Topic: Unpopular Gaming Opinions

@Yousef- Uh oh — don’t tell @Ravix 😅 Rav loves KCD

I will add an addendum though — I find it equally off-putting in games when you can just barge into people’s homes and they’re sitting there watching you while you completely loot all their possessions right in front of them and they don’t trigger any response at all. Sometimes you can even talk to the NPC after you’ve ransacked his house and he still ignores the fact that you probably just ruined his life and stole his life savings.

Genius idea to ping them. That’ll make them less likely to find out.

No, see, you just don’t get it. I barge into people’s homes to say hi.

I think in GTA the wanted system works as well as is needed. People actually call the cops on you and you can eventually lose them. In fantasy or historical games it is a little weird though, I agree @Th3solution @Yousef-

And nothing will make me not like KCD, even if the town's guard can sniff out a stolen cheese next to a legally acquired cheese in my very large cheese carrying pockets 😂😂

Anyway... I have been given a secret task.

That usually resolves any criminal investigation in KCD.

@Ravix @Yousef- I’ll keep an open mind, but watching the preview of Star Wars Outlaws it seems like they really double down on a Wanted system between the different factions, replete with immediate “game over” scenarios if you wander into an area where you’re wanted.

Eh… it saps some of the excitement I had for the game. I’ll see if it’s implemented well, but whereas the challenge of balancing reputation status between different factions sounds like a deep gameplay mechanic, we’ll have to see if it results in a fun game.

I don’t mind it when I can try to get in the good graces of multiple NPCs or factions with the use of charm or doing them favors, etc but I dislike it when I automatically lose reputation points with one faction if I help another faction.

So I appreciated the ability to simultaneously date all the girls in Persona 5 at the same time. 😂 Just trying to keep everyone happy.

@Th3solution mate, trying to get me to say anything positive about a Star Wars game that isn’t called “bounty hunter” or “revenge of the sith” is nigh impossible 😂. So I sympathize with you there.

@Yousef- I’ve actually really liked a lot of the SW games — Jedi Fallen Order, Jedi Survivor most recently. Both were good Souls-likes.

The Force Unleashed games were quite good too.

I was ‘meh’ with Battlefront and Battlefront II, but I’m not much of a FPS fan.

I’ve been meaning to play Squadrons. Other games just keep taking priority.

@Th3solution
I'm playing a game with such a wanted system like you described currently, it's Rustler on PS4 and its not great. Having to horse around town with imprecise controls to meet timed targets and one civilian crushed and the medieval horse cops are on me and I have to restart... So yeah I kinda know what you mean. It's does have horses that flash red and blue lights though!

Since it appears our “Gaming pet peeves” thread has disappeared… I’ll share my recent thoughts here about something that annoys me and is, perhaps, an unpopular opinion —

A lot of boss fights are too difficult. And I feel like they are often artificially enhanced to be difficult just because developers think that’s what gamers want. I suspect it’s because of FromSoft’s success that many developers now mistakenly assume that satisfying = difficult, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Lately I’ve been running into boss fights (and also hoard enemy encounters) that are just made hard for the sake of ticking some box on a list of attributes they are trying to shove into their game. At least that’s what it feels like.

The tactic seems to be:
Make the enemy’s health bar really large and make your attacks do very little damage so just a sliver of their health goes down with each attack. And give the enemy a huge unavoidable attack that knocks down 70% of the players own health bar. Make it a process of attrition where the player has to patiently endure a long drawn out battle so that it gives a false sense of an “epic boss battle.”

To me, combat encounters don’t have to long and arduous to be satisfying. I think what makes the From bosses and combat encounters so satisfying is that they actually feel like your figuring out how to approach an enemy by watching for patterns and reacting appropriately. When you strike an enemy, you do feel like you’re making progress. A lot of boss battles feel like you’re not making any headway, and if you do, then you realize that you actually are just through the boss’s first phase and you have two more to go.

There’s lot of other tactics that game makers use to make boss encounters drag out, like puzzling out something in the environment, having minions join the fray, or bosses that heal. I don’t have an issue with using some of these mechanics, and I don’t mind if a battle is long, but make it so that I feel like I’m actually making progress and have a chance. I want to feel that power fantasy that we are all playing these games for.

I honestly have this problem with game difficulty in general to be honest. I'm in a weird place in my life, where I am not as young as I used to be so hard modes are generally too hard for me, but I also dedicate a lot of my time to playing games, so I'm alright at them, usually meaning easy modes are usually too easy for me (especially if its a game with mechanical depth, whether I really want to explore and push against the systems), but normal mode usually feels only good for the first two acts of a game, with this common trope I am coming across of really significantly ramping up the difficulty in the last act, meaning normal is no longer a sweet spot and it effectively locks me out of a difficulty mode that feels good for my skill level (which is why I love granular difficulty options in games like Control, that let you tweak every aspect of things, rather than just a binary normal, easy, hard etc)

For all the advancements in gaming, difficulty design seems to remain often really rudimentary and lazy. Whether it is wearing the player down with every increasing waves of enemies watching your resources dwindle as each wave of stronger enemies comes in fresh, or forcing you to face enemies that have some sort of multi life, shield, self heal combination (while also having more health and damage than your entire party or whatever combined) or whether its just allowing the boss to cheat the limitations of the mechanics by being able to skip turns, or move faster and attack more than the player physically can - just a few off the dome from some recent games I've played where these sorts of things just made me say 'I'm out' right at the end of a game I was otherwise really enjoying.

I guess its just easier to make a boss fight a massive sponge with the ability to one shot your party than it is to programme an intelligent boss and its wild that seems to have been true for like three decades now.

@Pizzamorg Yeah, I’m with you. The game I played recently that prompted these thoughts is Immortals of Aveum. I played on the “normal” default difficulty, and I flew through the first half without too much trouble, some encounters actually being a little too easy but most felt fair and balanced and then the last couple chapters I was struggling and came very close to decreasing the difficulty to “easy”. But because there was a silver trophy on the line for finishing on “normal” and I had made it through 30 hours at that difficultly and didn’t want to give up now, I pushed myself through a couple B.S. encounters by respawning over and over until I eventually prevailed, somewhat by sheer luck and somewhat by just grit and perseverance. Whereas in a FromSoft game when I’ve run up against a difficult encounter or boss, I feel a dopamine rush when I finally prevail, but with these scenarios I was just annoyed and a little bit angry at the game for trolling me into feeling stuck at a difficulty level that did not feel appropriate and also at the battle which was just a smorgasbord of spongy overpowered enemy types.

I think that is important too, cause the main argument I see for the whole Souls thing is that immense satisfaction, joy, pleasure etc one gets from overcoming a boss they have been stuck on for hours, days, weeks, whatever it is. And I'm just not wired that way.

My sense of self value, or self worth, or accomplishment in life doesn't come from my gaming. And if yours does, then okay then. For me, in my gaming, I just want to have fun. I want to escape from the bad stuff in my own life.

And like I say, each to their own, different strokes for different folks. I think its just become a problem for me because it feels like the Soulslike is now every other game that hits the market. So many games over the last few years have looked so good and then you see in the description "soulslike" and I'm just like... yeah I'm out.

I have to agree with @Pizzamorg and @Th3solution. Sudden difficulty spikes in the latter part of a game is some of the most frustrating game design out there. A game's latter portion doesn't need to be incredibly hard to be satisfactory. If I made it that far with the way the difficulty was, obviously I was enjoying the game the way it was.

A Plague Tale: Innocence is a perfect example of this. I loved the game up until the last couple of chapters. Then you get the whole cart sequence followed by the final boss, and it nearly completely ruined a game I otherwise would've loved. I literally just pushed through it to finish, not enjoying a moment of those sequences but not wanting to waste the hours I put into it otherwise. I haven't played Requiem yet mainly because of that experience. I have it from when PS Plus gave it away for free a while back, but fear of Asobo creating an endgame like they did for the first one all over again has kept me from playing it yet. I probably still will at some point and hope the experience is much more balanced this time around.

I am also with @Malaise though on FromSoft games. Even though they create games I would otherwise love if they weren't purposely designed to be insanely difficult, especially Elden Ring, I have no desire to ever give their games a chance. Like I've always said, I play games to have fun. Not to bang my head up against a wall for several hours before I magically somehow progress through mostly sheer luck or just an insane amount of attempts over and over again. I don't want to spend hours accomplishing nothing. Unlike some people, I don't have all day every day to game, so wasting the time I do get to game is a big deal.

@KilloWertz
I think everybody hated that kart sequence, just so random that if you weren't crouching in exactly the right position it was death and try again... I don't recall Requiem having anything like that annoying so you should be happier when you get around to it.

@sorteddan I think the worst part of that sequence for me was fighting the people that kept rushing the area with the steps on each side.

Thanks for the info on Requiem. I have no idea when I'll actually play it, but that's still good to know. Maybe sometime after another 30 FPS game so it's not quite as jarring.

As a fan of "Twin Peaks" and Stephen King and Remedy games in general, "Alan Wake 2" was bloody awful - lazily written, poorly paced and with game mechanics only minimally evolved over the notoriously janky (if charming) original - it's a smelly pile in a really beautifully wrapped gift box - I'm glad that the studio aren't making any money off of it.🙄.

On the difficulty conversation - I definitely think the length of games has made this worse, too. The 12 hour linear story game seems mostly dead now. So if its taken you forty hours to get to the third act, it sorta makes it all the more difficult to give up because you've invested so much time into the game, even if the third act might be a tedious slog. But then potentially forcing yourself through those last hours that aren't any fun for you will spoil the game for you regardless, so there is really no way to win.

Honestly not sure if this is to be considered an unpopular gaming opinion as I haven't seen anyone else bring this up about Red Dead Redemption II, but I absolutely hate realistic mechanics in video games.

I started playing this evening by first doing a side mission with one of the characters. The objective was to rob a homestead. When I got there and killed everyone, the character told me that I shouldn't have killed all of them because now nobody would say where they hid the cash. Then he left and there wasn't a way to retry the mission. Great.

Then I decided to do another mission on the other side of the map. Wanted to fast travel there with a stagecoach. Couldn't do that because I had a bounty on me and the drivers wouldn't drive someone with a bounty. Can't get rid of it either because it's too much money. Even if I got rid of it, I would have to get rid of the bounty in that region that I wanted to fast travel to as well if I wanted to get back. Great, so I had to ride my horse all the way there.

So when I got there, there were bounty hunters after me. I killed them, but then I became wanted and thus the mission got locked because nobody would want to associate themselves with a wanted person. Good thing I saved just before, so I could just load up the previous save file and then do the mission. When I arrived to the destination of the mission, the objective was to kill a cougar inside a cave. The cougar jumped me and during the skirmish, I dropped my hat. I didn't realise this until I was outside the cave, so I had to go back in and get it just as I was about to ride back. I retrieved the hat and as soon as I got back on my horse, my horse tripped and I nearly died.

All of this happened within one hour. During one hour did all of this crap happen to me, simply because Rockstar thought it was a good idea to make a game as realistic as possible.

I mean seriously, did the developer not stop and think: will these mechanics make the game more fun? Nothing about these mechanics make the game more fun. The whole point of video games is to get immersed into a fictional world absent of enough realism to make it fun to play. I'm seriously terrified of how much they're going to ruin GTA 6 if they decided to go the same route as RDR2. For example, imagine getting caught by the police, getting arrested, having to hire a lawyer to defend you in court, standing in court and trying to argue for your case, getting sentenced to a life-time in prison and then spending in-game time in a penitentiary. Best game ever!

On a side note, these mechanics aren't enough to ruin RDR2 for me. But they add absolutely nothing to the experience except for pain.

@LtSarge It’s just a matter of taste. From what I’ve seen, it’s probably the more popular opinion in these circles to hate on RDR II and realism on games! Personally I love the way they weave realistic mechanics into it, there’s not enough games that fully immerse you in a historical period in that way, LA Noire springs to mind as another. But everyone’s mileage varies. I guess I think that the whole attitude of letting games be ‘fun’ is a little limiting if that makes sense, like if every movie needed to have three acts or if every song needed to have a verse, chorus structure. Variety is good, I’d rather have something too immersive as I’m a sucker for those sorts of things!

God of War Ragnarok is underwhelming. I've finished 2018, 3 times; the first playthrough was awesome. Ragnarok though, I couldn't wait to see the end credits. lazy story, bad writing, shallow characters, terrible ending or terrible ragnarok and lack of something epic or grand. I was waiting for some big reveal or twist, or a crazy boss fight. nothing happened.
oh and Asgard is just a small village in Iceland apparently.

@nessisonett Well to clarify, I'm not saying that there shouldn't be any realistic mechanics at all in these games. For example, RDR2 has a wealth of customisation options for clothing, weapons, your horse and so on. I don't care much for these aspects, but I always appreciate them for people who love to customise as much as possible.

But that doesn't mean that there should be realistic mechanics that make the experience annoying, as I described above. Customisation options are optional, but I can't choose if I want my horse to trip or not.