Your video game hot take(s) thread
- Thread starter Dany_the_penguin
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See I thought it was good as an RPG, just not a good story with kind of bad gameplay and combat.
The story not being good is what prohibits the role-playing being good. For me at least. Skyrim has no characters that are interesting or engaging to talk to, so I don't, which means all that's left is going around getting better loot and higher skills. And this gets very boring after a certain point.
I always found Oblivion boring, and the advertising-hype for Skyrim made me even less invested.
Yeah... when I say good RPG, I actually meant the RPG mechanics. The skills and loot and stuff. I really did like the leveling system. A step up from old systems where you might get better at lockpicking randomly for killing your 100th rat. With Skyrim, you got better at lockpicking... by picking locks. It just made more sense. And the difficulty scaling actively punishing anyone trying to cheese the leveling was a brilliant FU to folks trying to grind up skill levels as opposed to just working it into your character build.
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Skyrim is just one of the few open world game where the open world is about exploring rather than collecting things that are already marked on your map. You'd think with how much money it printed other company would be eager to copy that formula, but no, they all go the assasin creed road of having the map be pre explored and you just going to each icon.
Because it's so much easier to copy and paste everything, instead of putting anything of genuine effort. Tsushima got this right. It wouldn't mark stuff on your map for the most part, until you encountered a new enemy camp, base, or after a story segment with a side character. For the side characters, it will usually mark, so you would know where to go for their next side quest after completing the previous one.
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Well, there’s at least a couple big games from the past few years that facilitate organic exploration. One has
Also while I haven’t played it, what @BrawlMan said above.
The Last of Us video game was not just a TV show or a playable movie. And I guess this applies to Uncharted and such.
I'm seeing a trend in gamer discourse against these so-called movie games. There's always the Dark Souls fanboys who see that game as a respite from what was the trend towards cinematic games at the time. But that was 12 years ago, we now have both kinds of games and everything in between.
Frost's recent Cold Take seems to fully give voice against the very idea of a game like The Last of Us. Yahtzee of course but even the less harsh folks at Escapist seem to be accepting of this idea that the game was just a movie that is a game in name only.
And I'm out here thinking- ok, sure, I suck at games, but am I the only one who actually remember playing the game? In that, most of the time, you are literally playing? You gotta sneak around areas filled with monsters, and you have to decide on whether to use stealth and if so how; whent to consume or preserve ammo and supplies; and engage in extended combat sequences. Also the environment puzzling which, sure, was a mixed bag, but it's still very much a video game.
Plus there are hard modes that amp the survival horror aspect of it, so there is classic video game challenge aspects.
I played the game with the first remaster on PS4, so years later after Uncharted and such. And, yes, my bias is towards the so-called "cinematic" games like Uncharted, Assassins Creed, Witcher, etc- sue me, I like a story and cut scene breaks (as long as they're reasonably paced) and characters that actually speak in sentences- yeah, like a "movie," whatever. But these are all very much games, and just because TLoU has really great cut scenes doesn't take away from the actual gameplay.
The gamer conventional wisdom is that TV show now is successful in parts because the game was already like a TV show. But... no, that's a disservice to both the original game and the wonderful adaptation, which does so much more than just "put the game on HBO" or whatever.
I'm seeing a trend in gamer discourse against these so-called movie games. There's always the Dark Souls fanboys who see that game as a respite from what was the trend towards cinematic games at the time. But that was 12 years ago, we now have both kinds of games and everything in between.
Frost's recent Cold Take seems to fully give voice against the very idea of a game like The Last of Us. Yahtzee of course but even the less harsh folks at Escapist seem to be accepting of this idea that the game was just a movie that is a game in name only.
And I'm out here thinking- ok, sure, I suck at games, but am I the only one who actually remember playing the game? In that, most of the time, you are literally playing? You gotta sneak around areas filled with monsters, and you have to decide on whether to use stealth and if so how; whent to consume or preserve ammo and supplies; and engage in extended combat sequences. Also the environment puzzling which, sure, was a mixed bag, but it's still very much a video game.
Plus there are hard modes that amp the survival horror aspect of it, so there is classic video game challenge aspects.
I played the game with the first remaster on PS4, so years later after Uncharted and such. And, yes, my bias is towards the so-called "cinematic" games like Uncharted, Assassins Creed, Witcher, etc- sue me, I like a story and cut scene breaks (as long as they're reasonably paced) and characters that actually speak in sentences- yeah, like a "movie," whatever. But these are all very much games, and just because TLoU has really great cut scenes doesn't take away from the actual gameplay.
The gamer conventional wisdom is that TV show now is successful in parts because the game was already like a TV show. But... no, that's a disservice to both the original game and the wonderful adaptation, which does so much more than just "put the game on HBO" or whatever.
Once again, it all dials back to Yahtzee. He was one of the first to start the whole "I hate/dislike cinematic games discourse". Then his rabid fanboys and the haters who had a grind against Uncharted or Naughty Dog, latched on to it, like flies on shit. The only defense I can give them, is that games like the Alone in the Dark Reboot (2008), The Order: 1886, Quantum Break, and Ryse proves how bad it can get, or when it's mismanaged that poorly.
Alan Wake and Asura's Wrath got the TV and TV anime thing down perfectly. Though the latter got in trouble for its horrible DLC practices. Making the true ending DLC was still a dumb move and a bad idea that killed the game. I would love for a re-release with everything on disc.
Edit: Another problem I actually mentioned before, but forgot to point out, is that a lot of these cinematic games have unskippable walking segments. How bad it happens depends on the game, but let's say you want to play on a harder difficulty. Have fun going through glorified unskippable cutscenes again. It's annoying to replay those sections again. This is still an issue that has not been solved and we're in the 9th generation now. It's why I usually stick with lower budget games and retro indie stuff. Those on that side of the industry have made the same mistake as well, but not to the extent of the dogs at top.
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I don't know which one you mean by the big-ass tree, but I'd throw Breath of the Wild on that list too. The only markers it puts on your map are major settlements and, if you use them, quest objective markers. Everything else, you have to mark out as a point of interest yourself using a high vantage point and a pair of binoculars, rather than simply having their locations handed to you. And the Korok Seeds, which easily could have become just busywork, manage to avoid that by requiring you to keep an eye out for anything in the environment that looks artificial - and that only worked because everything else looks natural.
I know plenty of people have issues with BOTW, but I think that it basically nailed everything that an open-world game should be. Nintendo were just letting everyone else get it out of their system before saying 'step aside, amateurs, this is how it's done'.
I always felt Skyrim's biggest mistake was taking the epic-ness out of encounters with dragons. Once you start running into one every 5 minutes (and often opting just to run away because you're tired of fighting dragons,) the core theme of the game is really diluted into convenience and far removed from the epic quest you're supposed to be on as the Dragonborn. Also, they didn't do enough to fix the ridiculous enemy/item scaling introduced in Oblivion ensuring Morrowind will forever be the superior Elder Scrolls title. I don't care how it's aged; I put way more time and had a lot more fun with it than Oblivion and Skyrim combined, and remains the only one I felt like playing through more than once.
Games have always tried to be cinematic or a TV Show, ever since cut-scenes became a thing in arcade games, and 8-bit days. Pac-Man's cut-scenes acted out as cartoon shorts you would see in old time theaters. Castlevania is one big ode to Universal horror monsters. Ninja Gaiden NES Trilogy was praised with having actual storylines and twists. Both 5th and 6th generation console and PC games have plenty of moments of shout outs, references, or throwbacks to TV/Film the creators loved as kids, teens, or 20 somethings. They just usually remembered to have gameplay. Not that "cinematic" games from 7th, 8th, and 9th gen don't have gameplay, but you got certain ones that take things too far and use a checklist of design choices for the sake of it, or get a bug up their ass. Sony still hasn't learned from those mistakes.
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The thing that makes Morrowind intolerable in my mind is the overbearing adherence to pen-and-paper RPG mechanics in a first-person action game (this also annoyed me in Daggerfall). The fact that you could actually hit an enemy with a weapon or a fucking fireball and have the game go "nuh-uh, doesn't count" just because you didn't sacrifice a chicken to RNGesus is supremely annoying; I have some very non-fond memories of pumping arrows into a cliffracer at point-blank range only to have it peck me to death because I could neither kill it nor get away from it.
Too late to edit, I just figured out what the one with the big-ass tree was.
Elden Ring if anyone was wondering the same thing.
The thing is, having to find 900 of any one thing could be considered busy work, regardless of how it’s presented. Especially when it’s for something as simple as expanding inventory space. Which really, should just be big enough in the first place. It’s always perplexing in games where carry limits are imposed when there’s no logical reason for it. You’re already holding a ton more than is practically possible, so why arbitrarily design restrictions to pad things.
And that’s not even what half of them are used for. The fact that Nintendo designed the reward for acquiring the remaining seeds solely as a “big joke” is really the icing on the…uh, poop cake?
“We just kind of thought it would be funny to make that a big joke,” Fujibayashi told IGN, laughing.
That said, BotW went above and beyond the vast majority of open world games with the climbing mechanics and world systems for how certain things interact. For as big as it is though it was bound to wind up having some superfluous aspects, like weapon durability and repetitive shrines/dungeons, lack of music, unique points of interest, etc.
I think Bethesda RPGs trying to do anything cinematically epic is a mistake. I mean, the dragons look cool enough, but they still fly around like weird stiff hanggliders.
Same here.
I lucked out in never having liked this particular something that was made by a piece of shit. I'm sure there's things I do like that were created by people just as bad as Rowling. I bought some Lays chips not too long ago.
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I don't like Harry Potter.. I mean I don't hate it or anything, I'm just not in the demo. I was too old to give a crap about it when it came out, and I don't have kids. The folks I personally know that are into HP my age read it to/with their children and credit the series to help develop an interest in reading with their kids and I'm gonna respect that.
The game looks cool though, so I think I would like to play it, but at some discount or buying a used copy, some months in the future, and the reason for waiting is indeed my disinterest in stories about child wizards.
As for the whole Rowling thing... man, it is one of the most irritating internet things I've seen and practically every internet thing irritates me.
I got new for folks- most of your money is already going to fund harmful things. Energy companies, electronics, agribusiness- do you know what monstrosities these companies and the rich fucks that profit from them are doing to this world?
Ok, you want to focus on individuals- these billionaire capitalists donate a lot of money to conservative politics in the US and UK, which are fueled by and exist solely to oppress marginalized groups including trans non-binary queer.
Yes, Rowling is being particularly bitchy with her anti-trans shit-posting. If it's immoral to participate in her profiting from purchasing a game, it is therefore immoral to purchase pretty much anything because somewhere in that chain, someone worse is profiting I guarantee.
The game looks cool though, so I think I would like to play it, but at some discount or buying a used copy, some months in the future, and the reason for waiting is indeed my disinterest in stories about child wizards.
As for the whole Rowling thing... man, it is one of the most irritating internet things I've seen and practically every internet thing irritates me.
I got new for folks- most of your money is already going to fund harmful things. Energy companies, electronics, agribusiness- do you know what monstrosities these companies and the rich fucks that profit from them are doing to this world?
Ok, you want to focus on individuals- these billionaire capitalists donate a lot of money to conservative politics in the US and UK, which are fueled by and exist solely to oppress marginalized groups including trans non-binary queer.
Yes, Rowling is being particularly bitchy with her anti-trans shit-posting. If it's immoral to participate in her profiting from purchasing a game, it is therefore immoral to purchase pretty much anything because somewhere in that chain, someone worse is profiting I guarantee.