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.
People have no right to complain about wanting more Team Fortress 2 updates and should be grateful that it’s even still being supported when very few developers would keep up with a 15+ year old game.
Ive been playing modded skyrim. Took me a long time just to learn how to properly mod skyrim, and even then, the balancing was tedious. But I got there, and it plays well.
Haha. All lewd games are weird at times. I can appreciate how it’s one of those games (nsfw or otherwise) that has had a surprising amount of hours put into expansion/enhancement over the years in the same way that Dwarf Fortress, or Factorio have. I haven’t delved into it extensively myself. Also like DF and Factorio, it’s systems are surprisingly deep and complex. XD
I stand by the theory that the ending/endings got leaked late in development (having read it, it was a great set of unique endings), and rather than release something that was already spoiled a higher up had a freak-out and told them to make something different, they ended up with the color swap nonsense.
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.
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.
I soooo strongly agree about the audio. I regularly hear people talking about how good a game’s soundtrack is, but most games don’t stand out at all where soundtrack is concerned. I can list on one hand how many games have had songs so iconic that I can remember them. That’s not to say I don’t care for the audio. I recognize a lot of the audio is fantastic and feels just so natural that I don’t even notice it as a stand alone piece, but an intractable part of a scene. But I certainly am not gonna go listen to most games soundtracks.
Persona 4 - that town/school theme is insanely catchy and burnt into my head. I also can recall the title theme being so good I’d always let it play in full when I started the game.
Persona 5 - tons of absolute bangers. Rivers in the Desert is perhaps my single favourite piece of video game music ever. I also love the city theme (I forget the title, “I’m a shape shifter, at Poe’s mascarade”).
Weirdly enough, FFXIII-2 - I specifically recall how good Noah’s theme is. It’s this somber piece that plays in a dead world setting and is just haunting.
There might be some others I can’t remember. But my point is that most game music is not nearly memorable enough that I can even draw it to mind. Let alone have it caught in my head or be able to recognize it later. Even for games I’ve played a ton of, you could probably play something and I wouldn’t recognize it.
But I was talking about music. Non music? Ugh, that’s usually worse. My biggest dislike is menu blips. You know, where every time you move the cursor in a menu, it makes a chime noise. In a lot of older games, I find it’s so bad that I refuse to play the game with sound on.
(Side note: I’m told that Fallout’s music is great, but I’m embarrassed to say I’ve almost never listened to it, in part because IIRC, the radio feature where all the good stuff can be heard is actually audible to enemies, making it incompatible with stealth.)
Paradox Interactive is eventually going to release so many DLC that they eventually collapse inward from their own gravity and implode, taking the company’s future with them.
That isn’t a hot take though, everyone and their mother makes jokes about how many DLC there is for Paradox Interactive games.
Here’s the real hot take -> I don’t mind the amount of DLC on Paradox Interactive games. Every game of their I’ve played was really good on its own, and I only buy any DLC after I’ve poured tens of hours into the main game, usually not because I feel like anything was lacking from the main game, but just because I want an excuse to keep playing it. So for all I care, they can keep making all the DLC they want if the base games keep being this good.
I guess you can spend a lot of money if you buy them on release, but I personally never do. And both their games and the DLCs pack are always on some sale. I’m pretty sure I bought Stellaris for like 10 euros and eventually bought a bunch of its DLC in some DLC pack for another 10 euros. The same for Cities Skylines basically. 20 euros for the amount of fun I took out of those games is hardly a lot.
It probably works out about the same as buying a subscription for a game, which many do for lots of games. I still think it’s egregious, but then again I own all Stellaris DLC, so…
I just bought Stellaris utopia dlc, despite not being able to tell you if the game I’m looking at it galactic civilizations 3, Stellaris or endless space 2 (I own all 3, I will play one of them some day). When I do play one of them I’d like it to be an enjoyable situation, which I’ve heard Stellaris needs utopia to be.
I’m fine with paying money as long as what I’m getting for it is commensurate to what I’m paying. I don’t think that Paradox is a particularly bad actor there (not the best, either). I mean, the DLC model permits funding production of more stuff for a game that one likes in a direction that one would like.
There are a number of games where DLC is sold by publishers at vastly higher prices than the content in the base game, though, and where the base game is kind of indadequate on its own. That is something that I’m not really enthusiastic about.
True. This is why I don’t play subscription based games either, and usually buy my triple As several years after they release, and on sale. I suppose I’m a big fan of getting a lot of value for my money.
Ive got collective thousands of hours in paradox titles. The good dlcs (and there are trash ones I haven’t bought) adds dozens of hours of playtime. They also keep the mod community active which adds hundreds more.
It seems expensive but 10-20 bucks every few months is reasonable to me.
My bigger issue is some of them are starting to feel very paytowin with the feature/power creep (compare vanilla Russia/Ottomans in EUIV to dlc versions for an example)
It’s a game I like and it gets more and more stuff. The only times games keep adding more things to itself is either a very infrequent constant subscription fee, or more frequent DLCs. There’s only so much you can do off the sales of the base game.
Honestly whenever I see a game on sale for <$20 and I open it only to see 5+ DLCs that increase the price, I just close the page and move on without even bothering to research whether or not I should buy the DLCs. Fuck that mess.
My hot take: Skyrim is the most overrated game of all time. Not bad, but overrated. My phone hardcrashed while I typed out the reasons why I think so, so I won‘t anger the gaming gods further this time.
Skyrim is definitely my comfort food. Along with Fallout. I can replay those games like nothing else, just like how I can eat mac n cheese damn near every day and never get sick of it!
Agreed. To me the comment from op sounded like “pizza is overrated” which is weird cause it’s not like pizza is rated incredibly highly, it’s just that even bad pizza is pretty good
Open-world action RPGs? Elden Ring for instance, or modern Zelda games. 3D Soul-likes if you want to stretch the definition. I‘d go as far as to say it’s my favorite genre.
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.
IMO Final Fantasy is not good. I’ve tried playing several of the games but every time the story is so cliche and overly complicated. I’ve been told “oh just try a different one. This version is better!” If I have to try that hard to enjoy a franchise it’s just not for me.
Final fantasy is a really weird series. Every game is different and every fan has their own opinion of which games are good and why, or what’s important in a final fantasy game.
When people tell me that the story is what’s most important in a Final Fantasy game, I know they probably started with 7 or later. I like the parts where you customize your party and explore and have battles and make decisions and solve puzzles and all that video game shit. Yes, the stories enhance the game, but the story was never meant to be the entire game: But after 7, a whole bunch of new fans were like “there’s this new genre of games where the whole point is to watch cut scenes and read a lot of dialogue”, and the games have changed to accommodate that.
I guess my point is maybe try an earlier game (probably 4, 5, or 6) that has better gameplay, and you can get through the dialogue faster without having to watch all the slow animations of characters putting their hands behind their head.
I mean, how many other games were tackling climate change, imperialism, genocide, and deindustrialization in a single game in 1998. I’d say some of the story beats can be cliche in FF, but the stories are pretty unique. Unique AND over-complicated.
That said, I live Final Fantasy. I’ve played most of them. I have never really liked the combat in any of them. Not the real time or turn based combat. It feels tedious, and the rock paper scissors mechanics get tiring after a while. I still replay them way too often,
While I’m a huge fangirl of the series, they are blatantly “JPRGy” and are always very full of the numerous JRPG tropes, which can definitely give a cliched feeling.
Admittedly, overly complicated isn’t a way I’d describe most of the games, but that definitely fits many of the more recent entries (especially 16). IMO, 7-10 and 12 are the peak Final Fantasy games. My personal favourites being 9 and 10. And even they have some cringe moments that I pretend don’t exist lol (for 9, everything involving Quina or Eiko; for 10, stuff like most of the outfits and the utterly bizarre laughing scene).
The sleepy plot-twist at the end could have only been imagined as good in a dream. It felt so lazy and uninspired I didn’t even bother giving X-2 a try.
BUT FFIX and Tactics: War of the Lions are definitely the best ones.
Did War of the Lions fix the game’s balance? I loved the original Tactics, but wow that game was whack where balance is concerned. You could go from utter broken characters being unbeatably strong to being soft locked if you only had one save because some battle was so hard.
I didn’t really feel the story was much. I’m struggling to remember it at all! But damn the gameplay was really something.
That’s true, but I don’t think that makes it worth playing these days unless you’re curious to see how things have evolved. You’ll find better written stories and more interesting features in pretty much any modern RPG.
Gaming has been actually dead for almost 10 years.
Occasionally the body twitches, but virtually all of my purchases in the last long time are just catching up with all the great things created before the collapse.
When the western Roman empire fell, it was the Germanic people in the wilderness who came in to fill the vacuum, bringing new ideas and new vitality to what was a stagnant slave society (which is why it collapsed in the first place). In the same way, indie game developers are the ones bringing new ideas and vigor from the hinterlands. In one sense, the fact that indies are hitting so hard only proves that the industry has mostly collapsed.
If we consider the golden age of video games to be between 2007 and 2013, a lot of the stuff that caused that era to be so extraordinary was companies taking risks and succeeding at making something people had never seen before. Part of the fall from there was that companies stopped taking risks because they found massively successful formulas. Another part of the fall was companies realizing that video games could have a 10 year lifecycle. That meant that video games became an investment that had a far longer window for success or failure so the successes would pay off far longer and the failures would hurt that much worse, so staying with established formulas and making things more vanilla paid off more than taking risks.
Valve did a lot of smart things in focus testing and sanding off rough edges back when there were some really bad examples of rough edges breaking good games, but eventually everyone was sanding so much that everything was a fisher price toy.
If the formulas were so successful, everyone would be doing the same thing. I’d argue that Golden Age of Video Games is more so now than the far past. It’s an Age where anyone can make a video game and be recognized as being among the greatest games of all times.
Also, companies definitely take risks. They take a lot of risks, it’s just that a lot of those risks don’t necessarily play out and we never really hear about it. If you only focus on the largest companies putting their entire company on the line, then that company wouldn’t have been so successful in the past anyways. Risk doesn’t make a game good and honestly, with stuff like Game Pass these days, developers are way more likely to make riskier games when they don’t need to make a return on that game to actually keep going. For instance, Pentiment by Obsidian, in their own words, would have never been a thing if things were as they were in the early 2010s.
Latest twitches for me: Dave the Diver and Rogue Legacy 2. Incredible games.
Many stellar games also go unnoticed. The Forgotten City didn’t get nearly the amount of love it deserves. The Hex is basically an unknown game, overshadowed by the same dev’s excellent Inscryption.
…I loved Inscryption… but I found myself walking away from The Hex loving it EVEN MORE. If anyone is interested, go in blind. Ignore the graphics, they’ll make sense. Playing Pony Island first isn’t necessary, but it’s two hours long and does make the experience even better.
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.
What about simple graphics that still need a server farm to run correctly, or intricate graphics on a potato PC? Would you still say art style >> graphics?
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.
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 feel like modding is sometimes a good answer to situations where a developer has spent a lot of money creating assets, but the gameplay that they made with those assets is limited.
I wonder if there’s potential for ways to try to take commercial advantage of that, like have another developer basically bulk-license the assets from an existing game and then just produce new gameplay. I can’t really think of many examples off the top of my head. Some commercial FPS mods, but usually they make larger changes than to just gameplay.
This is the perfect take. As soon as I unlocked the open world, I hunted all the legendary animals, got all the cool gear, upgraded my weapons, and that was pretty much the end of it. I played like 3 more missions and they were all boring time consuming garbage.
The Apple II is still the most fun I’ve ever had playing games. Even now, I will regularly go back and play games like Snake Byte and Swashbuckler in an emulator.
That may be the case, but I just think that those simple ideas are the most fun. They didn’t have good sound or graphics, so they had to focus entirely on gameplay and they created a lot of games that are incredibly fun to play despite being very simple.
Yep. But old arcade and console systems can also have pixel-perfect gameplay not only because the pixels are big 'n chunky, but because the controls are extremely low-latency and entirely synchronized to the game processing and the display.
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
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People have no right to complain about wanting more Team Fortress 2 updates and should be grateful that it’s even still being supported when very few developers would keep up with a 15+ year old game.
League of legends is 14 years old but still has a huge following and gets regular updates and content.
Is the age of a game really an issue in this live service era we’re in?
World of Warcraft is going to be 20 years old in a few months.
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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.
You can make a porn game thats both a good game and good porn. Its tricky as hell to balance, and you won’t attract most players, but its possible.
The real issue is the stigma, which right fully exists. But I still want my triple A porn game.
My dream is to make one of those. One day…
Mad respect my dude. Got any recommendations? ;D
I’ll give my two cents for the classic CoC, and the shockingly good story of The Last Sovereign.
Ive been playing modded skyrim. Took me a long time just to learn how to properly mod skyrim, and even then, the balancing was tedious. But I got there, and it plays well.
It’s weird sometimes, but I heavily fw degrees of lewdity.
Haha. All lewd games are weird at times. I can appreciate how it’s one of those games (nsfw or otherwise) that has had a surprising amount of hours put into expansion/enhancement over the years in the same way that Dwarf Fortress, or Factorio have. I haven’t delved into it extensively myself. Also like DF and Factorio, it’s systems are surprisingly deep and complex. XD
This reminds me of a fake quote attributed to Hideo Kojima:
Hubie Pop
I’m ok with the 4 possible endings in ME3. Considering EA was running the show I am shocked we got that many choices.
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I stand by the theory that the ending/endings got leaked late in development (having read it, it was a great set of unique endings), and rather than release something that was already spoiled a higher up had a freak-out and told them to make something different, they ended up with the color swap nonsense.
It really fits EA
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.
It was kinda fun to play through (mostly just to listen to the music) but the fact that there is basically zero challenge hurts the game a lot.
ULTRA HOT TAKE.
…I also enjoyed Mystic Quest. It was universally hated.
Last time I posted this hot take, reddit absolutely buried me. But hey, I stand by my gaming opinions!
It’s wild. As soon as it was usable on smartphones, Reddit just became “DOWNVOTE MEANS I DON’T LIKE THIS”
Lemmy is so refreshing.
The SNES final fantasy??
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.
I soooo strongly agree about the audio. I regularly hear people talking about how good a game’s soundtrack is, but most games don’t stand out at all where soundtrack is concerned. I can list on one hand how many games have had songs so iconic that I can remember them. That’s not to say I don’t care for the audio. I recognize a lot of the audio is fantastic and feels just so natural that I don’t even notice it as a stand alone piece, but an intractable part of a scene. But I certainly am not gonna go listen to most games soundtracks.
There might be some others I can’t remember. But my point is that most game music is not nearly memorable enough that I can even draw it to mind. Let alone have it caught in my head or be able to recognize it later. Even for games I’ve played a ton of, you could probably play something and I wouldn’t recognize it.
But I was talking about music. Non music? Ugh, that’s usually worse. My biggest dislike is menu blips. You know, where every time you move the cursor in a menu, it makes a chime noise. In a lot of older games, I find it’s so bad that I refuse to play the game with sound on.
(Side note: I’m told that Fallout’s music is great, but I’m embarrassed to say I’ve almost never listened to it, in part because IIRC, the radio feature where all the good stuff can be heard is actually audible to enemies, making it incompatible with stealth.)
Super Mario Galaxy has amazing orchestrated soundtrack that must be experienced with the innovative gameplay and beautiful art design.
I can’t imagine playing this game without the music.
definitely. i also feel the same way about the Nier games, their soundtracks add so much to the experience.
Paradox Interactive is eventually going to release so many DLC that they eventually collapse inward from their own gravity and implode, taking the company’s future with them.
That isn’t a hot take though, everyone and their mother makes jokes about how many DLC there is for Paradox Interactive games.
Here’s the real hot take -> I don’t mind the amount of DLC on Paradox Interactive games. Every game of their I’ve played was really good on its own, and I only buy any DLC after I’ve poured tens of hours into the main game, usually not because I feel like anything was lacking from the main game, but just because I want an excuse to keep playing it. So for all I care, they can keep making all the DLC they want if the base games keep being this good.
That is hotter than mine. You must not mind paying a lot of money.
I guess you can spend a lot of money if you buy them on release, but I personally never do. And both their games and the DLCs pack are always on some sale. I’m pretty sure I bought Stellaris for like 10 euros and eventually bought a bunch of its DLC in some DLC pack for another 10 euros. The same for Cities Skylines basically. 20 euros for the amount of fun I took out of those games is hardly a lot.
It probably works out about the same as buying a subscription for a game, which many do for lots of games. I still think it’s egregious, but then again I own all Stellaris DLC, so…
I just bought Stellaris utopia dlc, despite not being able to tell you if the game I’m looking at it galactic civilizations 3, Stellaris or endless space 2 (I own all 3, I will play one of them some day). When I do play one of them I’d like it to be an enjoyable situation, which I’ve heard Stellaris needs utopia to be.
Also I love paradox games.
I’m fine with paying money as long as what I’m getting for it is commensurate to what I’m paying. I don’t think that Paradox is a particularly bad actor there (not the best, either). I mean, the DLC model permits funding production of more stuff for a game that one likes in a direction that one would like.
There are a number of games where DLC is sold by publishers at vastly higher prices than the content in the base game, though, and where the base game is kind of indadequate on its own. That is something that I’m not really enthusiastic about.
How’s it any different than buying a new game though?
In the end, is paying $30 for DLC and getting another 50 hours of gameplay really that much worse than paying $60 for a new game?
As long as I actually use the DLC, to me it’s equivalent. I’m paying money to extend the hours of entertainment I’m getting.
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True. This is why I don’t play subscription based games either, and usually buy my triple As several years after they release, and on sale. I suppose I’m a big fan of getting a lot of value for my money.
Ive got collective thousands of hours in paradox titles. The good dlcs (and there are trash ones I haven’t bought) adds dozens of hours of playtime. They also keep the mod community active which adds hundreds more.
It seems expensive but 10-20 bucks every few months is reasonable to me.
My bigger issue is some of them are starting to feel very paytowin with the feature/power creep (compare vanilla Russia/Ottomans in EUIV to dlc versions for an example)
It’s a game I like and it gets more and more stuff. The only times games keep adding more things to itself is either a very infrequent constant subscription fee, or more frequent DLCs. There’s only so much you can do off the sales of the base game.
They’re basically in an arms race against The Sims
And now they’ll have their own Sims game, so they’ll be going into overdrive.
Honestly whenever I see a game on sale for <$20 and I open it only to see 5+ DLCs that increase the price, I just close the page and move on without even bothering to research whether or not I should buy the DLCs. Fuck that mess.
Perhaps Steam could use a “price of game+aggregate DLC” sorting/filtering option.
The sentence “I lost my gear / They took my gear” has never been followed by a fun part in any videogame, ever
That island in Breath of the Wild though
My hot take: Skyrim is the most overrated game of all time. Not bad, but overrated. My phone hardcrashed while I typed out the reasons why I think so, so I won‘t anger the gaming gods further this time.
I think of skyrim like Jay Leno.
No one would say he’s the best comedian, or even great. But he’s unoffensive and kinda funny to most people.
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Skyrim is definitely my comfort food. Along with Fallout. I can replay those games like nothing else, just like how I can eat mac n cheese damn near every day and never get sick of it!
Agreed. To me the comment from op sounded like “pizza is overrated” which is weird cause it’s not like pizza is rated incredibly highly, it’s just that even bad pizza is pretty good
Do you enjoy other games in that vein/genre?
Open-world action RPGs? Elden Ring for instance, or modern Zelda games. 3D Soul-likes if you want to stretch the definition. I‘d go as far as to say it’s my favorite genre.
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.
IMO Final Fantasy is not good. I’ve tried playing several of the games but every time the story is so cliche and overly complicated. I’ve been told “oh just try a different one. This version is better!” If I have to try that hard to enjoy a franchise it’s just not for me.
I’m a fan, but even I can admit that they can be fairly ‘typical fantasy saga’. What kinds of videogame stories do you like?
Final fantasy is a really weird series. Every game is different and every fan has their own opinion of which games are good and why, or what’s important in a final fantasy game.
When people tell me that the story is what’s most important in a Final Fantasy game, I know they probably started with 7 or later. I like the parts where you customize your party and explore and have battles and make decisions and solve puzzles and all that video game shit. Yes, the stories enhance the game, but the story was never meant to be the entire game: But after 7, a whole bunch of new fans were like “there’s this new genre of games where the whole point is to watch cut scenes and read a lot of dialogue”, and the games have changed to accommodate that.
I guess my point is maybe try an earlier game (probably 4, 5, or 6) that has better gameplay, and you can get through the dialogue faster without having to watch all the slow animations of characters putting their hands behind their head.
I mean, how many other games were tackling climate change, imperialism, genocide, and deindustrialization in a single game in 1998. I’d say some of the story beats can be cliche in FF, but the stories are pretty unique. Unique AND over-complicated.
That said, I live Final Fantasy. I’ve played most of them. I have never really liked the combat in any of them. Not the real time or turn based combat. It feels tedious, and the rock paper scissors mechanics get tiring after a while. I still replay them way too often,
While I’m a huge fangirl of the series, they are blatantly “JPRGy” and are always very full of the numerous JRPG tropes, which can definitely give a cliched feeling.
Admittedly, overly complicated isn’t a way I’d describe most of the games, but that definitely fits many of the more recent entries (especially 16). IMO, 7-10 and 12 are the peak Final Fantasy games. My personal favourites being 9 and 10. And even they have some cringe moments that I pretend don’t exist lol (for 9, everything involving Quina or Eiko; for 10, stuff like most of the outfits and the utterly bizarre laughing scene).
The sleepy plot-twist at the end could have only been imagined as good in a dream. It felt so lazy and uninspired I didn’t even bother giving X-2 a try.
BUT FFIX and Tactics: War of the Lions are definitely the best ones.
Did War of the Lions fix the game’s balance? I loved the original Tactics, but wow that game was whack where balance is concerned. You could go from utter broken characters being unbeatably strong to being soft locked if you only had one save because some battle was so hard.
I didn’t really feel the story was much. I’m struggling to remember it at all! But damn the gameplay was really something.
Final Fantasy is the OG JRPG. They invented most of those the tropes that are used today in RPG-style games.
That’s true, but I don’t think that makes it worth playing these days unless you’re curious to see how things have evolved. You’ll find better written stories and more interesting features in pretty much any modern RPG.
X has the best story of any game I ever played. IV and VI have good stories as well. The rest didn’t pique my interest.
Gaming has been actually dead for almost 10 years.
Occasionally the body twitches, but virtually all of my purchases in the last long time are just catching up with all the great things created before the collapse.
@SJ_Zero @LeylaaLovee Maybe this can be said for the tripple A space, but indie devs have been firing on all cylinders the last 5-6 years.
When the western Roman empire fell, it was the Germanic people in the wilderness who came in to fill the vacuum, bringing new ideas and new vitality to what was a stagnant slave society (which is why it collapsed in the first place). In the same way, indie game developers are the ones bringing new ideas and vigor from the hinterlands. In one sense, the fact that indies are hitting so hard only proves that the industry has mostly collapsed.
What was the collapse?
If we consider the golden age of video games to be between 2007 and 2013, a lot of the stuff that caused that era to be so extraordinary was companies taking risks and succeeding at making something people had never seen before. Part of the fall from there was that companies stopped taking risks because they found massively successful formulas. Another part of the fall was companies realizing that video games could have a 10 year lifecycle. That meant that video games became an investment that had a far longer window for success or failure so the successes would pay off far longer and the failures would hurt that much worse, so staying with established formulas and making things more vanilla paid off more than taking risks.
Valve did a lot of smart things in focus testing and sanding off rough edges back when there were some really bad examples of rough edges breaking good games, but eventually everyone was sanding so much that everything was a fisher price toy.
If the formulas were so successful, everyone would be doing the same thing. I’d argue that Golden Age of Video Games is more so now than the far past. It’s an Age where anyone can make a video game and be recognized as being among the greatest games of all times.
Also, companies definitely take risks. They take a lot of risks, it’s just that a lot of those risks don’t necessarily play out and we never really hear about it. If you only focus on the largest companies putting their entire company on the line, then that company wouldn’t have been so successful in the past anyways. Risk doesn’t make a game good and honestly, with stuff like Game Pass these days, developers are way more likely to make riskier games when they don’t need to make a return on that game to actually keep going. For instance, Pentiment by Obsidian, in their own words, would have never been a thing if things were as they were in the early 2010s.
Latest twitches for me: Dave the Diver and Rogue Legacy 2. Incredible games.
Many stellar games also go unnoticed. The Forgotten City didn’t get nearly the amount of love it deserves. The Hex is basically an unknown game, overshadowed by the same dev’s excellent Inscryption.
…I loved Inscryption… but I found myself walking away from The Hex loving it EVEN MORE. If anyone is interested, go in blind. Ignore the graphics, they’ll make sense. Playing Pony Island first isn’t necessary, but it’s two hours long and does make the experience even better.
These types of comments remind me of that Douglas Adams quote.
If there has been anything I’ve seen in the last 30+ years of gaming, it’s that people always think games used to be much better.
Bouncing babies on my IBM XT is just the way I likes it!
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.
What about simple graphics that still need a server farm to run correctly, or intricate graphics on a potato PC? Would you still say art style >> graphics?
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.
I’d love to see a big budget AAA low-res pixel art game, like what you’d see on a GBA.
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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.
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!
Great world, terrible game.
I feel like modding is sometimes a good answer to situations where a developer has spent a lot of money creating assets, but the gameplay that they made with those assets is limited.
I wonder if there’s potential for ways to try to take commercial advantage of that, like have another developer basically bulk-license the assets from an existing game and then just produce new gameplay. I can’t really think of many examples off the top of my head. Some commercial FPS mods, but usually they make larger changes than to just gameplay.
This is the perfect take. As soon as I unlocked the open world, I hunted all the legendary animals, got all the cool gear, upgraded my weapons, and that was pretty much the end of it. I played like 3 more missions and they were all boring time consuming garbage.
I feel dirty for upvoting your objectively wrong opinion, but you earned it!
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The Apple II is still the most fun I’ve ever had playing games. Even now, I will regularly go back and play games like Snake Byte and Swashbuckler in an emulator.
Older systems have much less delay between the controls and the screen than modern systems do. USB is slow. HDMI is slow.
That may be the case, but I just think that those simple ideas are the most fun. They didn’t have good sound or graphics, so they had to focus entirely on gameplay and they created a lot of games that are incredibly fun to play despite being very simple.
Yep. But old arcade and console systems can also have pixel-perfect gameplay not only because the pixels are big 'n chunky, but because the controls are extremely low-latency and entirely synchronized to the game processing and the display.
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