Your video game hot take(s) thread

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XsjadoBlaydette

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I really have no idea where you are going with this.
last few months just been noticing more and more people speak about the industry and problems beyond that (not here, none of all ten of us left lol) as if the only voice or change they can affect is through what products they choose to buy or not buy, what creators they can harass on social media or influencers claiming to provide them with the better products, confined by illusionary walls of consumerism, not understanding the change happens on the outside where laws are fought for instead
 
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Old_Hunter_77

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There's this thing in a lot of action games (at least mostly the kind I play- third person, single player, melee centered with light attack strong attack dodge parry roll and maybe some magic or projectile) where the enemy just kind of takes hits but doesn't really change its reaction. The health bar goes down a little but it just continues standing there or shooting its gun or whatever. And sometimes it looks so bad it feels like a bug but more it just feels like they forgot to build in a part of the system.

Currently I am encountering it in AC: Shadows. Now before you go off on Ubisoft and AC and how bad their games are- a point I'm not arguing- I have seen this in Final Fantasy 16, Atomic Sands, Lies of P, Lords of the Fallen, Jedi: Survivor. Something feels off about it and it really bothers me. Yet I don't really see it discussed. I think it's really bad actually and should be one of those things by now relegated to old-school jank not a part of new games, because we've had games without it. Yes I will use Sekiro and Witcher 3 as examples of games that did this right because my mental gaming library is limited and I worship those games for a reason (ironic that the idea that W3 has "bad combat" is such a common opinion even though at least in that game the enemies react when you hurt them).
 
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thebobmaster

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Persona 3's story falls off hard in the third act. Specifically, after November 4th, I felt the story went from intriguing to super-generic with one massive twist.
 

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Yet I don't really see it discussed.
It is, but mainly among the actual fans of the games themselves, or the smaller YouTube channels in these type of games.

Currently I am encountering it in AC: Shadows. Now before you go off on Ubisoft and AC and how bad their games are- a point I'm not arguing- I have seen this in Final Fantasy 16, Atomic Sands, Lies of P, Lords of the Fallen, Jedi: Survivor.
I haven't played any of these, FF XVI did get a patch update fixing this last I heard from a friend. As for Lies of P and its DLC, I guess people are too enamored to even care or ignore the issues.

Yes I will use Sekiro and Witcher 3 as examples of games that did this right because my mental gaming library is limited and I worship those games for a reason (ironic that the idea that W3 has "bad combat" is such a common opinion even though at least in that game the enemies react when you hurt them).
Let help you add your mental gaming library:

  • Metal Gear Rising
  • Devil May Cry 5
  • Bayonetta 2
  • No More Heroes 1
  • Killer Is Dead
Whatever idiot says Witcher 3 has "bad combat", has never played the first two games, nor have played many of the shitty God of War clones from the 2000s.They have never played the PS2 Oneechanbara games, nor the 360 game, Bikini Samurai Squad/Vortex.

@Worgen, It looks like COD WW2 is taking my #2 spot for best Call of Duty single player campaigns. I am nearing the last few chapters.
 

Worgen

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Whatever, just wash your hands.
@Worgen, It looks like COD WW2 is taking my #2 spot for best Call of Duty single player campaigns. I am nearing the last few chapters.
Surprising but glad your enjoying it. Maybe someday I'll go back and give it another shot, but right now I am still uninterested in ww2.
 
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Old_Hunter_77

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Let help you add your mental gaming library:

  • Metal Gear Rising
  • Devil May Cry 5
  • Bayonetta 2
  • No More Heroes 1
  • Killer Is Dead

Are you listing these as examples of games that don't do the thing I'm complaining about?
Well let's see- of these, I've played Bayonetta 2 in its entirety (meaning the critical path not all the bonus stuff) and a bit of DMC5 and I honestly don't remember. But that probably means that it didn't have that problem! (good design/implementation mostly means you don't notice stuff)
 

Old_Hunter_77

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Persona 3's story falls off hard in the third act. Specifically, after November 4th, I felt the story went from intriguing to super-generic with one massive twist.
I don't do Persona but I wouldn't expect anything else. Most long story games fall apart at the end. I'm pretty sure I understand the reasons why and that's a whole 'nother long post...
 
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Are you listing these as examples of games that don't do the thing I'm complaining about?
Yes. I admit, I was messing with you a little there.

Most long story games fall apart at the end. I'm pretty sure I understand the reasons why and that's a whole 'nother long post...
I prefer my long story games to be 7-15 hours at most. Anything more, and it's just stretching it.
 

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@Worgen, @thebobmaster, @laggyteabag, and everyone else:

One thing I didn't hear discussed enough about COD Vanguard, then and now, is forcing the player to have an activision account, just to play the single player. No reviewer, be they positive or negative, about any aspect of the game's single player or multiplayer talk about this. Or only bring it up as a super minor convenience at best. Yahtzee, who was okay with the single player and thought it was fine, never mentions this either especially. He's usually on shit like this. Yet he never once brings it up. What the actual hell, Yahtzee?

To add insult to injury, you still have to actually download the campaign digitally, even when you have the disc. The install for this game is over sixty gigabytes (and that's not counting some of the updates). And you have to install two campaign packs (within the game itself, when you're at the menu screen; campaign is faded and has a 🔒 symbol before you install it), which equals a total of nine gigabytes. No one mentions this either in their reviews or rants.

While I am still early into the game, I already like the cast of characters you play as. The whole "forced diversity" thing is bull crap. Just so everyone is clear: this game originally was supposed to be more like Wolfenstein, hence the diverse cast in the first place. It would be even more over the top, but Activision forced Sledgehammer, to not do that, and make it "our real world". Yet, just as many over the top stuff happened in the game. Sledgehammer still made a fun single player campaign, and that is all that matters. It's not their best, but it's certainly not the disaster certain people and grifters on the internet were claiming. Some of them never actually played the game or just getting second hand opinions off each other, and they're little pals or echo chambers. Thus proving once again, many streamers or YouTubers aren't there for the "common man/gamer" they claim to preach about; if they don't even bother bringing up this aspect and why it sucks.
 
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laggyteabag

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@Worgen, @thebobmaster, @laggyteabag, and everyone else:

One thing I didn't hear discussed enough about COD Vanguard, then and now, is forcing the player to have an activision account, just to play the single player. No reviewer, be they positive or negative, about any aspect of the game's single player or multiplayer talk about this. Or only bring it up as a super minor convenience at best. Yahtzee, who was okay with the single player and thought it was fine, never mentions this either especially. He's usually on shit like this. Yet he never once brings it up. What the actual hell, Yahtzee?

To add insult to injury, you still have to actually download the campaign digitally, even when you have the disc. The install for this game is over sixty gigabytes (and that's not counting some of the updates). And you have to install two campaign packs ( within the game itself, when you're at the menu screen; capmpaign is faded and has a 🔒 symbol before you install it), which equals a total of nine gigabytes. No one mentions this either in their reviews or rants.

While I am still early into the game, I already like the cast of characters you play as. The whole "force diversity" thing is bullcrap. Just so everyone is clear: this game originally was supposed to be more like Wolfenstein, hence the diverse cast in the first place. It would be even more over the top, but Activision forced Sledgehammer, to not do that, and make it "our real world". Yet, just as many over the top stuff happened in the game. Sledgehammer still made a fun single player campaign, and that is all that matters. It's not their best, but it's certainly not the disaster certain people and grifters on the internet were claiming. Some of them never actually played the game or just getting second hand opinions off each other, and they're little pals or echo chambers. Thus proving once again, many streamers or youtubers aren't there for the "common man/gamer" they claim to preach about; if they don't even bother bringing up this aspect and why it sucks.
I haven't actually played the Vanguard campaign. The latest one that I played was MW (2019), which I actually enjoyed quite a bit.

I like CoD campaigns, specifically as nice little breaks in between particularly long RPGs, but the games rarely come down in price, and I can't really justify spending £70(?!) on a game that will be obsolete within a year.

I'm hoping that they all make their way to gamepass shortly, so I can just blast through them all in a couple of weekends.

Vanguard's did look like a decent amount of fun when I watched its campaign preview.
 
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can't really justify spending £70(?!) on a game that will be obsolete within a year.
I bought mine used. I'm assuming you're playing on pc.

BTW, you're i'm gonna want to play cod ww2 first before getting to Vanguard. Vanguard is still fun, but i'm still early in the game. Also, attack dogs and charging bayonet soldiers are one that kills now. So make sure to always have s machine gun with fast reload speed on you.
 

Worgen

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Whatever, just wash your hands.
Beat Crysis 2. Yeah its pretty good, didn't play it on the highest difficulty, I wanted to have fun with armor before having to do a pretty much full stealth playthrough. Campaign is quite good, gunplay feels good, graphics are good, encounters are pretty well thought out, story is interesting and did some neat things even if it did kind of annoy me with how it treated the armor. Like, In the first game the armor was very just military tech and was common enough for us to send 5 of them to a weird island and for North Korea to have knock offs, but we don't see any of the armor in 2 aside from the suit you wear, not to mention the weird billionaire guy who made the armor. He ended up being interesting, but its just a pet peeve of mine, the armor in the original game just felt very military, it feels more fantastical in the sequel.

One weird thing about the game is that it kinda blueballs you on vehicle sections. Like you can drive these armored humvee like things, but aside from 1 part of the game there isn't a point in doing much besides jumping on the gun. Speaking of gun, you have two times in the campaign where you mount the gun as part of a convoy and it really feels like you are about to have a big action turret section and then it just loads the next level and you are back on foot. You do get one section where you man the gun of a armored vehicle but its surprisingly brief. Feels like they took people complaining about the vehicles in the first game and just got rid of them for the most part.

I think I kinda like the first Crysis a bit more, but Crysis 2 plays better and has a more involved story. I think the first one just has a bit of unique magic to it that you really don't see in something that apes more of the modern military shooter.
 
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laggyteabag

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I bought mine used. I'm assuming you're playing on pc.

BTW, you're i'm gonna want to play cod ww2 first before getting to Vanguard. Vanguard is still fun, but i'm still early in the game. Also, attack dogs and charging bayonet soldiers are one that kills now. So make sure to always have s machine gun with fast reload speed on you.
I did play World War 2, and I didn't really care for it.

It felt very much like a mashup of the events of Saving Private Ryan with Band of Brothers. It was somewhat cool to experience a lot of these events in a game, but I couldn't really shake the feeling that I wasn't really seeing anything new. Though I do appreciate that novelty within a setting as saturated as World War 2 is getting harder and harder as time goes on.
 
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It felt very much like a mashup of the events of Saving Private Ryan with Band of Brothers.
That was pretty much the point, and I love it. COD WW2 is throwback to those type of WWII films and TV shows respectively. The game itself is a genre throwback to the Classic COD Trilogy. The first game especially with an actual health meter, and med kits making a comeback. Only in the single player. Multiplayer is the standard regenerating health.
 
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There's this thing in a lot of action games (at least mostly the kind I play- third person, single player, melee centered with light attack strong attack dodge parry roll and maybe some magic or projectile) where the enemy just kind of takes hits but doesn't really change its reaction. The health bar goes down a little but it just continues standing there or shooting its gun or whatever. And sometimes it looks so bad it feels like a bug but more it just feels like they forgot to build in a part of the system.

Currently I am encountering it in AC: Shadows. Now before you go off on Ubisoft and AC and how bad their games are- a point I'm not arguing- I have seen this in Final Fantasy 16, Atomic Sands, Lies of P, Lords of the Fallen, Jedi: Survivor. Something feels off about it and it really bothers me. Yet I don't really see it discussed. I think it's really bad actually and should be one of those things by now relegated to old-school jank not a part of new games, because we've had games without it. Yes I will use Sekiro and Witcher 3 as examples of games that did this right because my mental gaming library is limited and I worship those games for a reason (ironic that the idea that W3 has "bad combat" is such a common opinion even though at least in that game the enemies react when you hurt them).

Look, I loved the original Witcher in spite of its "horrible" combat, because as simple and gimmicky as it was it still fit well enough with the game's framework, and despite a couple glitches which were fixed in the Enhanced Edition it worked. Most of my frustration with TW3 boils down to traversing its open world, because while they iterated on Geralt's movement mechanics it still felt too janky; especially on Roach. This is a problem in a huge game that requires a shit ton of traversal unless seeking out fast travel, which kinda sours a huge point of open world games: exploration. Maybe a big chunk of that is being spoiled by RDR2's horse mechanics and physics but regardless, if getting around an open world doesn't feel good, then more time should've been spent rectifying that aspect.

It's one of the reasons I'd plop TW2 right in the sweet spot, because they revamped the combat and movement mechanics enough to feel more modern, and set the game within a more *wide linear* (a loathsome term by now but yeah) map design which, all things considered felt like the Goldilocks zone for the series thus far.
 
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@Worgen, I am still kind of early into COD Vanguard (3rd mission; barely a quarter through the campaign), and I am loving the game's story and its characters. Funny enough, it's YouTubers (many of the grifters, but some of them not) who "hate or find the story boring", because "it has too much diversity, is not realistic, or is just another WW2!". Fuck these assholes. Anti-Woke grifters or not, It didn't stop these bitches from sucking Black Ops 1's dick 24/7. The last complaint I do get, but each of the playable characters have their own dedicated chapters, and either play differently from each other, or have special abilities unique to them. Arthur Kingsley can give squad commands for example. Polina Pertrova can do parkour and can easily crawl through tiny spaces the easiest and the fastest. This works great, as she usually has large arenas where she can flank Nazis while they're still trying to find her or lost sight of her.

Ironically, most the professional gaming critics, or those with YouTube pages, actually love the campaign, or consider it between good and fine (Yahtzee). I know you're tired of WW2 shooters, but I felt the need to share my thoughts. Thank you.
 
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Old_Hunter_77

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Look, I loved the original Witcher in spite of its "horrible" combat, because as simple and gimmicky as it was it still fit well enough with the game's framework, and despite a couple glitches which were fixed in the Enhanced Edition it worked. Most of my frustration with TW3 boils down to traversing its open world, because while they iterated on Geralt's movement mechanics it still felt too janky; especially on Roach. This is a problem in a huge game that requires a shit ton of traversal unless seeking out fast travel, which kinda sours a huge point of open world games: exploration. Maybe a big chunk of that is being spoiled by RDR2's horse mechanics and physics but regardless, if getting around an open world doesn't feel good, then more time should've been spent rectifying that aspect.

It's one of the reasons I'd plop TW2 right in the sweet spot, because they revamped the combat and movement mechanics enough to feel more modern, and set the game within a more *wide linear* (a loathsome term by now but yeah) map design which, all things considered felt like the Goldilocks zone for the series thus far.
I mean that's fine if you feel that way about the movement in W3 (I just disagree, otherwise I wouldn't replay the game so often, as I find it rather intuitive and easy to move around), but that's a whole 'nother issue from the combat thing I'm talking about. In W3, when you hit an enemy, it gets hit. The only ones that tank hits and keep going are large stone monsters, which makes sense. And I'm just saying it's weird that it's a game widely panned for its combat when more beloved games don't even do that.

I'm not making some big pro-TW3 argument, I was just using it as an example because it's a game I'm intimately familiar with. Lord knows that game does not need me to juice it up, it is one of the most beloved games of all time (and I believe a reason why criticisms get highlighted, as anything that popular eventually invites a backlash industry).

I just hope that the upcoming Witcher doesn't have too many of the issues like this I'm having with action games that have come out since, especially since they're using Unreal 5 and I don't know how much a shared engine might lead to shared problems.
 
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just hope that the upcoming Witcher doesn't have too many of the issues like this I'm having with action games that have come out since, especially since they're using Unreal 5 and I don't know how much a shared engine might lead to shared problems.
PRJKT RED will be fine. They know they can't afford to mess up like last time. UE5 it does have its problems, but it seems like most developers, mainly those on the japanese side of game development, already know what to do and what not to do.
 

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I mean that's fine if you feel that way about the movement in W3 (I just disagree, otherwise I wouldn't replay the game so often, as I find it rather intuitive and easy to move around), but that's a whole 'nother issue from the combat thing I'm talking about. In W3, when you hit an enemy, it gets hit. The only ones that tank hits and keep going are large stone monsters, which makes sense. And I'm just saying it's weird that it's a game widely panned for its combat when more beloved games don't even do that.

I'm not making some big pro-TW3 argument, I was just using it as an example because it's a game I'm intimately familiar with. Lord knows that game does not need me to juice it up, it is one of the most beloved games of all time (and I believe a reason why criticisms get highlighted, as anything that popular eventually invites a backlash industry).

I just hope that the upcoming Witcher doesn't have too many of the issues like this I'm having with action games that have come out since, especially since they're using Unreal 5 and I don't know how much a shared engine might lead to shared problems.
The main problem with W3's combat is that the system is designed for humanoid enemies and the main highlight of playing as a witcher combat-wise is fighting monsters and combat against monsters is really weak because it's not designed for that. I remember the E3 when they showed off the griffon fight and that was a really bad fight in comparison to the griffon fight in Dragon's Dogma; I didn't understand how other people thought that was good. And then playing it, the fight was even worse than expected, I think the griffon just has like 3 moves or something, it's a really bad fight. Also, both Axii and Quen abilities completely break combat and make it joke easy. For example, you can just Axii the griffon over and over again.
 

Ezekiel

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Been looking at handheld emulation consoles. Thought about the Steam Deck before, but, like the ROG Xbox Ally, it looks stupid as hell in hands. Will make your hands fall off in an hour. Handhelds are not the place for photorealistic AAA games. They have to be smaller. Sony and Microsoft will never (again) make a handheld that many people want because they won't make simpler games that need less processing power.