Gaming hot takes?

I posted a comment on Reddit talking about how disappointed I am hearing that the AC set in Japan is going to be made by the Valhalla people and I got destroyed for it. Like I wanted Japan since brotherhood and now I get this? I don't like the newer games because they just don't respect your time and that's a bummer for me.

I agree. I'm also a bit of a completionist by nature so it's doubly as painful since I can't just do the main story...

I have gotten a bit better about it in the last few years to be fair. Though sometimes I relapse and realize I've wasted 80% of my free time that day doing mediocre side content.

I personally do enjoy long and open games. But Valhalla managed to go way too far even for me. It very noticeably came at the cost of quality, with many dull side quests. The map was actually too big. It needed to drop a region or two, because there was just soooo many regions.

Odyssey had the same issue. In fact, I found it worse there, because I recall I completed even less of that game.

The DLCs for all the AC games have at least been much tighter and a better example of a reasonable size.

You know this is a really good point and it’s why I really don’t care for open world single player games. I’ve tried to pick up RDR2 multiple times and I always just end up stopping after a day or two cause it’s not enough dopamine

This is a good one, I salute you! RDR2 is one of my favorite games of all time, I had to clutch my pearls for a minute there!

I feel dirty for upvoting your objectively wrong opinion, but you earned it!

Completely agreed. Seriously, if anyone genuinely feels like gaming has become stale, go play Hi-Fi Rush and Pizza Tower (both having come out this year).

AAA games are more interested in keeping you on a virtual engagement treadmill than simply being fun.

I've never played a military shooter, but Battle Bit is piquing my interest.

This is why Smash Bros is the goat.

Low barrier for entry but super high skill ceiling.

I've always wanted to get into fighting games but I never really have because of this exactly. It feels like a chore to learn all the combos and the fighting feels weird and stiff to me because of them.

I loved Final Fantasy Dissidia for this. Every character has the same basic controls, and the abilities are totally customizable. So I'd make general schemes the same across everyone.

Fighting games should not be QTE

Guilty Gear Strive and smash have these combos though, and just like street fighter they aren't required to do well at beginner levels(even at higher levels you can get by with basic bnb combos).

The main thing fighting games need to do better is teach new players, as it isn't clear what you should be learning as a beginner. That's probably why so many people think its combos they have to learn.

The other things you mentioned, “positioning, timing and improvisation” are all infinitely more important in every fighting game when compared to combos. Long complex combos don’t matter if you can’t land a hit.

If the only combo you know is a 3-hit combo that does 20% HP, and your opponent has a 15-hit combo that does 70% HP, then you just need to hit the opponent 5 times while avoiding getting hit 2 times. If your spacing, reactions, and adaptation are much better than your opponent’s, you can win consistently.

Of course there’s always gonna be different variables when it comes to stuff like specific game knowledge, but that’s usually not as much a skill issue as it is a knowledge check. In the end, stronger fundamentals will always reward you more in the long-run.

@simple @LeylaaLovee I think where we are now with fighting games is exactly where it should stay. Auto combos and modern controls make it so the bar to entry is super low, but they need to be scaled down so that they do less damage and the incentive should always be learn pure combos to get better. At the end of the day there's no interesting high level play if you can press a button three times and do 30% damage.

I think this take got ice-cold shortly after Windwaker released.

The issue is that game developers have been using this as a crutch to do less and still charge full-price. Even with Windwaker, I always found the art style was inappropriate for the tone the rest of the game tried to set. It really felt more like they were trying to save time and money than actually having something that serves that art. That style worked pretty well in the handheld games, but I just don't think it holds up as well as Twilight Princess on a big screen.

I enjoy the occasional 16-bit style indie game, but I'm not paying $60 or $70 for that. I love Supergiant games, and they all look amazing, but even they know that art style can only push the price so far. There's also value in a game that is realistic and not stylized, especially in military shooters and racing games.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, you have AAA games from big studios selling for full-price that have neither. Look at GameFreak's Switch games: terrible quality textures, uninspired lighting, bad draw distance, terrible FPS, and they literally cut to a black screen describing what your character does instead of animating anything. And the art style is just the most generic anime-style imaginable. It looks like Nintendo too the Mii system and just made some minor updates and used that to make human models. This may be a hot take, but I think the models in TotK and BotW are the same. The devs create some fancy clothes, hair, and accessories, but the actual models are bland. It's essentially the Mii system.

Graphics and art style are not mutually exclusive. It's fair to ask for both in a full-price game.

That island in Breath of the Wild though

Removes mask They were a glyphid all along!

I very highly disagree but to each their own, of course.

Same, couldn't find the fun in it

I think a big part of the hype is how in-tune with the fan base the devs are. It's just refreshing to feel like the devs are on your side. Rock and Stone.

Simon Tatham's puzzles are goated indeed

Bumped for Simon tathams puzzle pack.

Half the games in there I've marked as favorite. There's barely any better way to unwind after a day than a 60 point 'untangle' puzzle.

Exactly, the same goes for movies and tv and even books.

Don't like it? Stop. Move on to something else.

I started playing ac: origins last year, and as soon as I got the "Kill Animal" side missions I knew I wouldn't like the game. I made it to the second city and haven't played since

The Minesweeper implementation included in that is also miles ahead of the standard Microsoft one because instead of generating the grid randomly, it generates it in a way that guarantees you can always solve it without guessing, making it a pure logic puzzle.

I got bored after like 8 hours of looking for things to do before I just said "fuck it, I guess I'm killing Ganon." I don't know when I am meant to go find the Master Sword but I was able to get it without having a quest and just using my knowledge of Hyrule from past games ("sword in forest!") and I activated the 4 ancient machines; but then I couldn't find many side quests that weren't just fetch quests for things I already had in my posession.

TOTK actually has shit to do. I thought BOTW was a bit bare bones before, but given it was Nintendo's first go at it I just thought it was that. But TOTK makes BOTW look like an alpha build of a tech demo for TOTK.

BotW was the first Zelda game for me, and it was such a massive disappointment. It's just open world without any redeeming qualities, with every single mechanic existing just to support open world. Felt more like a sandbox than a game. It's fun for about 2-3 hours, but then I just got really bored

I did finish it, because hey I paid for it, but it was not really something too fun for most of the time

EDIT: And I'm still mildly salty that BotW got GOTY in a year we got Nier Automata and Persona 5

Zelda games straight up have a very mediocre story. And often nothing about their world building makes much sense either. They're definitely a series built only for fun gameplay. Everything else is just glue to hold the gameplay together.

Personally, I love the gameplay and exploration, but you're definitely right about the story and voice acting.

PS: dodging should be the same as jump (x). Lock on with ZL and point the movement stick to the side you wanna dodge to, the jump. If you pull the stick back, you'll do a backflip. Whether you want to jump back or to the side depends on the enemy attack (eg, do they swing horizonal or vertical?). If you dodge juuuust before the enemy attacks, you'll get a slow motion during which you're prompted to spam y to rapidly attack. Especially useful for tough foes like lynels.

There's shrines near the start of the game that teach you to dodge & flurry rush;

While locking onto an enemy, jump while moving to the side or backwards at the last second before an enemy attacks-- if the timing is done correctly, you can flurry rush. The trick is finding the timing for each enemy type, though you start to get a feel for it.

It's a grindy mechanic, but I really enjoyed filling out the compendium once you upgrade your Sheikah Slate-- taking pictures of things became the focus of the game for a while, and I'm glad that TOTK improved upon that.

It's a decent game but once I beat it I'll likely never play it again

And it's so ok that I have a hard time getting back to it after breaking for a few weeks

I killed Ganon and still had no idea how to actually do these things.

Just as a wild guess, it might be related to performance tuning on consoles. If you increase the width of the view frustrum, you're throwing more stuff on the screen.

I think if you compare it to games from the last 10 years, then yes.

But at the time it was miles ahead of everything else. Most RPG's were incredibly unfriendly to beginners, throwing paragraphs of text to read, spreadsheets of numbers to understand, incredibly unfair mechanics, making the player make decisions without understanding them, and legacy mechanics that traced their routes back to tabletop wargaming. The marketing for RPG's revolved around hyping up bigger numbers of systems, skills, weapons, armor, items, spells, and whatever else you can think of. You can still go back and have fun, but the ethos of a lot of RPG's was quantity over quality. They were very difficult to get into, and most RPG's kind of had the assumption that the player already knew how to play RPG's.

It may seem silly to say that Skyrim was a break from that. After all, it has radiant quests, tons of NPC's, a pretty big map, tons of dungeons, etc. But it streamlined a ton and made it accessible. The quantity of voice lines was incredible for the time, and reducing the reliance on text made couch gaming easier. The leveling system is incredibly intuitive and fun, and IMO the best I've seen before or since. A lot of systems exist to allow customization of either the roleplaying or mechanical experience, but most of those systems are optional. You can just bash through the game with the equipment you get in Helgen if you want.

The game isn't perfect, but when I see criticisms it's usually that people want to add more systems or more complexity. That's the kind of thing that always sounds great in an armchair thinking about it, but when you actually put it in a game the game usually ends up bloated and tedious. It's great to add mods later after a couple playthrough, but it's easy to overwhelm new players with things like a spell creation system.

Whenever I see people talking on the Internet about trying Skyrim for the first time, I see a lot of other players recommending to start with mods. I also see a lot of people saying they bounced off of Skyrim, and I think there's a correlation. I ran into similar experiences with Civ and Cities Skylines: it's tempting to add in tons of stuff to try to get the best experience possible, but sometimes it's better to start simple.

Skyrim has bugs, but most of them are either just visual, hilarious, or can be fixed by re-loading the area or the game.

It's not perfect, but overall I think it's fair to include Skyrim in the conversation for... Idk, top-20 ish games of all time.

Upvoted for providing one of the few real hot takes in this thread. I'm a huge MGS fan, but I can see why people wouldn't like it. MGS plays with realism a lot, all while also playing with ideas from Hollywood. It makes for a very strange mix.

The most fun I ever had with a MGS game was watching someone else play it.

I would probably like the MGS games if they didn’t have 2 hour cutscenes, but I just can’t handle that.

Edit: Also, I probably have permanent damage from how much I rolled my eyes when I saw that PlayStation magazine cover for MGS2 saying “The Greatest Game Ever Made?!”

Well, the problem is you've played the worst MGS games. 5 is the most realistic, and it's worse for it. It's also fairly early chronologically, so it doesn't do as many interesting things. The best stuff it does are references to great things that come in other games. Open worlds just generally make games worse. They slow everything down because they make you travel across space that does nothing.

4 is probably the most fun game, 3 is probably the best game, and 2 is probably the most interesting game. 3 is getting a remake (it's a fan favorite and chronologically the first game, I'm not sure which is the reason for it being the first remake), but who knows if it'll be good.

This reminds me of a fake quote attributed to Hideo Kojima:

It says "Try not to cum", but the point of the game is obviously to cum. So yes, I would call that bad game design.

My dream is to make one of those. One day...

Hubie Pop

This is tangentially related to inventory management, encumbrance, and other mechanics that often come across as tedious. Does it make sense that the character is sitting down and taking a while to decide how much & which stuff to carry, which gems to socket, which items to upgrade? How much is the game supposed to be about resource management vs. about swinging swords at skeletons or solving puzzles?

If you want a game that not only allows you to break it but encourages it and it doesn't ruin the fun, try Noita. Very unforgiving and secretive. It's kinda like a roguelike where the thing you're building up between plays is knowledge of how the game works. Sometimes you'll find an ability combination that makes you a god, other times you'll find one that kills you before you understand the implications of what you're trying to do.

It's fun but just be aware that any specific fun you start to have will be fleeting, but you'll find other kinds of fun while chasing that last one.

I'm okay with those kinda things if they're not limited. Eg, if they're a skill and you can get many skills. But if it's like FFXVI, where you have only 3 accessory slots and most accessories are borderline useless, then I agree that they're just disappointing. I want to feel like equipment (or whatever) is impactful. I want it to be able to wildly change up my strategy.

I love when games have stuff like wildly different weapon types or the likes, such that you can make so many different kinds of builds. Far more fun and replayable than the games where there's basically only one way to play and nothing will significantly change it.

Go back to your lawn, Morrowboomer.

I like Morrowind, but I think you should consider Oblivion's writing. No it's not perfect, the main story is absolutely ass but everything else? Oblivion Theifs Guild and Dark Brotherhood absolutely SHIT on the Morang Tong. The gray fox, Lucienne, Lex, just absolutely insane! Not as immersive as Morrowind, however I'd say that the blend between the open world and the linear story is just paved perfectly in some of the Oblivion's quests

Yeah but modded skyrim