Your video game hot take(s) thread

Xprimentyl

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Mass Effect, the whole bloody thing, was never very good. The first game is as good as it gets, and even it chooses all the boring aliens over the cool weird ones for your companions. Then with the start of the second game the series becomes too obsessed with being cool and sexy to not only tell a good sci-fi story, but a good story in general. And I wouldn't have as much of a problem with this series getting its freak on if it didn't choose the most stilted and robotic way to present its characters. You have all these hot people/aliens with canyon deep necklines and vacu-sucked booties, and they move around like awkward mannequins with stiff hands.
Agree, actually. Mass Effect 1 was new and different ("new and different" as in filled the gap where another KOTOR or Jade Empire needed to be,) but after that... Well, let's just say my favorite part of the franchise after the first game was mining planets from orbit for resources. General consensus seems to be it was the least interesting part of the franchise, but combined with the iconic map music, I found it very relaxing, and I enjoyed that aspect quite a bit. Yeah, that's my hot take: mining planets for resources was actually enjoyable.
 

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Well, c'mon; logical adherence to ACTUAL history has never been a thing GoW has gone for. They use the various elements of Greek mythology as source material to craft fantasy tales; yours isn't so much a hot take as it is a gripe with an extremely niggling detail. I mean after all, you said it yourself, the Colossus of Rhodes existed for a relatively short and specific period of time... at what point was it EVER a living being that needed taken down by a singular guy with a couple blades swing from chains?

Now if you wanted to take up this kind of criticism with , say, Assassins Creed or some such franchise that would have you believe they're going for at least some modicum of reasonable credibility with their depictions of history, that be more fitting.
I wasn't sure if I should have put that here or the "Detail that bugs me" thread but it's not a small detail. But I agree, it's pretty fucking nitpicky, I just wanted to reason to gripe.

And believe me, I'd be happy to do the same to AC as well. I've played most of the big games in the series so I feel like I'm more then qualified to tear it to shreds. I really did like GOW2, but the history fan in me demanded I say something.

I just need to work myself up enough to write a bunch of Hot takes on a series with....how many fucking games in that series now? Ubisoft stopped numbering and I don't feel like looking all the games up right now. I also gave on the series so it's more apathy at this point then anything else.
 
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Gordon_4

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Mass Effect, the whole bloody thing, was never very good. The first game is as good as it gets, and even it chooses all the boring aliens over the cool weird ones for your companions. Then with the start of the second game the series becomes too obsessed with being cool and sexy to not only tell a good sci-fi story, but a good story in general. And I wouldn't have as much of a problem with this series getting its freak on if it didn't choose the most stilted and robotic way to present its characters. You have all these hot people/aliens with canyon deep necklines and vacu-sucked booties, and they move around like awkward mannequins with stiff hands.
Well BioWare's strength by my observation is in character writing. The primary narratives of Mass Effect and DragonAge are as generic a doomsday/dark lord plot as you can find anywhere in fiction. Its just more often than not they manage to hit the emotional stuff with characters out of the park and that connective tissue with the main cast is enough to create player investment. Like I've played both franchises through start to finish A LOT - thanks Legendary Edition - and even with their overarching narratives being found wanting and at times deeply self contradictory, I just love the characters so much I don't care.
 

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I also gave up on the series so it's more apathy at this point then anything else.
A Game Stop employee (at a local store in my area that no longer exists) got mad at me, because she found it worse than hatred. She's a huge AC fan girl, and claimed how all the games are near good and there are no bad ones. I asked her "Why does it matter that I don't care?" She responds back that I wasn't being fair, because I did not play the later sequels and that the series have some innovation. I responded back not really, and that's why I stopped playing. It's the same game over and over with little variations or differences. I ended with, "My apathy or others should not bother your enjoyment of the series.". If it does, then you have a bigger problem and not like AC as much as you think. She can only respond with a weak and flippant whatever. That was back in 2016, and I never seen her again since then.
 
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BrawlMan

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After some experience, I have to say Ray-tracing technology is just not worth cutting the framerate in half for. I understand that it potentially takes a small load off the devs work, but when games like Control claim they are giving the choice between 60fps or 30fps with Ray-tracing... a game where pretty much everything is unreflective concrete, it baffles me why anyone would bother, or why there should even be an 'either/or' when Spiderman manages to compromise for both high framerate and Ray-tracing within an open world city able to maintain fast traversal and high-octane combat. Every game feels way more next-gen with higher framerate, yet disappointing with just this RT technology for show.

I suppose it's all about those marketing screenshots or whatever, but unless the technology can present some unexpected results from a phantasmagorical clash of light sources that human imagination could not have conceived, it's not particularly interesting or exciting for the customer much, seems more a hindrance on performance so far.
Raytracing already reached old hat territory for me within a month. It's just another stupid visual gimmick that does not add much to the experience in the long run and will fade in to the background.

Art Style and Art Design > Graphics.
 
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Casual Shinji

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Well BioWare's strength by my observation is in character writing. The primary narratives of Mass Effect and DragonAge are as generic a doomsday/dark lord plot as you can find anywhere in fiction. Its just more often than not they manage to hit the emotional stuff with characters out of the park and that connective tissue with the main cast is enough to create player investment. Like I've played both franchises through start to finish A LOT - thanks Legendary Edition - and even with their overarching narratives being found wanting and at times deeply self contradictory, I just love the characters so much I don't care.
I like the idea of Mass Effect more than Mass Effect itself. I got the Legendary Edition too, and largely I actually quite enjoyed it. But the way it presents itself and how it starts to heavily preference "sexy coolness" after the first game kinda makes it impossible for me to return to it. I'm left imagining what this world would look like if the characters weren't stuck in canned animations, with disembodied voice acting, and weird cuts in conversation, and I'd already like it more. Not to mention if they actually involved the more alien "non-sexy" species into the mix.

I feel similarly about Bethesda RPGs, where the idea is very appealing, but as soon as I start to play everything feels stiff, awkward, and kinda lifeless.

Raytracing already reached old hat territory for me within a month. It's just another stupid visual gimmick that does not add much to the experience in the long run and will fade in to the background.

Art Style and Art Design > Graphics/
Same. I got over raytracing within a few weeks of purchasing a PS5. It was neat watching Spider-Man reflected in a toaster and firetruck, but that's about as far as my appreciation went. Maybe if developers use it as a mechanic, like to solve puzzles or to track down clues, but so far it's just some jangling keys.
 
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A Game Stop employee (at a local store in my area that no longer exists) got mad at me, because she found it worse than hatred. She's a huge AC fan girl, and claimed how all the games are near good and there are no bad ones. I asked her "Why does it matter that I don't care?" She responds back that I wasn't being fair, because I did not play the later sequels and that the series have some innovation. I responded back not really, and that's why I stopped playing. It's the same game over and over with little variations or differences. I ended with my apathy or others should not bother your enjoyment of the series. If it does, then you have a bigger problem and not like AC as much as you think. She can only respond with a weak and flippant whatever. That was back in 2016, and I never seen her again since then.
If the early games weren't doing it for you, the later games likely weren't gonna change your mind. Even with the later emphasis on gear and RPG elements it still remains much of the same formula albeit with less focus because the games are much longer now.

So yeah, you didn't miss much if you weren't invested already.
 
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Chimpzy

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Raytracing already reached old hat territory for me within a month. It's just another stupid visual gimmick that does not add much to the experience in the long run and will fade in to the background.

Art Style and Art Design > Graphics/
Same. I got over raytracing within a few weeks of purchasing a PS5. It was neat watching Spider-Man reflected in a toaster and firetruck, but that's about as far as my appreciation went. Maybe if developers use it as a mechanic, like to solve puzzles or to track down clues, but so far it's just some jangling keys.
From my own experience, even with a pc beefy enough that I don't necessarily have to choose between 60fps and raytracing, I agree. I still choose to leave it off. Sure, it's nice to look at when you're just standing around, but when you're actually playing you stop noticing.
 
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Dalisclock

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Since @Xprimentyl suggested it, I'm gonna Hot take the Assasins Creed series, or at least the games I've played. This will likely take a couple posts.

Unmarked spoilers for the
Assassins' Creed Series.

So the hottest take of all, this series started strong with a great premise(though the first game was a bit overlong and clunkly at times) and basically lost it's way. It looked like it might have fixed itself a couple years ago but nope, it's lost in the wilderness again and I have no faith it'll ever figure out how to make it compelling at this point without a full reboot.


The inherent problem of course is that the series started with the idea the Templars rule the world secretly, the assasins, who act as "Organized" resistance to them, are scattered and in hiding and the Templars are trying to use Desmond, an apparent nobody, to delve into his ancestries using a time machine but not really, to find magical mcguffins hidden throughout the world and basically the cornerstones of our myths and legends so they can...rule the world more. With Mind Control, even though they don't need it. In the meantime, the Assassins' want to use the animus to find those McGuffins before the templars do so they can, well, stop them from having them and also train Desmond to be an assassin by giving him years of training in days.

And that's a great fucking premise. The problem is ,they pretty much lost track of that premise after like 2 fucking games. By AC Brotherhood, the story is "Use animus to find magical thingy #5". There's the threat of a Templar Satellite launch in the background and this never goes anywhere. Even up to AC3 they're still talking about it and then you find out in an e-mail that the launch was scrubbed. I imagined at some point Desmond was actually going to use his super assasin skills to scale the rocket under a time limit in order to prevent the apple being launched into orbit in AC3 because it felt like that's where this was supposed to be leading, but nope, you get an email and that's that.

And here you run into a number of other problems. They introduce the solar flare in AC2 or AC Brotherhood(I forget which off the top of my head) and tie it to the 2012 date, because of course they do. Yes, this was hinted in the first game when you see the blood stains at the end but it's very vague until like a couple games down the line. Then you start getting this background on the ISU(the ones who came before) which shows them as being hyper advanced to the point of absurdity but also incredibly fucking dumb and incapable of saving their own skins. AC3 gives you a bunch of little movies about how they tried to save their asses and all of them are basically magic but also completely ineffective because...of course they are. "We could build an energy shield ,but it wouldn't be finished in time. We can't even protect a single city with it" "We can upload ourselves to information storage but then we have to wait for someone else to get us out and need an internet to transfer over to and.....then someone needs to build us a body to download back into and..." And "We could mind control humans to make them magic shit into existence by wishing the same thing all at once so we told them "SAVE US" and......seriously, this this is fucking bananas and smacks of the writing of a 10 year old who read their first Sci-fi book. There's also the Sage thing that I'm not even gonna go into here because it's dumb but is the longest lived dumb plot thread.

Oh, and to make it better, the Templars apparently never get a fucking hint the world is going to be melted to fucking glass by a solar flare, because there's no evidence of them ever talking about it beforehand or that they expected it, despite doing far and way the most research into the ISU stuff. And considering they control the world, you'd think THAT would be far more important to them then anything else and they'd do everything in their damn power to prevent it, because you don't want to break what you control. Nope, never fucking addressed. After 3, the Templars showed up and collected Desmonds corpse to mine for memory material and even in later games STILL don't mention "Oh, the assassins' saved our buts and were right all along on this, at this on this topic"

Here's where I get to talk about Juno. At the end of AC3, Desmond gets the choice to A.) let the solar flare hit and wipe out 90% of the world, creating a free but primitives blank state but one which eventually use him as a legendary figure for violence and oppression in his name or B.) Stop the flare, sacrifice his life and let Juno out of the ancient computer onto the Internet. Of course Desmond chooses B, and Juno is set up as the Arc Villian of the next few games, trying to get a body with help of a cult following her and some parts of Abstergo helping her. And the games following AC3 seem to be setting up her return. Except it doesn't end up mattering because Ubisoft resolved her return in a comic. She gets a new body(courtesy of one of the magical bits and some ISU DNA that they found) and then Desmonds Son(who he had with a hooker or something) shows up and stabs her because, sure why not? Who cares?

Ubisoft didn't because they never really mention it again in the games(so if you didn't read the comics that whole thing is left fucking hanging forever) and then they started making games about Layla and building up to another Calamity(because the big shield they turned on in AC3 to save the earth from the solar flare never turned off and that's bad apparently).

It all smacks of "We make these games yearly to make more money" and give no shits about where if anywhere this is going. Which is why the historical bits can work as their own stories but the overarching plot just never seems to fucking matter because ubisoft can't seem to bring themselves to properly construct plot arcs across multiple games that actually conclude and then a new plot arc follows from that. Or find a way to make the link between the history stuff tie into the present stuff in a compelling and interesting way besides "Find magical ISU doohicky #17 for reasons". There's creative sterility here where any hope of making compelling or interesting fiction takes a backseat to annual earnings and even though they'll be making this shit forever, god forbid we use that freedom from the threat of cancelation to build something compelling.

I mean, I could go on forever but I'll stop here. On my next post, I'll actually dive into individual games and pick them apart for your reading pleasure.
 
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Spoilers for No More Heroes 3 and some of Grasshoppers earlier works. Including Killer 7.

I'll defend the boss switcheroo for nearly half of the alien roster. I honestly don't know why people are surprised about this. Suda 51 is known for doing stuff like this all the time. In Killer 7, most of the people you're going after, you never face as actual bosses. They either die in a cut-scene by one of the seven, or somebody or something else kills them and they act as a replacement. Not to forget, that both of the previous No More Heroes games done this as well. Albeit, the first game did it at a smaller scale. The second game, most people familiar with his works knew they weren't going to face all 50 assassins.

I admit, that it's semi sucks that we could have missed out on some possible fights with the aliens, but most of the replacements are so good that it doesn't even matter.
 
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Gyrobot

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Honestly I saw it coming as well, your true enemy was the guy in charge and the only alien you fight proper beforehand would have turned everyone into Pop Team Epic death clouds. Everyone else has a reason to protect earth from annihilation too you know even if you cut them down
 

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Everyone else has a reason to protect Earth from annihilation too you know, even if you cut them down.


Kimmy Love (Howell) didn't give a shit about the Earth. All she cared about was her obsession with Travis. The only reason she killed Vanishing Point, was due to him trying kill her. After he killed her back up dancers. Kimmy wants no one to kill Travis, but her. Notorious killed Sniping Lee, because he's an actual part time hero that cares about the planet. Travis and him get along great. Destoryman only cared about taking over the world with his mass produced Destroymen and no one else (Notorious was on his target list too). All Henry wants to do his kill Travis. To the point where he does make that happen...twice. Once in the present, and permanently in the future, while teaming up with evil galactic aliens.

FU killed Paradox Bandit for the petty crime of sleeping too much, even though it was not his turn yet. FU killed Sonic Juice for failing to kill Travis and attempting to run after said human spared him.
 
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Hades

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Gaming hot take of the day.

Forcing everyone to get a battle.net account to play Overwatch is fucking stupid and puts me off playing it. I don't want this hassle. I just want to try some Overwatch matches after putting the game down for about a year. Why is the game bothering me about an online pass I have no intention of getting and blocking my playtime for the game I paid for?
 

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Gaming hot take of the day.

Forcing everyone to get a battle.net account to play Overwatch is fucking stupid and puts me off playing it. I don't want this hassle. I just want to try some Overwatch matches after putting the game down for about a year. Why is the game bothering me about an online pass I have no intention of getting and blocking my playtime for the game I paid for?
This is one of the many reasons why I don't bother with multiplayer first person shooters anymore. The fact that season online pass still exist and are arbitrarily there to make you pay more money.
 
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Gordon_4

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Gaming hot take of the day.

Forcing everyone to get a battle.net account to play Overwatch is fucking stupid and puts me off playing it. I don't want this hassle. I just want to try some Overwatch matches after putting the game down for about a year. Why is the game bothering me about an online pass I have no intention of getting and blocking my playtime for the game I paid for?
Uh, when have you NOT needed a BattleNet account to play Overwatch? It’s an Activision-Blizzard game; complaining about needing a BattleNet account is like complaining about needing a Steam account to play Counter Strike.
 
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Dirty Hipsters

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This is one of the many reasons why I don't bother with multiplayer first person shooters anymore. The fact that season pass still exist and are arbitrarily there to make you pay more money.
...Overwatch doesn't have a season pass and never has. Not sure what you're talking about.
 
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BrawlMan

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...Overwatch doesn't have a season pass and never has. Not sure what you're talking about.
Read this and check Hades post.

Gaming hot take of the day.

Forcing everyone to get a battle.net account to play Overwatch is fucking stupid and puts me off playing it. I don't want this hassle. I just want to try some Overwatch matches after putting the game down for about a year. Why is the game bothering me about an online pass I have no intention of getting and blocking my playtime for the game I paid for?
 

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Read this and check Hades post.
I still don't know what he's talking about. I play Overwatch pretty much every day, it hasn't really bothered me for anything.

The season pass idea doesn't even make sense, since all additional heroes and maps are free - the only thing you pay for besides the base game is cosmetics.
 

Dirty Hipsters

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Read this and check Hades post.
I'm pretty sure by "online pass" he just means a separate launcher. There isn't any kind of online pass or season pass for overwatch and there never has been.

Hell, an online pass doesn't even make any sense considering Overwatch is a multiplayer only title. What exactly would they gate behind an online pass?