Unpopular Opinions about Video Games

[Hentai-Semitism]

aren't you a fan of the series?

I finished DS2, DS3, ER and Sekiro. I liked them all a lot, but I wouldn't call myself a fan. I didn't finish DLCs for DS2 and DS3 because in my opinion they were made for REAL fans who wanted an extra challenge. I didn't enjoy constant cheap ambushes.

 

[Max Free]

Paradox Map-Games like Stellaris, Crusaders Kings, etc. are overdecorated Idle Games. You essentially just wait for number to be big enough to buy something that make numbers grow big faster. Thats it.

 

[The Ugly One]

They were read by the enthusiasts and especially those that had care and time put into them. The Elder Scrolls maps were brilliant.

Game companies still make that stuff, but since only <1% of the player base wants it, they just sell it to the people who actually want it. Buy the Collector's Edition and the Game Guide and whatever if you want all the swag.

The only reason not to have them is greed.

In a broad sense, the only reason a company doesn't give you their products for free is greed. But so what? The only reason I don't want to shell out money for a canvas map of Skyrim is greed.

I don't want to have to fish around the internet to look up something that I had in the manual. What does screen resolution and storage have to do with manuals?

Back when screen resolution was 320x240 and RAM was measured in kilobytes, you couldn't have much in the way of tooltips or in-game help. This started to change in the 2000s, as console memory went into the double-digit megabytes. Might not seem like a lot today, but a few hundred words might take a kilobyte or two. No big deal when you've got 32,768 kB of system memory.. Games in the good old days needed paper manuals because there was not enough memory in the machine to make text readily accessible, nor enough pixels on the screen to make it very readable. Strategy guide sales were killed by the internet, and game manuals became obsolete once machines got large enough to serve up help with a button press or mouseover.

 

[Hentai-Semitism]

Back when screen resolution was 320x240 and RAM was measured in kilobytes, you couldn't have much in the way of tooltips or in-game help. This started to change in the 2000s, as console memory went into the double-digit megabytes. Might not seem like a lot today, but a few hundred words might take a kilobyte or two. No big deal when you've got 32,768 kB of system memory.. Games in the good old days needed paper manuals because there was not enough memory in the machine to make text readily accessible, nor enough pixels on the screen to make it very readable. Strategy guide sales were killed by the internet, and game manuals became obsolete once machines got large enough to serve up help with a button press or mouseover.

When I played C64 games as a kid, some of them had "copy protection" and they'd ask you to type a specific word from the manual. For instance, you'd load the game (which could take up to a minute sometimes, even with a floppy drive) and you'd be greeted with a screen that said "enter the fifth word from page 16 of the manual". Cracked copies didn't have that.

 

[Theongogablogian]

Today I saw a family member playing a game called Dispatch. I thought it was a TV show at first, but it turned out to be a Telltale game. I honestly don’t get the hype. I tried The Walking Dead back then because everyone was talking about it, and the first episode was free. But after playing, I realized the choices were meaningless. Why do people waste their money on this?

 

[Point Man]

Why do people waste their money on this?

It's one of those occasional normie videogames for people who don't play/don't like videogames where they can play it so they can say "Now THIS is art!" or say they're a nerd because they "played" what is essentially an interactive movie.

 

[Theongogablogian]

It's one of those occasional normie videogames for people who don't play/don't like videogames where they can play it so they can say "Now THIS is art!" or say they're a nerd because they "played" what is essentially an interactive movie.

It feels like every game’s the same these days. Maybe getting old and just rotating the same five games isn’t the worst thing, lol.

 

[Fount of BadSpeak]

What you mention with Diablo, it's almost a carbon copy of what happened with Starcraft. We went from a frankly dark universe in Starcraft 1 and Broodwars, with an actually evil character in Kerrigan, to the Starcraft equivalent of a Marvel Movie (Including whitewashing Kerrigan's character through retcons to such an extent it's not even funny). It's pretty clear that sometime after releasing WoW, Blizzard lost both its balls and its talent.

SC2 really is not good. Even when it came out I didn't like it, but I recently replayed it, and holy shit it aged horribly and is truly just bad all around. It starts below average with the first installment, and gets much worse as it goes. Blizzard is a classic example of studios being skinsuits that rely on reputations built by white men who left the companies years, or even decades, before.

I tuned out of Starcraft 2 after Wings of Liberty and only know the cliff notes about Kerrigan becoming a retarded star god or something. It irked me enough that Blizzard wanted to rip you off by selling you the same game 3 times at full price, but doing a 180 on Brood War Raynor was too much:

Jim Raynor: Fenix! No!
Kerrigan: What are you worried about, Jim? He died the way all Protoss hope to: in combat.
Jim Raynor: He died because you betrayed him. How many more noble souls do you need to consume before you're satisfied? How many more innocent people have to die before you realize what you've become?
Kerrigan: You don't even know what you're talking about, Jim!
Jim Raynor: Don't I? I'll see you dead for this, Kerrigan! For Fenix, and all the others who got caught between you and your mad quest for power!
Kerrigan: Tough talk, Jimmy, but I don't think you have what it takes to be a killer.
Jim Raynor: It may not be tomorow, darlin', it may not even happen with an army at my back. But rest assured; I'm the man who's gonna kill you one day. I'll be seeing you.

Well Kerrigan was right and Fenix can go hang, I guess. F

The way Diablo IV treats its story is something that put me off Monster Hunter: Wilds's story, but that version is fucking mild compared to Blizzard slapping you over the head repeatedly with this shit.

Even better, Raynor murders his supposed old best friend to protect Kerrigan, who he swore to kill as punishment for all the evil she had committed, because vagina is perfect UwU. Not only does he not avenge Fenix, but he kills another friend to protect the woman who killed Fenix. You did yourself a favor. Not only is the story and lore obliterated, but the gameplay gets progressively worse as well.

Speaking of story, in the Heart of the Swarm, it really goes out of its way to try to pretend that Kerrigan doesn't remember being evil and it wasn't really her who did it, but then still has multiple missions of her slaughtering scores of innocent people for her revenge. But it will show her not slaughtering each and every single one of them, sometimes, which is supposed to redeem her... somehow? As if murdering 99 innocent people is fine but 100 innocent people is just too much. She lets a few ragtag survivors leave Char when she kills Warfield, a good man who was protecting innocents as much as he could. She allows some evacuations before attacking Mengsk's capital to slaughter everyone who gets in the way. However, she does slaughter every single Protoss colonist on that ice planet that were just minding their own business, and is totally fine with it. That's not even getting into the level where you infest tens of thousands of humans to use them as disposable shock troops against Dominion forces. Yet, consistently, the story wants us to pretend she is a righteous hero.

Oh, and it gets even worse when they bring back Fenix as a robot in the Protoss installment... Such shitty, nostalgia bait garbage that shows they had zero faith in their game by that point. I never touched the Nova cash grab DLC they shit out, but it looked like it was somehow even worse than everything that preceded it.

 

[Need for Sped]

Oh, and it gets even worse when they bring back Fenix as a robot in the Protoss installment... Such shitty, nostalgia bait garbage that shows they had zero faith in their game by that point. I never touched the Nova cash grab DLC they shit out, but it looked like it was somehow even worse than everything that preceded it.

Yeah, Jim Raynor conveniently forgetting about Fenix was absolute bullshit, but bringing Fenix from the dead (Who then literally decides to be someone else at the end of the game) just for nostalgia points was as close as you can get as pissing on the corpse of the original Starcraft without actually whipping it out and doing it. And while we're at it, they basically took everything unique that the Protoss had and neutered it in that game. The whole trilogy felt like the polar opposite of Starcraft.

 

[Max Free]

Oh, and it gets even worse when they bring back Fenix as a robot in the Protoss installment... Such shitty, nostalgia bait garbage that shows they had zero faith in their game by that point. I never touched the Nova cash grab DLC they shit out, but it looked like it was somehow even worse than everything that preceded it.

Ironic, I think the DLC was actually better than the rest of the game, exactly because it had nothing to do with the rest of the original SC story and the Secret-Ops style narrative was a better fit for the more personal storytelling Blizzard Strategy-games had since WCIII.

But yeah, SCII was not only a trainwreck, but also lazy. The entire Zerg backstory was retconned so they could make a carbon copy of the Orcs from WCIII, with the big ravaging antagonistic faction redeemed by removing it's "corruption" imposed on them by a big emo, returning back to more traditional/archaic values, which somehow "purifies" them, and remove anything unique about them. The right decision would have been never to reveal the Xel'Naga instead of making them benevolent Space-Cthulhus, especially since they were supposed to be all consumed by the Overmind. For all the built-up of what Protoss-Zerg-Hybrids would be able to do in SC1, they turned out to be big disappointments when they are easily defeated by a small horde of space marines. And don't even get me started about the writing and voice acting. We didn't even came close to something as eloquent as the Overmind. Making the most grotesque biological aberration speak like shaquespeare was genius, as it elegantly underlined the zerg to be more than just wild animals, and that it accumulated a great deal of knowledge over the course of it's lifespan.

 

[MembersSchoolPizza]

I recently picked up Just Cause 4 on a Steam sale for pennies.

I heard all the horror stories going in.

You know what?

It's not bad.

I'd actually be heretical and say it's a better game than Just Cause 3.

Don't get me wrong - It's deeply flawed. It's got some really frustrating technical glitches, the graphics are a... side-grade at best, the UI is an abomination. The characters are just not near as fun - I miss Mario! And the plot... Just Cause 3 was an 80s action movie, stupid and tongue and cheek funny in equal parts. JC4 is an early 2000s action movie... The humor is gone. It's just... bleh. The revamped tether system is dumb - the balloons are just stupid, for example. And the loss of the C4 charges is just a pure downgrade in terms of being able to be a destructive force of nature.

Sounds like I hate it, but... I kind of don't.

Because, hear me out here... JC3 kind of... wasn't much of a game. It was a power fantasy sandbox toy. You never had any real sense of danger - for almost the entire game, it was meaningfully impossible for the enemy to pose any sort of serious challenge. It was pretty easy to take out bases even protected by the TOW systems that were supposed to make them story-progression-gated, for example. If you actually got stuck on the ground for longer than it took to activate an objective switch, you were basically in a failure state... The intended playstyle was "pyscopathic demolition flying squirrel with ADHD". And as long as you could make that work, the game wasn't so much fun as it was... cathartic and relaxing, in a bizarre, hyperkinetic sort of way. The only time the game ever got "hard" was in the handful of story missions where they basically stuck you in a tiny enclosed room with tons of super soldiers, or those last couple of Airship DLC missions that were just annoying because they more or less forced you to wingsuit-dogfight, which just was not well done as a mechanic.

What I noticed though, with JC4? The ground combat is... fun again. It doesn't feel like a failure state. I like how the map feels dynamic - the constantly shifting front lines as you play the sort of token "strategy game" element. The world feels much more alive, while Medici felt like... basically static set dressing. If you wipe out a base, the enemy will rebuild it, eventually - you can even see helicopters shipping in repair parts. A nice touch.

Yeah, the escort missions are annoying. No question. But on the other hand, JC3 basically had one mission... "destroy the shit out of everything". Occasionally there would be very scripted missions that were, basically... Yeah, you got it, escort missions. That's not really a major downgrade. It's just that you don't have the "destroy everything" missions to take over cities and bases anymore. Which were never hard - long before the game was done, I'd get kind of bored of it. "Oh... Just another 5 towns to take over this province, the another 18 provinces to go... yay..."

The writing is... sort of the same. I miss the goofy buddy-action-movie 80s vibe, I really do. This Rico is just depressing and not as fun, nobody really jokes anymore. But on the other hand, at least it feels like the enemy you're facing is, well... a credible threat. Di Ravello was just a temper-tantrum throwing clown. For all the game's audio tapes made him out to be some sort of master strategist, he was... completely ineffectual.

I dunno. I guess... I just think the game got an unfair rap, because people wanted/expected more of JC3... just being an insane sandbox toy, not really a game. Whereas JC4 is more a successor to JC2.

 

[LORD IMPERATOR]

Today I saw a family member playing a game called Dispatch. I thought it was a TV show at first, but it turned out to be a Telltale game. I honestly don’t get the hype. I tried The Walking Dead back then because everyone was talking about it, and the first episode was free. But after playing, I realized the choices were meaningless. Why do people waste their money on this?

Because there was a fad in the late 2000s and early 2010s about turning video games into interactive cinematic stories. While that worked for games like Mass Effect 1-3, other games failed at it. Telltale had a mixed history with their Batman game being great while their Game of Thrones game wound up flopping despite early good reviews.

 

[Kharash]

Worst effect of piracy is that it encourages hate-playing games instead of hate-ignoring them

If the hate-playing kiwifarmers are any indication they'd just buy it instead(and many still do regardless)
It's always the same "I'm just playing it ironically guys, oh actually it's not THAT bad, it's a solid 6/10!"

 

[The Ugly One]

If the hate-playing kiwifarmers are any indication they'd just buy it instead(and many still do regardless)
It's always the same "I'm just playing it ironically guys, oh actually it's not THAT bad, it's a solid 6/10!"

"I would never pay the $19.99 sale price for this woke slop that is constantly shoving homosexuality and diversity in my face! No, I am spending hours and hours and hours of my life playing this game about homosexuality and diversity for free! Because I hate woke shit!"

 

[Hentai-Semitism]

If the hate-playing kiwifarmers are any indication they'd just buy it instead(and many still do regardless)
It's always the same "I'm just playing it ironically guys, oh actually it's not THAT bad, it's a solid 6/10!"

Hate-playing sounds like a made up concept, much like hate-fucking. The only thing I hate-watched was Grown Ups 2 (bottom of the barrel Adam Sandler "comedy"), and that was after drinking a few shots of vodka.

All that is different than watching a so-bad-it's-good movie such as The Room or Samurai Cop because you are aware that the creator didn't mean them to be bad. That can be really funny and entertaining.

 

[Green Kitbash]

I got one topical and current to a recent game series revival

Silent Hill 3 is an unnecessary continuation of Silent Hill 1. While its fine from a gameplay perspective, it lacks the story or thr characters of thr first 2. In the end it just feels like an epilogue to 1 without any of thr characters from 1. I personally didn't care about a single one of thr very sparse cast.

Sure it was a fine game, atmospheric. But nowhere near the first two and just feels like an attempt to annual-ize the series and it didn't work

 

[Hyper Vigilant Dumbass]

I think Final Fantasy II is good. I like the leveling system and I think putting two shields on guy so he blocks everything is fucking awesome.

 

[Scarthew]

I got one topical and current to a recent game series revival

Silent Hill 3 is an unnecessary continuation of Silent Hill 1. While its fine from a gameplay perspective, it lacks the story or thr characters of thr first 2. In the end it just feels like an epilogue to 1 without any of thr characters from 1. I personally didn't care about a single one of thr very sparse cast.

Sure it was a fine game, atmospheric. But nowhere near the first two and just feels like an attempt to annual-ize the series and it didn't work

Why should it have characters from 1? Dahlia, Kaufman, Lisa and eventually Harry are all dead. That only leaves Cybil who has no reason to be there. I'm glad we got Douglas instead of Cybil for that role.

 

[Green Kitbash]

Why should it have characters from 1? Dahlia, Kaufman, Lisa and eventually Harry are all dead. That only leaves Cybil who has no reason to be there. I'm glad we got Douglas instead of Cybil for that role.

That effectively is the core issue I have with even the story existing. Yes it continues Alessa's story but that was effectively wrapped up in 1. So the whole game has this vague through plot that halfway when someone is found dead its like "ok we get to finish the story from 1 now" when that story was already done. Like I dont think Cybil for instance should replace Douglas for instance, I just dont feel like anything in 3 matters to begin with

 

[Scarthew]

That effectively is the core issue I have with even the story existing. Yes it continues Alessa's story but that was effectively wrapped up in 1. So the whole game has this vague through plot that halfway when someone is found dead its like "ok we get to finish the story from 1 now" when that story was already done. Like I dont think Cybil for instance should replace Douglas for instance, I just dont feel like anything in 3 matters to begin with

But of course it matters, Cheryl is still in danger and grows as her own person and has to deal with the concequences of her birth.