Gaming hot takes?
Gaming hot takes?
Any weird/controversial opinions? I'll start. Before the remake, the best version of Resident Evil 4 was the Wii version. The Wiimote controls old Resi's tank controls better than any other controller at the time. The PC version had a bunch of little bugs and detractors that the Wii version just doesn't have.
I'll extend this by saying that the Wiimote is actually pretty damn good for shooters, and particularly good for accessibility. Not having to cramp up my hands to press buttons is awesome for having arthritis. Aiming with the Wiimote and moving with the nunchuck just feel really natural, you barely have to move your fingers for anything.
Red Dead Redemption 2 isn’t a good game. Everything is ridiculously time consuming, buggy, and slow for no reason. Painstaking attention to detail on insane things nobody will ever see or care to look at (like horse balls shrinking in cold weather) is not a good enough reason to be considered a good game.
I always hated complex combo systems in fighting games like Tekken and Street Fighter. Fighting games shouldn't be about being able to input 50 super precise key combinations in the span of 1.5 seconds. It should be about positioning, timing, improvisation... Guilty gear strive and super smash bros is proof of this. Every game that gatekeeps new players for not memorizing the built-in combo that takes 60% of your opponent's HP feels like it's still stuck in the 90's arcade game era. Most fighting game series refuse to move forward. There, I've said it.
People who get video game burnout or say gaming is dead or whatever are victims of AAA marketing.
Most of the time I see posts like this they complain that they bought all the newest games with great reviews and aren't having any fun. Normally it's Sony games and other cinematic experience kind of games. Or they are games that they put 100's of hours into. They are doing the same stuff over and over and getting bored.
Unfortunately critics care more about production values and polish than novel game mechanics. Plenty of interesting games get overlooked due to being a little weird or not fitting in modern game conventions. If you only play the big budget AAA stuff you are going to get burnt out because they all copy each other trying to be the next "big game". If you play games that get bad reviews, have weird mechanics, or do something different you won't get burnt out. I like to recommend the Gravity Rush games to people who have a playstation and are burnt out on the "cinematic" games. They typically have never heard of it and end up having a blast with them. Makes me sad when I see people still buying games based on metacrtic scores. They miss out on so much.
It's not a super-hot take, but art style >>>>> graphics when it comes to "beautiful" looking games. There are games coming out today that can run on a toaster that look far better than many AAA titles with all the fancy lighting effects and ray tracing that require you to dump 4-digit sums into a monster gaming PC to fully enjoy, all due to how the smaller games masterfully handle their art design.
Games are for fun. If you're not having fun, stop playing. Don't spend effort on griping about the game; just stop playing and do something else. Do not go on the game forum and spend hours arguing about whether the game started sucking with the last release or two years ago. Just stop playing and do something else with your time & energy. Stick a potato in the ground and see what happens.
Software quality varies widely in online games; even for "simple" games such as abstract strategy board games. One of the highest-quality pieces of game software is lichess. Most board-game software, even for other abstract strategy games like Go, absolutely sucks compared to lichess. The best Go client is KGS; it's pretty good, but it's no lichess.
Regarding CCGs: Hearthstone is terrible. Magic Arena is okay. Eternal is fine but I stopped playing it when Magic Arena released for Android. Mythgard is pretty neat. Runeterra is probably okay if you're already into the League/Arcane characters.
Paying for games is fine, but consider your opportunity cost in both money and time. ("Opportunity cost" is an economist's way of asking, "What else could you be doing with this money and time?") Maybe you just want to go see a movie instead. Or go stick a potato in the ground and see what happens.
Simon Tatham's Portable Puzzle Collection is an astonishingly good collection of puzzle games that runs on pretty much any computer or device you use. You can install it for free on your phone. It's all open source, no ads, no bullshit, just puzzle games.
If the game you're paying for is pissing you off, consider whether you're paying for the service of being pissed off. Maybe just stop doing that?
I'm currently playing through Breath of the Wild for the first time and I don't think it's an amazing game. I think it's decent and fun enough, but it has a lot of grindy BS and aimless wandering, plus a story that is a rehash of literally every Zelda game every made, but now with 100% more open world.
Seriously how many times are we going to beat Ganon? And good God the voice acting is cringe.
Also, I just freed the second divine beast and I still have no idea how to dodge or flurry rush.
Souls-like games aren't difficult, they just show you how impatient the average player is. Very rarely do those games actually challenge your ability or technical skill, and instead they just test your patience with annoyingly-defensive enemy behavior that encourages impatient players into aggressive, risky gameplay.
People spend way to much time complaining about how games are not perfect in their eyes, instead of taking it at face value. They get literally outraged when a game doesn't function exactly how they want, instead of finding a game they actually enjoy.
Back in the day we'd just pick whatever looked cool at the store and hoped it was decent. People have the right to complain, but its gotten out of hand and modern gamers are whiney as all hell.
Edit: just want to clarify, I'm mainly refer to post launch and established games. If a game promises somthing and is released half baked, 100% people are in the right to complain.
Most AAA games are boring. All the big games from the last few years are just plain boring. They found a formula back in the 2000's that they never expanded upon or really changed in any way shape or form. The focus is on visuals and story (and I gotta say, the stories are pretty fucking cringe a lot of the time unless you're a 13 year old) or skinnerboxes and psycho tricks to keep you addicted and the gameplay remains the same stale shit it's been for over 20 years. I feel like AAA games are games for people who don't play games, because the actual game part is always the worst part about them.
Hideo Kojima's games are bad.
For context, when I was 11 my friend told me that MGS was incredible, so I went to his house to play it. It was fucking tedious. I spent hours shuffling around grey corridors, interspersed with painfully long dialog and cut scenes that were mostly about nothing.
Then, years later I decided to go back to MGS V and give the series another try. I had the exact same reaction to it as the original game. Endless waffle about characters and situations that meant nothing to me, uninspired modern military aesthetics, and boring locations.
They were clearly very well-made games, and I appreciate that people have massive regard for them. I just don't like them at all.
Third-person shooters suck. The character model gets in the way of seeing and I don't need to see the super tacticool costumes. And the more decent third-person shooters switch to first-person for aiming down the sights anyway.
Cards in video games suck. Unless it's simulating a real card game. Otherwise we don't need powerup cards and such, use some other mechanic. My level 89 death knight doesn't need to be pulling cards out of his pockets.
Motion blur, vignetting, depth of field, lens flare, none of these should be the default. Show me the game world clearly.
@LeylaaLovee When you play a long game (i.e. 60+ hours) all the way through, it's hard to tell how much of it was genuine enjoyment over some kind of weird sunk cost situation.
Kind of like watching a show that goes on for a ton of seasons. You get into a habit and despite inconsistent quality, you keep going back and you're not sure why, especially after the really bad parts.
It's why I understand *some* of the 100+ hour playtime negative reviews, & am skeptical of positive ones.
Weapons, armor, equipment, upgrades, etc. in single-player games that have effects that have tradeoffs or very niche use-cases are unfun. I can understand it in multiplayer competitive games where balance is important, but effects like “provides 20% more defense versus <specific enemy type>” or “increases range, but decreases damage” just deflate me when I get them in games. If I’m spending time playing a game, I want to earn things that make me objectively better as I progress. Developers of modern games seem waaay to preoccupied with holding back and not allowing things to be “broken” in games where it just doesn’t matter.
Headbobbing doesn't help with immersion but leads to me wanting to puke violently. Looking at you, east European first person games. At least let me turn it off, then we're cool.
Exclusives can be beneficial. By exclusives, I don't mean Sony/Microsoft pay the developer for exclusivity, that sucks. What I'm referring to is a developer picking a platform and developing a game using that platforms full potential. Games like Zelda, Crash Bandicoot, God Of War, Last Of Us all took full potential of their consoles architecture and brought pretty good games.
VHS/TV static, scanlines, and tracking filters are obnoxious and developers need to stop using them. You can't just slap a shit filter over bad graphics and be like "It's the 80s/90s!"
I get the aesthetic and that a lot of developers are pandering to my generation, but it's become the hallmark of shit games for me. Do something innovative.
The popularity of skill based matchmaking decimated game design that allows people of different skill levels to play together and progress in a multiplayer setting. Most games actually punish you for playing with better players on your team instead of allowing you to help somehow without being a liability. And when you are, the game is no longer winnable and people get extremely pissed off ensuing you won't get to play with them again.
My true hot take is that despite all the moaning in gaming communities about the death of gaming, we're in pretty much the golden age of gaming. There's so many good games constantly coming out that I haven't been able to play nearly as much of them as I'd like to and my backlog keeps growing.
Sometimes I'll notice that I keep postponing some indie game that I put on my list because it looked like a lot of fun over some newer indie and realize that I'll maybe never end up reaching that far down in my backlog that I'll actually play it.
Breath of the Wild is merely okay.
It's kind of tedious, the weapon durability system is annoying, and the visuals are held back by the Switch's weak specs.
Nintendo games are great FIRST games.
If Zelda is the first action RPG you ever played, it will forever hold a warm spot in your heart.
Same for Smash Brothers and fighting games, Mario Kart and racing games, or Pokemon and turn based RPGs.
But if you aren't 10 years old or have played literally any other games, they really aren't very good.
After the first Halo came out, every damn game was a FPS. I don't mind FPS games, but it's not all I ever want to play.
It was around then I was basically forced to start playing more indie games, and now I play them almost exclusively. The AAA space is just 3 games in a trenchcoat (and I've already played those 3).
Most audio in video games is irrelevant at best and irritating at worst (especially for retro games). I listen to podcasts over 95% of the games I play and don't feel like I'm missing much. In fact, the multitasking aspect of it makes it feel like a more efficient use of time than just keeping the game audio on.
There are exceptions to this when I know there's important audio cues in gameplay. Admittedly, I don't care much at all for narratives in games either, so i know I'm probably in the minority with this take.
If your game has constant Chromatic Aberration, I respect you less as designer. I don't understand how you have a job making games look good, and then ruin it with CA. And if I have to rate those games, CA is an automatic full point out of 10 reduction.
If it's a temporary effect during dreams or drug sequences, sure, that's okay. I don't like it but I get it. But during normal gameplay, absolutely not. It makes my eyes water and makes the game look just plain worse.
And it's everywhere. I just want this trend to end, please.
Knockdowns/stuns/silences/freezes on the player, and immunities that enemies have, are bad game design because they all have the same issue: they remove player choice.
The issue with knockdowns/stuns/freezes is that they remove the player's ability to do anything, at least how they work in most games. They make you take a timeout, essentially, and that's very unfun for the player. Essentially, it's removing your choice of what to do in the moment. You can't react, you can't flee, you can't fight, you just get to sit and wait or maybe press a button repeatedly just to wait a bit less. It is terrible game design that is wholly uninteresting, and it needs to be telegraphed nearly as hard as an instant-death move to be anything other than completely bad.
Silences do much the same thing in that they limit the player's ability to react and use their cool tools you just gave them. It's like handing a lumberjack a chainsaw and then saying "cool, now don't use it". It's not as bad as a stun, but it's pretty close.
Immunities for enemies are similar in that they limit player choice. You wanted to use cool X thing? Too bad, you literally can't win with that method. Resistances are fine (within reason, doing 1 damage is no different from 0 damage in a lot of games) because they allow a sufficiently-skilled player to still use a method they like (ideally), but immunities do nothing but kill build variety.
We don't need a new switch or any stronger gaming hardware at all. There are games 10 or maybe even 20 years old at this point who nail realism. Once I'm in the flow of the game, I wouldn't rate e.g., Dark Souls 1 visuals below Eldenring despite their ~10 year gap. So I'd prefer not spending on a new console every so often.
More recently, I couldn't tell you the difference between a PS4 and a PS5 release without a side-by-side comparison. Maybe in loading times, but a PS4 with an SSD would have done the job. Once again, I won't spend on a PS5 for as long as possible.
Lastly, without this focus on graphics, development time and cost probably wouldn't be so ridicolulous as it is today.
Mine? Mystic Quest was fine. It was a fine game. Was it amazing? No. Easy as heck but the charm and personality of the game is just so great. The music slaps, the world is fun even if it is restricted to linear paths. People treat it like it's the most brazen insult to JRPGs. It's just not true. It's a perfectly average game that is a fun beat-it-in-a-day game.
Nintendo needs to release old-school versions of Mario, Zelda, and Metroid again, maybe hiring out an indie developer like Sega did for Sonic.
Mario Kart is not a fun casual party game, because it rewards skilled metagame play way higher than racing skill.
While valid game design, it means new players will just be crushed by bullshit and not know how to improve by just playing better at the game in front of them.
I fond Uncharted original trilogy extremely boring and repetitive. I also dislike TLoU for many reasons. I understand why most people love them, but I just can't
Resident Evil 6 is one of the best games in the franchise. It's definitely the best out the 4-5-6 era. It's huge, has many, many hours of gameplay due to the three different campaigns. The monsters are fun, even if they do have guns, and the bosses are the wild and insane kind of Resident Evil content I'm in it for. It has all those romantic overtones between Chris and Piers. I'd call it a must play.
A lot of multiplayer games are made unplayable for newcomers because they'll be instantly slayed by a minority of players that revel in the killing of everyone they meet even though it's not the focus of the game.
Even though there's potential for cooperation, it almost never happens. You'll be quickly massacred by space pirates, roaming bandits, or whatever that have amassed high end weapons and ressources.
When I played RE4 on the Wii, I felt that controllers were a thing of the past and we entered a new era of gaming - the wiimotes were just amazing for RE4 - problem was it was the only game I played that really brought the controls to the next level. Somehow humanity fell back into the controllers - real shame honestly, but I'm glad I got to experience that next level of awesome I have yet to experience since
People love to hate on motion controls, but when implemented well, they are actually the best way to play shooters. Also without motion controls VR would have never gotten to where it is now.
Silent Hill: The Room is just as good as the first 3 games.
Indie is the new AAA. I think some people were saying this even back when most indie games were just 16-bit style sidescrollers. But now small teams and even individual developers are giving us stuff that looks good, plays good, and is more fun than a lot of AAA games out there, and it comes with a lot of variety too. I think that AAA games are going to become micro-transacriom factories. Once Nintendo starts putting loot boxes into their games it's over for AAA.
Here's another one. I do not care about 60fps unless the game looks for input every frame. Not even a little bit. I would not have known how many frames Tears of the Kingdom was running on if no one said it in the reviews, and honestly I don't even really see the difference most of the time.
And a bonus: reamking old games is a good thing. Re-releasing is fine i guess, but enhancing character models, textures, lighting, addressing glitches and stuff that made the original less fun, and maybe giving some bonus content is a great idea. Companies like Nintendo need to stop cracking down on people emulating/modding/making fan enhancements of their old games and start making their own upgraded versions. Most people who play HD mods/remakes of their games would be happy to pay to buy a competent remake/remaster. I play Render96 for Mario 64 and own multiple copies of the game. Would I buy and HD remake anyway? Absolutely.
Most popular survival games (Minecraft, Valheim, Raft, Ark) are dull, unimaginative experiences that disrespect your time. I truly don't get the appeal, other than if you're a terminally online kid with nothing else going on. They promise this world of near-eternal fun and imagination, and then forget to develop fun mechanics, write a compelling story to give context to what you're doing, give you goals, teach you how to play...
Raft is probably the worst example I can think of. What a crock of shit that game was. Zero tutorial, a terrible grind. Just lazy. You can softlock yourself in the first 30 minutes if you jump onto an island and let your raft drift away, because you can't build a new raft, and all the game's resources spawn around it for no good reason. The game has a Very Positive rating on Steam with over 200,000 reviews...
There are some obvious exceptions. Terraria is still so charming, and does away with the hunger/thirst/durability trappings of other survivals. I didn't get too far into Subnautica, but it's clearly a fresh idea and has an ambitious story. And y'know... I can't be too hard on Minecraft, it's iconic.
But the rest is just hollow and soul-crushing and in most cases unfinished. They're punishing time-sinks disguised as a "world where you can do anything," and the fact that so many go to bat for them really makes me grieve for people's taste in games.
Hot take over... Woof, I need to lie down...
Interested to see how hot this take actually is but... The Nintendo switch is the best console ever made. As a lifelong Nintendo fan boy (Nes, right the way through) I may be a little biased but I have also owned various PS/Xbox and I don't think I've spent as much time on any console as the Switch. Being locked inside for a few years during the pandemic helped, but even a year or so after that I'm still playing. It helps that Breath of the wild is maybe one of the best games ever made, and Tears of the Kingdom is, so far, an incredible sequel. But also playing Overcooked with my wife and more recently Mario Kart (a personal "couples goal" of mine I never thought would happen) has filled so many lazy Sundays with hours of gaming joy.
Nintendo should have flopped years ago, but so many people shovel out cash for no other reason than 'it's Nintendo!'. No, you don't need every 'version' of the Switch or every color of joycon.
The Switch is a disappointment. The hardware is purposely under clocked because of the did a 'Pro' that ran at full speed it would really shine a light that in it's current spec, it's barely a 720p device. The OS is embarrassingly not done.
Nintendo hates it's customers. Loves to sue because you emulated a game you can't buy. Did you make a YouTube video and the games music played, that's their video now! Here's a crappy subscription were going to tie services to, but cloud saves... Nah. Discounts... Ha, no. (Meanwhile, Stream exists). Oh and they'll fight tooth and nail to not have to do warranty work (joycon drift for example).
Far less of the first party games are actually good. And any game that's multiplatform is better on anything that's not a Nintendo device. BotW was at best a 7/10, but the zealot fans sent death threats because it didn't get a perfect score. And the latest entry, looks like they yet again couldn't come up with real content so they did the classic fallback of 'have the player make their own fun'.
Oh and the Pokemon games are garbage. Every main line game since going 3d has been shit and a waste of money. There been no actual development, it's the same white bread game it's been since the 90s. Sorry, the older games were better, they had villains and rivals. Now it's what, disgruntled emo kids and an overly attached forced friend.
Frequent deep game sales are disrespectful to the customers because you either need to time your purchases or pay way more than the game "actually" sells for, and the gamer attitude of "I only buy games on sale" is both enabling this and disrespectful to game developers who charge a reasonable amount for their game.
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I strongly dislike open-world games and prefer denser, hub-world designs. Open-world designs do not immerse me. They feel like busy work.
WoW is overrated.
I don't like Half-Life, even though I appreciate that it has an important place in gaming history.
Witcher 2 was more fun than Witcher 3. There, I said it.
Idk, just something about the super clunky controls and dated graphics (I played it about 4 years ago) made it extremely lovable. Witcher 3 had so much to do that I never got fully into the main story line. I'm probably an idiot though.
Handheld gaming is better than console or PC gaming.
Gaming has and will continue on a downhill trend for years to come because 'gamers' are ignorant slobbering idiots that happily consume any diarrhea that the corps shieeet out onto their plate because their standards are so gawddamn low that they defend and buy literally any piece of SHIT game their favorite mega corp plops out for them.
Oh, and every major company has been infiltrated by non-gamers who want to force their views and politics into them so they can propagandize in video games to the masses & achieve higher ESG scores for their black*ock corporate overlords.