayer gaming and it has never been the same since.
EA isn't the worst company in gaming.
The weird original boomerang PS3 controller looked interesting and it's a shame it never saw the light of day because the SixAxis and the DualShock 3 kinda sucked.
Super Smash Bros. is not as intuitive as it should be.
Katamari Damacy is, pound for pound, the most "fun" video game. Not a single wasted moment, including the Namco title screen.
Half-Life 2 is still the best masterclass in linear level design.
Arena shooters and RTS games aren't dead, it's just that nobody has invested money into making good AAA ones in far too long. (Hopefully Doom Eternal has a proper multiplayer this time.)
StarCraft has always been more of an exception to RTS games than an example of the genre.
All the best Star Wars media are video games (maybe with the exception of the Thrawn trilogy).
That's it for now. Maybe I'll add more later as I remember them.
EDITED New ones:
Fulbright Studios (Gone Home, Tacoma) games suffer from the same problem: good ideas, and execution that runs out of steam 2/3 of the way through.
Nintendo isn't very good at controller designs.
Prince of Persia 2008 is the best game in the entire franchise.
The original Uncharted wasn't a good game because of its reliance on shooting gameplay, all of which was bad.
Killzone is an underrated franchise, though still not a very good one. But the first game's multiple-character level design was excellent and it's a shame it wasn't expanded on.
Gears of War 2's online was ruined by people who demanded they rebalance the gameplay to be as broken by the shotgun as the first game's online, and the series was never able to recover from that.
Halo CE had some of the worst level design ever. Halo 2's SMG is one of the worst weapons ever and it's ridiculous that they made it the default weapon. Halo 3 is the first Halo game to not have major design issues. The Halo series generally has bad spawns, and the lack of any spawn protection makes it so much worse.
Office is the best Counter-Strike level.
Fallout 1 and 2 have aged just fine.
MW2's No Russian level would have been better served if we instead played as a civilian trying to outrun the massacre.
Wow. Basically everything I have a reference point to comment on I agree with. This doesn't happen often! I would add one thing though: The Bioshock games have nothing "deep" or interesting to...
Wow. Basically everything I have a reference point to comment on I agree with. This doesn't happen often!
I would add one thing though:
The Bioshock games have nothing "deep" or interesting to say. (Simply discussing a philosophical concept doesn't automatically mean you're engaging with it at any level fo depth).
Yeah, I'd say it's something similar to my Spec Ops thing. Just because a game refers to something new that games don't usually delve into doesn't automatically make it amazing or even poignant....
Yeah, I'd say it's something similar to my Spec Ops thing. Just because a game refers to something new that games don't usually delve into doesn't automatically make it amazing or even poignant. It's just a reference unless it's exploring those ideas in interesting new ways and inviting exploration and new kinds of thinking on those matters.
EA has by far the best customer support out of all the companies l've required support from. They call you(so no phone costs), in my language, taking their time and making sure you get the help...
EA has by far the best customer support out of all the companies l've required support from. They call you(so no phone costs), in my language, taking their time and making sure you get the help you need.
Steam? Takes three weeks to get an answer sometimes, and it might just be a generic bot answer.
I don't expect you to go on a full-blown rant about this, but – could you elaborate on that? Ditto for the following: Is there a company that you can nominate for that title, or were you simply...
COD Modern Warfare 2 has one of the worst stories in gaming.
I don't expect you to go on a full-blown rant about this, but – could you elaborate on that? Ditto for the following:
Platform party chat killed an important aspect of multiayer gaming
StarCraft has always been more of an exception to RTS games than an example of the genre.
EA isn't the worst company in gaming.
Is there a company that you can nominate for that title, or were you simply making an observation that it's not as bad as the publicity suggests?
Sure! Every time I play this game, I'm so annoyed by how little sense the story makes. Shepard is a Marine commander who lost a ton of his men... but those guys were all Army, not Marines. His...
Sure!
COD Modern Warfare 2 has one of the worst stories in gaming.
Every time I play this game, I'm so annoyed by how little sense the story makes. Shepard is a Marine commander who lost a ton of his men... but those guys were all Army, not Marines.
His goal then is to galvanize America into a full blown war against Russia in the spirit of overzealous patriotism for all those American lives... and then he does so through probably the single biggest and most treasonous act in US history, by working with those same Russians to have them invade and deal major blows to the US. But also how did the US not detect or see an entire invasion coming until they were already ashore? MW and MW2 both have heavily shown that the US has all kinds of information from all over the world at any given point in the loading screens alone until this point.
So to hide it he goes very far out if his way to bring together all the best Special Ops people into one unit, including breaking Price out of a gulag, just so he can have them cover up his actions. Then he proceeds to betray them, even though Price was suspicious of him all along. But also he now has this elite mercenary group under him? He's a Marine commander, and he put together all the best SpecOps people in a unit... and he chose to hire some other PMC firm to be his muscle instead of using either of those two groups? The dumbest part of it all is that if he didn't betray his SpecOps group at all, they would have had no idea what he had done! He outed himself for some stupid reason!
Also, what was the deal with Ghost? He was in all the marketing because of his look, the art book even lists him as a "silent but deadly" type. And then he won't shut up, does nothing, and then gets shot in the face. What was the point of him?
Not to suggest that CoD4 had some kind of amazing story but at least it was contained, made sense, and didn't try to be overdramatic with badly done plot twists.
EDIT: Oh man, I forgot about No Russian. How the hell did Russia justify an invasion over a CIA asset all by himself?! How did they even buy that it was all his idea? The way the story handled the consequences of the level just made the level feel disrespectful in retrospect. What a mess.
Platform party chat killed an important aspect of multiayer gaming
The days of lobby chat had their fair share of problems, to be sure, but there were also so many great moments of playing with the people in that lobby. Jokes, shit talking, laughs, insults, and more as the game went on, poorly or well. Maybe someone took control and guided the team, everyone fell in line behind them, and the game went smoothly.
Now days, it's all a ghost town. If I go online and into a lobby there's just... names. Nobody's chatting, nobody's having fun. It's gone from feeling like I joined a pick-up game at the local community centre to feeling like I joined a pick-up game inside a library. The erstwhile sense of "community" within that lobby is simply gone.
These days, I can only really find it in certain games where communication is vital, like Counter-Strike or LoL or DOTA. But then those games are also way too intense to be all I can play so it's not exactly a solution.
Additionally, party chat ruined some interesting online chat features, like local voice broadcast where your voice comes out of your character in the game space, and enemies could hear you if they were close enough since you were, for all intents and purposes, speaking out loud.
StarCraft has always been more of an exception to RTS games than an example of the genre.
StarCraft is just simply an outlier because of how fast it is. It was always meant to be the fastest RTS game, especially StarCraft 2. People dismiss RTS games as a genre where you needed crazy high APM to even compete but that's only true of StarCraft (and even then, not really). After all, WarCraft is right there next to it and that's not at all nearly as demanding about APM. It's more of a traditional RTS game because of how slow-paced it all is. Games like Age of Empires, Dark Reign, Impossible Creatures, Company of Heroes, Command & Conquer all had more in common with WarCraft than they did StarCraft.
EA isn't the worst company in gaming.
Activision gets it for me. To me, they're the least daring, least adventurous, most predatory company. The still have Bobby Kotick as their CEO. Remember all the wild shit he said in the 2000's? It's not like that went away, the board probably told him to shut the fuck up after a while, but all his notions are still there with him.
I'd also give the nod to Microsoft during the Xbox 360 days. A lot of the predatory gaming practices we have now can be traced back to their actions during the Xbox 360.
I'm still ridiculously pissed about this point. Some games I played were focused around the whole "local voice broadcast where your voice comes out of your character in the game space" thing, or...
Platform party chat killed an important aspect of multiayer gaming
I'm still ridiculously pissed about this point. Some games I played were focused around the whole "local voice broadcast where your voice comes out of your character in the game space" thing, or relying on something else in-game. Modern platforms basically trashed that.
Also, I've played far too many games where I seem like I'm the only one saying stuff for half the game, and then someone pipes up and says "yo, sorry, we're all on discord" or something similar. Basically, if you're the +1, the other group decides to ignore you since it's easier. It used to be that at least they spoke in-game and you could join in the shenanigans.
I agree with you, but it's not Discord's fault in the least. If Discord didn't exist, it would just be another platform. Unfortunately the closed nature of the platform makes it seem especially...
I agree with you, but it's not Discord's fault in the least. If Discord didn't exist, it would just be another platform. Unfortunately the closed nature of the platform makes it seem especially dubious.
I have to completely back you up with this. Every time I think about how I'm missing out on playing multiplayer games with my friends, I remember it's too hard to coordinate playing with them...
I have to completely back you up with this. Every time I think about how I'm missing out on playing multiplayer games with my friends, I remember it's too hard to coordinate playing with them these days (30s). Then I think about going online to play with strangers but then remember this effectively stifles any chance of me making friends with somebody
It's definitely beloved. I think calling it the single most "fun" game is probably what is unpopular since it's not usually in "favourite" or "best" lists for many people. What I'm more trying to...
It's definitely beloved. I think calling it the single most "fun" game is probably what is unpopular since it's not usually in "favourite" or "best" lists for many people. What I'm more trying to get at is that it has the most "fun game" in every aspect than any other game, and I don't think any other game has come close to making sure the entire experience, from start to finish, is as much "fun game" as Katamari Damacy. The Namco title screen, for example, would be a legal thing in any other game. KD uses it as the save profile select, and you have to use Katamari mechanics to do it! Before the game even starts (upon a previously played boot) you're thrown into the world and gameplay immediately.
(Also, I am lumping We <3 Katamari with Damacy for this purpose.)
Lots of overlaps, here! Katamari Damacy sits comfortably in my top 10, basically, since I discovered it exists. One thing about "arena shooters" and RTS games reaching mass appeal, though: I think...
Lots of overlaps, here! Katamari Damacy sits comfortably in my top 10, basically, since I discovered it exists.
One thing about "arena shooters" and RTS games reaching mass appeal, though: I think it's pretty pointless to split game genres (which are already separated along weirdly drawn lines) even further and pretend like, for example, "MOBAs" aren't just the most popular form of RTS games right now. Same with "arena shooters". There's PUBG and a last-man-standing game mode that has been around since the 90s and that's just the FPS flavor currently popular.
I think it's telling that projects trying to bring back "arena shooters" (Reflex Arena, Toxikk) essentially look like perfect clones of Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament. Those aren't really "genres", they're just two specific ways of doing an online FPS, their appeal heavily relying on the freshness of the technology at the time. Since then we had Tribes, which added large environments, Team Fortress, which added classes and Counter Strike, which added scenarios based on real events. The FPS just evolved. Almost everything a Quake 3 did still exists (with the possible exception of bunnyhopping). Quake 3 today just looks like (I'm so, so sorry) Fortnite. Again, I'm sorry, but it does. StarCraft today looks like League of Legends.
I think the reason "arena shooters" aren't a thing today is that the term "arena shooter" is trying to repackage like 3 games as if they had enough potential to be redone in endless, unique ways. They're not. A "modern arena shooter" is simply a "modern FPS" and we all know what that looks like.
That one is more personal than the rest but I always enjoyed the spaces this level had, they're pretty different from any other CS map, like the side hall facing down the main hallway, or the...
That one is more personal than the rest but I always enjoyed the spaces this level had, they're pretty different from any other CS map, like the side hall facing down the main hallway, or the garage to back office entryway.
It's not a big map either, but the paths are winding and meet at a few points that make it great for ambushes and unexpected plays. It also has the side effect of making good audio setups much more important so you can listen for where someone may be.
I'm playing it right now because it was free in the PS Store and have to agree. The platforming is fun, if a little frustrating at times, but the shooting is just not good.
The original Uncharted wasn't a good game because of its reliance on shooting gameplay, all of which was bad.
I'm playing it right now because it was free in the PS Store and have to agree. The platforming is fun, if a little frustrating at times, but the shooting is just not good.
Nathan Drake collection on PS4? Would you believe the PS4 version fixed the aiming across all three original games? It was worse on the PS3. The good news is that Uncharted 2 and 3 are a lot...
Nathan Drake collection on PS4? Would you believe the PS4 version fixed the aiming across all three original games? It was worse on the PS3.
The good news is that Uncharted 2 and 3 are a lot better about it. The thing that made the first Uncharted worse (despite similar enough mechanics) is how they designed the combat arenas—the constant spawning of the enemies behind you was annoying as all hell.
Uncharted 2 lessened the shooting down to pace it with the platforming nicely. Uncharted 3 is a bit of a step back. I thought 4 was really well done.
Yep! It just gets me how it takes 3 shots with the pistol to kill a baddie and like 10 with the AK. The pistol seems like the strongest weapon by far. Then there is the jetski level that I just...
Yep! It just gets me how it takes 3 shots with the pistol to kill a baddie and like 10 with the AK. The pistol seems like the strongest weapon by far. Then there is the jetski level that I just finished, where you can't move and shoot at the same time and controls are just not great. Looking forward to getting through it and playing 2 and 3 though. I've played 3 before but it has been many years.
You can definitely argue with me that this is a chicken and egg problem, but they're not as popular as they used and they're not part of the modern trends, that's why they're dead. You can say...
Arena shooters and RTS games aren't dead, it's just that nobody has invested money into making good AAA ones in far too long. (Hopefully Doom Eternal has a proper multiplayer this time.)
You can definitely argue with me that this is a chicken and egg problem, but they're not as popular as they used and they're not part of the modern trends, that's why they're dead. You can say that's because no one is pushing any of those games in the mainstream, but that doesn't negate the fact that they're "dead".
Storytelling in games is overrated. Or rather: The way stories are "told" in games often do not benefit from any interactive parts (the only reason to make it a game in the first place?) at all,...
Storytelling in games is overrated. Or rather: The way stories are "told" in games often do not benefit from any interactive parts (the only reason to make it a game in the first place?) at all, making me wonder why the creators didn't just write a book or do a movie short or something.
To add a more constructive note: I think Ken Levine, at least in theory, might be onto something with his vision for "storytelling" that's simulated as gameplay rather than providing a background.
PS: Can't resist putting this lovely tweet here. It illustrates perfectly how disconnected "story" and gameplay can be, even – like in this case – if it's entirely non-verbal.
I think the issue, to be blunt, is that most videogame stories are shit. Including the ones that get awards and universal praise. Any average film is MILES ahead of the years' best game when it...
I think the issue, to be blunt, is that most videogame stories are shit. Including the ones that get awards and universal praise. Any average film is MILES ahead of the years' best game when it comes to story.
I've felt this way for a long time! I keep hearing about certain games that I must play because they have a great story, but I'm just like... I've already seen those types of plots and stories in...
I've felt this way for a long time! I keep hearing about certain games that I must play because they have a great story, but I'm just like... I've already seen those types of plots and stories in books, TV-series, and movies. Everyone praises Witcher 3 for its story, but it bored me and I uninstalled it after playing it for about 20 hours. I didn't feel it was very unique or anything, but I did quite like the Netflix show. Perhaps storytelling in games is just too slowly paced for my tastes.
I'll add on to this: Sandbox games are more "game" than story-based games. Note: I am not saying that story games are bad (for me, they are), but the games I keep going back to are ridiculously...
I'll add on to this: Sandbox games are more "game" than story-based games. Note: I am not saying that story games are bad (for me, they are), but the games I keep going back to are ridiculously open-ended. I still play Master of Orion II on occasion.
I really like the idea of emergent gameplay in simulators. One of the things Rimworld is praised for is the stories it can afford to tell. Maybe you choose to save that raider because his...
I really like the idea of emergent gameplay in simulators. One of the things Rimworld is praised for is the stories it can afford to tell. Maybe you choose to save that raider because his backstory is pure tragedy and you can't just leave them to die with such dishonor. Maybe your decision to install a faulty bionic backfires drastically, and one of your favorite characters in the whole colony suddenly goes on a rampage and kills or maims other characters you care about, including animals¹. Maybe your curiosity and/or need overtakes you and you open a crypt full of creatures armed with powerful rifles able to obliterate your whole colony... which they do.
It's something I've been exploring for a few years. Recently I've been working on a concept of a magic system that can create non-encoded, dynamic effects based on the combination of spell parts it uses. I have a vague idea of "grammar" that would entail certain interactions between given parts of the spell, assuming it consists of more than one component. Something similar has already been done – picking characteristics from a list to form a single spell. What I'm aiming to do is make sure those effects are dynamic, as well. All that should be set is the base elements that can form any other complex form.
It's also why I love Borderlands: its dynamically-constructed weapons. It's an underrepresented concept in modern games. I think some FPS/TPS could be made more fun with such things.
¹ I dunno if it was a mod's weird interaction with the game or a true example of emergent gameplay, but one of my colonists, after having an archotech cognitive enhancement installed, started finding themselves in unpredictable fits of rage that would entail smashing everything and everyone around them. The colonist was a brainy type, with almost no fighting skill to speak of, so the damage they did was negligible. That alone was a very interesting part of that character's emergent story – something to love about these types of games.
It's something I've been exploring for a few years. Recently I've been working on a concept of a magic system that can create non-encoded, dynamic effects based on the combination of spell parts it uses. I have a vague idea of "grammar" that would entail certain interactions between given parts of the spell, assuming it consists of more than one component. Something similar has already been done – picking characteristics from a list to form a single spell. What I'm aiming to do is make sure those effects are dynamic, as well. All that should be set is the base elements that can form any other complex form.
It does, doesn't it? Currently the work is on the conceptualization stage. I'm figuring out how such a thing would even work. Right now, even though I call it "grammar", it more closely resemble...
It does, doesn't it?
Currently the work is on the conceptualization stage. I'm figuring out how such a thing would even work. Right now, even though I call it "grammar", it more closely resemble mathematics in the way these components are supposed to interact: there's a small fundamental system of interactions from which the complex framework stems.
It's one of those things I'm going to be working on passively for years, until pieces fall just close enough to each other that the picture clicks.
Magicka is something like this. Casting spells involves combining “elements” and the combination you do (chording button sequences basically) determines the type of spell, how it comes out (like...
I've been working on a concept of a magic system that can create non-encoded, dynamic effects based on the combination of spell parts it uses.
Magicka is something like this. Casting spells involves combining “elements” and the combination you do (chording button sequences basically) determines the type of spell, how it comes out (like in a straight line, a cone, a radius around you), and how far it goes. And it’s multiplayer, so the elements being used by the wizards around you affect your spells in unpredictable ways.
That way it's been done, yeah. There are tabletop RPG systems that allow players to construct their spells and superpowers in this fashion. The latest announced edition of Shadowrun (6th?) and, I...
That way it's been done, yeah. There are tabletop RPG systems that allow players to construct their spells and superpowers in this fashion. The latest announced edition of Shadowrun (6th?) and, I think, City of Heroes do that.
Sorry to post on a comment a couple days old (just made my account here), but do you have some examples of games that manage to use their medium's unique strengths in telling a story? I think I...
Sorry to post on a comment a couple days old (just made my account here), but do you have some examples of games that manage to use their medium's unique strengths in telling a story? I think I agree with your general point.
I would say Dark Souls is a game with great storytelling using the medium's strengths. The story as told through cutscenes and narration/exposition is bare bones, but the lore of the world and the...
I would say Dark Souls is a game with great storytelling using the medium's strengths. The story as told through cutscenes and narration/exposition is bare bones, but the lore of the world and the relationships between characters is fleshed out through things like item descriptions, level architecture, game art, map design, etc..
The story itself (in all 3 games, plus the other Souls-adjacent games) is vague and removed from realism, as if it was an old oral legend passed down. Literal giants, animal-human hybrids, huge differences in scales between characters. Picking up on all of the fragments of the story and making a reading of it invites interpretations of what is happening without coming out and directly telling the player what is happening. At the same time you never get a definitive sense of exactly what is happening, only what you can piece together as the player, from the world around you, and from what other characters tell you.
edit: Also I just want to say, one of the reasons I really like the Souls series method of storytelling is because I am just sick.and.tired of the standard "use cutscenes like a movie to tell the story, have tedious gameplay to link cutscenes" style of storytelling that most games have. Most games also don't attempt more subtle and interesting storytelling devices than "tell the player exactly what is happening, maybe have one lame twist that you could never see coming, and also wear all of the character's character traits and overall arcs like a signboard".
Dwarf Fortress on the one end, more abstract stuff like The Witness on the other. Oh, and Papers, Please of course! There’s plenty of ways of doing it. What bores me is just stopping the gameplay...
Dwarf Fortress on the one end, more abstract stuff like The Witness on the other. Oh, and Papers, Please of course! There’s plenty of ways of doing it. What bores me is just stopping the gameplay to play a movie every hour.
Ah Papers, Please really did impress me with how intertwined its gameplay was with its story. I'll have to check out the other titles you mentioned. Thanks for humoring me!
Ah Papers, Please really did impress me with how intertwined its gameplay was with its story. I'll have to check out the other titles you mentioned. Thanks for humoring me!
If you're looking for something recent, I heard good things about Disco Elysium. I couldn't quite tell if people applaud the writing in general or how well it was implemented as gameplay (could be...
If you're looking for something recent, I heard good things about Disco Elysium. I couldn't quite tell if people applaud the writing in general or how well it was implemented as gameplay (could be a stylishly done choose-your-own-adventure-book mechanic?) but I'm tempted to try it to see whether they pulled off something that's complex enough to actually benefit from being a videogame.
Not that I agree, but I can at least understand that perspective for a game like GTA. But what about games where the whole point is the stupid amount of emergence, like in dwarf fortress? Or games...
Not that I agree, but I can at least understand that perspective for a game like GTA. But what about games where the whole point is the stupid amount of emergence, like in dwarf fortress? Or games where the direct consequences of your choices are staggeringly detailed and seem remarkably individual, like in nethack? Or games where where your direct interaction with it allows it to create unprecedented levels of tension, like portal? Or games where the gameplay is, in some sense, the story, like braid or the witness?
Yea, that's what I meant with the Ken Levine bit. Emergent story is something that absolutely works and can be amazing (I still remember Bronzemurder, for example!). I'm more talking about games...
Yea, that's what I meant with the Ken Levine bit. Emergent story is something that absolutely works and can be amazing (I still remember Bronzemurder, for example!). I'm more talking about games where it's like "you play a starving orphan in 19th century France" and all you do is clumsy platforming (made up example but I bet there's something close!). Super Mario Bros isn't a game about Italian plumbers, right? Of course, every single modern AAA game also does something weird in this regard ("ludonarrative dissonance", as horrible as this phrase is).
It's funny you mention Braid and The Witness cause those are like my favorite games and my reply is basically just aping every Jonathan Blow talk, ever. So yea, that kind of "story" through gameplay, actual gameplay, is what I want more of.
Most video game stories suck balls. Video game narratives - even acclaimed ones - are almost always significantly inferior to their counterparts in other major mediums (such as film and...
Most video game stories suck balls.
Video game narratives - even acclaimed ones - are almost always significantly inferior to their counterparts in other major mediums (such as film and television), and we only put up with it because we love pressing buttons.
I'm going to copy-and-paste my reply to another similar comment: Not that I agree, but I can at least understand that perspective for a game like GTA. But what about games where the whole point is...
I'm going to copy-and-paste my reply to another similar comment:
Not that I agree, but I can at least understand that perspective for a game like GTA. But what about games where the whole point is the stupid amount of emergence, like in dwarf fortress? Or games where the direct consequences of your choices are staggeringly detailed and seem remarkably individual, like in nethack? Or games where where your direct interaction with it allows it to create unprecedented levels of tension, like portal? Or games where the gameplay is, in some sense, the story, like braid or the witness?
Battle royale games, autochess games... There are all trends, aren't they? They come suddenly, become very popular for a limited time, and go quickly. The Action-RTS/MOBA trend came and went;...
Battle royale games, autochess games... There are all trends, aren't they? They come suddenly, become very popular for a limited time, and go quickly. The Action-RTS/MOBA trend came and went; there are still persistent games of such nature, but it's no longer the Big Thing™ that players, publishers, or developers chase.
What about this sort of games bothers you? Is it the fact that their popularity prevents developers from reaching into other territories and making different games?
What about this sort of games bothers you? Is it the fact that their popularity prevents developers from reaching into other territories and making different games?
Hentai dating sims are interactive pornography. I have a feeling they satisfy the same cravings for intimacy that porn does, and both do it superficially – just enough to offset the thirst, but...
Hentai dating sims are interactive pornography. I have a feeling they satisfy the same cravings for intimacy that porn does, and both do it superficially – just enough to offset the thirst, but not enough to provide a deeper existential need for being wanted and/or company.
I'd guess that on Tildes this probably is an unpopular opinion. I myself disagree, no one should feel bad for wanking to a creature that does not exist.
I'd guess that on Tildes this probably is an unpopular opinion.
I myself disagree, no one should feel bad for wanking to a creature that does not exist.
I don't understand why people would want to use voice chat in games where you're grouped with random people (Dota, Overwatch, etc). It's full of the worst people you could ever want to talk with...
I don't understand why people would want to use voice chat in games where you're grouped with random people (Dota, Overwatch, etc). It's full of the worst people you could ever want to talk with even if you don't sound like a woman or anything else that people will harass you for.
I've been playing Dota 2 for six years now (played my first match on Jan 1, 2014). I have somewhere between 2.5k and 3k hours put into it. I've never used voice chat in the game itself, but I have...
I've been playing Dota 2 for six years now (played my first match on Jan 1, 2014). I have somewhere between 2.5k and 3k hours put into it. I've never used voice chat in the game itself, but I have played with those who do, sometimes or often.
There have been a handful of griefers (like those putting music from their shitty speakers through their shitty mic), there have been ragers, there have been outright assholes.
Most people, though? They're either using voice chat to communicate between each other (like in a party) or genuinely communicate with their team. I would even venture a guess that about 25% of the people I've heard use voice chat were positive in their expression: "Nice work, guys!", "Nice, nice, nice", "Good job! Now push!" ("push" means "assault enemy base", which is the main objective).
The malicious VC users were ever a minority. Most people I've heard talk often just chat about semi-related things.
That said, I've always been at the higher bracket of the behavior scoring. Dota 2, in particular, has a system where it ranks your behavior based on the commends and the reports you receive. The scale ranks from 1 (the absolute worst of the worst players, behavior-wise) to 10 000 (well-behaved, generally positive players who rarely abuse communcation channels or abandon games before those are finished). I'm regularly at 10k. This may have had an effect on the kinds of communication I'd witnessed.
That said, I do play with women every so often. (The only way I would know is if they'd used voice chat.) Some of the more-needy young men seek to ascertain if it's truly a girl on the other end, and they may start asking to add you to their friends list. The rest just get into the groove and PTFO.
I've got about 1400 hours in Dota, mostly between 2013 and 2015 at a mid-low-range MMR, and my experience was the opposite. Not many people used voice chat, but the ones that did were almost...
I've got about 1400 hours in Dota, mostly between 2013 and 2015 at a mid-low-range MMR, and my experience was the opposite. Not many people used voice chat, but the ones that did were almost entirely assholes. And in text chat people being assholes was a regular occurrence. My behavior score was consistently around 9800 and I was still surrounded by these people.
I dunno what to say to that. Assholes exist in this open-to-public multiplayer game, but... I seem to be meeting many fewer of those than others? My games are feeling much smoother ever since I...
I dunno what to say to that. Assholes exist in this open-to-public multiplayer game, but... I seem to be meeting many fewer of those than others? My games are feeling much smoother ever since I started muting people. I usually play like Gordon Ramsey, myself: if you fuck up, I speak up, but otherwise, I'm trying to move things along nicely.
I dunno. Maybe we should play sometime, see how it goes. If you're being connected with a different pool of people, so would I, right? And vice versa, but I dunno which pool's gonna get tugged closer.
I haven't ever played with someone who claimed there were all these assholes around them.
The good/bad interactions ratio you're mentioning might not look the same as yours if you're a woman using voice chat, because every other game will be a bad experience. Not disagreeing with the...
The good/bad interactions ratio you're mentioning might not look the same as yours if you're a woman using voice chat, because every other game will be a bad experience. Not disagreeing with the rest of the post.
That's a good point. It's the kind of perspective that you don't get to experience much unless you restrict your comms. When I pretended to be a girl in other games, male players would sure end up...
That's a good point.
It's the kind of perspective that you don't get to experience much unless you restrict your comms. When I pretended to be a girl in other games, male players would sure end up hitting on me more.
This is such a pessimistic outlook. Almost every human being is lovely and friendly, and in my experience this holds true online as well. I've been playing online games for close to ten years now,...
This is such a pessimistic outlook.
Almost every human being is lovely and friendly, and in my experience this holds true online as well. I've been playing online games for close to ten years now, and I've encountered less than a dozen assholes in all that time.
Maybe it's just because I'm not into the hyper-competitive games like dota or csgo.
That's fair. I'll freely admit that I'm pretty jaded and cynical in general, so take everything I say with a grain of salt. I used to play Starcraft 2 semi-competitively and even in the least...
That's fair. I'll freely admit that I'm pretty jaded and cynical in general, so take everything I say with a grain of salt.
I used to play Starcraft 2 semi-competitively and even in the least competitive game modes people would get pissed off if they were losing. "Team sucks," "this player sucks" even though it's one specific custom game that you need to individually learn, stuff like that. Dota was largely the same way in my experience, although you can see in my conversation with @ThatFanficGuy that it's not always that way even in competitive games. I want to be optimistic about people in general, but with all the garbage that gets spewed online I'm not so sure. People say awful things on Facebook under their real name for all their friends and relatives to see. Unmoderated chats in games tend to devolve into garbage and I don't think it makes a difference if the people shouting pro-Trump stuff are sincere or just trying to stir shit up because in the end no one can tell the difference and they're promoting an awful cause.
(necrobumping, but...) There are a few games where using voice comms or not significantly impacts success rate [at higher levels of play]. The genre that comes to mind are games like Rainbow Six:...
(necrobumping, but...) There are a few games where using voice comms or not significantly impacts success rate [at higher levels of play]. The genre that comes to mind are games like Rainbow Six: Seige. The team size is small (5 vs. 5), so the value of each individual on your team matters a lot compared to in other games. 1 teammate of 5 is 20% of your team. Contrast that with 1 teammate out 32. 1 bad teammate out of 32 only drags the team down a tiny bit. But if 1 teammate out of your 5 is bad instead of good, that changes the strength of your team significantly. In R6S, when all other factors are equal (skill, equipment), your team is at a significant advantage if you can communicate well regarding various aspects of the game, like: current position, current status, sightings of enemies, their last known locations, intention of maneouvering, declaration of coverage/overwatch, coordination of movement, ... lots of things. R6S had no shortage of people I wanted to mute, but the incentive is very strong to be using your mic to better your team.
Cities skylines is not a city simulator but a city builder. The simulation absolutely sucks. It's nice for building cool looking stuff, but it's still not a great simulator. There's still no...
Cities skylines is not a city simulator but a city builder. The simulation absolutely sucks. It's nice for building cool looking stuff, but it's still not a great simulator.
The traffic simulator craps out way too soon though. I was building a medium-sized city in a single tile. Reached the cap, cars just stopped moving and the whole city died. Pathing is horrible...
The traffic simulator craps out way too soon though. I was building a medium-sized city in a single tile. Reached the cap, cars just stopped moving and the whole city died. Pathing is horrible too. Oh, and ambulances get stuck in traffic?
SC4 didn't simulate every car individually, but had cars driving around which visually represented the traffic density on that road. I honestly don't think there's a need to simulate everything individually, since performance just takes too big of a hit.
Is that not actually a popular opinion? The staggeringly huge audiences of Let's Players, Twitch streamers and esports celebrities is proof. I was actually thinking of posting the opposite as my...
Is that not actually a popular opinion? The staggeringly huge audiences of Let's Players, Twitch streamers and esports celebrities is proof.
I was actually thinking of posting the opposite as my unpopular opinion. There's this enormous movement of watching personalities play games with commentary. Some of the gamers in question are raking in huge sponsorships; it's serious money these days. I feel like an old fuddy-duddy because I don't get it at all. Every game stream I've watched was, in my opinion, either boring or unbelievably stupid. I don't want to watch people play games, I want to play them myself.
This probably has something to do with the kinds of games I enjoy. I'm all about the single-player adventure. I love stuff like Uncharted, Mass Effect, Skyrim, and The Outer Worlds... immersive offline narrative campaigns are my jam. As far as I can tell, the most popular streamers are playing frenetic, competitive stuff. It goes without saying that esports are in the same category. So these aren't games that I'm even interested in playing, that explains why I don't want to watch them. Though streams of games I like are available too, and I don't want to watch them either.
I also don't watch any YouTubers regularly, which are an adjacent phenomenon. I do listen to the Philip DeFranco Show podcast, which is just audio from the video show; it's a good news roundup but he often talks about YouTube drama and different personalities from that world. I feel like I've landed on an alien planet whenever he starts a story about Jeffree Star's makeup or Jake Paul fighting people or some Tannacon nonsense. I couldn't possibly be less interested.
On the other hand, I'm not judging you or anybody. My SO is actually a big fan of YouTubers, streamers, and watching me play games. We just have different personality types and interests, nobody has to be right or wrong about it. And I'm pretty sure in 2020, it's my opinion that is the outlier here.
A lot of the time watching Let's Players is not about the game, but more about the person playing the game. Think of it like it's a show/a podcast, not just watching a game. The same is other...
A lot of the time watching Let's Players is not about the game, but more about the person playing the game. Think of it like it's a show/a podcast, not just watching a game. The same is other non-gaming youtubers. It's the same thing as tv, but for zoomers (that's a ridiculous simplification but you know :D).
You're probably right, seeing how popular twitch is. But personally I enjoy a lot of games that I don't have the disposition to spend money or time on. And single player games with rich stories...
You're probably right, seeing how popular twitch is.
But personally I enjoy a lot of games that I don't have the disposition to spend money or time on. And single player games with rich stories are the best example of this. I don't want to spend money on a PS4 and on latest God of War, plus set aside a hefty chunk of my time to learn how to play, get frustrated, and finish it in the end.
Also I feel like my "I prefer watching" thing has its origins way before twitch and youtube were popular, when I was watching friends play Heroes of Might and Magic 3, rather than playing for myself. :D
I don't want more open worlds. I want small worlds with cool stuff at every step. I don't want super-long, super complex stories with heavy drama and political commentary. That's what Game of...
I don't want more open worlds. I want small worlds with cool stuff at every step.
I don't want super-long, super complex stories with heavy drama and political commentary. That's what Game of Thrones, Godfather, and House of Cards are for. I want my games to be fun. Remember Mario? How complex is that story? It turned out okay for him.
I don't need games with more than 30 hours. I like games that are short and sweet (as long as the price is fair)
I don't like Horizon Zero Dawn. The story was too hippy-mother-gaia-we-are-all-connected-kumbaya for my taste. And the combat was too unpredictable, which leads me to...
I don't want smart AI. I want dumb enemies that seem smart, so I can figure them out, kill them and feel like a badass.
I don't like online multiplayer (with the exception of Rocket League cause reasons). Dear developers: never stop making campaigns. And make them longer too.
Why do people hate some game companies like The Devil while pledging allegiance to others, as if there was some kind of clear moral compass dividing which is which? You do know they are all in this for profit, right? Like, they are not a person that loves you (or hates you) and wants you to be happy (or unhappy), they're just an abstract name to which people flock around to reap financial benefits. So settle down...
Brand loyalty. Also, Internet forums get polarizing sometimes – Reddit would be the lazy example.
Why do people hate some game companies like The Devil while pledging allegiance to others, as if there was some kind of clear moral compass dividing which is which?
Brand loyalty.
Also, Internet forums get polarizing sometimes – Reddit would be the lazy example.
I have a feeling that playing violent video games actually does affect our mind in ways we don’t realize. When I look at how pro-war many Americans are, and I see that we have a culture of violent...
I have a feeling that playing violent video games actually does affect our mind in ways we don’t realize. When I look at how pro-war many Americans are, and I see that we have a culture of violent movies, alienation of opposing forces, and yes, violent video games, I can’t help but think that all this propaganda affects what we think is normal.
From all the studies, it appears that violence and aggression in video games is more likely than not to have an effect. The American Psychological Association has even issued a statement on the...
The same studies find that the aggression response isn't actually much worse than any competitive endeavor, and possibly less severe than you get from participating in contact sports. Actually...
The same studies find that the aggression response isn't actually much worse than any competitive endeavor, and possibly less severe than you get from participating in contact sports.
Actually being able to get your aggression out physically through playing the sport maybe has some catharsis that just sitting on a couch furiously pounding your controller does. But I think the much bigger thing is people learn sports under coaches as kids who teach sportsmanship and how to manage your emotions as part of the socialization process. Gamers, though, get socialized by the internet, which is a toxic cess-pool lacking in adult supervision.
I actually think the best argument around it was one made by David Wong on Cracked. He makes a persuasive case that what video games train into us isn't an instinct towards violence so much as an emotional inability to deal with the fact that not all problems can be surmounted by just grinding at them hard enough.
I first started to notice this among the subculture of pickup artist stuff where it felt like people were basically trying to gamify human interaction to manipulate women to get laid. It obviously doesn't work because humans don't work that way, and the times when it does work it ends up tipping really easily into being skeevy emotional manipulation. And it's like a self-reinforcing feedback loop. People grow up learning that all problems should be broken down and addressed like video-game problems, and then they design video-games that presume problems can be solved like video-game problems.
From there it's easy to see how people too deep into this might have trouble actually dealing with real human beings and more difficult and nuanced emotional baggage one deals with throughout their lives.
I’ve just glanced at the Wikipedia page (sorry, at work), but I see that the link focuses specifically on individual aggression. I’m thinking more along the lines of how violent video games as...
I’ve just glanced at the Wikipedia page (sorry, at work), but I see that the link focuses specifically on individual aggression. I’m thinking more along the lines of how violent video games as propaganda may make us more willing to agree with war and violence committed by others. Like if we play a lot of video games about war, we think war is normal. If we played a lot of video games about union organizing and solidarity with our fellow human beings, perhaps we would focus more on that in our daily lives.
Thanks for sharing those links. I had no idea that there was any research showing this. On reddit and elsewhere I have only seen stories suggesting the opposite is the case. This goes against my...
Thanks for sharing those links. I had no idea that there was any research showing this. On reddit and elsewhere I have only seen stories suggesting the opposite is the case. This goes against my ancient anecdotal experience.
I certainly experienced the Tetris Effect in my youth. While not violent it certainly programmed my brain, even after ending gameplay.
After playing the original GTA or GTA2 for days one Christmas I recall driving afterwards and having really inappropriate suggestions coming from my brain.. like hey that you could hit that nicer car and take it. That would just be a flash of a thought, apparently programmed in me by the game mechanics. A similar thing would happen after a long day of snowboarding irl. On the drive home I would see "fun lines" on the banks of the road and my brain would suggest it. Of course I never did those things, but my brain did suggest them.
Now that I think about it, I may have grown obssessed with firearms because I played plenty of games that featured them, very early in my youth. My first PC happened when I was 7, and my first...
Now that I think about it, I may have grown obssessed with firearms because I played plenty of games that featured them, very early in my youth. My first PC happened when I was 7, and my first game was Serious Sam, with this sorta cover.
This is a bit of a meta opinion, but I think the gaming community by and large has opinions that are too strong. This isn't exclusive to them and is also a product of the modern discourse...
This is a bit of a meta opinion, but I think the gaming community by and large has opinions that are too strong. This isn't exclusive to them and is also a product of the modern discourse prioritizing loud voices, but it's particularly pronounced in gaming. A game or company has to be the BEST or the WORST. Designers are GENIUSES or IDIOTS. Everything is escalated to the highest point or completely diminished. There's little to no nuance, and it makes back and forths particularly painful, because there'll be a sort of positional whiplash as someone tries to argue that Skyrim is AMAZING while someone else tries to argue that it's OBVIOUSLY TERRIBLE and neither one can see that maybe it does some good things but also has some flaws? This might not be an unpopular opinion so much as it is one you can't really bring up without looking like a jerk. I'm not trying to be a jerk, but I do think that gamers could benefit from chilling out a bit. I should note here that I don't really see this problem much on Tildes, but it's rampant elsewhere.
Gaming narratives are way more constrained than seemingly anyone wants to admit. Interactivity and experience are nice things that separate gaming from other types of media, but that doesn't mean games are fundamentally more resonant or that it's definitively possible to do more in them. Most games involve the player in an invisible pact that says that you are in control and success is possible. This is very limiting, similar to what @NaraVara brought up in their post here. Games can certainly break this convention at times for effect, but by and large the player's experience is one that is reliant on agency within the game world and very obvious cause-and-effect, otherwise the game simply wouldn't work. Other media can easily work around these limitations, but it's much harder to do in gaming. I don't know that this is unpopular as in "controversial" but instead it's unpopular in that I never see anyone really addressing it or talking about it.
The current iteration of World of Warcraft includes a lot of quality of life changes that are helpful for people who want to play the game without devoting 100 hours a month to it. On top of that,...
The current iteration of World of Warcraft includes a lot of quality of life changes that are helpful for people who want to play the game without devoting 100 hours a month to it. On top of that, raid designs have improved immensely; raids in classic wow were pretty terrible, with the challenge mostly consisting of getting 40 people to look at the same thing and show up. Raids now are much more challenging and interesting.
The story has also matured significantly; the story team has a much more cohesive idea of what they're doing. It's cheesy, but it can be compelling; if you haven't watched the Saurfang cinematics from the recent expansion, they're actually a nice little micro-story.
The perception of "difficulty" in classic wow is mostly about levelling and not about end game content, but a significant number of people actually don't enjoy the levelling process; even in classic it's disjoint, and the story is wonky. The experience of levelling is less painful in current WoW, and will improve in the next expansion.
Overall, classic WoW is a fun time, but current WoW is just... better, in almost every measurable way.
I'd say they only really messed up with their neglect on the server community front. The grouping roulette made it easier to find groups by teaming up with people from other servers, but that also...
I'd say they only really messed up with their neglect on the server community front. The grouping roulette made it easier to find groups by teaming up with people from other servers, but that also meant you didn't get to know the people on your own server at anywhere near the level of games like EQ. Rather defeats the purpose of an MMO, imo. That wasn't just blizzard, either, most MMOs made that mistake, it's a large part of what killed Rift off. Other than that one nitpick I'd agree with you, quality of life in WoW is much better than in classic MMOs.
To me, WoW was a wonderful excuse to talk to my buddies on a daily base. Yeah, the game was alright, but my guild was the best. I was such a bad player, and had such a blast!
To me, WoW was a wonderful excuse to talk to my buddies on a daily base. Yeah, the game was alright, but my guild was the best. I was such a bad player, and had such a blast!
Bethesda being creatively bankrupt is not a new thing. Mass Effect is extremely overrated, as is Borderlands. Rockstar has the least predatory and least Pay2Win microtransaction model in the...
Bethesda being creatively bankrupt is not a new thing.
Mass Effect is extremely overrated, as is Borderlands.
Rockstar has the least predatory and least Pay2Win microtransaction model in the industry.
Saints Row 1/2 and Saints Row 3/4 are equally valid, and simply hit different tastes overall. (SR 1/2 is better story, SR 3/4 is better sandbox)
Why do you think Mass Effect is overrated? If anything I think the blowback from 3 soured a lot of people on 1 and 2 in retrospect, which I think are fantastic games.
Why do you think Mass Effect is overrated? If anything I think the blowback from 3 soured a lot of people on 1 and 2 in retrospect, which I think are fantastic games.
I never even played 3. I played 1, and started into 2 but the gameplay as a whole felt completely uninspired. I will say that I preferred the gameplay in 1 to that of 2.
I never even played 3. I played 1, and started into 2 but the gameplay as a whole felt completely uninspired. I will say that I preferred the gameplay in 1 to that of 2.
They did change a lot of gameplay's foundation between 1 and 2. I didn't feel strongly about – I just went with it, it was still a game I was looking forward to enjoying – but I can see why it...
They did change a lot of gameplay's foundation between 1 and 2. I didn't feel strongly about – I just went with it, it was still a game I was looking forward to enjoying – but I can see why it would put you off.
The updated ending basically just made explicit most of what was previously just implied. The implications were pretty subtle though, so I think the vast majority of people who played didn't pick...
I never went back and played the updated ending, so I don't know anything about it.
The updated ending basically just made explicit most of what was previously just implied. The implications were pretty subtle though, so I think the vast majority of people who played didn't pick up on it and decided these were all "plot holes."
I didn't think it was substantially better thematically or anything, but I was never all that mad about the ending to begin with. Mostly it's just glitzier and sexier since there are more and more differentiated cut scenes.
What does add a lot of context to the ending, though, are the Prothean and Leviathan DLCs. They goofed by not making that part of the standard game, particularly the Leviathan DLC which actually explains how the Starchild's logic worked and why this iteration of the galaxy was able to fight the Reapers off where other's fail.
I'm going to go out on a controversial statement and say that Half Life 2 is a boring game that is weaker than Half Life 1. And that Portal 2 is a weaker game than Portal 1. Half Life 2: I...
I'm going to go out on a controversial statement and say that Half Life 2 is a boring game that is weaker than Half Life 1. And that Portal 2 is a weaker game than Portal 1.
Half Life 2: I remember playing this roughly when it came out and I just found it incredibly boring. About 6 years before Half Life 2 I played Half Life and whilst I didn't play up to Xen (I think I played about half of the game), half of that game was immensely better than anything I played in Half Life 2. True, I didn't play Xen so I didn't get to feel all the disappointment and frustration of those levels (thank goodness), but I believe H:2 is the complete opposite to HL in many ways:
The guns are weaker. I can't really explain it, but nearly all of the arsenal in HL feels powerful to some degree. In HL2 only the shotgun felt powerful, but was only powerful when you used the two shells mechanism instead of one.
The AI is abysmall. HL had some of the best AI from the millitary to the little creatures on the floor. Millitary people would give the impression that they communicated to each other and would organise together to sniff you out. I hated playing against them, but I respected how challenging they were. In HL2, the AI just aimlessly runs towards you to get shot or play peekaboo behind cover.
The levels. The only memorable level I remember for being fun was Ravenholm - where I had the opportunity to blitz zombies using the gravity gun and whatnot. Every other level felt like a simple boring chore of mopping up enemies or wasting a long time travelling from X to Y. While I agree giving players a break from the action is necessary, the way HL2 did it was mind numbing and tedious for me.
The constant physics puzzles. This ties in with the levels, but it got boring really quickly placing a block of wood on a barrel and then placing a few bricks on the other end to get to a certain area.
The scenario. I admit being an absolute sucker for HL's dread-filled atmosphere, so this is something I can understand is a matter of personal taste. But the world in HL2 was just boring. I never really felt any sense of dread or despair in HL2 (probably except for Ravenholm) so I was just bored throughout.
The fanservice. My god - I get it. Gordon Freeman is seen as a badass, but HL2 pretty much had every character kiss Gordon Freeman's arse (and by extension, the player's arse). It was too much, honestly. I get that they want the player to feel powerful, but having in game NPCs be cheerleaders for the player over and over was pretty weak. Alyx just being this sort of distant love-interest to a mute man was especially cringey.
As with Portal 2, I think I enjoyed Portal's short length mixed with the weird odd humour. With P2, the flow went start level -> joke -> puzzle -> joke -> end level, and that motonony really bugged me. Especially as I didn't really find the game that funny - not compared to the pitch black humour of the first game. What I will say in P2's defence is that it had the better end-game boss than P1. But overall I really enjoyed P1's puzzle and humour over P2.
With both HL1 and P1, I was sad when I stopped playing them. With HL2 and P2, I was relieved for it to end so I'd never play them again.
I. There is an unexplored market for games that both soothen the need for and teach about relationships I.a. Dating sims, when done well, can be as good as any more-conventional praised title I.b....
I. There is an unexplored market for games that both soothen the need for and teach about relationships I.a. Dating sims, when done well, can be as good as any more-conventional praised title I.b. Overall, the educational potential of video games for teenage and adult population has not yet been explored in any meaningful way II. Customizability of your character and equipment is underexplored and underused. Often this is limited to having fewer than ten slots for what can be identified as a conventional RPG-ish "item", while the depths in which such an item can customized and changed with parts and materials found in the fictional world are still dark and unknown – even though there are dozens of examples in the real world of things that could be modified to work differently III. Too few games are made and/or optimized for lower-tier hardware, even though there's a wide market for things that can work on such machines, particularly in poorer countries IV. Sound design is underappreciated in many a title both high-tier and indie. A good sound design, though not necessary, could elevate the experience to something beyond a mere video game V. Involving professional writers into game design may improve many aspects of a game VI. Experimental, promising titles should receive priority in support and development over most AAA titles VII. There remains a vast cave system of unexplored and underrepresented topics for games, but they can't be meaningfully realized because most game devs have little in the way of writing, and the indie teams that could push the envelope the most have too few dedicated writers VIII. A game plot that's tastefully lacking is better than a plot that's been attempted but not completed VIII.a. It's perfectly fine to keep the lore of the game mostly hidden and the players – ever so curious VIII.b. Only ever releasing the lore in bits and pieces hidden in-between new gameplay content is perfectly fine, as well VIII.c. Games that contain very little to no actionable lore are okay as long as they're enjoyable VIII.c.1. Not developing lore for such games is an acceptable choice if the game remains interesting IX. Game dev sims are fun for a while but are severely lacking in control over titles and the effect of one's decisions on the success of the resulting game IX.a. Game dev sims fail to account for ingenuity of the developer team: the same concept, when presented in a different light or followed through on further, may be significantly-better received, as is evident by the outstanding games of the last decade alone
In terms of visual novels: Some dating sims are basically porn where you click through the story at your own pace and perhaps have a few decisions to make that determine which scene you watch. For...
Exemplary
In terms of visual novels:
Some dating sims are basically porn where you click through the story at your own pace and perhaps have a few decisions to make that determine which scene you watch. For example, the "Sakura" games on steam fall into this for the most part.
The better dating sims tend to have a much more in-depth plot. Lots of decisions and branches that will lead to different endings or scenarios. Sometimes a guide with a complex flowchart will be made to show just how to get an ending, as decisions are often adding to a hidden stat tracker or triggering a flag. The stories are well written and the characters tend to have personalities and character growth rather than be a walking caricature with jiggle physics. Some dating sims also have the male character change personality between possible story lines too. They'll start generic, but as you make decisions, your character gets more refined and responds appropriately. A good game will have you feel like you were two different people if you play two different story lines.
The better ones will tug your heartstrings and deal with some in-depth concepts (past trauma, physical disabilities, loneliness, deperession, etc). Katawa Shoujo is an amazing visual novel at a high school for kids with disabilities and its amazingly in-depth and well done. Its also free and was made collaboratively by 4chan - which is always a strange thing to say.
There are also some that focus more on fun/weird stuff and can be entertaining to play as something very different or perhaps a parody of the usual. So things like hatoful boyfriend (aka pigeon dating sim) or Doki Doki Literature Club (out there - just play it).
A good story is that which, most importantly, draws you in. It makes you want to be a part of it. Games, by the nature of their interactivity, can you put you much closer to the border between...
A good story is that which, most importantly, draws you in. It makes you want to be a part of it.
Games, by the nature of their interactivity, can you put you much closer to the border between fiction and reality, thus making you feel more involved.
What dating sims I've played so far focus mostly on giving you the fantasy of being wanted. Rather than make you work for a relationship – or work at it, more precisely – it avoids the imperfect connection problem (where two people are less likely to connect the fewer values and experiences they have in common, and vice versa) by gifting the player with the state of being desired.
Crudely put, most dating sims are the pornography for the part of your mind that's searching for a tribe to belong to, rather than a mate to procreate with. These games give you a fish without ever teaching you how to catch one yourself. They satisfy a need once, without teaching you how to satisfy it better on your own or with better tools.
In my opinion, a better dating sim would be that in which the player may not be able to connect with all of the dates if they play genuinely. Unless you're looking for a way to get into someone's pants, it's more likely than not that certain characters will rub you the wrong way, and the displayed difference in values between you and said character may well be enough that, when attempting to falsely connect with them, you will make the choices that seem natural to you but unpleasant or even offensive to them.
It's my assumption that making dating sim characters behave more like real people will, overall, enhance a player's experience from such a game.
For one, should they find a character that fits them well, the experience of intimacy – fulfilling a need they can't readily satisfy – will be more meaningful and more genuine.
This should lead into the self-reinforcing learning process: finding ways to connect with more people without sacrificing your values should provide an incomplete but still valuable experience that may, if done well, translate into the real world, so that finding a connection with another human being should prove easier and less anxious.
Writing such a thing is no easy task. Portraying characters that have their own sufficiently-different personalities requires a lot of effort. Then you have to contextualize it, by giving each event meaning within the borders of the current situation. There are many ways to do this – ironically, it depends on the broader context. You then have to also portray the perspective of the player character that most players can relate to, so that their choices may best reflect their own values while remaining accessible within the confines of the game (given that no game can span infinite, or even very large, volume of possible actions).
This should provide the player with experiences that rival some of the more conventional games' plots, based in a major way on the fact that the player is able to directly relate to the things that happen to them and the characters they seek to date. Like in many RPG games (and some non-RPGs, like The Last of Us), if you find yourself looking out for a character, and enjoying their company, you will also start caring for them and whatever happens to them. A dating sim should emphasize on that connection – and, preferably, make that connection not an end in itself – to provide a relationship simulator that's fulfilling, enjoyable, and potentially educating.
Isn't this, essentially, the romantic subplot in a Bioware game? Your definition of a dating sim sounds like a degraded form of an RPG. (Though I guess you could also say that a "walking sim" like...
It's my assumption that making dating sim characters behave more like real people will, overall, enhance a player's experience from such a game.
Isn't this, essentially, the romantic subplot in a Bioware game? Your definition of a dating sim sounds like a degraded form of an RPG. (Though I guess you could also say that a "walking sim" like Dear Esther or Firewatch is a degraded form of an FPS by the same logic).
What about Persona 5 where the romantic subplot is a big part of the game? Does that fit the bill you're talking about?
In my experience, romance in BioWare games sucks – just like in most of the AAA titles. Their definition of "romance" is "engaging romantically with a character you couldn't possibly relate to"....
Isn't this, essentially, the romantic subplot in a Bioware game?
In my experience, romance in BioWare games sucks – just like in most of the AAA titles. Their definition of "romance" is "engaging romantically with a character you couldn't possibly relate to". It's the same type of fantasy dating in most, if not all, of those games.
Even the smut/porn games I've played are plagued with the same issue: they offer you options that you can under no circusmtances possibly get in real life, without really engaging with things much more grounded. One of the games I liked only ever gives you three options of how to spend time with the most normal and non-kinky of the girls: go on a picnic, go to the cinema, and play video games in her room. There's no conversation, no discussion of preferences, no talking about one's memories, or opinions on certain matters...
None of them feel alive and like a person.
(I've never played Persona 5 and couldn't attest to how it ranks in this framework.)
Firewatch is actually one of the games that comes rather close to this sort of human engagement. It's fairly limited in scope while also feeling rather genuine. Also, the fact that you can select how parts of the main character's backstory played out – as well as make a few choices about their personality (like in what way Julia drew Henry, which you get to see at some point) makes it that much more personal a story.
It's by no means a relationship simulator, but it gives you a glimpse into what sort of storytelling is possible for dating sims done well.
How so? Being an RPG, my player character isn't me specifically. It's more like a persona I'm inhabiting and the ways I've played them generally had my character believably relating to the...
Their definition of "romance" is "engaging romantically with a character you couldn't possibly relate to". It's the same type of fantasy dating in most, if not all, of those games.
How so? Being an RPG, my player character isn't me specifically. It's more like a persona I'm inhabiting and the ways I've played them generally had my character believably relating to the romantic interest.
The problem I find with them is the baked in assumption that the world revolves around the player and any romantic option should be open to you. Consequently, the characters themselves don't have any sort of ingrained wants or preferences. For example, Leliana doesn't have a type and as long as the player character likes her and expresses that like through the right dialogue options and stuff Leliana will fall in love with him. She will never turn the player down because she tends to go for guys who are sullen and melancholy but you're a sardonic jokester. But that's like, 99% of human relationships. Most people aren't romantically interested in most people so, in this way, it makes the game a bit of a "power fantasy" in the interpersonal relations part the same way they're a power fantasy in the combat part.
Edit: To add, "power fantasy" doesn't really work for romantic stories because a big part of actually establishing an emotional connection with a person involves the capacity to be vulnerable and open with them. So making you feel like you can't fail or be rejected as long as you hit the right combination of phrases completely undercuts the premise of the story you're trying to achieve. One of the main anxieties about dating is that you and your crush are fundamentally incompatible and being compatible with them would mean sacrificing parts of yourself that are foundational to who you are.
FWIW, Persona 5 does kind of do what you're talking about. The romances develop over the course of the entire game and lots of comments and decisions you make throughout factor into whether a character even expresses interest in you. You have to spend a lot of time with them, particularly in your "off-hours" where you're doing stuff like going shopping or having coffee together. And your personality as expressed during those side-plots ends up determining whether you and the other character interact as friends or as potential romantic interests.
I can understand that. Roleplaying is, after all, the name of the game if you're playing an RPG. Me, I tend to be myself but empowered by the rules of the game. I always strive to be The Good Guy...
How so? Being an RPG, my player character isn't me specifically. It's more like a persona I'm inhabiting and the ways I've played them generally had my character believably relating to the romantic interest.
I can understand that. Roleplaying is, after all, the name of the game if you're playing an RPG. Me, I tend to be myself but empowered by the rules of the game. I always strive to be The Good Guy and help every single soul I find, and generally behave in a similar fashion in ways that would demand too much of me IRL but have no such restrictions within the confines of the game.
And me, I can't find any of those outlandish characters attractive. I did appreciate Liara for her intellectual streak and how she ascended to a certain powerful position between Mass Effect and Mass Effect 3, and I liked some of my party members more than others. But there was never anything relatable about them. Morrigan seemed cool, but in the way you appreciate an interesting picture on the wall: it's enjoyable, but not something I want to take home (or, in her case, grow close to).
Which, to me, feeds into the idea of connecting to someone without sacrificing your values. I was never good at playing against the type in these kinds of games, even though I can write characters that aren't much like myself. If I can ever connect with a character in these games, it's because we have that much in common. Creating that common ground, for me, is part of what would make a good dating sim.
The problem I find with them is the baked in assumption that the world revolves around the player and any romantic option should be open to you. Consequently, the characters themselves don't have any sort of ingrained wants or preferences.
And games that do appoint preferences to their characters, do so in order to gamify the experience with a different aspect – like HuniePop.
I feel like if you take HuniePop and add depth and genuine character to the women you're supposed to date, it could maybe come out as a better dating sim. It's a match-3 game where your goal is literally to collect the underwear of the women you seduce, but – did you have to mention that one of them has a kid? did you have to make two characters from the same family romancable? How about why is that one Japanese character so longing to things that remind her of her native country? All these details just laying there to be collected and used to good effect.
Either way, that PC-centric storytelling is one of things that's very wrong with the idea of romance in modern high-tier RPG. I'm not even surprised plenty of characters would be attracted to someone who's literally known around the galaxy for their exploits – that sort of presence is impossible to emulate, no matter how kindly or tyrannically you play Shepard, and that makes it very powerful – but maybe one of your crew members could be a little more selective about the species they choose to procreate with (because, you know, DNA alignment as well as cultural and personal preferences)?
Ah see, if I played "myself" I'd probably not be in the situations most RPGs put you in in the first place, so the whole premise becomes moot. My characters tend to have more conflicted interior...
Roleplaying is, after all, the name of the game if you're playing an RPG. Me, I tend to be myself but empowered by the rules of the game.
Ah see, if I played "myself" I'd probably not be in the situations most RPGs put you in in the first place, so the whole premise becomes moot. My characters tend to have more conflicted interior lives than I do. I find RPGs much more satisfying if I try to empathize with characters who are sort of like me, but with specific drives and tendencies tweaked up or down. It's kind of like acting where you want to examine your character's motivations rather than your own and behave accordingly.
For example, (Mass Effect spoilers below)
My Shepherd in Mass Effect went with the "Butcher of Torfan" backstory and I played him like someone who was traumatized and working through the guilt of having been part of a Gallipolli style trench war where he sent many of his own men into a meat grinder. He started the game with a very cold, by-the-book level of ruthless emotional distance on everything along with a mildly xenophobic outlook, particularly against Batarians. The experience of having to lead a more intimate team of misfits kind of softens him up over the course of the game. Then he DOES end up losing someone in Virmire right when he meets Sovereign, who is the epitome of "get my shit done regardless of the human cost because I think on a scale so cosmic and vast that you ants wouldn't even get it." It worked really nicely as a way to mesh Shepherd's own arc of learning to value the individual and put him up against an antagonistic force that gives zero shits about any individual living being. It's actually kind of impressive how I didn't even know the twists and turns in the plot, but I ended up going step by step and ending up with a compelling narrative arc for my character.
Having a deeper relationship system embedded into dating sims would satisfy the desire to roleplay, as well, by providing inputs for different mental maps – that is, different assumed characters.
Having a deeper relationship system embedded into dating sims would satisfy the desire to roleplay, as well, by providing inputs for different mental maps – that is, different assumed characters.
Steam is constantly being flooded with new indie games that run on a potato.
Too few games are made and/or optimized for lower-tier hardware, even though there's a wide market for things that can work on such machines, particularly in poorer countries
Steam is constantly being flooded with new indie games that run on a potato.
To be honest I don't see any of your points as being unpopular. My gut feeling is that as we've moved from custom-made engines (up until 2005 I'd say) to general purpose engines (prominent from...
To be honest I don't see any of your points as being unpopular.
III. Too few games are made and/or optimized for lower-tier hardware, even though there's a wide market for things that can work on such machines, particularly in poorer countries
My gut feeling is that as we've moved from custom-made engines (up until 2005 I'd say) to general purpose engines (prominent from 2010 onwards) the knowledge inside the studio was lost. It used to be that there was a person or a team in the building that made the engine, which was made with the end result in mind. Now, I'm absolutely not saying game engines were perfect but when management allowed QC to point out issues, it made for really optimized games. Now all the internal knowledge about the engine is hard to come by, you don't have someone that knows the engine inside and out, you can only hire UE4 experts and hope to iron out performance issues if you have made a mistake.
There's also the fact that as our hardware grows stronger, our engines did too, and the sheer quantity of code is astounding, you can't hope to grasp everything, I'm not sure that any one person at Epic truly knows what goes on in the Unreal Engine.
Add to that the rise of indie games, created by teams that can barely afford to exist, and you get performance issues for most games.
I suppose they fall under "not popular" (neutral) rather than "unpopular" (negative), now that I think about it. In my defence: if they were ever "popular" (positive), my comment would be empty.
To be honest I don't see any of your points as being unpopular.
I suppose they fall under "not popular" (neutral) rather than "unpopular" (negative), now that I think about it.
In my defence: if they were ever "popular" (positive), my comment would be empty.
I agree. I would really be interested in a seriously realistic dating sim (or even just about social interaction in general) game and detailed what I would want it to look like here. Currently...
I. There is an unexplored market for games that both soothen the need for and teach about relationships
I.a. Dating sims, when done well, can be as good as any more-conventional praised title.
I agree. I would really be interested in a seriously realistic dating sim (or even just about social interaction in general) game and detailed what I would want it to look like here. Currently dating sims, while (according to the game theorists) use dating logic that makes sense in the real world, the characters and situations are usually incredibly unrealistic anime archetypes.
I don't know what it is about deep characters and healthy relationships, but we don't see them often. Are they boring to play? I know most stories are born out of conflict, but that conflict can...
I don't know what it is about deep characters and healthy relationships, but we don't see them often. Are they boring to play? I know most stories are born out of conflict, but that conflict can be external to the interactions with the people you're supposed to get attached to in games.
I get a feeling that most devs don't want to deal with depth of character and healthy relationships in their game. One, because those games are fantasy, and the strife – either dramatic or violent...
I get a feeling that most devs don't want to deal with depth of character and healthy relationships in their game.
One, because those games are fantasy, and the strife – either dramatic or violent – is what helps us escape the strongest.
Two, because it takes a bit of creative thinking and a bit of understanding to make those characters, and I think most devs can't go there because they lack either.
Three, because basing a game on those relationships alone is a risky proposition: if you can't pull it off well, the whole game loses meaning, and games are usually a product of months and years of work.
I think the problem (at least with the hypothetical dating sim I described) is that by describing it 'as accurate as possible' it puts all the moral responsibility on you if anything feels...
I think the problem (at least with the hypothetical dating sim I described) is that by describing it 'as accurate as possible' it puts all the moral responsibility on you if anything feels inaccurate. 'As accurate as possible' only works if everything you're modeling is already thoroughly been studied or else it will require equally thorough speculation and doing something like that for vague things like personality, attractiveness, and how that influences friend circles, the clothing they wear, their interests for hobbies and other people and for you (not to mention how much could change if you start as female or LGBT+ or even a different race or different location, since dating won't be the same everywhere) means that the game has a very high chance of feeling reductive or inaccurate and a large amount of people will say it's bullshit because the developer made X, Y, or Z assumption, so most people won't take it seriously and the people who do take it seriously might end up better off if they can recognize that, but if they don't it will be like seeing a dating manual, it will most likely be inaccurate for someone and it might as well be them.
It's worse than pretending to be a parody, GTA has become an unironical representation of American capitalism through its rampant microtransactions and gambling driven online. The idea of...
It's worse than pretending to be a parody, GTA has become an unironical representation of American capitalism through its rampant microtransactions and gambling driven online. The idea of transgression is alluded to by having crass characters and lots of explosions and violence. It makes me sad to see such a huge pool of talented artists put so much effort towards such an empty game.
For what it's worth, GTA V gave us more Steven Ogg everywhere. It's a really good outcome for many people, even far removed from the gaming media, as far as I'm concerned.
For what it's worth, GTA V gave us more Steven Ogg everywhere. It's a really good outcome for many people, even far removed from the gaming media, as far as I'm concerned.
I don't know if you ever read the comic book "Wanted" but I got the same vibe from GTA V as I got from that. They're part of this sub-genre of geek fiction where everything about it seems to be...
GTA V is an awful, joyless game.
I don't know if you ever read the comic book "Wanted" but I got the same vibe from GTA V as I got from that. They're part of this sub-genre of geek fiction where everything about it seems to be dripping with contempt for the imagined audience from the developers. At it's best it can come across as knowing self-parody, but all too often it starts to feel like self-loathing or mean-spiritedness that can only culminate in a sort of violent nihilism.
Yes. That's a great part of what GTA is. Maybe I'm just a cynic myself, but that didn't affect me at all. GTA V is a farcical action-comedy. I didn't get the impression it was supposed to be taken...
It's soaked through with cynicism and misanthropy
Yes. That's a great part of what GTA is.
everything about the game is just downright unpleasant
Maybe I'm just a cynic myself, but that didn't affect me at all.
It's media for people who are angry about something about society, are looking for an outlet, but don't actually want to think about why they're upset
GTA V is a farcical action-comedy. I didn't get the impression it was supposed to be taken seriously.
Sure. I just had a few. Dota 2 was fun. I think your issue is not with games not being fun, as you had it worded: it's with the shift from pure gameplay to the narrative-driven gameplay.
Sure. I just had a few. Dota 2 was fun.
I think your issue is not with games not being fun, as you had it worded: it's with the shift from pure gameplay to the narrative-driven gameplay.
You're entirely correct here. I vividly remember my disappointment with the transition from PS1 to PS2 for this very reason. Every silly platformer now had a story, and frequently unskippable. I...
the shift from pure gameplay to the narrative-driven gameplay.
You're entirely correct here. I vividly remember my disappointment with the transition from PS1 to PS2 for this very reason. Every silly platformer now had a story, and frequently unskippable.
I also think that yes, game makers are way too obsessed with narrative.
I don't think they are. I think what gaming's going through as a genre of art is the transitions from child's play into a more mature, authentic, self-defined medium. More and more games appear on...
I don't think they are. I think what gaming's going through as a genre of art is the transitions from child's play into a more mature, authentic, self-defined medium. More and more games appear on the market that seek to explore the growing field of possibility this maturation affords. Can you provoke intense feelings in the player? Can you provoke the player to care about any particular character? Can you provoke the player to get involved into fates of nations? And apparently – yes, you can, very much so.
It's painting with a wide brush, but I can see how you, personally, would get caught in the crossfire of this quiet revolution. Sometimes you just wanna play: control your character, shoot the baddies, jump as high as you can on the platforms, run towards the finish line first... And that's fine. The ludus part of gaming should never perish.
It doesn't help your situation that games that are mostly ludus nowadays are often party games that you must play with other people, otherwise they don't work so well.
I'd be glad if lifestyle games died. It almost physically pains me seeing someone's Steam profile with 7000 hours in Dota 2. There are so many games that do different interesting things, why are...
I'd be glad if lifestyle games died. It almost physically pains me seeing someone's Steam profile with 7000 hours in Dota 2. There are so many games that do different interesting things, why are you tying yourself to just one?
Fallout: New Vegas is a very bad open world game and the fact people consider it better than Fallout 3 kills me. Games like Battlefield which offer multiple guns per class is a terrible idea and...
Fallout: New Vegas is a very bad open world game and the fact people consider it better than Fallout 3 kills me.
Games like Battlefield which offer multiple guns per class is a terrible idea and poor design.
The Metro Series is only getting better and Exodus was a natural iteration on the series.
No Man's Sky was still a huge scam. Just because someone scams you so they can continue their passion instead of running doesn't make it OK.
I'll take your word for it, I didn't gt to experience much good writing as I was unlucky enough to have all 3! of my attempts to play the game run into game breaking bugs. But I don't fault...
I'll take your word for it, I didn't gt to experience much good writing as I was unlucky enough to have all 3! of my attempts to play the game run into game breaking bugs. But I don't fault obsidian for that necessarily, bad luck just happens sometimes. But it probably did color my impressions of the game.
Having multiple guns doesn't do anything meaningful but lead to unreasonable complexity when trying to balance them against each other. That makes the game-play less skill driven because some...
Having multiple guns doesn't do anything meaningful but lead to unreasonable complexity when trying to balance them against each other. That makes the game-play less skill driven because some people end up with better guns than others. Which is something I don't think people want.
As for no man's sky, I have gone through the video and feel that interpretation is fairly generous. But even then, acknowledges that Hello Games understood the situation and chose to take the reputational hit instead of the monetary hit by correctly defining what the game was. It is obviously still not a scam because there's plenty of documentation about what you're buying. However the game they've ended up with is still far different than what I believe was initially presented.
I've been saying this since forever. It blows my mind that there's a game where the entire point is competitive online multiplayer and yet there is an experience system that gives you advantages...
I've been saying this since forever. It blows my mind that there's a game where the entire point is competitive online multiplayer and yet there is an experience system that gives you advantages over newbies. Shouldn't it be the other way around - make it easier for newbies who won't have all the same skill as people who play compulsively so they don't want to permanently rage quit?
But then these games make insane bank, so maybe it's just us who are crazy.
I like the new Halo games. I like all the Halo games. If you browse /r/halo, the consensus in that community is basically everything after Halo 3 or maybe Halo: Reach is terrible. I don't really...
I like the new Halo games. I like all the Halo games. If you browse /r/halo, the consensus in that community is basically everything after Halo 3 or maybe Halo: Reach is terrible. I don't really like to go there cause it seems like no one even likes Halo but just want to complain about it.
I've played all the games, campaigns and multiplayer, though I mostly play multiplayer. I love it. I still play Halo 5 almost every day after work and sometimes the older games on the Master Chief Collection. I enjoy the story but I don't nerd out over it.
Every argument I've heard for why the new games are bad are about things I never thought about and don't care about. I just like playing the games, and I don't think about them much beyond that.
Unfortunately I feel like I'm in the minority and no matter what 343 industries puts out, the community is going to find some way to hate it.
I get it. As games get more refined, older games lose their sheen. Hydlide is the perfect example; people hate the game today, but it's largely because they don't have the historical background to...
I get it. As games get more refined, older games lose their sheen. Hydlide is the perfect example; people hate the game today, but it's largely because they don't have the historical background to appreciate. It may seem like a cheap Zelda clone, but it actually predates the creation of Zelda.
Donkey Kong Country games were bad. They used "3D" in a way that just made the game harder to read, felt really "zoomed in" probably due to a wide sprite, kinda boring level layouts, repetitive...
Donkey Kong Country games were bad. They used "3D" in a way that just made the game harder to read, felt really "zoomed in" probably due to a wide sprite, kinda boring level layouts, repetitive enemies, etc.
I feel like it got popular because it used some good looking 3D models for the time. I really didn't like 3D when I first played it, so I was biased against it, but I feel like looking back my criticisms still stand.
For each DKC Game, there were at least 10 other platformers that had either better graphics, better gameplay, or were just simply more interesting. But the thing about those games was that they...
For each DKC Game, there were at least 10 other platformers that had either better graphics, better gameplay, or were just simply more interesting.
But the thing about those games was that they were the perfect tech demo for the SNES. The impressive part of the graphics was not that they were prerendered 3D, but that they could be represented with enough colors that they didn't look terrible. Beyond that, it used very big sprites (not possible on the NES), had very smooth gameplay with no slowdowns (which was a common problem on the SNES, especially with shooters), and had great soundtracks that could take advantage of the sampler and effects that were only possible on the SNES.
Geometry dash is an incredibly underrated game in places like tildes (Most likely due to the community) and takes what the impossible game created to a far, far higher level into one of the best...
Geometry dash is an incredibly underrated game in places like tildes (Most likely due to the community) and takes what the impossible game created to a far, far higher level into one of the best mobile games ever made.
You shouldn't be playing video games past the age of 27. Go live a life!
I must begrudgingly give this a vote since it's the only opinion in here (thus far) that caught me off guard and I completely disagree with. That said, I don't approve of yucking someone's yum.
That's a new one for my vocab.
It's honestly not a strongly held belief. I'm kinda just trying to explain away my declining interest in video games (which bums me out, a bit).
Honestly it takes so much investment to get into them or get anywhere with them these days that many of the most popular ones are just not worth it if you need to juggle a social life and other responsibilities.
There are treasures out there, like Stardew Valley, though.
Curious, why do you think it's impossible to play video games and live a life? Is there a cutoff you have in mind for how much video games are acceptable to play? Why are video games any different than other media like consuming music, movies, or TV?
Because it's for children. Only children can play it. Adults should do adult things, like adulting...
...sorry, had to let it out.
My mother's like that. She doesn't understand the appeal of video games at all, so whenever father and I talk about the next game – one of the new STALKER mods he's playing, most often – she chimes in to remind us how lowly that whole affair of gaming is.
But whenever I say something negative about the trashy melodramas she enjoys so much, she replies with incredulity at my offense: "But this is life! Not like one of your little toys..."
You might be pleased to hear a not-all-mothers instance. My mom still plays vidya games. Mainly console RPGs, final fantasy, HZD, stuff like that. She just started playing witcher 3 last week. She's in her late 60s, and learning new control schemes can be a bit slow, but damn if it isn't fun going through a game with her.
She doesn't always play games though. I think she feels a little too engrossed by them and backs off for a while. Instead, she ends up watching detective shows that are difficult to describe in any way except "mind numbing". And she definitely can take games to the point of being mind numbing. She racks up hundreds of hours across multiple playthroughs of the same game, and it all pretty much runs on auto pilot. But at least it's an auto pilot that you engage with instead of passively zoning out at.
Games are just another form of entertainment, another flavor of escapism. So I'll throw in my unpopular opinion at this point: Show me a person who has no need of escapism and I'll show you a person who lacks empathy. Because I honestly can't see how someone can live in this world, grapple with the challenges it presents, and not have the need to step away occasionally to give the echoes of bombardment a moment to fade into the distance.
It's really cool that your mother enjoys video games so much.
How do you figure it's empathy they're lacking? I thought empathy is the ability to correctly recognize and respond to others' feelings.
I think of empathy more along the lines of allowing the experience or current emotional state of another to affect one's own experience or mental state (granted, it's limited to one's perception of another's state, which may or may not ring true). Probably even a bit more broadly than that. Basically the internalization of external frames of reference. The process of allowing oneself to be altered moment to moment by other consciousnesses around them can be boiled down to recognizing and responding to feelings, but I feel like there's a whole lot more to it than that.
That whole mechanism can have a pretty large impact, good or bad or anywhere in between. And with the tightly-wound state of affairs of modern society, allowing such fundamental shifts can hit with a pretty heavy dose from time to time. Consequently, it becomes a necessity to escape, from time to time, the constant bombardment of the myriad external frames of reference that bear down on those who are susceptible to being affected by them. Whether that escape is through video games, drinking, hobbies, reading, tv, exercise... you name it, there's probably someone out there that uses a form of it as an escape.
That's my take on it anyways. Probably not as much of an absolute as I presented it as, more like a working theory that only takes into account a small facet of behavior and tries to boil it down to a pithy statement for the hell of it.
Off topic but your dad sounds fucking rad. STALKER is great and it takes real dedication for a lot of those mods. Anomaly is torture lol
He's the kind of a player that tries few games, likes even fewer, and the ones he likes, he sticks with.
I think he's drawn in on a particular set of experiences, and wants to explore them from as many different angles as possible. He curses some of the mods he plays – yet he plays them through unless they're so broken it's impossible. I have that with music: I seek out all the remixes of a song I like, because the song was great and the takes it could be viewed from could be even greater.
The other game he likes is MechCommander 2. We had a CD of it at some point, and my father replayed it every few years. The CD broke, so I had to find a disk image online: if he wants to play it, he wants to play it – and I get that.
There are other games he enjoyed – like the Metro series, unsurprisingly – but none he actively returns to so often. STALKER is by far the most played game of his if you include all the modded versions: probably hundreds of hours.
Def not impossible to play video games and live life. Though, I feel like an increasing amount of exploitative video games are trying to make them life. In the sense that you invest more and more hours for the next trinket. (much like life, hehe). Assuming you sleep and work for 8 hours, that leaves 8 hours of "free time." Spend how you will, of course.
I would say they're not, except that the finding "artistic merit" in video games is harder than in those other forms of media, I think.
Anyhow, I was mostly stirring the pot. ;)
Saw 2 interesting things related to this today.
IMO merely consuming media doesn't lead to a fullfilling life. Lose the games, stop watching TV, stop browsing so much internet.
Fill the void with creation. Create art. Create a new business. Volunteer. Create or take care of children. Join a political movement. Help solve the world's problems. Stop being a consumer.
Enjoyment of recreational activities might be fine in small doses. Many video games are like jobs, and are designed to be addictive and suck away your time.
I don't like starting new games, or new TV shows, because of their addictiveness and huge time requirements.
It's kind of the other way around, isn't it? You have to have lived life for media to have an affect on you. If you show a kid a melodrama about a woman coming to terms with a stillbirth, you'll bore them to tears. If you show them the same melodrama years later after they have kids of their own, it's going to be a different kind of tears.
In any case, I think you are too dismissive of the value of media, and perhaps of art in general. The point of art is to assert meaning to it's viewers. Art can convey messages that are so fundamental that they cannot be meaningfully taught by words. Without art there is no culture, no philosophy, and no society. It is the single most valuable invention in humankind's history.
I wish it were that easy because I really do struggle to do more productive things when given the choice to game. Not that there isn't room in everyone's lives for unproductive things, but it's kind of a hobby that dominates for me. Why write, read, paint miniatures, etc. during my freetime when I could just sit on my ass and play games?
It occurred to me one day that I may die having never accomplished the things my inner drive pushes me to. That thought terrifies me every time.
I used to play games every fucking day, for hours on end, because I never had an aim in life. The only thing I saw on my path was one step forward, on the same road I was walking for years. It took an existential crisis – finding myself at a loss for purpose and questioning my very existence – to shake things up enough to get me off my feet.
I play games, and I enjoy them all the same – but today they are a source of active rest, rather than the day's bounty. I find great satisfaction in making my plans come to life – something I never thought I'd have.
Don't give yourself the choice to play games, then. Lock all your games up and throw the key away.
I don't know if you're joking or not, so I'll assume you are!
As someone who almost never plays games (because my phone has very little room for games and almost all the games I like are on PC for performance reasons anyways and because noone makes games for PS3s and my parents wouldn't really buy them anyway)
I just spend my life on social media instead.
I don't know that there is a specific age above which you shouldn't play them or anything - I don't have a strong opinion about it. I can just speak for myself and my own personal experience and say that I definitely feel like I've missed out on a lot in my life because I spent such a ridiculous amount of time playing games. I gained (and lost) friends around the world, but I don't know that it was worth it - friends online never did the same things for my mood as friends in real life did.
I may just be saying this because I'm burnt out though. I haven't played anything for several months outside of AFK Arena on my phone lol
Dark Souls isn't hard. It's just badly broken. Broken controls, broken camera, broken movement, broken combat. The game punishes you just for trying to move around and interact with the world. Difficulty should come from level design, interesting enemies, coöperating enemies, clever enemies.
Have an upvote for integrity.
For what it's worth, that is an unpopular opinion. :p
Oddly enough, I felt that way the first time I played Dark Souls, but when I tried it again, I actually managed to get the hang of it. It just plays differently, and things like weapon speed can, at first, come across as laggy.
That's by no means saying that the game is for everyone, but if you get the chance to try it, or snag it during a good sale, I'd still recommend it. :)
It took me 30 hours to get Dark Souls to click, and I've played it constantly ever since then. When you get it, you get it.
I never got gud, but after a few hours, I at least understood how it works... or at least, that it works. :p If it were actually broken, it wouldn't be the kind of game that rewards experience as much as it does. The mechanics are just different from other hack & slash games. Honestly, I wish more games had that kind of combat, and I'm glad that more are at least taking bits and pieces of it.
...I will say, though, that I take great issue when people say Dark Souls is so fair that every death is your fault. There are still plenty of times where the game goes "HAHA GOTCHA! That'll show you to turn a corner with only mild caution, ya stupid." The second time you go at it you'll know what to expect, and as you get better you'll be able to overcome things, but there are absolutely areas designed to kill you completely by surprise with little to no way to see it coming. (On the flip side, I also think the game doesn't punish death nearly as much as some people make it out; you never lose gear or spent experience. It's not a roguelike, even if it scratches a similar itch.)
Oh yeah, people who think Dark Souls is perfectly designed have some very rosy glasses on. There's a lot about the original Dark Souls' design that was janky and half-baked to say the least, including a whole area (Lost Izalith). It's a great game to play because the mechanics are so good, and I really came around to enjoy the progression systems, but there's a lot about the world design that was improved with later Soulsborne games.
Oh my god, please don't. Dark Souls 1 was on my "to play, maybe, eventually" list for years before I gave it a try. Now I revisit it every few months because it's just such an amazing game. The level of depth to its mechanics and world are unparalleled.
Give the game a chance. Let it click for you.
If it helps, this thread's OP conflated dying with punishment. Any good Soulsbourne player will rebut that, saying instead that dying is a learning experience. An opportunity to try a different approach.
You will die a lot, but in Soulsbourne it is always worth asking "why?" you died.
Yeah you need to try and decide for yourself. (but still it's just so broken)
Well then.
Spec Ops: the Line isn't as good as its reputation it suggests and a lot of what it did aim for was done better by Metal Gear Solid 2.
COD Modern Warfare 2 has one of the worst stories in gaming.
Platform party chat killed an important aspect of multiayer gaming and it has never been the same since.
EA isn't the worst company in gaming.
The weird original boomerang PS3 controller looked interesting and it's a shame it never saw the light of day because the SixAxis and the DualShock 3 kinda sucked.
Super Smash Bros. is not as intuitive as it should be.
Katamari Damacy is, pound for pound, the most "fun" video game. Not a single wasted moment, including the Namco title screen.
Half-Life 2 is still the best masterclass in linear level design.
Arena shooters and RTS games aren't dead, it's just that nobody has invested money into making good AAA ones in far too long. (Hopefully Doom Eternal has a proper multiplayer this time.)
StarCraft has always been more of an exception to RTS games than an example of the genre.
All the best Star Wars media are video games (maybe with the exception of the Thrawn trilogy).
That's it for now. Maybe I'll add more later as I remember them.
EDITED New ones:
Fulbright Studios (Gone Home, Tacoma) games suffer from the same problem: good ideas, and execution that runs out of steam 2/3 of the way through.
Nintendo isn't very good at controller designs.
Prince of Persia 2008 is the best game in the entire franchise.
The original Uncharted wasn't a good game because of its reliance on shooting gameplay, all of which was bad.
Killzone is an underrated franchise, though still not a very good one. But the first game's multiple-character level design was excellent and it's a shame it wasn't expanded on.
Gears of War 2's online was ruined by people who demanded they rebalance the gameplay to be as broken by the shotgun as the first game's online, and the series was never able to recover from that.
Halo CE had some of the worst level design ever. Halo 2's SMG is one of the worst weapons ever and it's ridiculous that they made it the default weapon. Halo 3 is the first Halo game to not have major design issues. The Halo series generally has bad spawns, and the lack of any spawn protection makes it so much worse.
Office is the best Counter-Strike level.
Fallout 1 and 2 have aged just fine.
MW2's No Russian level would have been better served if we instead played as a civilian trying to outrun the massacre.
Wow. Basically everything I have a reference point to comment on I agree with. This doesn't happen often!
I would add one thing though:
Yeah, I'd say it's something similar to my Spec Ops thing. Just because a game refers to something new that games don't usually delve into doesn't automatically make it amazing or even poignant. It's just a reference unless it's exploring those ideas in interesting new ways and inviting exploration and new kinds of thinking on those matters.
Most videogames, dude. Most videogames.
That's not even what games are about usually.
Katamari is still one of my al-time favourite games. Everyone I’ve introduced to it has a blast.
I can’t wait to check out Wattam.
EA has by far the best customer support out of all the companies l've required support from. They call you(so no phone costs), in my language, taking their time and making sure you get the help you need.
Steam? Takes three weeks to get an answer sometimes, and it might just be a generic bot answer.
I don't expect you to go on a full-blown rant about this, but – could you elaborate on that? Ditto for the following:
Is there a company that you can nominate for that title, or were you simply making an observation that it's not as bad as the publicity suggests?
Sure!
Every time I play this game, I'm so annoyed by how little sense the story makes. Shepard is a Marine commander who lost a ton of his men... but those guys were all Army, not Marines.
His goal then is to galvanize America into a full blown war against Russia in the spirit of overzealous patriotism for all those American lives... and then he does so through probably the single biggest and most treasonous act in US history, by working with those same Russians to have them invade and deal major blows to the US. But also how did the US not detect or see an entire invasion coming until they were already ashore? MW and MW2 both have heavily shown that the US has all kinds of information from all over the world at any given point in the loading screens alone until this point.
So to hide it he goes very far out if his way to bring together all the best Special Ops people into one unit, including breaking Price out of a gulag, just so he can have them cover up his actions. Then he proceeds to betray them, even though Price was suspicious of him all along. But also he now has this elite mercenary group under him? He's a Marine commander, and he put together all the best SpecOps people in a unit... and he chose to hire some other PMC firm to be his muscle instead of using either of those two groups? The dumbest part of it all is that if he didn't betray his SpecOps group at all, they would have had no idea what he had done! He outed himself for some stupid reason!
Also, what was the deal with Ghost? He was in all the marketing because of his look, the art book even lists him as a "silent but deadly" type. And then he won't shut up, does nothing, and then gets shot in the face. What was the point of him?
Not to suggest that CoD4 had some kind of amazing story but at least it was contained, made sense, and didn't try to be overdramatic with badly done plot twists.
EDIT: Oh man, I forgot about No Russian. How the hell did Russia justify an invasion over a CIA asset all by himself?! How did they even buy that it was all his idea? The way the story handled the consequences of the level just made the level feel disrespectful in retrospect. What a mess.
The days of lobby chat had their fair share of problems, to be sure, but there were also so many great moments of playing with the people in that lobby. Jokes, shit talking, laughs, insults, and more as the game went on, poorly or well. Maybe someone took control and guided the team, everyone fell in line behind them, and the game went smoothly.
Now days, it's all a ghost town. If I go online and into a lobby there's just... names. Nobody's chatting, nobody's having fun. It's gone from feeling like I joined a pick-up game at the local community centre to feeling like I joined a pick-up game inside a library. The erstwhile sense of "community" within that lobby is simply gone.
These days, I can only really find it in certain games where communication is vital, like Counter-Strike or LoL or DOTA. But then those games are also way too intense to be all I can play so it's not exactly a solution.
Additionally, party chat ruined some interesting online chat features, like local voice broadcast where your voice comes out of your character in the game space, and enemies could hear you if they were close enough since you were, for all intents and purposes, speaking out loud.
StarCraft is just simply an outlier because of how fast it is. It was always meant to be the fastest RTS game, especially StarCraft 2. People dismiss RTS games as a genre where you needed crazy high APM to even compete but that's only true of StarCraft (and even then, not really). After all, WarCraft is right there next to it and that's not at all nearly as demanding about APM. It's more of a traditional RTS game because of how slow-paced it all is. Games like Age of Empires, Dark Reign, Impossible Creatures, Company of Heroes, Command & Conquer all had more in common with WarCraft than they did StarCraft.
Activision gets it for me. To me, they're the least daring, least adventurous, most predatory company. The still have Bobby Kotick as their CEO. Remember all the wild shit he said in the 2000's? It's not like that went away, the board probably told him to shut the fuck up after a while, but all his notions are still there with him.
I'd also give the nod to Microsoft during the Xbox 360 days. A lot of the predatory gaming practices we have now can be traced back to their actions during the Xbox 360.
I'm still ridiculously pissed about this point. Some games I played were focused around the whole "local voice broadcast where your voice comes out of your character in the game space" thing, or relying on something else in-game. Modern platforms basically trashed that.
Also, I've played far too many games where I seem like I'm the only one saying stuff for half the game, and then someone pipes up and says "yo, sorry, we're all on discord" or something similar. Basically, if you're the +1, the other group decides to ignore you since it's easier. It used to be that at least they spoke in-game and you could join in the shenanigans.
I agree with you, but it's not Discord's fault in the least. If Discord didn't exist, it would just be another platform. Unfortunately the closed nature of the platform makes it seem especially dubious.
I have to completely back you up with this. Every time I think about how I'm missing out on playing multiplayer games with my friends, I remember it's too hard to coordinate playing with them these days (30s). Then I think about going online to play with strangers but then remember this effectively stifles any chance of me making friends with somebody
I’d nominate Activision for what they’ve done to Blizzard.
I think Blizzard was already going down that path before they merged with Activison, but the merger certainly didn't help.
Do people NOT like Katamari? It's a universally beloved game.
It's definitely beloved. I think calling it the single most "fun" game is probably what is unpopular since it's not usually in "favourite" or "best" lists for many people. What I'm more trying to get at is that it has the most "fun game" in every aspect than any other game, and I don't think any other game has come close to making sure the entire experience, from start to finish, is as much "fun game" as Katamari Damacy. The Namco title screen, for example, would be a legal thing in any other game. KD uses it as the save profile select, and you have to use Katamari mechanics to do it! Before the game even starts (upon a previously played boot) you're thrown into the world and gameplay immediately.
(Also, I am lumping We <3 Katamari with Damacy for this purpose.)
Lots of overlaps, here! Katamari Damacy sits comfortably in my top 10, basically, since I discovered it exists.
One thing about "arena shooters" and RTS games reaching mass appeal, though: I think it's pretty pointless to split game genres (which are already separated along weirdly drawn lines) even further and pretend like, for example, "MOBAs" aren't just the most popular form of RTS games right now. Same with "arena shooters". There's PUBG and a last-man-standing game mode that has been around since the 90s and that's just the FPS flavor currently popular.
I think it's telling that projects trying to bring back "arena shooters" (Reflex Arena, Toxikk) essentially look like perfect clones of Quake 3 or Unreal Tournament. Those aren't really "genres", they're just two specific ways of doing an online FPS, their appeal heavily relying on the freshness of the technology at the time. Since then we had Tribes, which added large environments, Team Fortress, which added classes and Counter Strike, which added scenarios based on real events. The FPS just evolved. Almost everything a Quake 3 did still exists (with the possible exception of bunnyhopping). Quake 3 today just looks like (I'm so, so sorry) Fortnite. Again, I'm sorry, but it does. StarCraft today looks like League of Legends.
I think the reason "arena shooters" aren't a thing today is that the term "arena shooter" is trying to repackage like 3 games as if they had enough potential to be redone in endless, unique ways. They're not. A "modern arena shooter" is simply a "modern FPS" and we all know what that looks like.
Okay, that's a pretty unpopular opinion. I'd like to hear more about it.
That one is more personal than the rest but I always enjoyed the spaces this level had, they're pretty different from any other CS map, like the side hall facing down the main hallway, or the garage to back office entryway.
It's not a big map either, but the paths are winding and meet at a few points that make it great for ambushes and unexpected plays. It also has the side effect of making good audio setups much more important so you can listen for where someone may be.
I'm playing it right now because it was free in the PS Store and have to agree. The platforming is fun, if a little frustrating at times, but the shooting is just not good.
Nathan Drake collection on PS4? Would you believe the PS4 version fixed the aiming across all three original games? It was worse on the PS3.
The good news is that Uncharted 2 and 3 are a lot better about it. The thing that made the first Uncharted worse (despite similar enough mechanics) is how they designed the combat arenas—the constant spawning of the enemies behind you was annoying as all hell.
Uncharted 2 lessened the shooting down to pace it with the platforming nicely. Uncharted 3 is a bit of a step back. I thought 4 was really well done.
Yep! It just gets me how it takes 3 shots with the pistol to kill a baddie and like 10 with the AK. The pistol seems like the strongest weapon by far. Then there is the jetski level that I just finished, where you can't move and shoot at the same time and controls are just not great. Looking forward to getting through it and playing 2 and 3 though. I've played 3 before but it has been many years.
You can definitely argue with me that this is a chicken and egg problem, but they're not as popular as they used and they're not part of the modern trends, that's why they're dead. You can say that's because no one is pushing any of those games in the mainstream, but that doesn't negate the fact that they're "dead".
Unfortunately the only way to say for sure is if someone makes a high quality AAA title (with multiplayer) and it flops or soars.
Storytelling in games is overrated. Or rather: The way stories are "told" in games often do not benefit from any interactive parts (the only reason to make it a game in the first place?) at all, making me wonder why the creators didn't just write a book or do a movie short or something.
To add a more constructive note: I think Ken Levine, at least in theory, might be onto something with his vision for "storytelling" that's simulated as gameplay rather than providing a background.
PS: Can't resist putting this lovely tweet here. It illustrates perfectly how disconnected "story" and gameplay can be, even – like in this case – if it's entirely non-verbal.
I think the issue, to be blunt, is that most videogame stories are shit. Including the ones that get awards and universal praise. Any average film is MILES ahead of the years' best game when it comes to story.
I've felt this way for a long time! I keep hearing about certain games that I must play because they have a great story, but I'm just like... I've already seen those types of plots and stories in books, TV-series, and movies. Everyone praises Witcher 3 for its story, but it bored me and I uninstalled it after playing it for about 20 hours. I didn't feel it was very unique or anything, but I did quite like the Netflix show. Perhaps storytelling in games is just too slowly paced for my tastes.
Witcher 3 gets much better once you get out of Velen.
I'll add on to this: Sandbox games are more "game" than story-based games. Note: I am not saying that story games are bad (for me, they are), but the games I keep going back to are ridiculously open-ended. I still play Master of Orion II on occasion.
I really like the idea of emergent gameplay in simulators. One of the things Rimworld is praised for is the stories it can afford to tell. Maybe you choose to save that raider because his backstory is pure tragedy and you can't just leave them to die with such dishonor. Maybe your decision to install a faulty bionic backfires drastically, and one of your favorite characters in the whole colony suddenly goes on a rampage and kills or maims other characters you care about, including animals¹. Maybe your curiosity and/or need overtakes you and you open a crypt full of creatures armed with powerful rifles able to obliterate your whole colony... which they do.
It's something I've been exploring for a few years. Recently I've been working on a concept of a magic system that can create non-encoded, dynamic effects based on the combination of spell parts it uses. I have a vague idea of "grammar" that would entail certain interactions between given parts of the spell, assuming it consists of more than one component. Something similar has already been done – picking characteristics from a list to form a single spell. What I'm aiming to do is make sure those effects are dynamic, as well. All that should be set is the base elements that can form any other complex form.
It's also why I love Borderlands: its dynamically-constructed weapons. It's an underrepresented concept in modern games. I think some FPS/TPS could be made more fun with such things.
¹ I dunno if it was a mod's weird interaction with the game or a true example of emergent gameplay, but one of my colonists, after having an archotech cognitive enhancement installed, started finding themselves in unpredictable fits of rage that would entail smashing everything and everyone around them. The colonist was a brainy type, with almost no fighting skill to speak of, so the damage they did was negligible. That alone was a very interesting part of that character's emergent story – something to love about these types of games.
That sounds kinda amazing!
It does, doesn't it?
Currently the work is on the conceptualization stage. I'm figuring out how such a thing would even work. Right now, even though I call it "grammar", it more closely resemble mathematics in the way these components are supposed to interact: there's a small fundamental system of interactions from which the complex framework stems.
It's one of those things I'm going to be working on passively for years, until pieces fall just close enough to each other that the picture clicks.
Magicka is something like this. Casting spells involves combining “elements” and the combination you do (chording button sequences basically) determines the type of spell, how it comes out (like in a straight line, a cone, a radius around you), and how far it goes. And it’s multiplayer, so the elements being used by the wizards around you affect your spells in unpredictable ways.
That way it's been done, yeah. There are tabletop RPG systems that allow players to construct their spells and superpowers in this fashion. The latest announced edition of Shadowrun (6th?) and, I think, City of Heroes do that.
Sorry to post on a comment a couple days old (just made my account here), but do you have some examples of games that manage to use their medium's unique strengths in telling a story? I think I agree with your general point.
I would say Dark Souls is a game with great storytelling using the medium's strengths. The story as told through cutscenes and narration/exposition is bare bones, but the lore of the world and the relationships between characters is fleshed out through things like item descriptions, level architecture, game art, map design, etc..
The story itself (in all 3 games, plus the other Souls-adjacent games) is vague and removed from realism, as if it was an old oral legend passed down. Literal giants, animal-human hybrids, huge differences in scales between characters. Picking up on all of the fragments of the story and making a reading of it invites interpretations of what is happening without coming out and directly telling the player what is happening. At the same time you never get a definitive sense of exactly what is happening, only what you can piece together as the player, from the world around you, and from what other characters tell you.
A random example of how people are interpreting the story: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcGS3O27XYY
edit: Also I just want to say, one of the reasons I really like the Souls series method of storytelling is because I am just sick.and.tired of the standard "use cutscenes like a movie to tell the story, have tedious gameplay to link cutscenes" style of storytelling that most games have. Most games also don't attempt more subtle and interesting storytelling devices than "tell the player exactly what is happening, maybe have one lame twist that you could never see coming, and also wear all of the character's character traits and overall arcs like a signboard".
Dwarf Fortress on the one end, more abstract stuff like The Witness on the other. Oh, and Papers, Please of course! There’s plenty of ways of doing it. What bores me is just stopping the gameplay to play a movie every hour.
Ah Papers, Please really did impress me with how intertwined its gameplay was with its story. I'll have to check out the other titles you mentioned. Thanks for humoring me!
If you're looking for something recent, I heard good things about Disco Elysium. I couldn't quite tell if people applaud the writing in general or how well it was implemented as gameplay (could be a stylishly done choose-your-own-adventure-book mechanic?) but I'm tempted to try it to see whether they pulled off something that's complex enough to actually benefit from being a videogame.
I agree. I care way more about the gameplay than the story. I usually skip the story and cut scenes.
Not that I agree, but I can at least understand that perspective for a game like GTA. But what about games where the whole point is the stupid amount of emergence, like in dwarf fortress? Or games where the direct consequences of your choices are staggeringly detailed and seem remarkably individual, like in nethack? Or games where where your direct interaction with it allows it to create unprecedented levels of tension, like portal? Or games where the gameplay is, in some sense, the story, like braid or the witness?
Yea, that's what I meant with the Ken Levine bit. Emergent story is something that absolutely works and can be amazing (I still remember Bronzemurder, for example!). I'm more talking about games where it's like "you play a starving orphan in 19th century France" and all you do is clumsy platforming (made up example but I bet there's something close!). Super Mario Bros isn't a game about Italian plumbers, right? Of course, every single modern AAA game also does something weird in this regard ("ludonarrative dissonance", as horrible as this phrase is).
It's funny you mention Braid and The Witness cause those are like my favorite games and my reply is basically just aping every Jonathan Blow talk, ever. So yea, that kind of "story" through gameplay, actual gameplay, is what I want more of.
Most video game stories suck balls.
Video game narratives - even acclaimed ones - are almost always significantly inferior to their counterparts in other major mediums (such as film and television), and we only put up with it because we love pressing buttons.
I'm going to copy-and-paste my reply to another similar comment:
Not that I agree, but I can at least understand that perspective for a game like GTA. But what about games where the whole point is the stupid amount of emergence, like in dwarf fortress? Or games where the direct consequences of your choices are staggeringly detailed and seem remarkably individual, like in nethack? Or games where where your direct interaction with it allows it to create unprecedented levels of tension, like portal? Or games where the gameplay is, in some sense, the story, like braid or the witness?
Battle royal is overrated
Battle royale games, autochess games... There are all trends, aren't they? They come suddenly, become very popular for a limited time, and go quickly. The Action-RTS/MOBA trend came and went; there are still persistent games of such nature, but it's no longer the Big Thing™ that players, publishers, or developers chase.
Yeah true it’s just a trend but it’s certainly taking its time to become uncool
What about this sort of games bothers you? Is it the fact that their popularity prevents developers from reaching into other territories and making different games?
I think it’s hindering the industry
Hentai dating sims are interactive pornography. I have a feeling they satisfy the same cravings for intimacy that porn does, and both do it superficially – just enough to offset the thirst, but not enough to provide a deeper existential need for being wanted and/or company.
I'd guess that on Tildes this probably is an unpopular opinion.
I myself disagree, no one should feel bad for wanking to a creature that does not exist.
I don't understand why people would want to use voice chat in games where you're grouped with random people (Dota, Overwatch, etc). It's full of the worst people you could ever want to talk with even if you don't sound like a woman or anything else that people will harass you for.
I've been playing Dota 2 for six years now (played my first match on Jan 1, 2014). I have somewhere between 2.5k and 3k hours put into it. I've never used voice chat in the game itself, but I have played with those who do, sometimes or often.
There have been a handful of griefers (like those putting music from their shitty speakers through their shitty mic), there have been ragers, there have been outright assholes.
Most people, though? They're either using voice chat to communicate between each other (like in a party) or genuinely communicate with their team. I would even venture a guess that about 25% of the people I've heard use voice chat were positive in their expression: "Nice work, guys!", "Nice, nice, nice", "Good job! Now push!" ("push" means "assault enemy base", which is the main objective).
The malicious VC users were ever a minority. Most people I've heard talk often just chat about semi-related things.
That said, I've always been at the higher bracket of the behavior scoring. Dota 2, in particular, has a system where it ranks your behavior based on the commends and the reports you receive. The scale ranks from 1 (the absolute worst of the worst players, behavior-wise) to 10 000 (well-behaved, generally positive players who rarely abuse communcation channels or abandon games before those are finished). I'm regularly at 10k. This may have had an effect on the kinds of communication I'd witnessed.
That said, I do play with women every so often. (The only way I would know is if they'd used voice chat.) Some of the more-needy young men seek to ascertain if it's truly a girl on the other end, and they may start asking to add you to their friends list. The rest just get into the groove and PTFO.
I've got about 1400 hours in Dota, mostly between 2013 and 2015 at a mid-low-range MMR, and my experience was the opposite. Not many people used voice chat, but the ones that did were almost entirely assholes. And in text chat people being assholes was a regular occurrence. My behavior score was consistently around 9800 and I was still surrounded by these people.
I dunno what to say to that. Assholes exist in this open-to-public multiplayer game, but... I seem to be meeting many fewer of those than others? My games are feeling much smoother ever since I started muting people. I usually play like Gordon Ramsey, myself: if you fuck up, I speak up, but otherwise, I'm trying to move things along nicely.
I dunno. Maybe we should play sometime, see how it goes. If you're being connected with a different pool of people, so would I, right? And vice versa, but I dunno which pool's gonna get tugged closer.
I haven't ever played with someone who claimed there were all these assholes around them.
You're in Russia, right? That might make a difference. I'm in the United States.
I've heard stories about NA pubs, yes. The fact that your treatment there sucks may have something to do with it.
Have you ever played on EU servers?
I might have once or twice, but it's been long enough that I don't remember.
If you ever want to, the invitation stands: I'm curious about the effect this would have.
Thank you, I appreciate the offer. If I ever feel like playing Dota I'll hit you up.
The good/bad interactions ratio you're mentioning might not look the same as yours if you're a woman using voice chat, because every other game will be a bad experience. Not disagreeing with the rest of the post.
That's a good point.
It's the kind of perspective that you don't get to experience much unless you restrict your comms. When I pretended to be a girl in other games, male players would sure end up hitting on me more.
This is such a pessimistic outlook.
Almost every human being is lovely and friendly, and in my experience this holds true online as well. I've been playing online games for close to ten years now, and I've encountered less than a dozen assholes in all that time.
Maybe it's just because I'm not into the hyper-competitive games like dota or csgo.
That's fair. I'll freely admit that I'm pretty jaded and cynical in general, so take everything I say with a grain of salt.
I used to play Starcraft 2 semi-competitively and even in the least competitive game modes people would get pissed off if they were losing. "Team sucks," "this player sucks" even though it's one specific custom game that you need to individually learn, stuff like that. Dota was largely the same way in my experience, although you can see in my conversation with @ThatFanficGuy that it's not always that way even in competitive games. I want to be optimistic about people in general, but with all the garbage that gets spewed online I'm not so sure. People say awful things on Facebook under their real name for all their friends and relatives to see. Unmoderated chats in games tend to devolve into garbage and I don't think it makes a difference if the people shouting pro-Trump stuff are sincere or just trying to stir shit up because in the end no one can tell the difference and they're promoting an awful cause.
(necrobumping, but...) There are a few games where using voice comms or not significantly impacts success rate [at higher levels of play]. The genre that comes to mind are games like Rainbow Six: Seige. The team size is small (5 vs. 5), so the value of each individual on your team matters a lot compared to in other games. 1 teammate of 5 is 20% of your team. Contrast that with 1 teammate out 32. 1 bad teammate out of 32 only drags the team down a tiny bit. But if 1 teammate out of your 5 is bad instead of good, that changes the strength of your team significantly. In R6S, when all other factors are equal (skill, equipment), your team is at a significant advantage if you can communicate well regarding various aspects of the game, like: current position, current status, sightings of enemies, their last known locations, intention of maneouvering, declaration of coverage/overwatch, coordination of movement, ... lots of things. R6S had no shortage of people I wanted to mute, but the incentive is very strong to be using your mic to better your team.
Cities skylines is not a city simulator but a city builder. The simulation absolutely sucks. It's nice for building cool looking stuff, but it's still not a great simulator.
There's still no worthy successor to SC4 imo.
I think I consider it more of a traffic simulator, funded by faffing around with
buildingszones.The traffic simulator craps out way too soon though. I was building a medium-sized city in a single tile. Reached the cap, cars just stopped moving and the whole city died. Pathing is horrible too. Oh, and ambulances get stuck in traffic?
SC4 didn't simulate every car individually, but had cars driving around which visually represented the traffic density on that road. I honestly don't think there's a need to simulate everything individually, since performance just takes too big of a hit.
Watching other people play games can be more entertaining than playing said games.
Is that not actually a popular opinion? The staggeringly huge audiences of Let's Players, Twitch streamers and esports celebrities is proof.
I was actually thinking of posting the opposite as my unpopular opinion. There's this enormous movement of watching personalities play games with commentary. Some of the gamers in question are raking in huge sponsorships; it's serious money these days. I feel like an old fuddy-duddy because I don't get it at all. Every game stream I've watched was, in my opinion, either boring or unbelievably stupid. I don't want to watch people play games, I want to play them myself.
This probably has something to do with the kinds of games I enjoy. I'm all about the single-player adventure. I love stuff like Uncharted, Mass Effect, Skyrim, and The Outer Worlds... immersive offline narrative campaigns are my jam. As far as I can tell, the most popular streamers are playing frenetic, competitive stuff. It goes without saying that esports are in the same category. So these aren't games that I'm even interested in playing, that explains why I don't want to watch them. Though streams of games I like are available too, and I don't want to watch them either.
I also don't watch any YouTubers regularly, which are an adjacent phenomenon. I do listen to the Philip DeFranco Show podcast, which is just audio from the video show; it's a good news roundup but he often talks about YouTube drama and different personalities from that world. I feel like I've landed on an alien planet whenever he starts a story about Jeffree Star's makeup or Jake Paul fighting people or some Tannacon nonsense. I couldn't possibly be less interested.
On the other hand, I'm not judging you or anybody. My SO is actually a big fan of YouTubers, streamers, and watching me play games. We just have different personality types and interests, nobody has to be right or wrong about it. And I'm pretty sure in 2020, it's my opinion that is the outlier here.
A lot of the time watching Let's Players is not about the game, but more about the person playing the game. Think of it like it's a show/a podcast, not just watching a game. The same is other non-gaming youtubers. It's the same thing as tv, but for zoomers (that's a ridiculous simplification but you know :D).
Sometimes I just run in LetsPlays in the background when I leave my dog at home because hearing people talking makes him feel less alone.
You're probably right, seeing how popular twitch is.
But personally I enjoy a lot of games that I don't have the disposition to spend money or time on. And single player games with rich stories are the best example of this. I don't want to spend money on a PS4 and on latest God of War, plus set aside a hefty chunk of my time to learn how to play, get frustrated, and finish it in the end.
Also I feel like my "I prefer watching" thing has its origins way before twitch and youtube were popular, when I was watching friends play Heroes of Might and Magic 3, rather than playing for myself. :D
Brand loyalty.
Also, Internet forums get polarizing sometimes – Reddit would be the lazy example.
I have a feeling that playing violent video games actually does affect our mind in ways we don’t realize. When I look at how pro-war many Americans are, and I see that we have a culture of violent movies, alienation of opposing forces, and yes, violent video games, I can’t help but think that all this propaganda affects what we think is normal.
From all the studies, it appears that violence and aggression in video games is more likely than not to have an effect. The American Psychological Association has even issued a statement on the matter, clearly stating its position as accepting that violence caused by aggressive video games is a proven phenomenon that the public has to be educated about.
The same studies find that the aggression response isn't actually much worse than any competitive endeavor, and possibly less severe than you get from participating in contact sports.
Actually being able to get your aggression out physically through playing the sport maybe has some catharsis that just sitting on a couch furiously pounding your controller does. But I think the much bigger thing is people learn sports under coaches as kids who teach sportsmanship and how to manage your emotions as part of the socialization process. Gamers, though, get socialized by the internet, which is a toxic cess-pool lacking in adult supervision.
I actually think the best argument around it was one made by David Wong on Cracked. He makes a persuasive case that what video games train into us isn't an instinct towards violence so much as an emotional inability to deal with the fact that not all problems can be surmounted by just grinding at them hard enough.
I first started to notice this among the subculture of pickup artist stuff where it felt like people were basically trying to gamify human interaction to manipulate women to get laid. It obviously doesn't work because humans don't work that way, and the times when it does work it ends up tipping really easily into being skeevy emotional manipulation. And it's like a self-reinforcing feedback loop. People grow up learning that all problems should be broken down and addressed like video-game problems, and then they design video-games that presume problems can be solved like video-game problems.
From there it's easy to see how people too deep into this might have trouble actually dealing with real human beings and more difficult and nuanced emotional baggage one deals with throughout their lives.
I’ve just glanced at the Wikipedia page (sorry, at work), but I see that the link focuses specifically on individual aggression. I’m thinking more along the lines of how violent video games as propaganda may make us more willing to agree with war and violence committed by others. Like if we play a lot of video games about war, we think war is normal. If we played a lot of video games about union organizing and solidarity with our fellow human beings, perhaps we would focus more on that in our daily lives.
Thanks for sharing those links. I had no idea that there was any research showing this. On reddit and elsewhere I have only seen stories suggesting the opposite is the case. This goes against my ancient anecdotal experience.
I certainly experienced the Tetris Effect in my youth. While not violent it certainly programmed my brain, even after ending gameplay.
After playing the original GTA or GTA2 for days one Christmas I recall driving afterwards and having really inappropriate suggestions coming from my brain.. like hey that you could hit that nicer car and take it. That would just be a flash of a thought, apparently programmed in me by the game mechanics. A similar thing would happen after a long day of snowboarding irl. On the drive home I would see "fun lines" on the banks of the road and my brain would suggest it. Of course I never did those things, but my brain did suggest them.
Anyone else have similar experiences?
Now that I think about it, I may have grown obssessed with firearms because I played plenty of games that featured them, very early in my youth. My first PC happened when I was 7, and my first game was Serious Sam, with this sorta cover.
This is a bit of a meta opinion, but I think the gaming community by and large has opinions that are too strong. This isn't exclusive to them and is also a product of the modern discourse prioritizing loud voices, but it's particularly pronounced in gaming. A game or company has to be the BEST or the WORST. Designers are GENIUSES or IDIOTS. Everything is escalated to the highest point or completely diminished. There's little to no nuance, and it makes back and forths particularly painful, because there'll be a sort of positional whiplash as someone tries to argue that Skyrim is AMAZING while someone else tries to argue that it's OBVIOUSLY TERRIBLE and neither one can see that maybe it does some good things but also has some flaws? This might not be an unpopular opinion so much as it is one you can't really bring up without looking like a jerk. I'm not trying to be a jerk, but I do think that gamers could benefit from chilling out a bit. I should note here that I don't really see this problem much on Tildes, but it's rampant elsewhere.
Gaming narratives are way more constrained than seemingly anyone wants to admit. Interactivity and experience are nice things that separate gaming from other types of media, but that doesn't mean games are fundamentally more resonant or that it's definitively possible to do more in them. Most games involve the player in an invisible pact that says that you are in control and success is possible. This is very limiting, similar to what @NaraVara brought up in their post here. Games can certainly break this convention at times for effect, but by and large the player's experience is one that is reliant on agency within the game world and very obvious cause-and-effect, otherwise the game simply wouldn't work. Other media can easily work around these limitations, but it's much harder to do in gaming. I don't know that this is unpopular as in "controversial" but instead it's unpopular in that I never see anyone really addressing it or talking about it.
Current WoW is better than WoW classic, by a huge amount.
How so? I'm not familiar with either but am curious about your perception.
The current iteration of World of Warcraft includes a lot of quality of life changes that are helpful for people who want to play the game without devoting 100 hours a month to it. On top of that, raid designs have improved immensely; raids in classic wow were pretty terrible, with the challenge mostly consisting of getting 40 people to look at the same thing and show up. Raids now are much more challenging and interesting.
The story has also matured significantly; the story team has a much more cohesive idea of what they're doing. It's cheesy, but it can be compelling; if you haven't watched the Saurfang cinematics from the recent expansion, they're actually a nice little micro-story.
The perception of "difficulty" in classic wow is mostly about levelling and not about end game content, but a significant number of people actually don't enjoy the levelling process; even in classic it's disjoint, and the story is wonky. The experience of levelling is less painful in current WoW, and will improve in the next expansion.
Overall, classic WoW is a fun time, but current WoW is just... better, in almost every measurable way.
I'd say they only really messed up with their neglect on the server community front. The grouping roulette made it easier to find groups by teaming up with people from other servers, but that also meant you didn't get to know the people on your own server at anywhere near the level of games like EQ. Rather defeats the purpose of an MMO, imo. That wasn't just blizzard, either, most MMOs made that mistake, it's a large part of what killed Rift off. Other than that one nitpick I'd agree with you, quality of life in WoW is much better than in classic MMOs.
To me, WoW was a wonderful excuse to talk to my buddies on a daily base. Yeah, the game was alright, but my guild was the best. I was such a bad player, and had such a blast!
Why do you think Mass Effect is overrated? If anything I think the blowback from 3 soured a lot of people on 1 and 2 in retrospect, which I think are fantastic games.
I never even played 3. I played 1, and started into 2 but the gameplay as a whole felt completely uninspired. I will say that I preferred the gameplay in 1 to that of 2.
They did change a lot of gameplay's foundation between 1 and 2. I didn't feel strongly about – I just went with it, it was still a game I was looking forward to enjoying – but I can see why it would put you off.
The updated ending basically just made explicit most of what was previously just implied. The implications were pretty subtle though, so I think the vast majority of people who played didn't pick up on it and decided these were all "plot holes."
I didn't think it was substantially better thematically or anything, but I was never all that mad about the ending to begin with. Mostly it's just glitzier and sexier since there are more and more differentiated cut scenes.
What does add a lot of context to the ending, though, are the Prothean and Leviathan DLCs. They goofed by not making that part of the standard game, particularly the Leviathan DLC which actually explains how the Starchild's logic worked and why this iteration of the galaxy was able to fight the Reapers off where other's fail.
I'm going to go out on a controversial statement and say that Half Life 2 is a boring game that is weaker than Half Life 1. And that Portal 2 is a weaker game than Portal 1.
Half Life 2: I remember playing this roughly when it came out and I just found it incredibly boring. About 6 years before Half Life 2 I played Half Life and whilst I didn't play up to Xen (I think I played about half of the game), half of that game was immensely better than anything I played in Half Life 2. True, I didn't play Xen so I didn't get to feel all the disappointment and frustration of those levels (thank goodness), but I believe H:2 is the complete opposite to HL in many ways:
As with Portal 2, I think I enjoyed Portal's short length mixed with the weird odd humour. With P2, the flow went start level -> joke -> puzzle -> joke -> end level, and that motonony really bugged me. Especially as I didn't really find the game that funny - not compared to the pitch black humour of the first game. What I will say in P2's defence is that it had the better end-game boss than P1. But overall I really enjoyed P1's puzzle and humour over P2.
With both HL1 and P1, I was sad when I stopped playing them. With HL2 and P2, I was relieved for it to end so I'd never play them again.
I. There is an unexplored market for games that both soothen the need for and teach about relationships
I.a. Dating sims, when done well, can be as good as any more-conventional praised title
I.b. Overall, the educational potential of video games for teenage and adult population has not yet been explored in any meaningful way
II. Customizability of your character and equipment is underexplored and underused. Often this is limited to having fewer than ten slots for what can be identified as a conventional RPG-ish "item", while the depths in which such an item can customized and changed with parts and materials found in the fictional world are still dark and unknown – even though there are dozens of examples in the real world of things that could be modified to work differently
III. Too few games are made and/or optimized for lower-tier hardware, even though there's a wide market for things that can work on such machines, particularly in poorer countries
IV. Sound design is underappreciated in many a title both high-tier and indie. A good sound design, though not necessary, could elevate the experience to something beyond a mere video game
V. Involving professional writers into game design may improve many aspects of a game
VI. Experimental, promising titles should receive priority in support and development over most AAA titles
VII. There remains a vast cave system of unexplored and underrepresented topics for games, but they can't be meaningfully realized because most game devs have little in the way of writing, and the indie teams that could push the envelope the most have too few dedicated writers
VIII. A game plot that's tastefully lacking is better than a plot that's been attempted but not completed
VIII.a. It's perfectly fine to keep the lore of the game mostly hidden and the players – ever so curious
VIII.b. Only ever releasing the lore in bits and pieces hidden in-between new gameplay content is perfectly fine, as well
VIII.c. Games that contain very little to no actionable lore are okay as long as they're enjoyable
VIII.c.1. Not developing lore for such games is an acceptable choice if the game remains interesting
IX. Game dev sims are fun for a while but are severely lacking in control over titles and the effect of one's decisions on the success of the resulting game
IX.a. Game dev sims fail to account for ingenuity of the developer team: the same concept, when presented in a different light or followed through on further, may be significantly-better received, as is evident by the outstanding games of the last decade alone
Since I'm not experienced with the genre, can you talk through some examples of stuff done well vs. poorly?
In terms of visual novels:
Some dating sims are basically porn where you click through the story at your own pace and perhaps have a few decisions to make that determine which scene you watch. For example, the "Sakura" games on steam fall into this for the most part.
The better dating sims tend to have a much more in-depth plot. Lots of decisions and branches that will lead to different endings or scenarios. Sometimes a guide with a complex flowchart will be made to show just how to get an ending, as decisions are often adding to a hidden stat tracker or triggering a flag. The stories are well written and the characters tend to have personalities and character growth rather than be a walking caricature with jiggle physics. Some dating sims also have the male character change personality between possible story lines too. They'll start generic, but as you make decisions, your character gets more refined and responds appropriately. A good game will have you feel like you were two different people if you play two different story lines.
The better ones will tug your heartstrings and deal with some in-depth concepts (past trauma, physical disabilities, loneliness, deperession, etc). Katawa Shoujo is an amazing visual novel at a high school for kids with disabilities and its amazingly in-depth and well done. Its also free and was made collaboratively by 4chan - which is always a strange thing to say.
There are also some that focus more on fun/weird stuff and can be entertaining to play as something very different or perhaps a parody of the usual. So things like hatoful boyfriend (aka pigeon dating sim) or Doki Doki Literature Club (out there - just play it).
A good story is that which, most importantly, draws you in. It makes you want to be a part of it.
Games, by the nature of their interactivity, can you put you much closer to the border between fiction and reality, thus making you feel more involved.
What dating sims I've played so far focus mostly on giving you the fantasy of being wanted. Rather than make you work for a relationship – or work at it, more precisely – it avoids the imperfect connection problem (where two people are less likely to connect the fewer values and experiences they have in common, and vice versa) by gifting the player with the state of being desired.
Crudely put, most dating sims are the pornography for the part of your mind that's searching for a tribe to belong to, rather than a mate to procreate with. These games give you a fish without ever teaching you how to catch one yourself. They satisfy a need once, without teaching you how to satisfy it better on your own or with better tools.
In my opinion, a better dating sim would be that in which the player may not be able to connect with all of the dates if they play genuinely. Unless you're looking for a way to get into someone's pants, it's more likely than not that certain characters will rub you the wrong way, and the displayed difference in values between you and said character may well be enough that, when attempting to falsely connect with them, you will make the choices that seem natural to you but unpleasant or even offensive to them.
It's my assumption that making dating sim characters behave more like real people will, overall, enhance a player's experience from such a game.
For one, should they find a character that fits them well, the experience of intimacy – fulfilling a need they can't readily satisfy – will be more meaningful and more genuine.
This should lead into the self-reinforcing learning process: finding ways to connect with more people without sacrificing your values should provide an incomplete but still valuable experience that may, if done well, translate into the real world, so that finding a connection with another human being should prove easier and less anxious.
Writing such a thing is no easy task. Portraying characters that have their own sufficiently-different personalities requires a lot of effort. Then you have to contextualize it, by giving each event meaning within the borders of the current situation. There are many ways to do this – ironically, it depends on the broader context. You then have to also portray the perspective of the player character that most players can relate to, so that their choices may best reflect their own values while remaining accessible within the confines of the game (given that no game can span infinite, or even very large, volume of possible actions).
This should provide the player with experiences that rival some of the more conventional games' plots, based in a major way on the fact that the player is able to directly relate to the things that happen to them and the characters they seek to date. Like in many RPG games (and some non-RPGs, like The Last of Us), if you find yourself looking out for a character, and enjoying their company, you will also start caring for them and whatever happens to them. A dating sim should emphasize on that connection – and, preferably, make that connection not an end in itself – to provide a relationship simulator that's fulfilling, enjoyable, and potentially educating.
Isn't this, essentially, the romantic subplot in a Bioware game? Your definition of a dating sim sounds like a degraded form of an RPG. (Though I guess you could also say that a "walking sim" like Dear Esther or Firewatch is a degraded form of an FPS by the same logic).
What about Persona 5 where the romantic subplot is a big part of the game? Does that fit the bill you're talking about?
In my experience, romance in BioWare games sucks – just like in most of the AAA titles. Their definition of "romance" is "engaging romantically with a character you couldn't possibly relate to". It's the same type of fantasy dating in most, if not all, of those games.
Even the smut/porn games I've played are plagued with the same issue: they offer you options that you can under no circusmtances possibly get in real life, without really engaging with things much more grounded. One of the games I liked only ever gives you three options of how to spend time with the most normal and non-kinky of the girls: go on a picnic, go to the cinema, and play video games in her room. There's no conversation, no discussion of preferences, no talking about one's memories, or opinions on certain matters...
None of them feel alive and like a person.
(I've never played Persona 5 and couldn't attest to how it ranks in this framework.)
Firewatch is actually one of the games that comes rather close to this sort of human engagement. It's fairly limited in scope while also feeling rather genuine. Also, the fact that you can select how parts of the main character's backstory played out – as well as make a few choices about their personality (like in what way Julia drew Henry, which you get to see at some point) makes it that much more personal a story.
It's by no means a relationship simulator, but it gives you a glimpse into what sort of storytelling is possible for dating sims done well.
How so? Being an RPG, my player character isn't me specifically. It's more like a persona I'm inhabiting and the ways I've played them generally had my character believably relating to the romantic interest.
The problem I find with them is the baked in assumption that the world revolves around the player and any romantic option should be open to you. Consequently, the characters themselves don't have any sort of ingrained wants or preferences. For example, Leliana doesn't have a type and as long as the player character likes her and expresses that like through the right dialogue options and stuff Leliana will fall in love with him. She will never turn the player down because she tends to go for guys who are sullen and melancholy but you're a sardonic jokester. But that's like, 99% of human relationships. Most people aren't romantically interested in most people so, in this way, it makes the game a bit of a "power fantasy" in the interpersonal relations part the same way they're a power fantasy in the combat part.
Edit: To add, "power fantasy" doesn't really work for romantic stories because a big part of actually establishing an emotional connection with a person involves the capacity to be vulnerable and open with them. So making you feel like you can't fail or be rejected as long as you hit the right combination of phrases completely undercuts the premise of the story you're trying to achieve. One of the main anxieties about dating is that you and your crush are fundamentally incompatible and being compatible with them would mean sacrificing parts of yourself that are foundational to who you are.
FWIW, Persona 5 does kind of do what you're talking about. The romances develop over the course of the entire game and lots of comments and decisions you make throughout factor into whether a character even expresses interest in you. You have to spend a lot of time with them, particularly in your "off-hours" where you're doing stuff like going shopping or having coffee together. And your personality as expressed during those side-plots ends up determining whether you and the other character interact as friends or as potential romantic interests.
I can understand that. Roleplaying is, after all, the name of the game if you're playing an RPG. Me, I tend to be myself but empowered by the rules of the game. I always strive to be The Good Guy and help every single soul I find, and generally behave in a similar fashion in ways that would demand too much of me IRL but have no such restrictions within the confines of the game.
And me, I can't find any of those outlandish characters attractive. I did appreciate Liara for her intellectual streak and how she ascended to a certain powerful position between Mass Effect and Mass Effect 3, and I liked some of my party members more than others. But there was never anything relatable about them. Morrigan seemed cool, but in the way you appreciate an interesting picture on the wall: it's enjoyable, but not something I want to take home (or, in her case, grow close to).
Which, to me, feeds into the idea of connecting to someone without sacrificing your values. I was never good at playing against the type in these kinds of games, even though I can write characters that aren't much like myself. If I can ever connect with a character in these games, it's because we have that much in common. Creating that common ground, for me, is part of what would make a good dating sim.
And games that do appoint preferences to their characters, do so in order to gamify the experience with a different aspect – like HuniePop.
I feel like if you take HuniePop and add depth and genuine character to the women you're supposed to date, it could maybe come out as a better dating sim. It's a match-3 game where your goal is literally to collect the underwear of the women you seduce, but – did you have to mention that one of them has a kid? did you have to make two characters from the same family romancable? How about why is that one Japanese character so longing to things that remind her of her native country? All these details just laying there to be collected and used to good effect.
Either way, that PC-centric storytelling is one of things that's very wrong with the idea of romance in modern high-tier RPG. I'm not even surprised plenty of characters would be attracted to someone who's literally known around the galaxy for their exploits – that sort of presence is impossible to emulate, no matter how kindly or tyrannically you play Shepard, and that makes it very powerful – but maybe one of your crew members could be a little more selective about the species they choose to procreate with (because, you know, DNA alignment as well as cultural and personal preferences)?
Ah see, if I played "myself" I'd probably not be in the situations most RPGs put you in in the first place, so the whole premise becomes moot. My characters tend to have more conflicted interior lives than I do. I find RPGs much more satisfying if I try to empathize with characters who are sort of like me, but with specific drives and tendencies tweaked up or down. It's kind of like acting where you want to examine your character's motivations rather than your own and behave accordingly.
For example, (Mass Effect spoilers below)
My Shepherd in Mass Effect went with the "Butcher of Torfan" backstory and I played him like someone who was traumatized and working through the guilt of having been part of a Gallipolli style trench war where he sent many of his own men into a meat grinder. He started the game with a very cold, by-the-book level of ruthless emotional distance on everything along with a mildly xenophobic outlook, particularly against Batarians. The experience of having to lead a more intimate team of misfits kind of softens him up over the course of the game. Then he DOES end up losing someone in Virmire right when he meets Sovereign, who is the epitome of "get my shit done regardless of the human cost because I think on a scale so cosmic and vast that you ants wouldn't even get it." It worked really nicely as a way to mesh Shepherd's own arc of learning to value the individual and put him up against an antagonistic force that gives zero shits about any individual living being. It's actually kind of impressive how I didn't even know the twists and turns in the plot, but I ended up going step by step and ending up with a compelling narrative arc for my character.
Having a deeper relationship system embedded into dating sims would satisfy the desire to roleplay, as well, by providing inputs for different mental maps – that is, different assumed characters.
Steam is constantly being flooded with new indie games that run on a potato.
Sorry: good games.
Good indie games exist.
This point was never questioned. The contention was that there's too few of them.
Some of the best games that came out last year were indie games.
To be honest I don't see any of your points as being unpopular.
My gut feeling is that as we've moved from custom-made engines (up until 2005 I'd say) to general purpose engines (prominent from 2010 onwards) the knowledge inside the studio was lost. It used to be that there was a person or a team in the building that made the engine, which was made with the end result in mind. Now, I'm absolutely not saying game engines were perfect but when management allowed QC to point out issues, it made for really optimized games. Now all the internal knowledge about the engine is hard to come by, you don't have someone that knows the engine inside and out, you can only hire UE4 experts and hope to iron out performance issues if you have made a mistake.
There's also the fact that as our hardware grows stronger, our engines did too, and the sheer quantity of code is astounding, you can't hope to grasp everything, I'm not sure that any one person at Epic truly knows what goes on in the Unreal Engine.
Add to that the rise of indie games, created by teams that can barely afford to exist, and you get performance issues for most games.
I suppose they fall under "not popular" (neutral) rather than "unpopular" (negative), now that I think about it.
In my defence: if they were ever "popular" (positive), my comment would be empty.
I agree. I would really be interested in a seriously realistic dating sim (or even just about social interaction in general) game and detailed what I would want it to look like here. Currently dating sims, while (according to the game theorists) use dating logic that makes sense in the real world, the characters and situations are usually incredibly unrealistic anime archetypes.
I don't know what it is about deep characters and healthy relationships, but we don't see them often. Are they boring to play? I know most stories are born out of conflict, but that conflict can be external to the interactions with the people you're supposed to get attached to in games.
I get a feeling that most devs don't want to deal with depth of character and healthy relationships in their game.
One, because those games are fantasy, and the strife – either dramatic or violent – is what helps us escape the strongest.
Two, because it takes a bit of creative thinking and a bit of understanding to make those characters, and I think most devs can't go there because they lack either.
Three, because basing a game on those relationships alone is a risky proposition: if you can't pull it off well, the whole game loses meaning, and games are usually a product of months and years of work.
I think the problem (at least with the hypothetical dating sim I described) is that by describing it 'as accurate as possible' it puts all the moral responsibility on you if anything feels inaccurate. 'As accurate as possible' only works if everything you're modeling is already thoroughly been studied or else it will require equally thorough speculation and doing something like that for vague things like personality, attractiveness, and how that influences friend circles, the clothing they wear, their interests for hobbies and other people and for you (not to mention how much could change if you start as female or LGBT+ or even a different race or different location, since dating won't be the same everywhere) means that the game has a very high chance of feeling reductive or inaccurate and a large amount of people will say it's bullshit because the developer made X, Y, or Z assumption, so most people won't take it seriously and the people who do take it seriously might end up better off if they can recognize that, but if they don't it will be like seeing a dating manual, it will most likely be inaccurate for someone and it might as well be them.
It's worse than pretending to be a parody, GTA has become an unironical representation of American capitalism through its rampant microtransactions and gambling driven online. The idea of transgression is alluded to by having crass characters and lots of explosions and violence. It makes me sad to see such a huge pool of talented artists put so much effort towards such an empty game.
For what it's worth, GTA V gave us more Steven Ogg everywhere. It's a really good outcome for many people, even far removed from the gaming media, as far as I'm concerned.
I don't know if you ever read the comic book "Wanted" but I got the same vibe from GTA V as I got from that. They're part of this sub-genre of geek fiction where everything about it seems to be dripping with contempt for the imagined audience from the developers. At it's best it can come across as knowing self-parody, but all too often it starts to feel like self-loathing or mean-spiritedness that can only culminate in a sort of violent nihilism.
South Park can be like this at times as well.
To be fair, I think that's an accurate description of the series all the way back to GTA3.
Yes. That's a great part of what GTA is.
Maybe I'm just a cynic myself, but that didn't affect me at all.
GTA V is a farcical action-comedy. I didn't get the impression it was supposed to be taken seriously.
Current game makers are way too obsessed with narrative. Remember when games were fun?
Sure. I just had a few. Dota 2 was fun.
I think your issue is not with games not being fun, as you had it worded: it's with the shift from pure gameplay to the narrative-driven gameplay.
You're entirely correct here. I vividly remember my disappointment with the transition from PS1 to PS2 for this very reason. Every silly platformer now had a story, and frequently unskippable.
I also think that yes, game makers are way too obsessed with narrative.
I don't think they are. I think what gaming's going through as a genre of art is the transitions from child's play into a more mature, authentic, self-defined medium. More and more games appear on the market that seek to explore the growing field of possibility this maturation affords. Can you provoke intense feelings in the player? Can you provoke the player to care about any particular character? Can you provoke the player to get involved into fates of nations? And apparently – yes, you can, very much so.
It's painting with a wide brush, but I can see how you, personally, would get caught in the crossfire of this quiet revolution. Sometimes you just wanna play: control your character, shoot the baddies, jump as high as you can on the platforms, run towards the finish line first... And that's fine. The ludus part of gaming should never perish.
It doesn't help your situation that games that are mostly ludus nowadays are often party games that you must play with other people, otherwise they don't work so well.
Fallout 4 was my favorite Fallout game.
I'd be glad if lifestyle games died. It almost physically pains me seeing someone's Steam profile with 7000 hours in Dota 2. There are so many games that do different interesting things, why are you tying yourself to just one?
It's not the open world that makes people like New Vegas more than Fallout 3. It's the fantastic quest design and writing.
I'll take your word for it, I didn't gt to experience much good writing as I was unlucky enough to have all 3! of my attempts to play the game run into game breaking bugs. But I don't fault obsidian for that necessarily, bad luck just happens sometimes. But it probably did color my impressions of the game.
How so?
Regarding No Man's Sky: I'm assuming, from the way you talking about it still being a scam, that you've seen the Internet Historian video?
Having multiple guns doesn't do anything meaningful but lead to unreasonable complexity when trying to balance them against each other. That makes the game-play less skill driven because some people end up with better guns than others. Which is something I don't think people want.
As for no man's sky, I have gone through the video and feel that interpretation is fairly generous. But even then, acknowledges that Hello Games understood the situation and chose to take the reputational hit instead of the monetary hit by correctly defining what the game was. It is obviously still not a scam because there's plenty of documentation about what you're buying. However the game they've ended up with is still far different than what I believe was initially presented.
I've been saying this since forever. It blows my mind that there's a game where the entire point is competitive online multiplayer and yet there is an experience system that gives you advantages over newbies. Shouldn't it be the other way around - make it easier for newbies who won't have all the same skill as people who play compulsively so they don't want to permanently rage quit?
But then these games make insane bank, so maybe it's just us who are crazy.
I like the new Halo games. I like all the Halo games. If you browse /r/halo, the consensus in that community is basically everything after Halo 3 or maybe Halo: Reach is terrible. I don't really like to go there cause it seems like no one even likes Halo but just want to complain about it.
I've played all the games, campaigns and multiplayer, though I mostly play multiplayer. I love it. I still play Halo 5 almost every day after work and sometimes the older games on the Master Chief Collection. I enjoy the story but I don't nerd out over it.
Every argument I've heard for why the new games are bad are about things I never thought about and don't care about. I just like playing the games, and I don't think about them much beyond that.
Unfortunately I feel like I'm in the minority and no matter what 343 industries puts out, the community is going to find some way to hate it.
(non multiplayer) Indie games are better than AAA games.
This would be sacrilege in some circles I frequent, but Super Mario Brothers wasn't a fun game. Most Nintendo games are not fun (at least to me).
I get it. As games get more refined, older games lose their sheen. Hydlide is the perfect example; people hate the game today, but it's largely because they don't have the historical background to appreciate. It may seem like a cheap Zelda clone, but it actually predates the creation of Zelda.
Donkey Kong Country games were bad. They used "3D" in a way that just made the game harder to read, felt really "zoomed in" probably due to a wide sprite, kinda boring level layouts, repetitive enemies, etc.
I feel like it got popular because it used some good looking 3D models for the time. I really didn't like 3D when I first played it, so I was biased against it, but I feel like looking back my criticisms still stand.
For each DKC Game, there were at least 10 other platformers that had either better graphics, better gameplay, or were just simply more interesting.
But the thing about those games was that they were the perfect tech demo for the SNES. The impressive part of the graphics was not that they were prerendered 3D, but that they could be represented with enough colors that they didn't look terrible. Beyond that, it used very big sprites (not possible on the NES), had very smooth gameplay with no slowdowns (which was a common problem on the SNES, especially with shooters), and had great soundtracks that could take advantage of the sampler and effects that were only possible on the SNES.
Geometry dash is an incredibly underrated game in places like tildes (Most likely due to the community) and takes what the impossible game created to a far, far higher level into one of the best mobile games ever made.