Your video game hot take(s) thread

[TheMysteriousGX]

Indeed they do and power to them and the genre. However, I would be interested to see the alternate universe numbers of the sales of a hypothetical version of Baldur’s Gate 3 that has no combat.

Kind of irrelevant, really. This universe has plenty of people who like BG3 in spite of its combat instead of because of its combat. I'm mostly objecting to calling those people faking or insane

(Then again, I suppose I started this tangent by responding to somebody who was using logical deduction to determine if someone actually liked a game or not, so this was probably doomed from the start. Anybody else remember how mad Gamers™️ got when somebody dared suggest a Skip Combat option to go alongside the Skip Story option in Mass Effect?)

 

[BrawlMan]

Anybody else remember how mad Gamers™️ got when somebody dared suggest a Skip Combat option to go alongside the Skip Story option in Mass Effect?

Barely, but it doesn't surprise me. Alone in the Dark 2008 (Inferno on PS3), has a skip story/combat option, and no one ever bitched about that. Then again, the game is shit, with the PS3 port barely above mediocre.

 

[RhombusHatesYou]

Bethesda's weird dichotomy of both being recognized as bug ridden and landscapes of repetitive nothingburgers while still being consistently hyped is its own topic that someone will probably write a thesis on or something someday.

The thesis should be submitted incomplete with a note that modders will take care of it.

 

[Gordon_4]

Kind of irrelevant, really. This universe has plenty of people who like BG3 in spite of its combat instead of because of its combat. I'm mostly objecting to calling those people faking or insane

(Then again, I suppose I started this tangent by responding to somebody who was using logical deduction to determine if someone actually liked a game or not, so this was probably doomed from the start. Anybody else remember how mad Gamers™️ got when somebody dared suggest a Skip Combat option to go alongside the Skip Story option in Mass Effect?)

I think it was one of DragonAge’s writers that said that. I forget her name but Jesus was the reaction to that fucking appalling.

 

[Drathnoxis]

I think it was one of DragonAge’s writers that said that. I forget her name but Jesus was the reaction to that fucking appalling.

Something Hepler I think.

 

[sXeth]

The thesis should be submitted incomplete with a note that modders will take care of it.

Funnily enough, I think Bethesdas rep/rise was primarily due to Oblivion on Xbox.... so without mods.

From the perspective of a CRPG enthusiast (to the near exclusion of other genres) at the time, the earlier games were all the poor mans wannabe Might and Magic, and even Morrowind was pretty blatantly the second fiddle to the Black Isle/Interplay slew of the early 2000s.

Consoles meanwhile, you had JRPGs and uh.... like horrible ports of stuff like Ultima and M&M that had to chop off huge sections of the games or outright make stuff like the Runes of Virtue games. Or very blandy bland dungeon crawlers. So Oblivion was this crazy super shiny gem comparitively there.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Here's my "hot" (not really) take: Baldur's Gate 3 and Starfield have nothing to do with each other.
Corollary: the vast majority of single player games do not have mtx or whatever, so we don't need to praise a game for it.

The love-heap on BG3 is insane. I'm glad folks are enjoying it but I've also seen youtube content creators talk about how they like the game even though they don't like the combat which to me is a way of saying "I don't like this game but I'm afraid to admit it."

And even worse is praising BG3 by making fun of how much Starfield- a game that hasn't come out yet- sucks. Specifically that BG3 is superior because it offers much more choices than Starfield possibly could, which is logically equivalent to saying that Starfield is a better game because it offers superior space travel.

You know- maybe not everyone wants to fuck a bear or whatever. Internet is so stupid lol.

Personally I have no intention of playing either. I think pitting two massive awesome looking games against each other is the peak of asshole gamr privilege.

The only thing I'm genuinely rooting for is Starfield to perform well on PC and BG3 to play well on PS5 because platform compatibility seems to be an increasingly big problem and it would be a shame of players get f'd over with these highly anticipated games.

Also I just think it's funny that it's two games that promise like a million hours of play-time while Star Wars and Assassins Creed game devs are tripping over themselves promising their games aren't too long lol.

The real fight between Balder's Gate 3 and Starfield is going to be AI generated content versus hand crafted content.

Starfield's big selling point is that it's going to have 1000 planets, each with its own quests. That means that the vast majority of the game is going to be procedurally generated, and will likely be an extremely high amount of content, but extremely shallow. Most of the quests are probably going to be "object spawns on a random part of the planet, go fetch it and bring it back because reasons." If you enjoy the game and are dedicated to playing it, the content there could easily last you a decade without seeing everything, but it would also likely all feel pretty samey.

On the other hand Balder's Gate 3 is all about the story and how your choices affect the quests and gameplay. Every interaction and choice is thought through by the writers and interestingly written. Everything is hand-crafted with care. You could probably replay the game for years making different choices and still have interesting results, though you would be treading familiar ground after a while.

Honestly, neither game appeals to me at the moment. I've had enough of massive RPGs and open world games for now. I can't do another 100 hour epic story. I just don't have time for it. The perfect length for a game is 30 hours, anything past that is overly padded. Change my mind.

 

[Old_Hunter_77]

The real fight between Balder's Gate 3 and Starfield is going to be AI generated content versus hand crafted content.

Starfield's big selling point is that it's going to have 1000 planets, each with its own quests. That means that the vast majority of the game is going to be procedurally generated, and will likely be an extremely high amount of content, but extremely shallow. Most of the quests are probably going to be "object spawns on a random part of the planet, go fetch it and bring it back because reasons." If you enjoy the game and are dedicated to playing it, the content there could easily last you a decade without seeing everything, but it would also likely all feel pretty samey.

On the other hand Balder's Gate 3 is all about the story and how your choices affect the quests and gameplay. Every interaction and choice is thought through by the writers and interestingly written. Everything is hand-crafted with care. You could probably replay the game for years making different choices and still have interesting results, though you would be treading familiar ground after a while.

Honestly, neither game appeals to me at the moment. I've had enough of massive RPGs and open world games for now. I can't do another 100 hour epic story. I just don't have time for it. The perfect length for a game is 30 hours, anything past that is overly padded. Change my mind.

The recent promotion about Starfield is talking about how there are concentrated areas with handcrafted quests, and the whole "1000 planets" thing is for the sense of exploration, resources, and to convey the vastness of space.
I think Stafield will have both- a ton of handcrafted stuff, and procedurally generated radial quests. I mean... you know, Bethesda.

This whole fear of 1000 planets = it's all empty shit is yet another games critic content creator generated talking point thing, IMO.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

The recent promotion about Starfield is talking about how there are concentrated areas with handcrafted quests, and the whole "1000 planets" thing is for the sense of exploration, resources, and to convey the vastness of space.
I think Stafield will have both- a ton of handcrafted stuff, and procedurally generated radial quests. I mean... you know, Bethesda.

This whole fear of 1000 planets = it's all empty shit is yet another games critic content creator generated talking point thing, IMO.

I'm sure there will be core planets on which the actual story takes place, and each of those will have a hand made city on it. It's just that at the scale they keep advertising I don't trust that a significant enough portion of that will actually be engaging enough. If your game world is 99% exploring procedurally generated planets, I'm fucking out, I don't care about how much of it is technically optional. If there's nothing worth doing there then why is it there?

Maybe I just have a lower tolerance for procedurally generated content than most. I got soured by the concept back with Bloodborne and I've absolutely hated it since. The idea of an endless dungeon to continue playing Bloodborne after beating the game, with tons of unique bosses sounded cool on paper, but playing it felt absolutely awful in comparison to the hand crafted main world, and I dropped the chalice dungeons after like 2 hours and never touched them again, which sucks because it means I never actually got to do more than half the boss fights in that game.

 

[BrawlMan]

I don't think I'm ever going to buy the River City Girls duology. As both games do things I don't like nor have the time or patience for anymore. The first game has a dumb twist ending that makes all the characters to be jackasses. Kyoko and Misako are psycho ex-girlfriends. Their "boyfriends" never needed rescuing in the first place. To get the true ending is kind of a pain too, because you have to find all these statues and you're better off just looking at a YouTube walk through to find them all. There was a patch update that changed the ending to alleviate this a little, but it's still an issue. Why Way Forward went with this ending is beyond me, and it really shows they got kind of careless around the later half of the games story. The second game has too much padding around the last hour and deliberately wastes the players time. I've already looked it up and that killed my interest in the sequel. I love the character designs, but I hate it when a developer purposely pads a game, cuz they know they don't have enough content to justify the length. Nobody was going to complain about this game being shorter than the first game. Especially if you're going to charge at $30+. Maybe if they ever decide to do a third game, I might consider buying it, but I'm going to take a wait and see approach first.

Also, the first RCG being better than Streets of Rage 4 (and I'm assuming it's sequel as well) I find highly subjective and disagree. I'm saying this because Pat and Woolie made that statement back in 2020, when both games released. Just because all your characters have universal running and dashing, doesn't automatically make it superior. Granted I think I kind of already made this case but I wasn't as detailed. SOR4 has all these content updates that came out. Rcg rcg does have a lockable characters for both games, but that's about it. It's just a full campaign and that's it. Other than a story change patch update for the first game, there is not much else.

 

[Kyrian007]

The real fight between Balder's Gate 3 and Starfield is going to be AI generated content versus hand crafted content.

Starfield's big selling point is that it's going to have 1000 planets, each with its own quests. That means that the vast majority of the game is going to be procedurally generated, and will likely be an extremely high amount of content, but extremely shallow. Most of the quests are probably going to be "object spawns on a random part of the planet, go fetch it and bring it back because reasons." If you enjoy the game and are dedicated to playing it, the content there could easily last you a decade without seeing everything, but it would also likely all feel pretty samey.

On the other hand Balder's Gate 3 is all about the story and how your choices affect the quests and gameplay. Every interaction and choice is thought through by the writers and interestingly written. Everything is hand-crafted with care. You could probably replay the game for years making different choices and still have interesting results, though you would be treading familiar ground after a while.

Honestly, neither game appeals to me at the moment. I've had enough of massive RPGs and open world games for now. I can't do another 100 hour epic story. I just don't have time for it. The perfect length for a game is 30 hours, anything past that is overly padded. Change my mind.

And its going to come down to what someone likes. I preferred the Icewind Dale games to Balder's Gate 1 & 2, almost precisely because they were more like what Skyrim eventually would become. More of a framework for role-playing in a setting and less of a railroaded through linear experience. Based on that, I'm coming down on the Starfield side of the equation. What I like about procedurally generated quests like the radiant system so maligned in Skyrim, it invites as much participation in it as the player would like to experience. If you want to blast through story campaign and never engage with radiant quests, no problem. Bethesda did exactly the same thing in Fallout 4 with settlements and factions. Don't wanna build settlements? Then don't, not required at all. Wanna ignore specific factions? Easy enough. All the ridiculous bitching about Preston Garvey that Fallout haters always spew, don't like the minutemen??? Don't fuckin join the minutemen. I'm sure Balder's Gate is going to be fine. I'll probably get around to playing it at some point. But I'm going to get Starfield first. Not because "AI generated" is better than "hand-crafted..." but because the game I make out of the looser framework is better than something crafted by a committee of developers trying to appeal to the widest demographic of players they generically can.

 

[Dalisclock]

Barely, but it doesn't surprise me. Alone in the Dark 2008 (Inferno on PS3), has a skip story/combat option, and no one ever bitched about that. Then again, the game is shit, with the PS3 port barely above mediocre.

That being said, I appreciate the "Skip Game" option, that's opt in by default.

 

[BrawlMan]

I've noticed a pattern now, but it seems like every game LPER/critic or movie critic goes through a "I don't want to save the world or have a movie being about saving the world!" phase. Doubly so if it's the universe or the entire multiverse. I get where some of these people are coming from but it's called just play or watch something else. You got plenty to choose from. Pat and Woolie talked about this back when Rise of the Skywalker came out with lukewarm reception. Yahtzee, you're not exactly covering new ground here.

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[BrawlMan]

Another brawler hot take I disagree with, is the one Slopes makes about how all Double Dragon games you have to use hit and run tactics to win, and that Double Dragon Gaiden are avoid this. That's actually bull crap. I've done about seven playthroughs of the game, and the game actively encourages doing this. You don't have to always do it, but it's the best way to get out of attacks a a bad guy this is, and if you upgrade your run attacks, you can chain them or chain cancel them and knock enemies into other enemies causing a huge amount of damage. With a decent amount happening to bosses. I like the game, don't get me wrong, but not every Double Dragon relies you on just hit the enemy a couple times then back off and so on. You could get away with them and a good amount of Double Dragon games, but not all of them. Then again, DD is not the only one to suffer from this; even Final Fight and it's various clones had this problem. Even modern brawlers have this problem. So it really has not gone away much, but just mostly mitigated.

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[sXeth]

I've noticed a pattern now, but it seems like every game LPER/critic or movie critic goes through a "I don't want to save the world or have a movie be about to save the world!" phase. Doubly so if it's the universe or the entire multiverse. I get where some of these people are coming from but it's called just play and watch something else. You got plenty to choose from Pat and wooly talk about this back when Rise of the Skywalker came out with lukewarm reception. Yahtzee, you're not exactly covering new ground here.

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The broad strokes plot of "New generation overthrows old generation and resets the world" (often corresponding with "killing god" or tossing out a religious idealogy) does seem to be a pretty ingrained into various (literally, its the baseline plot of the Souls games even) Japan games thing. Which I don't have the background or cultural knowledge to fully assess, but is probably related to some generational schism between the before and afters of the events of WW2 (notice how often there's also some great disaster that destroyed the old utopia as well).

But yeah, its not hard to find stuff outside of world ending stakes. Arguably they really only crop up significantly in various RPGs because player power progression ultimately depends the antagonist also progress and that ends up fighting gods or apocalyptic monsters or whatever as a general whole.

 

[Dalisclock]

The broad strokes plot of "New generation overthrows old generation and resets the world" (often corresponding with "killing god" or tossing out a religious idealogy) does seem to be a pretty ingrained into various (literally, its the baseline plot of the Souls games even) Japan games thing. Which I don't have the background or cultural knowledge to fully assess, but is probably related to some generational schism between the before and afters of the events of WW2 (notice how often there's also some great disaster that destroyed the old utopia as well).

But yeah, its not hard to find stuff outside of world ending stakes. Arguably they really only crop up significantly in various RPGs because player power progression ultimately depends the antagonist also progress and that ends up fighting gods or apocalyptic monsters or whatever as a general whole.

Interestingly, this video basically makes that point. It's 90 minutes but TLDW he makes the argument that Japanese history is replete with New gods replacing old gods AKA new governments and ways of live overthrowing the old ones so much that it's ingrained into the national psyche and mythos. Also probably a cry for help from the last few generations of Japanese who are expected to live for the corporation and if they're really lucky maybe they might have a small retirement and possibly raise a family before they die from stress.

 

[I can't enter my old name]

I've noticed a pattern now, but it seems like every game LPER/critic or movie critic goes through a "I don't want to save the world or have a movie be about to save the world!" phase. Doubly so if it's the universe or the entire multiverse. I get where some of these people are coming from but it's called just play and watch something else. You got plenty to choose from Pat and wooly talk about this back when Rise of the Skywalker came out with lukewarm reception. Yahtzee, you're not exactly covering new ground here.

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You know there's a lot of RPGs that end by killing a supernatural creature, sorcerer, deity, or someone empowered by a deity. Look no further than LoTR, a story about an unremarkable person who goes on an adventure with a fellowship to kill Satan.

Interestingly, this video basically makes that point. It's 90 minutes but TLDW he makes the argument that Japanese history is replete with New gods replacing old gods AKA new governments and ways of live overthrowing the old ones so much that it's ingrained into the national psyche and mythos. Also probably a cry for help from the last few generations of Japanese who are expected to live for the corporation and if they're really lucky maybe they might have a small retirement and possibly raise a family before they die from stress.

FF7 is obviously inspired by Evangelion, and what could be a more poignant example of the death of God than Evangelion? God is killed, but he does not resurrect. The main character rejects the literal second coming of Jesus. He loves his life so much, he would rather die than live forever.

Also Evangelion is apparently so important that there's this notion of pre- and post-Evangelion anime. It's also called a "postmodern" anime, which I don't know if it was intended to be but that's what people call it.

So what is a postmodernism? It's a world where all the grand narratives (religion, nationalism, liberalism, marxism, etc), are exactly that, narratives, with no truth, nothing that legitimizes them except beliefs in a culture. Once you deconstruct everything to be arbitrary and meaningless, you end up in a crisis of belief. In a capitalist society, this turns into consumer fetishism, and the old gods are replaced with gods of wood and stone. We start to worship the domain of the material as a replacement of the spiritual.

So no, god killing isn't supposed to represent triumph over rampant consumerism, maybe we think it is but in reality it's a precondition for it to emerge. Whether you like God or not doesn't matter, God is already dead. We can't go back and time and unkill God, so we have to keep killing him over and over and telling ourselves that the indomitable human spirit will somehow fix everything in the end.

 

[Gordon_4]

FF7 is obviously inspired by Evangelion, and what could be a more poignant example of the death of God than Evangelion?

I really think that’s a big stretch. Evangelion first aired in 1995 - not sure when the manga began publication - and FFVII came out in 1997. Given what we know about lead times and shit, if there was any inspiration I seriously doubt it was significant.

 

[BrawlMan]

FF7 is obviously inspired by Evangelion, and what could be a more poignant example of the death of God than Evangelion? God is killed, but he does not resurrect. The main character rejects the literal second coming of Jesus. He loves his life so much, he would rather die than live forever.

Also Evangelion is apparently so important that there's this notion of pre- and post-Evangelion anime. It's also called a "postmodern" anime, which I don't know if it was intended to be but that's what people call it.

Yeah, that led to an era (mid 90s to 2007) of Eva clones, or "deconstruction" anime where most of them are and were shit. Not fan of that and Eva, aside from Digimon Tamers.

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[Gergar12]

For fuck sakes how is Star Wars Jedi Sruvvior not fixed? And how the fuck does it affect just my type of graphics card. The 3080, 3080TI, and 3080 12GB.