The Biggest Joke in Gaming

[FPLOON]

Already calling a game series with only, like, two or three released games under their belt a "franchise"...

To me, personally, I find that to be both hilarious and a bit of a misunderstanding, because when I think of "game franchise", I think of a series of up to 10 games (5 if they're just that good not to continue further and/or has more upcoming titles in the future) under the same IP...

Now, don't get me wrong, I don't think those kinds of games are bad, per se... They're just not at the point of being called a "franchise" yet... (Let me know when I can count all of the games in this particular IP series with more than just one hand and then we'll talk...)

 

[Gamer_Fries]

The gaming community?

Cause we all just wanna have fun but we like to ***** like there's no tomorrow and some of us like to think that we get to say who can have fun and who can not.
That's pretty funny. Or kinda sad.

Honestly I would have to agree with Phasmal here, one of the biggest jokes in gaming is every single one of us.I mean here we are arguing about what the "Biggest Joke in Gaming" is. I can not say very many of us actually care enough to do much about the problems everyone is talking about other than sit on our asses complaining.

 

[gyrobot_v1legacy]

League of Legend's current Lore Team, Kitae managed to piss off fans of the League of Legends Lore with terrible champions who are boring and uninspired and been smashing things with the Retcon hammer of doom.

 

[Sarge034]

It's possible for an RPG to cover a very wide apectrum of player choice (although obviously not every possible one.) To make it work, you sacrifice voice acting. Text responses makes it much easier for the game to acknowledge choices you made without it costing very much in terms of money or extra work.

Ok... So you acknowledge that there is no player choice. Only predetermined paths the devs put in place. If there was player choice you could make any choice you wanted in a game.

Simple examples:

Characters can call you by your custom name.

Other than text only games, like Pokémon, what game has characters call you by your custom name? Shepard, Hawk, the Nerevarine, the Dragonborn, the Lone Wanderer, Courier, the Grey Warden, ect.

It's extremely easy to embed references to past events, even specific details such as how you did it without having to re-record dialogue.

Text allows a greater variety of 'flavour' responses without expensive dialogue recording.

But there are only responses for things the devs said you could do.

If you're willing to put up with old games, have a look at something like Fallout 2 or Arcanum to see the sorts of depths of player choice studios with a 10th or even a 100th of Bioware's current budget could build into their games 10 years ago.

Obviously no major publisher is ever going to spend Mass Effect money on a game with text dialogue but between that and a graphical style that would allow for malleable environments, it would probably be possible to make a game that could acknowledge and handle the vast majority of choices a player could want to make.

Vast majority is still the illusion of choice. I couldn't shoot some fool in the face on the Citadel in ME, get arrested for murder and doom the galaxy. I couldn't do anything but pick one of a handful of predetermined ending in Deus Ex: HR. I couldn't be a good guy in Far Cry 3 without sounding like a whiny emo pacifist in the post game dialog. Dialog choices in games simply don't matter. DA, ME, Skyrim, Oblivion, Morrowind, Fallout 3, Fallout NV, Dragon's Dogma, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, ect, ect. If the person was quest essential you could say anything you wanted, but the character was destined to help you. You couldn't say anything to absolutely turn them against you, and if you could you knew there was an alternate person to talk to. Games don't give the player the option to piss someone quest essential off and fuck themselves. Morrowind got close by letting you kill quest essential NPCs and ruining your main quest, but they promptly "fixed" that in Oblivion and Skyrim.

 

[Pink Gregory]

When people, and especially retro indie devs confuse "retro" with "looks like shit".
Sure back in the day, we knew each of our pixels by their first name, but we tried to make the most of them.
Now, people use the "retro" excuse to use placeholder textures or sprites instead of hiring an artist.
Sure, the point of indie is to make the most with the least money, but that doesn't mean you should stop trying, or justify the game looking aggressively bad.

Examples?

Sorry, but I like pixel art, and the idea that 'indie developers are lazy' irritates me no end. Not that that's what you're saying.

Do you really think stuff like Resonance and Volgarr the Viking look like shit?

 

[b3nn3tt]

The gaming community?

I'd agree with this. I still wryly chuckle every time gamers urge others to vote with their wallets on an issue, but then the game is still ridiculously successful and you get thread after thread of people complaining about it.

To go even further, just the general fact that so many people feel the need to criticise what other people enjoy playing. In an ideal world, it would be accepted that we're all gamers and we all like to have fun playing games, any games. But no, we constantly get people deriding other people's choices of game, and saying how they must be so much better for not enjoying it. I always feel that this says more about the person being critical than the person that is actually enjoying themselves.

This translates into reviews as well. I really cannot understand why people get so up in arms about review scores they don't agree with. So somebody thought a game deserved a 9 instead of a 10, how does this actually affect anyone? Why do people feel the need to spew hate because others don't share their opinions. I just don't get why people care.

The joke of course being that these people will often agree that enjoyment is subjective, but still argue that others are wrong for not liking the same things they do.

That actually turned a bit more bitter than I intended. So I'll add that every time I hear WiiU an ambulance noise plays in my head and I smile. I think that's a pretty funny joke.

 

[Evilpigeon]

Ok... So you acknowledge that there is no player choice. Only predetermined paths the devs put in place. If there was player choice you could make any choice you wanted in a game.

You seem to have the ability to approach a problem in multiple ways and come out with multiple solutions - i.e. choices - confused with perfect choice, which would be the game reacting to everything you could possibly think of doing.

Other than text only games, like Pokémon, what game has characters call you by your custom name? Shepard, Hawk, the Nerevarine, the Dragonborn, the Lone Wanderer, Courier, the Grey Warden, ect.

my whole point was about using text dialogue to allow for a far greater variety of choice what do voice acted games have to do with that?

But there are only responses for things the devs said you could do.

The devs decide the rules for whatever game I'm playing, I don't see how this is different. The whole point of my post is that with the correct tools i.e. text dialogue and the right graphical style you can build in a very high level of choice. We're back to high variety of choices versus perfect choice.

Vast majority is still the illusion of choice. I couldn't shoot some fool in the face on the Citadel in ME, get arrested for murder and doom the galaxy. I couldn't do anything but pick one of a handful of predetermined ending in Deus Ex: HR. I couldn't be a good guy in Far Cry 3 without sounding like a whiny emo pacifist in the post game dialog. Dialog choices in games simply don't matter. DA, ME, Skyrim, Oblivion, Morrowind, Fallout 3, Fallout NV, Dragon's Dogma, Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning, ect, ect. If the person was quest essential you could say anything you wanted, but the character was destined to help you. You couldn't say anything to absolutely turn them against you, and if you could you knew there was an alternate person to talk to. Games don't give the player the option to piss someone quest essential off and fuck themselves. Morrowind got close by letting you kill quest essential NPCs and ruining your main quest, but they promptly "fixed" that in Oblivion and Skyrim.

Every game you listed there is irrelevant to what I'm talking about apart from Morrowind. Seriously you keep brinign up voice acted games, it's like you didn't read a word of what I was writing.

Look up the games I talked about, Fallout 2 and Arcanum. Come back and tell me it's all illusion of choice, obviously some of it is, that's the nature of things but it's quite possible to have a lasting impact of chunks of the world or for the world to have one on you.

Both games give you the ability to significantly change the world you're playing in and the world's reaction to you in a non-trivial way. Most quests have several possible solutions and they account for players actions within the rules to the point where they account for you playing as character whose intelligence is to low to properly communicate with everyone else.

 

[Piorn]

When people, and especially retro indie devs confuse "retro" with "looks like shit".
Sure back in the day, we knew each of our pixels by their first name, but we tried to make the most of them.
Now, people use the "retro" excuse to use placeholder textures or sprites instead of hiring an artist.
Sure, the point of indie is to make the most with the least money, but that doesn't mean you should stop trying, or justify the game looking aggressively bad.

Examples?

Sorry, but I like pixel art, and the idea that 'indie developers are lazy' irritates me no end. Not that that's what you're saying.

Do you really think stuff like Resonance and Volgarr the Viking look like shit?

No no,I'm not saying it always happens, it happens quite rarely, it just irritates me when it happens.
And I'm not against Pixel Art in itself, either.
Every now and then though, you come along some game like Minecraft, where it becomes apparent that the look of the game was not designed, but rather just started existing and nobody bothered to change it.

Make your games realistic, make your games abstract. I don't care, just make it into something.

 

[Tanner The Monotone]

Probably most of metacritic. In theory the fan part of the metacritic can be useful, but with people just spamming 10's and 0's like morons, it kinda ruins it. It's also hard to trust the "pro" reviews when the website gets to nitpick what reviewers they want to use. The reviewers also don't review in the same way, so the arbitrary number that they give is sorta pointless.

 

[Sarge034]

You seem to have the ability to approach a problem in multiple ways and come out with multiple solutions - i.e. choices - confused with perfect choice, which would be the game reacting to everything you could possibly think of doing.

Illusion of choice vs actual choice.

my whole point was about using text dialogue to allow for a far greater variety of choice what do voice acted games have to do with that?

... Because they are games? My point was about the illusion of choice in games...

The devs decide the rules for whatever game I'm playing, I don't see how this is different. The whole point of my post is that with the correct tools i.e. text dialogue and the right graphical style you can build in a very high level of choice. We're back to high variety of choices versus perfect choice.

Illusion of choice vs actual choice.

Every game you listed there is irrelevant to what I'm talking about apart from Morrowind. Seriously you keep brinign up voice acted games, it's like you didn't read a word of what I was writing.

Lol, wut?

It's possible for an RPG to cover a very wide apectrum of player choice (although obviously not every possible one.) To make it work, you sacrifice voice acting. Text responses makes it much easier for the game to acknowledge choices you made without it costing very much in terms of money or extra work.

I didn't realize that "DA, ME, Skyrim, Oblivion, Morrowind, Fallout 3, Fallout NV, Dragon's Dogma, and Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning" were not RPGs. I neglected your remark about text only games because, "My point was about the illusion of choice in games..." I am not going to allow a cherry picked genre to undermine my argument when I was talking about ALL games. ME's marketing campaign said my choices mattered, but they were not MY choices and arguably the illusion of choice I did have didn't matter. There is no choice, only the illusion of choice, in text based games too so it is a null point. The one that pissed me off the most was TellTale's The Walking Dead, followed very closely by ME3, and third place going to FarCry 3. All these games are about player choice, but in reality the player has no choice. Publishers need to stop saying "Your choice matters" when it obviously isn't even my choice.

Look up the games I talked about, Fallout 2 and Arcanum. Come back and tell me it's all illusion of choice, obviously some of it is, that's the nature of things but it's quite possible to have a lasting impact of chunks of the world or for the world to have one on you.

Both games give you the ability to significantly change the world you're playing in and the world's reaction to you in a non-trivial way. Most quests have several possible solutions and they account for players actions within the rules to the point where they account for you playing as character whose intelligence is to low to properly communicate with everyone else.

It's all an illusion of choice.

How many examples do you want? Or better yet why don't you give me an example of true player choice in those games and I will prove it to simply be an illusion of choice?

 

[Karadalis]

How many examples do you want? Or better yet why don't you give me an example of true player choice in those games and I will prove it to simply be an illusion of choice?

What you are refering to is illusion of Freedom.

You cant say illusion of choice when the game gives you choices.

It just doesnt give you the freedom to ignore the choices that it hands to you.

Lets see... jokes of gaming...

How about play X type of game promotes Y type of behavior?

You know.. racism, violence, sexism.. all that good stuff.

Or how about Parents rallying against the games industry for "selling" their kids violent videogames.. when the only way those kids can get their hands on those games are the very same uninformed clueless parents?

Hrmm.. nah the last one clearly falls under "parenting" and less under gaming.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Atari's ET was such a tasteless joke it practically bankrupted Atari single-handed.

 

[Hunter Hyena]

Anyone who gets mad because a Grand Theft Auto game offended them, especially when people were freaking out because the game "made a joke about transexuals." Guess what? The game made a joke about practically every race, group, sexuality, animal, and vehicle they could think of. Also, the series is called Grand Theft Auto, it's quite obvious it isn't out there to make the world a better and happier place...if it was, we would have played as Roman...in every one of the games

 

[SuperfastJellyfish]

How pathetic gamers get when people mention feminism. The animalistic rage that builds up and explodes would be laughable, if it didn't display such an undercurrent of being fucked in the head.

 

[Breccia]

Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor, and what it means for the gaming industry/gamer relationship.

I have seen only one review that called the game anything other than completely unplayable. IGN gave it a 3.0 ("Awful") salvaged only by the game's premise and potential, but still referred to it as a "nightmare on almost every level". Say what you will about motion controls in general, if you're talking about a game that professional gamers could not even get out of the tutorial level, but still gets sold at full price in stores, you have to ask yourself this:
a) Did the game's creator not bother to test the game themselves, so see that it just flat-out didn't work?
b) Or did they test the game, and just not care that it didn't work?

Neither of these options can be considered a good thing. The fact that this game made it to shelves at all, that's the joke, and we, the game-playing intended audience, are the punch line.

 

[captaincabbage]

Well, as a Dan Murphy's employee in Melbourne with aspirations as a fine wine expert, I can comfortably say BULL FUCKING SHIT.

Seriously, some of the best wines we have in our store are under $15AUD, so the thought that any level of quality comes from a high price-point, especially in the gaming community, is absolutely moronic.

Seriously, the games I've had the most fun with in the last few years have all been under $20AUD, with the exception of Red Dead Redemption, because hell yeah cowboys!

 

[Blaster]

The gaming community?

Cause we all just wanna have fun but we like to ***** like there's no tomorrow and some of us like to think that we get to say who can have fun and who can not.
That's pretty funny. Or kinda sad.

This. At what point did gamers become so entitled that death threats to a developer was called for, BECAUSE a developer decided to change a SNIPER RIFLE in a video game? Kinda making it hard to defend video games as a hobby, and not something that people obsess over...

 

[Racecarlock]

I'm not trying to say that it was shit for everyone else. If you like it, fine, but for me it was one of the worst games I have ever played.

I haven't seen goodfellas, but I assume that film would actually do something to keep me interested, but mafia II's story just reminded me of the stories of GTA III and IV, as if they collided and farted out a generic mafia game.

Also, extreme ADD? Really? I know you don't agree with my opinion which I am still not trying to force on everyone else, but there's no need for insults.

I can get behind those criticisms more. I do agree, it's no masterpiece of storytelling, and it could have been improved in a number of ways, just that the angle of going at it because it was filled with a few activities that slowed down gameplay a bit, but improved narrative and story focus felt like it was missing the point. For example that crate moving bit you were talking about, the entire point of it was to show even the main character's frustration with the monotony of how things would be if he continued down that path. And as I recall, you had the option as well to just walk away from it as well. The purpose for things like that are a bit more world building that a lot of games I feel just skip out completely these days. I mean, stories and such can't constantly be rising action until the finale and then just end, it has to have some room to breathe as well.

And yeah, sorry, went a bit over the line with the ADD remark, but that's my own personal frustration that came out a bit there. Seriously, going back on that and reading it again, I do think that was over the line, so again, sorry 'bout that. It's just I find both Saints Row and Red Faction to be some of the bottom of the barrel sandboxes that, especially with Saints Row's case, are held up way too high. Both are a bit of fun once in a while, but get very boring very quickly because there's no real sense of achievement or challenge present in each which are major crippling flaws. It's all cheap thrill. Sure you can go knock down a building, or go around with unlimited ammo and invulnerability to near everything and cause some chaos but both have the same amount of substance as piling a bunch of bodies together on some explosive barrels on GMod and then watching them go flying. There isn't much satisfaction to be had when everything is spoon fed to the player. And this is coming from someone who played the original Saints Row after launch and loved it. The demand by people to make that game just more and more over the top absolutely ruined it in my mind.

Oh yeah, saints row the third. One of my favorite sandbox games of all time. I love the cheap thrills and I love the cheat codes and I love the hover jets, the missions, the weapons, and especially the gameplay. Also, genki bowl is awesome.