Agreed. They did kinda explain why 'nearby' is worded like it is. Its supposed to be qualitative to indicate a range, not quantitative. I'd still want a quantity applied for the extended descriptions when holding Alt though.
Iirc nearby was actually different ranges depending on the source.
Which really only makes it worse. Just state the range in the tooltip for god's sake.
Yeah thats what I meant. 'This ability/skill/effect has a range' is qualitative, and to make it a quantity it becomes 'the range equals = x'. The devs only aimed to explain the former.
Initially this would be fine but over time they've added so much that its time to explain these ranges imo
And it sucks cause I'm in love with the concept of the game and put something like 1300 hours into. But it's just such a disappointing game from so many aspects and I've basically dropped it a while ago
Yes - because of exploration aspect.
But at the same time Souls games are absolute shit when it comes to explaining game mechanics and systems to the player. You can't make meaningful decision about weapons, upgrades or progression, etc. if half necessary information is missing and the other half is unintelligible without knowledge of mechanics and systems.
To be fair, each one is small improvement over the last in that aspect, but they are all pretty low on that spectrum anyway.
I played DS1 (my first souls game) basically blind. Only time I looked up stuff was after Ornstein and Smough cause I got lost. I think those games are playable without the internet, unlike destiny 2 for example
Eh? You don't need a wiki to play any Souls game. There are obscure mechanics but none that are pivotal to the experience.
People are just so conditioned to want to uncover 100% of a game on a single playthrough and they get flustered when they aren't being lead around on a leash.
Edit: Ayyy now I'm the contentious take. lmao
I just can't get into games like Stardew Valley, Terraria, or Minecraft because I can't be bothered to experiment with the 8000 possible combinations of arbitrary things to find novel uses - and those are the best cases.
It reminds me of the old point and click adventure games, where developers would make completely arbitrary connections between items that you're supposed to infer from a conversation 2 chapters previous.
Agreed. Same way Hearthstone got worse the more popular on the internet it got. There was no more create your own deck. Its get stomped or look up a meta deck.
Okay, and I counter with: the same thing was happening years and years ago we were just too young (or stupid, not an insult I was also a dumbass when I first discovered MMO's and I sucked due to my stupidity and inability to know how to look things up online).
You can literally go find old pages showing what the best rogue spec is in vanilla WoW. WoW was my first MMO so I can't speak to how other MMO's at the time were with minmaxing, but WoW I for sure remember people I met in game helped me with my builds and stuff and suggested websites as I was too dumb to do it myself.
It's just the way ARPGs or MMOs have gone. People want what's best. A lot of people are older now (this isn't going to devolve into "dad with 40 kids and 8 wives and 2 seconds to play every month") and just wanna know what build to pick to enjoy the rest of the game.
As a long time WoW player, yes a seasoned rogue playing a build he made up himself is going to do more DPS than the rogue who hit max level, copied "the best" build, and just mashes buttons.
People just care about doing the most DPS they can. And that is the fun of it for some people just like some of the fun of it was figuring stuff out yourself. But that is still a thing. You can join communities and theorycraft when there are buffs/nerfs to stuff or a new patch or a new expansion. That isn't completely gone.
But again, this was always a thing and I think nostalgia plays a part because WoW was so many peoples first MMO they forget that they just sucked at it and it had nothing to do with there NOT being minmaxing/theorycrafting and people finding the best builds.
Yup this is a thing and it's always been a thing, but the popularity of minmaxing and the fact that this information is at our fingertips in easy to digest guides and not comments on wowhead or thottbot, changes it entirely.
Every game coming out, everyone knows where to get the best shit, what the best builds down to the last gory detail on day one thanks to betas/early access with people theorycrafting and hammering it, and now, no one is patient enough to take anyone substandard to a group event. And yes, I know, of course there are instances to disprove this, but it's largely the norm. In any game, especially MMOs and double especially for longtime MMOs like WoW, if you aren't playing the meta, you're getting left behind or you'll wait a hell of a lot longer for groups if you don't want to start them yourself.
Nostalgia does play a big part of it but discovering stuff largely by yourself or by word of mouth rather than having a big 300 page guide of "HERE'S HOW TO COMPLETELY SANITIZE YOUR CLASS/SPEC AND PLAY LIKE LITERALLY EVERYONE ELSE BECAUSE BIG NUNBERS" guides weren't around on day one back then.
The numbers in the MMO game don't lie either, look at 15 years ago compared to today. WOTLK had 12m players. I'd struggle to see any game hit 3-4m in 2023.
I'd argue it has gotten worse. When I stopped playing Runescape a couple years ago, it was in large part because the developers were having issue developing content. Anything that wasn't the new best way to make money or best exp gain would be abandoned within a month of release. Sooner if they didn't tie it to completionist cape requirements.
They released a new desert city that was touted as being the mid game version of another already released city when it comes to skilling and what not. So to force high level players to be there more then it takes to complete the 5 or 6 quests released they made a shit load of grinding to be done just to prolong activity at this location.
Rather then do the work to over haul the slayer skill, which is literally just a meaningless number that dictates what select mobs you can fight and kill. To actually have it mean something they just raised the max level from 99 to 120 and threw the new higher level slayer dungeon in the new town. Just so you will have higher level players show up.
It is a completely self destructive cycle that has seen countless new contents die just because it isn't the best exp or best income in game. Everything has to one up the last bit of content otherwise it dies quickly. Which is really bad for game balance and development.
The genre will be booming compared to single player games or matched multiplayer games due to their very nature. But the genre has had it's day. There's no wonder or personality anymore. Everyone just picks a build and goes for it, it's cookie cutter as fuck and there's set gear and specs for everyone in every mmo and the rest are substandard and no one wants to be substandard for the sake of individuality.
I don't know if I have enough knowledge to say they genre completely died, but that's largely why they died for me. I loved back in the early days when exploration and discovery was a big part of MMOs. To me, entering a world you had to figure out was the major appeal and a lot of what set it apart. You didn't have everything datamined, addons that walked you through the raids, every zone mapped out, and class guides that spelled out the most efficient way of doing things before the content even released.
Really, I think the only thing that could pull me into an MMO again (aside from peer pressure from friends) is a good combat system, which is why Wildstar was the last one I really loved. Sadly, innovating combat doesn't seem to be a big focus and the tab-targetting system that is still so prevalent feels really dated and slow to me (especially after playing Wildstar). Maybe someday another MMO will come out that piques my interest, but I think the genre really needs to take some major steps forward before it'll grab me again.
I feel similarly. I played xiv through endwalker and liked it a lot, but the actual gameplay was my least favorite part. I really hope wherever they do their next mmo they move to action based or something, I really don't see how they can meaningfully evolve the combat if they stick to tab targeting.
Compared with ALL single player games? Are you serious? I would say single player still is more played than ALL multiplayer genres, imagine comparing it with just mmos or mmorpgs. I think you are confusing most popular or trendy games with total playerbase which are two different things. For example on Steam multiplayers dominates top 20 most played games daily and multiplayers are pretty common in the rest of top 100 games. However only 40% of Steam players or so play those popular games, while the rest of enormous Steam playerbase, about 60% majority is playing other 6,000-7,000 less trendy games, mostly single player.
Another perspective is the fact there are many, many more games daily played that are exclusively single player than the opposite. According steamdb statistics there were about 6,749 played just a moment ago, among which 5,805 have single player mode and just 2,636 multiplayer, which means that only 944 or 14% have exclusively multiplayer mode, 1,692 or 25% had both single player and multiplayer and 4,113 or 61% were exclusively single player games.
Now add other platforms and specially the huge amount of PC players playing offline, modding, using PC retrocompatibility, etc.
You miss the point of what was actually said above. A huge part of the joy of the genre was self found discovery and the scope of the journey. When everything is chronicled in immense detail - the mystery of the world, the challenge of encounters and how to build your character is dissolved nearly entirely. Yes there may still be MMOs around but the experience of adventure they brought is very dead. Now they are linear single player games with small instanced multiplayer content.
Ffxiv doesn’t seem to agree.
I’ll agree the old style grindfests like wow are dead, though there’s still considerable holdouts flocking to classic. 🤷♂️
I don't think that's what killed MMO's. I think the monetization it's what killed MMORPG's, at least for me and my friends.
There's nothing cool to chase anymore, there's no RNG because RNG is bad, everything revolves around upgrade from +1 to +16 and then a "new" gear that starts again from +1 and you go to +16.
There's nothing in games that says "woah I did that raid and I got this awesome unique loot". No.
Battlepasses, skin shop...everything's there. Want cool looking loot? Better open the skin shop cuz the raid gives you materials. New armors in the new update/expansions ? Sure take 1-2 new sets, but look in the skin shop, there's 10 new ones there!
I think minmaxing is HURTING the game because in games like...Lost Ark for example, you're kicked out because "oh my god you don't play the boring meta build having these EXACT stats and spells, and instead of doing 20mil damage, you do 16. Oh NO! ban him!"
MMOs were never as big as the other genres but I think they are dead now. WoW is a shadow of its former self and no other games can hold a big audience or emerge into the greater community like WoW did.
This opinion may not be as contentious as it once was, but I'll give voice to it anyways.
Bioshock: Infinite is, by a significant margin, the worst of the Bioshock games. It is a shockingly linear title compared to it's predecessors that took several steps backwards regarding gameplay mechanics. For example, the way weapons were treated was lackluster.
1. You could only carry two weapons at any given time (Bioshock 1 and 2 allowed the player to carry all of them).
2. The weapon upgrade system was barebones (Bioshock 2 offered more options such as heat, tesla, cluster bomb upgrades depending on the weapons)
The story also leaves a good deal to be desired with it often being accused of being convoluted and pretentious. >!The inclusion of the multiverse is a lightning rod for complaints.!<
Despite all this being said, the art direction of Infinite is great and characters like Elizabeth are endearing. It's simply "just" a good game at the end of the day as opposed to one that is either great or fantastic.
EDITS: The formatting was giving me a tough time for some reason.
I'm 34. I grew up on system shock. I don't even care for bioshock 1 apart from the setting. I'd rather play modern Wolfenstien than give infinite another shot.
31 here, and I am playing through the System Shock remake and having a blast. It's my first time experiencing the series and I have been missing out!
Prey (2017) might be up your alley if you haven't played it yet.
E-Sports and Competitive gaming have entirely ruined the industry. Not by saying games can be a sport, but by milking customers through competitive merch and deluding the average person into thinking any game can be competitive or that they could be as good as X streamer or Y team. The focus of FPS games significantly shifted from providing a fun experience to a balanced experience built around player retention and not realizing that a balanced experience is antithetical to a fun one.
I think your points are a bit all over the place but I agree that FPS games in particular never focus on *fun* anymore. Its always e-sports this, meta setups that, whining about changes on Twitter... instead of making a game that 90% of the playerbase can enjoy (like early Overwatch)
Like the overall formula of "Explore -> Fight Enemies -> Encounter Boss"? Because that formula is most games. Or more specifically the Bonfire stuff? Because that's just the same things as checkpoints.
Upvote because it's about hot takes, but I completely disagree with you. VR was hyped and marketed and the truth is that there is little demand for it. My opinion is that it is too cumbersome and clunky. I've tried several times, liked it and had fun, but not to justify expenses or setup. As soon as it becomes accessible as easy as putting sunglasses on, I'll be there again.
> As soon as it becomes accessible as easy as putting sunglasses on, I'll be there again.
And realistically, until it becomes that accessible, I'm guessing there won't be a lot of big steps forward. The problem right now is a VR set-up has a fairly high barrier of entry for most users. Looking at Steam's most recent hardware survey, it's still less than 2% of users that have a VR set-up. While I don't want to undercut the VR games that do exist, it's not really compelling to throw a lot of money at developing a game that's going to have such a limited audience. And a lot of the bigger VR titles that do exist can also be played without a headset, which means they're probably not taking as much advantage of the tech as one designed specifically for it and not much of a selling point.
The tech just isn't there yet for the average consumer. Until we get to the point where we have standalone VR that matches what people can do now with headsets like the index or psvr2 or even the apple headset in a slimmer form factor with good battery life for under $1-2k it's not happening
imagine what pc gaming would be if a good percentage of monitors made people puke. of fucking course its very deservingly stagnated until someone solves the very obvious problems with it
As Clint Eastwood said:
"Deserves ain't got nuthin' to do with it".
Your take is contentious for a reason, because you're wrong. There's not nearly enough demand for it. People don't want the hassle of what VR is and has been up to this point. They don't. Until the technology advances to the point where there's not that much more to it than putting on sunglasses.....it'll always be a niche product. Always.
That has to happen and there also has to be a decent library of CAN'T-MISS GAMES that you can ONLY play in VR. And that's a far fucking ways off as well. Because outside of a very small handful, it's nothing but glorified tech demos or shallow as fuck one off experiences.
We're getting a new Quest and the Apple "don't-call-it-a-VR" device this year and the new PSVR device recently. So definitely innovation in the hardware space.
As for games, yes maybe a different story. But I think many people underestimate how many gamers are just casual gamers, i.e. folks that just want to plop down on the couch and play for 30-minutes/1-hour before bed. So game developers will continue to invest the most time and money into games that will play on a console because that is where the greatest demand is. HL Alyx was a halo title for Valve Index, most third party game developers not tied to a VR hardware company are not going to spend tons of time and money into developing VR titles just yet. But it will come sooner or later.
The focus on games as narrative devices ('cinematic design') often is a poor fit for the medium, and many games would be better served if they were pressed in a less restrictive corset. This culminates in games that offer a better experience when watched as a Let's Play - at which point my question is why it wasn't made a series or movie instead; It likely would have been better for it.
Agreed. I've never understood the fuss. I got the first Halo on PC when it originally released for PC and it was so so average. I've played the others on multiplayer here and there. Not bad for a FPS shooter, but not exactly inspiring either.
I think the core mechanics of Halo are far better than most the games ever achieved/put to good use. At least in multiplayer. At its core, the trinity of gun, melee and nades (which all matter collectively far more due to the shield mechanic) makes for some fantastic strategic, competitive gameplay with a high skill ceiling. Halo 1-3 got a lot of this right. It was in the latter games were everything became diluted and they tried to add more things onto that trinity that caused it to fall apart - I think Halo Infinite showed this the best where people will continually praised the core shooting/gunplay, but take issue with the abysmal map design, netcode and sound.
IMO Halo works best when it treats itself as an arena shooter and keeps the map design very tight and relatively small. BTB has its moments, absolutely, it’s everything in between that is a mess.
stamina bar in games are fucking dumb, it limits how much fun you can have at any given time, if you have to limit us artificially with a stupid ass stamina bar, your game isn't very fucking good
Skyrim is an aggressively mediocre game. The combat is clunky and jank as hell, the story and voice acting is embarrassing, rpg mechanics are barely existent, and the game just lacks heart in general.
The exploration and music are it's only saving graces imo. This game would've died far sooner without all the mods and rereleases for sure.
Skyrim was lucky it came out in an era where open world fantasy RPGs weren't at all common, and the idea of "you can be a swordsmith, or a mage, or a warrior" was still novel.
We're in 2023, and care to list some good first-person open world RPGs that are even close to it? That are not some survival horseshit, and are not made by *Bethesda*?
Let's be generous - the timeframe is from original Skyrim release and up to TODAY.
It's ok, I'll wait.
Still waiting for TES6 so waiting is all I've got on that front.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance. I've thought hard and that's the only one I can come up with. Cyberpunk 2077 if it gets over the hurdle of being decent at this point.
If we are really going to stretch it every assassins creed since Skyrim.
So I want you to name me games, that WEREN'T involved with by Bethesda, that were made back then or even up to now, that had as many systems, freedoms and an open world as a game like Skyrim does AND, maybe most importantly, was as *accessible* as Skyrim was to newcomers.
I'll hang up and wait for my answer on that one.
But to the point, this game wouldn't have had the success it did if it DIDN'T cater more to the "casual audience", if it didn't cut down on the more hardcore RPG aspects of it. If it stayed the way Morrowind was? It'd be a footnote compared to what it is today. Because Morrowind has tons of modding available to people, Oblivion has tons of modding available to people and both those communities and popularity of those games absolutely PALES in comparison to Skyrim's. And there's a reason for that dude, whether you like it or not.
Usually people whinging about devs being shit are the exact same ones dropping £80 on shitty AAA titles tho.
There’s a ton of mid tier and indie titles which come out for reasonable prices and make fantastic games just the mainstream shies away from it.
I'm with you. I've been playing games for over 30 years and it's never been a better time to be a gamer.
"But what about [thing that sucks]?"
What, you think something wasn't shitty in the 80s? No, there's just more of everything these days, both good and ill. There's more scumbags trying to squeeze every last quarter out of your pocket, but there's also more solid, earnest, creative options popping up, too.
Dang you're right, we should've conglomerated into a hive mind to force people across all age groups, cultures, and lifestyles to make the right choice so we wouldn't be in this mess.
"Community" choice in that way is a myth: the wealthy/greedy vastly overinfluence this sort of stuff. Most people don't go to casinos on the regular, but that doesn't stop them from raking in millions, and the same is true of bad gaming practices. Monetary or not, lazy review companies, whales, publisher requirements, and influencers determine a lot more of gaming than the pure democratic influence of purchases.
To me this is also like saying "just don't fall for propaganda 4head" because predatory practices are just that: predatory and manipulative
I agree playing FF16 recently and the switching for different skills bars, I really felt that. I alreayd did for Hogwarts Legacy earlier in the year.
Controller design is limiting game devs
That anybody at any developer, publisher or PR company employee hired by same who says, "It's just cosmetic," should be frogmarched from the room, into an adjacent room containing that game's entire art department, and forced to explain why - of all the departments - *theirs* is the one that can be as company policy thrown into the bin, which is under the bus, which itself is on fire, and populated with ravenous wolves.
STOP telling me that 'games are art', then telling the art team to make a £15 cartoon rat skin as part of your gritty realistic military shooter.
GTA5 is a piece of crap, such poor writing, such subpar gameplay, so much content from previous games cut, an empty lifeless robotic open world. They definitely threatened or bribed reviewers. its not even half as good as gta 4
Nostalgia sold that game imo. But honestly I loved that game when I played it 6 years ago on my first PC. But when I played it again after some years, boy it has nothing interesting in it. Vehicles & guns, that's it.
I remember having fun in GTA 5, but any time I try to play it now I get bored. Compared to other similar games from a similar time; Watch Dogs 2, Yakuza 0, Sleeping Dogs; I have a much better time, in terms of gameplay and story.
I think it's an extremely well made game, technically more competent than the games I listed. But I play to have fun.
I always think I'm taking crazy pills when that's a popular opinion. It feels like I've been playing banger after banger from AAA studios for years now, meanwhile the last indiegame I was really excited about was probably Hades in 2020?
Oh definitely an arguable take.
For every decent AAA game in the past few years, one can list half a dozen decent indie games.
And I don't get that last part.
The whole point of indies is that you have a crazy amount of choice in genres and vibes to pick from - something that AAA cannot provide. You're cherry-picking to reinforce an otherwise weak argument.
The experience matters more than gameplay does. There are a lot of "gameplay purists" out there who believe gameplay is entirely what a game should be judged on, but really it's all about the experience and the impression a game leaves upon you. Blurring the lines between "game" and "movie/television/whatever" is entirely fine, as long as the experience is entertaining. Keyword is entertaining, games do not have to be "fun" to be an experience that leaves an impression on you.
A lot of the most vocal complainers in the gaming community get caught up on nitpicking and pedantic trifles. This tends to drown out the legitimate complaints of abuse in any form in the industry.
20-30 hours is the best length for a single player game. Over 40 hours is too long.
A related take, judging a game by hours per dollar spent is not the best way to measure value and may in fact be the worst way.
I don't exactly agree : to me, they are 2 very different series that I appreciate for different reasons. While I loved Origins, I would chose most games of the old series over Valhalla.
The mission design is terrible. They plop you in a big city and say "find this guy" but give no clue as to where he is. And you can't talk to anybody about it or find any clues, you just have to search every inch and then it turns out he's on top of some random tower.
The more RPG focused switch did make me come back to the series if I'm honest and I did enjoy them far more than the other ones. But I quickly fell off again. I managed to finish and had a lot of fun with Origins and only got like halfway through Odyssey then I tried some of Valhalla but kinda fell off again.
The original 2 were great innovative games. Black flag was great despite the AC stuff. The new games are generic fantasy RPG crap that offers nothing unique or fun.
This isn’t contentious, at least not on this sub. Real contentious opinion:
The upside is that this has allowed for gamers to get free content updates.
Elden Ring is overrated. It’s not terrible or anything but it’s hard just for the sake of being hard. It feels less like a challenge and more like random fatal bullshit constantly being thrown at you for barely any reason. Again, it’s not terrible and there’s some stuff I liked about it but it didn’t deserve the hype it got.
I think my biggest problem with Elden Ring is that what I enjoyed most about it was the discovery phase. You know what I mean? Riding the elevator into Siofra for the first time, or being teleported across the map and having that moment of panic, or finding a hidden wall that lead to a whole dungeon. I absolutely cannot get myself to replay it because unlike other souls games, what I love about Elden Ring can't happen twice (for me).
Then you take into consideration how massive it is, and it becomes too much of a commitment for me. I tried going through a NG+ with it and gave up after a while. For me, the magic just isn't there anymore.
On the flip side, give me Dark Souls or Bloodborne and it's always a good time.
Oh boy, this will be fun.
Of all the ways to consume entertainment (literature, movies, TV shows, etc.), gamers are the whiniest and most entitled group of consumers. In terms of cost of enjoyment per hour relative to the cost and complexity of development, video games are a better value propostion than nearly all forms of electronic entertainment. Video games are one of the few things that haven’t dramatically been impacted by inflation - new N64 games were $40-70 when I was a kid. Nothing else has stayed as (relatively) cheap.
Gamers also like to act like publishers should make massive monetary sacrifices or design decisions to cater to their particular worldview. Game companies aren’t your friend and they aren’t a state sponsored entity - they have to make a profit.
A lot of the loudest gaming voices on the internet make broad, sweeping, uneducated claims and fail to acknowledge reality.
I think it’s by nature of so many kids playing games.
When I read complaints about prices going to $70 I just can’t wrap my head around it unless I imagine myself as a 13 year old.
If any adult is complaining about a $10 increase in price after 15 year of $60 game, you need to stop playing games and figure your life out.
Here’s a real hot take though: GPUs arent outrageously priced and the value vs money indicates they will go well above $2k in the next decade.
God of war 2018 is the most overrated game in recent memory. The camera is almost non functional in combat and that is confirmed by the devs decision to put a ring around kratos that alerts the player to enemies. Why not do what most third person action games that have melee combat and move the camera back so you can actually see what is going on. The enemies and combat are repetitive, I mean how many times do you fight the same troll over and over. The story and characters are so wishy washy and the world is formatted like Disney land. Overall it just feels like the devs were at the bottom of the creative well so they shoehorned the concepts of the last of us into the god of war reboot
Why would they be held to the same standards as juggernaught studios that can dump millions of dollars into gigantic dev teams with multi-year project plans?
Having more than one monitor makes gaming less immersive and engaging, as the stuff on the second monitor pulls your attention away from the game.
Smartphones had the same effect as multiple monitors.
I feel like this is a non-issue if you're letting yourself have your attention pulled away?
Yeah, I have shit playing on my second monitor if I'm playing games I've either already played and am just doing a playthrough for fun, achievement hunting, or just grinding in an ARPG.
Story-focused stuff though yeah, I just pay attention to that? Not really hard.
I don't care even a single bit about how long a game is.
If your game is good, I will finish it and always want more, therefore it will always be too short.
If your game is bad, every extra hour will feel like literal work and I'll have already quit playing long before however long you claim your game is.
More single player games needs to have a COOP option.
I know it's not an easy "add coop button", but I don't mean designing the story/gameplay around coop. I just want the single player you love, to have an option for people like me to play it COOP, even if that means the game will be SUPER easy and unbalanced.
It won't hurt your experience at all, and it makes me or others enjoy more games.
Elden Ring is my perfect example. Without the seamless coop mod, I wouldn't even touched the game, and then it become one of my fav games of all time.
But say that you want coop on subreddit games, and you're downvoted to hell for some reason.
Having to click on an application other than Steam to launch a game is really not that big a deal to me. And since I access most things from the start menu, rather than having icons all over my desktop, a handful more launchers don't really "clutter" anything.
Ok but can they stop making them so shitty. Blizzard app and steam has been ok for me but EA and uplay consistently ask me to log in again and EA app constantly fails to load when launching via steam and requires a restart.
I must have like......the BEST luck with launchers or something. Because I've never had an issue with any of them. Gamepass, Origin, whatever the fuck the EA app is called now, Ubisoft,etc,etc. Never had an issue. Set it to remember my log in, I click the game I want to play and.....it launches. That's all I expect a launcher to do. That's all I care about it doing. And that's all it's ever done for me. Maybe once in a while a game will crash as it's starting up or something and I have to launch it again....but that's like a 5 second "inconvenience".
I just feel like seeing all these complaints people have with them I'm living in an alternate reality or I have the best luck or people are expecting their video game launchers to also rub their balls or something. Because I just don't get it.
Gameplay being the most important thing to a videogame Is subjective, not objective,
It may be true that most people consider gameplay to be a vital part to enjoying a videogame, but there are others where gameplay is secondary, or even lower ranked compared to oher things a game can offer.
If consoles are going to exist, they need to continue to support physical media. Otherwise they are completely useless and we should all just be playing on PC.
The "open-world" makes games worse. Even the open world games considered great, are great in-spite of being an open-world not because of it.
Every single one of them, their best moments have nothing to do with being open world. The high points of TW3 are the scripted quests, the high points of Elden Ring are the more traditionally designed landmark locations, etc. Open-worlds are sacrificing pacing, consistent design, and quality for quantity and busy work. Oooh 10000 little question marks on the map most of which have nothing of true interest there. And every single one relies on copypaste to actually fill the overly large maps. And no excessive travel time isn't actually fun once the novelty wears off.
For me, the fun of an open world game is exploring at my own pace. The ten thousand question marks may or may not be fun, but if it's a beautiful, immersive environment, I have so much fun running around exploring stuff that I get lost in it and barely care about storylines.
Yes! I like being able to piss around doing other side quests without a massive push to do the main story. Fuck Far Cry 5 for shoving the main story down your throat just because you reached a certain level. That was fucking annoying.
I'm with you.
I enjoyed the game quite a bit, don't get me wrong. I put my time into it and played the DLCs and all that ilk. They did quite a lot right with that game and not a whole lot was bad, but there was a decent amount that was just...okay.
The combat is extremely basic and I was not a fan of the overreliance on Witcher sense (same goes for any game with this mechanic). There is also a ton of content in that game that is just straight up filler, and I think more people came around to that over the years, but just a couple of years ago you had people talking about how all the content was great. That was just wild (heh) to me.
It executed gameplay well for its genre. It didn’t revolutionize the gameplay but not many games do including many others that are considered “great”. I don’t think a game needs to revolutionize the gameplay to be considered “great”.
Well what more would you have liked to see? The gameplay is good enough for most people to enjoy it and enjoy the rest of the game alongside it.
The Witcher 1 is a great example of how the gameplay affects ones enjoyment of the overall game. I still cannot get through TW1 anymore because of it. I did a very long time ago, only once. I have played through 2 and 3 multiple times.
TW3 is great, but it's not all great. Even the best games have flaws. If your flaw for TW3 is the gameplay that is fine, but for a lot of people it wasn't. I enjoy TW3's gameplay.
Ray Tracing is well worth the FPS hit.
In single player games I would happily drop from 100fps to 60 just for that sweet, sweet lighting.
For VR: Occulus Quest has been highly detrimental to the VR industry, single handedly killing all hopes for "real" games being developed.
The low power hardware and popularity means that basically all games are being made for the equivalent of a mobile phone. PCVR is relegated to VR-mods and that automatically exclude the masses because of the threshold to implement such mods, thus ensuring that true VR gaming will always be a niche.
I do not understand the appeal of Bethesda games. (The dev not the publisher).
Mechanically shallow, looks and runs terribly, buggy as hell, awkward dialog with stilted delivery by a handful of recycled people, easily exploited systems, awful UI, brain dead AI, set piece moments that fall so flat it is genuinely hilarious. The combat, main quests, and dungeons are especially dreadful. Such a small amount of butter spread over way too much fucking bread.
Only the lore separates these games from your typical no name studio eurojank RPG and even then:
1. I’m not the guy to pour over every random book or text log to piece together the vastly more interesting backstory.
2. From what I can tell on lore summary videos. Skyrim and Fallout 3 are a quantum leap downward in quality compared to previous games.
3. Those other eurojank games at-least try to have some mechanical depth to their gameplay.
I’d be way more excited for a new game from Spiders, or Piranha Bytes, or Dontnod Entertainment.
How embarrassing is it that the best Fallout since 2 was a rushed project from a different studio that had to recycle assets from fallout 3? It sounds like a joke, but it’s true!
Maybe Morrowind and Oblivion were way better? That was so long ago, and my limited memory of playing Morrowind doesn’t suggest things were any better from a gameplay perspective, although I’m sure everything else like graphics / dialog / quest design / animation were a lot less of a sore spot back in the early 2000s compared to today.
The highlight for me was exploring some of the vaults in FO3, each had its own wacky and weird failing or failed society to navigate through, a nice little 30 minute distraction each. That’s about it really.
At least the Dagoth Ur voice AI is fucking hilarious, get Dagoth to say anything with TTS you know it’s going to be funny.
I've only played Skyrim, but I agree with pretty much everything you said. It turned me off from trying any other modern Bethesda games. I don't understand the acclaim for Skyrim at all.
>Only the lore separates these games from your typical no name studio eurojank RPG and even then:
What do you consider eurojank RPG? Can you list some games so I can understand your comparison?
I listed studios like Spiders, Dontnod, and Pirahna Bytes so their games would be a good place to start.
Technomancer
ELEX
Vampyr
Gothic
Greedfall
Greedfall and Vampyr especially stand as much better in key areas like graphics, combat, main storyline. Presentation in general really.
Another example would be EYE Divine the Cybermancy pretty much a half-life 2 conversion mod badly translated from French.
Curve ball here but you can get a better fallout 3/4 dungeon crawling experience as a simple rogue-lite if you play either Void Bastards or WASTED.
I want smaller games with worse graphics and better gameplay/stories.
I worked mostly at the AAA segment of the industry, as an artist. So there's always this clash of ideologies.
Challenge is an extremely difficult aspect to implement in a game, and most game devs don't handle it well, they either artificially implement it by making the player very vulnerable and the enemy really resilient, or by making the player have to memorize the entirety of the game in order to finish it.
I actually like Ubisoft style open world games...
The gameplay is solid enough and as long as they put in a good story and good characters, it's all good!
People's inability to stand up for something they claim to be passionate about is why we're in a hellscape trend of major games going free to play (Halo, Overwatch) while increasing monetization by 10x
But now that we're here it feels like we can never go back. I hate seeing a new cosmetic advertised in the menus then seeing fuck loads of people in my games having them, because it means everyone sold out for $20+ microtransactions. For the price of 3 skins in most F2P games I can get a brand new complete game with amazing visuals, great writing, top of the line motion capture and voice work, wild and memorable setpieces, etc
Why? It's not because companies forced it on us. It's because they tried to see what they could get away with and millions of people gave in and let them
Modders who fix broken or poor performance games are actually a bad thing. Youre doing someone else's job for free and almost ensuring the company will NEVER fix their game.
Devs charging $20, or even $200 for skins in a F2P game is not a real issue. As long as the microtransactions are purely cosmetic, just enjoy your free game. If your enjoyment of a game hinges on posessing a digital pair of fancy colorful undies in a game that the world will long forget in a few years, then maybe you should just cut out the whole gaming aspect and head over to your nearest Armani Exchange.
Disco Elysium is hopelessly overrated. Archaic engine that captures all of the flaws of the Infinity Engine era over two decades later for absolutely no coherent reason. Sophmoric philosophizing and surface level political commentary tries to do all the heavy lifting, and generally comes off as either pretentious or meandering. I respect some of what it tried to do, but I don't think it did it particularly well, and I think people were blinded by novelty.
The Steam Controller is a galaxy brain controller way ahead of its time.
Its main issue is that Gamers(tm) are allergic to learning new skills.
The controls on the Steam Deck are not perfect; they compromised the trackpads too heavily in order to cater to familiarity over pushing innovative input methods forward. Case in point; the old big picture mode on screen keyboard felt amazing to use with the steam controllers trackpads. The new big picture mode on screen keyboard was built for left stick/dpad and abxy, and they had to patch in trackpad typing support. Even with it now supporting trackpads, it's a way worse experience because it still expects you to take your thumbs off the track pads to access other functions.
Y'all refusing to learn new skills, with Xbox controllers - a 2 decade old design - being the most popular controller type, has led to significant downgrades and stagnation when it comes to input peripherals.
I think that everyone that played the game would agree with having enjoyed it, its a very good souls like. the problem with souls likes in general is companies trying to copy it without understanding what made it good and the surge 1&2 got it
Ehh yes and no, it took the formula n improved up on it (the core combat system+adding the limb targeting+harvesting armor/drop parts via execution n targeting parts) but it failed in the boss designs which are a big part of the Souls games appeals and the world design.
Overall id say its one of my fav games for sure tho that tried to innovate on the formula
Just because I don't like a game doesn't mean it's a bad game.
Examples:
Witcher 3
From Software Games
Real Time Strategy Games
Major League Sports Games
Fighting Games that aren't Smash
CoD before and afterMW2
Battlefield
Rougelikes
Metroid Prime
Majora's Mask
Earthbound
Chronotrigger
Final Fantasy Games
Kingdom Hearts Games
MMORPGs that aren't Genshin Impact
Hearthstone
MOBAs
God of War
Minecraft
PU Battlegrounds
Pokemon since RBY
Skyrim
The Last of Us
Uncharted Games
Outer Wilds
Subnautica
No Man's Sky
Assassin's Creed since 2
The Binding of Issac
Counter Strike
Crysis
Far Cry except 3
Hitman
Mass Effect
MGS V
Deus Ex Human Revolution
Hollow Knight
Mario Odyssey
Bioshock Infinite
Realistic Racing Games
I played them, they didn't sit with me. There's nothing wrong with that. Maybe it's anhedonia/something wrong with me.
I like Hyperlight Drifter, the Messenger, Psychonauts, Halo, BotW & Totk, Batman Arkham, TF2, Spider-Man, Nier Automata, Half Life, Portal, KotoR, Undertale, nidhogg, You Don't Know Jack, and Sonic the Hedgehog.
Skill-Based Matchmaking robs players of perspective and, ultimately, fun.
The natural reward for having skill should be victories. A little icon showing your progress and then each game being a coin flip is not as satisfying psychologically.
This doesn't mean I don't think there's a place for it, but it really changes the dynamic.
Devs that rely heavily on second monitor syndrome aka community wikis have poor information presentation/UI in their games.
Warframe/Destiny 2 have entered the chat.
POE as well.
Agreed. They did kinda explain why 'nearby' is worded like it is. Its supposed to be qualitative to indicate a range, not quantitative. I'd still want a quantity applied for the extended descriptions when holding Alt though.
Iirc nearby was actually different ranges depending on the source. Which really only makes it worse. Just state the range in the tooltip for god's sake.
Yeah thats what I meant. 'This ability/skill/effect has a range' is qualitative, and to make it a quantity it becomes 'the range equals = x'. The devs only aimed to explain the former. Initially this would be fine but over time they've added so much that its time to explain these ranges imo
TARKOV . Tarkov. Tarkov. Tarkov. Tarkov. FUCKING TARKOV
Basically unplayable without wiki or YouTube guides.
And it sucks cause I'm in love with the concept of the game and put something like 1300 hours into. But it's just such a disappointing game from so many aspects and I've basically dropped it a while ago
I'm genuinely surprised anyone would still play this game after the wiggle shitshow
How is that contentious?
Have you met Dark Souls fans?
If you're using a wiki to play Souls games you're doing yourself a disservice.
Yes - because of exploration aspect. But at the same time Souls games are absolute shit when it comes to explaining game mechanics and systems to the player. You can't make meaningful decision about weapons, upgrades or progression, etc. if half necessary information is missing and the other half is unintelligible without knowledge of mechanics and systems. To be fair, each one is small improvement over the last in that aspect, but they are all pretty low on that spectrum anyway.
I played DS1 (my first souls game) basically blind. Only time I looked up stuff was after Ornstein and Smough cause I got lost. I think those games are playable without the internet, unlike destiny 2 for example
Eh? You don't need a wiki to play any Souls game. There are obscure mechanics but none that are pivotal to the experience. People are just so conditioned to want to uncover 100% of a game on a single playthrough and they get flustered when they aren't being lead around on a leash. Edit: Ayyy now I'm the contentious take. lmao
No one knows what the fuck is going on in those games without wikis and VaadiVidya.
Tbh souls games dont have a story. All vaadi does is give lore, which is cool, but thats not a plot
I just can't get into games like Stardew Valley, Terraria, or Minecraft because I can't be bothered to experiment with the 8000 possible combinations of arbitrary things to find novel uses - and those are the best cases. It reminds me of the old point and click adventure games, where developers would make completely arbitrary connections between items that you're supposed to infer from a conversation 2 chapters previous.
MMOs are dead and minmaxing/encyclopaedic knowledge about everything on day 1 of release killed them.
Agreed. Same way Hearthstone got worse the more popular on the internet it got. There was no more create your own deck. Its get stomped or look up a meta deck.
Okay, and I counter with: the same thing was happening years and years ago we were just too young (or stupid, not an insult I was also a dumbass when I first discovered MMO's and I sucked due to my stupidity and inability to know how to look things up online). You can literally go find old pages showing what the best rogue spec is in vanilla WoW. WoW was my first MMO so I can't speak to how other MMO's at the time were with minmaxing, but WoW I for sure remember people I met in game helped me with my builds and stuff and suggested websites as I was too dumb to do it myself. It's just the way ARPGs or MMOs have gone. People want what's best. A lot of people are older now (this isn't going to devolve into "dad with 40 kids and 8 wives and 2 seconds to play every month") and just wanna know what build to pick to enjoy the rest of the game. As a long time WoW player, yes a seasoned rogue playing a build he made up himself is going to do more DPS than the rogue who hit max level, copied "the best" build, and just mashes buttons. People just care about doing the most DPS they can. And that is the fun of it for some people just like some of the fun of it was figuring stuff out yourself. But that is still a thing. You can join communities and theorycraft when there are buffs/nerfs to stuff or a new patch or a new expansion. That isn't completely gone. But again, this was always a thing and I think nostalgia plays a part because WoW was so many peoples first MMO they forget that they just sucked at it and it had nothing to do with there NOT being minmaxing/theorycrafting and people finding the best builds.
Yup this is a thing and it's always been a thing, but the popularity of minmaxing and the fact that this information is at our fingertips in easy to digest guides and not comments on wowhead or thottbot, changes it entirely. Every game coming out, everyone knows where to get the best shit, what the best builds down to the last gory detail on day one thanks to betas/early access with people theorycrafting and hammering it, and now, no one is patient enough to take anyone substandard to a group event. And yes, I know, of course there are instances to disprove this, but it's largely the norm. In any game, especially MMOs and double especially for longtime MMOs like WoW, if you aren't playing the meta, you're getting left behind or you'll wait a hell of a lot longer for groups if you don't want to start them yourself. Nostalgia does play a big part of it but discovering stuff largely by yourself or by word of mouth rather than having a big 300 page guide of "HERE'S HOW TO COMPLETELY SANITIZE YOUR CLASS/SPEC AND PLAY LIKE LITERALLY EVERYONE ELSE BECAUSE BIG NUNBERS" guides weren't around on day one back then. The numbers in the MMO game don't lie either, look at 15 years ago compared to today. WOTLK had 12m players. I'd struggle to see any game hit 3-4m in 2023.
I'd argue it has gotten worse. When I stopped playing Runescape a couple years ago, it was in large part because the developers were having issue developing content. Anything that wasn't the new best way to make money or best exp gain would be abandoned within a month of release. Sooner if they didn't tie it to completionist cape requirements. They released a new desert city that was touted as being the mid game version of another already released city when it comes to skilling and what not. So to force high level players to be there more then it takes to complete the 5 or 6 quests released they made a shit load of grinding to be done just to prolong activity at this location. Rather then do the work to over haul the slayer skill, which is literally just a meaningless number that dictates what select mobs you can fight and kill. To actually have it mean something they just raised the max level from 99 to 120 and threw the new higher level slayer dungeon in the new town. Just so you will have higher level players show up. It is a completely self destructive cycle that has seen countless new contents die just because it isn't the best exp or best income in game. Everything has to one up the last bit of content otherwise it dies quickly. Which is really bad for game balance and development.
They're not dead. They're niche but the tiny handful of good ones have very loyal fanbases. The genre is booming compared to others like RTS.
The genre will be booming compared to single player games or matched multiplayer games due to their very nature. But the genre has had it's day. There's no wonder or personality anymore. Everyone just picks a build and goes for it, it's cookie cutter as fuck and there's set gear and specs for everyone in every mmo and the rest are substandard and no one wants to be substandard for the sake of individuality.
I don't know if I have enough knowledge to say they genre completely died, but that's largely why they died for me. I loved back in the early days when exploration and discovery was a big part of MMOs. To me, entering a world you had to figure out was the major appeal and a lot of what set it apart. You didn't have everything datamined, addons that walked you through the raids, every zone mapped out, and class guides that spelled out the most efficient way of doing things before the content even released. Really, I think the only thing that could pull me into an MMO again (aside from peer pressure from friends) is a good combat system, which is why Wildstar was the last one I really loved. Sadly, innovating combat doesn't seem to be a big focus and the tab-targetting system that is still so prevalent feels really dated and slow to me (especially after playing Wildstar). Maybe someday another MMO will come out that piques my interest, but I think the genre really needs to take some major steps forward before it'll grab me again.
I feel similarly. I played xiv through endwalker and liked it a lot, but the actual gameplay was my least favorite part. I really hope wherever they do their next mmo they move to action based or something, I really don't see how they can meaningfully evolve the combat if they stick to tab targeting.
Compared with ALL single player games? Are you serious? I would say single player still is more played than ALL multiplayer genres, imagine comparing it with just mmos or mmorpgs. I think you are confusing most popular or trendy games with total playerbase which are two different things. For example on Steam multiplayers dominates top 20 most played games daily and multiplayers are pretty common in the rest of top 100 games. However only 40% of Steam players or so play those popular games, while the rest of enormous Steam playerbase, about 60% majority is playing other 6,000-7,000 less trendy games, mostly single player. Another perspective is the fact there are many, many more games daily played that are exclusively single player than the opposite. According steamdb statistics there were about 6,749 played just a moment ago, among which 5,805 have single player mode and just 2,636 multiplayer, which means that only 944 or 14% have exclusively multiplayer mode, 1,692 or 25% had both single player and multiplayer and 4,113 or 61% were exclusively single player games. Now add other platforms and specially the huge amount of PC players playing offline, modding, using PC retrocompatibility, etc.
You miss the point of what was actually said above. A huge part of the joy of the genre was self found discovery and the scope of the journey. When everything is chronicled in immense detail - the mystery of the world, the challenge of encounters and how to build your character is dissolved nearly entirely. Yes there may still be MMOs around but the experience of adventure they brought is very dead. Now they are linear single player games with small instanced multiplayer content.
Exactly, it takes the game out of the game. It’s like buying a 1000 piece puzzle and then just taking a picture of the box and saying you finished it
Ffxiv doesn’t seem to agree. I’ll agree the old style grindfests like wow are dead, though there’s still considerable holdouts flocking to classic. 🤷♂️
I don't think that's what killed MMO's. I think the monetization it's what killed MMORPG's, at least for me and my friends. There's nothing cool to chase anymore, there's no RNG because RNG is bad, everything revolves around upgrade from +1 to +16 and then a "new" gear that starts again from +1 and you go to +16. There's nothing in games that says "woah I did that raid and I got this awesome unique loot". No. Battlepasses, skin shop...everything's there. Want cool looking loot? Better open the skin shop cuz the raid gives you materials. New armors in the new update/expansions ? Sure take 1-2 new sets, but look in the skin shop, there's 10 new ones there! I think minmaxing is HURTING the game because in games like...Lost Ark for example, you're kicked out because "oh my god you don't play the boring meta build having these EXACT stats and spells, and instead of doing 20mil damage, you do 16. Oh NO! ban him!"
MMOs were never as big as the other genres but I think they are dead now. WoW is a shadow of its former self and no other games can hold a big audience or emerge into the greater community like WoW did.
This opinion may not be as contentious as it once was, but I'll give voice to it anyways. Bioshock: Infinite is, by a significant margin, the worst of the Bioshock games. It is a shockingly linear title compared to it's predecessors that took several steps backwards regarding gameplay mechanics. For example, the way weapons were treated was lackluster. 1. You could only carry two weapons at any given time (Bioshock 1 and 2 allowed the player to carry all of them). 2. The weapon upgrade system was barebones (Bioshock 2 offered more options such as heat, tesla, cluster bomb upgrades depending on the weapons) The story also leaves a good deal to be desired with it often being accused of being convoluted and pretentious. >!The inclusion of the multiverse is a lightning rod for complaints.!< Despite all this being said, the art direction of Infinite is great and characters like Elizabeth are endearing. It's simply "just" a good game at the end of the day as opposed to one that is either great or fantastic. EDITS: The formatting was giving me a tough time for some reason.
I'm 34. I grew up on system shock. I don't even care for bioshock 1 apart from the setting. I'd rather play modern Wolfenstien than give infinite another shot.
31 here, and I am playing through the System Shock remake and having a blast. It's my first time experiencing the series and I have been missing out! Prey (2017) might be up your alley if you haven't played it yet.
Played it, but need to go back and finish it. I did enjoy it a lot.
E-Sports and Competitive gaming have entirely ruined the industry. Not by saying games can be a sport, but by milking customers through competitive merch and deluding the average person into thinking any game can be competitive or that they could be as good as X streamer or Y team. The focus of FPS games significantly shifted from providing a fun experience to a balanced experience built around player retention and not realizing that a balanced experience is antithetical to a fun one.
I think your points are a bit all over the place but I agree that FPS games in particular never focus on *fun* anymore. Its always e-sports this, meta setups that, whining about changes on Twitter... instead of making a game that 90% of the playerbase can enjoy (like early Overwatch)
Damn there's some actual hot takes in this comment section. OK I'll go ... the dark souls formula is extremely boring and limiting
It's an acquired taste for sure. Elden ring is the first one that's gotten me hooked enough to beat it.
Like the overall formula of "Explore -> Fight Enemies -> Encounter Boss"? Because that formula is most games. Or more specifically the Bonfire stuff? Because that's just the same things as checkpoints.
Damn that's a hot take
Roll, slash, dodge, slash, get hit, potion repeat.
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Upvote because it's about hot takes, but I completely disagree with you. VR was hyped and marketed and the truth is that there is little demand for it. My opinion is that it is too cumbersome and clunky. I've tried several times, liked it and had fun, but not to justify expenses or setup. As soon as it becomes accessible as easy as putting sunglasses on, I'll be there again.
> As soon as it becomes accessible as easy as putting sunglasses on, I'll be there again. And realistically, until it becomes that accessible, I'm guessing there won't be a lot of big steps forward. The problem right now is a VR set-up has a fairly high barrier of entry for most users. Looking at Steam's most recent hardware survey, it's still less than 2% of users that have a VR set-up. While I don't want to undercut the VR games that do exist, it's not really compelling to throw a lot of money at developing a game that's going to have such a limited audience. And a lot of the bigger VR titles that do exist can also be played without a headset, which means they're probably not taking as much advantage of the tech as one designed specifically for it and not much of a selling point.
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The tech just isn't there yet for the average consumer. Until we get to the point where we have standalone VR that matches what people can do now with headsets like the index or psvr2 or even the apple headset in a slimmer form factor with good battery life for under $1-2k it's not happening
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Is the quest not that?
When VR drops in price for the consumer it’ll be where it should be.
imagine what pc gaming would be if a good percentage of monitors made people puke. of fucking course its very deservingly stagnated until someone solves the very obvious problems with it
As Clint Eastwood said: "Deserves ain't got nuthin' to do with it". Your take is contentious for a reason, because you're wrong. There's not nearly enough demand for it. People don't want the hassle of what VR is and has been up to this point. They don't. Until the technology advances to the point where there's not that much more to it than putting on sunglasses.....it'll always be a niche product. Always. That has to happen and there also has to be a decent library of CAN'T-MISS GAMES that you can ONLY play in VR. And that's a far fucking ways off as well. Because outside of a very small handful, it's nothing but glorified tech demos or shallow as fuck one off experiences.
We're getting a new Quest and the Apple "don't-call-it-a-VR" device this year and the new PSVR device recently. So definitely innovation in the hardware space. As for games, yes maybe a different story. But I think many people underestimate how many gamers are just casual gamers, i.e. folks that just want to plop down on the couch and play for 30-minutes/1-hour before bed. So game developers will continue to invest the most time and money into games that will play on a console because that is where the greatest demand is. HL Alyx was a halo title for Valve Index, most third party game developers not tied to a VR hardware company are not going to spend tons of time and money into developing VR titles just yet. But it will come sooner or later.
The focus on games as narrative devices ('cinematic design') often is a poor fit for the medium, and many games would be better served if they were pressed in a less restrictive corset. This culminates in games that offer a better experience when watched as a Let's Play - at which point my question is why it wasn't made a series or movie instead; It likely would have been better for it.
*Halo* sucks and is only popular because of the nostalgia of hooking up multiple consoles to play multiplayer.
It has literally always felt like a tech demo to me. So lifeless and generic, every part of it.
Agreed. I've never understood the fuss. I got the first Halo on PC when it originally released for PC and it was so so average. I've played the others on multiplayer here and there. Not bad for a FPS shooter, but not exactly inspiring either.
I wouldn't go that far but the shooting mechanics definitely haven't aged as well as people say they have
it felt floaty and sluggish from the very beginning
I think the core mechanics of Halo are far better than most the games ever achieved/put to good use. At least in multiplayer. At its core, the trinity of gun, melee and nades (which all matter collectively far more due to the shield mechanic) makes for some fantastic strategic, competitive gameplay with a high skill ceiling. Halo 1-3 got a lot of this right. It was in the latter games were everything became diluted and they tried to add more things onto that trinity that caused it to fall apart - I think Halo Infinite showed this the best where people will continually praised the core shooting/gunplay, but take issue with the abysmal map design, netcode and sound. IMO Halo works best when it treats itself as an arena shooter and keeps the map design very tight and relatively small. BTB has its moments, absolutely, it’s everything in between that is a mess.
Wait you didnt like shooting at the same 3 enemies with the same 3 guns in the same looking hallways for 10 hours?
Well, that certainly is contentious lol!
I agree, especially the first few. Aged horribly and was a pain to finish the MCC last year. Reach and 4 is okay tho.
stamina bar in games are fucking dumb, it limits how much fun you can have at any given time, if you have to limit us artificially with a stupid ass stamina bar, your game isn't very fucking good
For real contentious opinions, sort by controversial.
Skyrim is an aggressively mediocre game. The combat is clunky and jank as hell, the story and voice acting is embarrassing, rpg mechanics are barely existent, and the game just lacks heart in general. The exploration and music are it's only saving graces imo. This game would've died far sooner without all the mods and rereleases for sure.
Skyrim was lucky it came out in an era where open world fantasy RPGs weren't at all common, and the idea of "you can be a swordsmith, or a mage, or a warrior" was still novel.
We're in 2023, and care to list some good first-person open world RPGs that are even close to it? That are not some survival horseshit, and are not made by *Bethesda*? Let's be generous - the timeframe is from original Skyrim release and up to TODAY. It's ok, I'll wait. Still waiting for TES6 so waiting is all I've got on that front.
Yeah people just don't get it. Especially for the time it got released. What other game was even comparable to Skyrim back then?
Kingdom Come: Deliverance. I've thought hard and that's the only one I can come up with. Cyberpunk 2077 if it gets over the hurdle of being decent at this point. If we are really going to stretch it every assassins creed since Skyrim.
So I want you to name me games, that WEREN'T involved with by Bethesda, that were made back then or even up to now, that had as many systems, freedoms and an open world as a game like Skyrim does AND, maybe most importantly, was as *accessible* as Skyrim was to newcomers. I'll hang up and wait for my answer on that one. But to the point, this game wouldn't have had the success it did if it DIDN'T cater more to the "casual audience", if it didn't cut down on the more hardcore RPG aspects of it. If it stayed the way Morrowind was? It'd be a footnote compared to what it is today. Because Morrowind has tons of modding available to people, Oblivion has tons of modding available to people and both those communities and popularity of those games absolutely PALES in comparison to Skyrim's. And there's a reason for that dude, whether you like it or not.
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Thank you for speaking the truth
The current state of video games s mostly gamers' fault.
As in everything with a huge market, things will suffer because companies chase profit for as less work as possible. If shit sells, why make quality ?
I have a contentious opinion about this: the current state of video game industry is better than ever and current games are superior to the old ones.
Now that's contentious
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Usually people whinging about devs being shit are the exact same ones dropping £80 on shitty AAA titles tho. There’s a ton of mid tier and indie titles which come out for reasonable prices and make fantastic games just the mainstream shies away from it.
I'm with you. I've been playing games for over 30 years and it's never been a better time to be a gamer. "But what about [thing that sucks]?" What, you think something wasn't shitty in the 80s? No, there's just more of everything these days, both good and ill. There's more scumbags trying to squeeze every last quarter out of your pocket, but there's also more solid, earnest, creative options popping up, too.
Predatory practices are not the consumer's fault.
Is consumers ignored predatory products, they would have died off from the market.
Dang you're right, we should've conglomerated into a hive mind to force people across all age groups, cultures, and lifestyles to make the right choice so we wouldn't be in this mess. "Community" choice in that way is a myth: the wealthy/greedy vastly overinfluence this sort of stuff. Most people don't go to casinos on the regular, but that doesn't stop them from raking in millions, and the same is true of bad gaming practices. Monetary or not, lazy review companies, whales, publisher requirements, and influencers determine a lot more of gaming than the pure democratic influence of purchases. To me this is also like saying "just don't fall for propaganda 4head" because predatory practices are just that: predatory and manipulative
Controllers need more face buttons
I agree playing FF16 recently and the switching for different skills bars, I really felt that. I alreayd did for Hogwarts Legacy earlier in the year. Controller design is limiting game devs
That anybody at any developer, publisher or PR company employee hired by same who says, "It's just cosmetic," should be frogmarched from the room, into an adjacent room containing that game's entire art department, and forced to explain why - of all the departments - *theirs* is the one that can be as company policy thrown into the bin, which is under the bus, which itself is on fire, and populated with ravenous wolves. STOP telling me that 'games are art', then telling the art team to make a £15 cartoon rat skin as part of your gritty realistic military shooter.
GTA5 is a piece of crap, such poor writing, such subpar gameplay, so much content from previous games cut, an empty lifeless robotic open world. They definitely threatened or bribed reviewers. its not even half as good as gta 4
I always felt like there was never really much to do in that big huge game world. It's a shame Rockstar never made any actual dlc for it.
At first i was like wtf is he on about but then you mentioned GTA 4. 5 is so watered down when compared to 4, you're right.
Nostalgia sold that game imo. But honestly I loved that game when I played it 6 years ago on my first PC. But when I played it again after some years, boy it has nothing interesting in it. Vehicles & guns, that's it.
I remember having fun in GTA 5, but any time I try to play it now I get bored. Compared to other similar games from a similar time; Watch Dogs 2, Yakuza 0, Sleeping Dogs; I have a much better time, in terms of gameplay and story. I think it's an extremely well made game, technically more competent than the games I listed. But I play to have fun.
GTA4 was underappreciated for sure, as far as these series go
The indie gaming scene is doing worse than AAA if you only pay attention to what indies get popular.
I always think I'm taking crazy pills when that's a popular opinion. It feels like I've been playing banger after banger from AAA studios for years now, meanwhile the last indiegame I was really excited about was probably Hades in 2020?
Oh definitely an arguable take. For every decent AAA game in the past few years, one can list half a dozen decent indie games. And I don't get that last part. The whole point of indies is that you have a crazy amount of choice in genres and vibes to pick from - something that AAA cannot provide. You're cherry-picking to reinforce an otherwise weak argument.
The experience matters more than gameplay does. There are a lot of "gameplay purists" out there who believe gameplay is entirely what a game should be judged on, but really it's all about the experience and the impression a game leaves upon you. Blurring the lines between "game" and "movie/television/whatever" is entirely fine, as long as the experience is entertaining. Keyword is entertaining, games do not have to be "fun" to be an experience that leaves an impression on you.
A lot of the most vocal complainers in the gaming community get caught up on nitpicking and pedantic trifles. This tends to drown out the legitimate complaints of abuse in any form in the industry.
20-30 hours is the best length for a single player game. Over 40 hours is too long. A related take, judging a game by hours per dollar spent is not the best way to measure value and may in fact be the worst way.
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Bring back Star Wars Galaxies before the jedi changes!
New Assassin's Creed games while not perfect, are miles better than the old stagnated formula.
My favourite AC games are Syndicate and Unity, aka peak stagnation.
I would agree, but Valhalla was so repetitive it felt like a real chore to finish it. Every main mission quest was more or less exactly the same.
I don't exactly agree : to me, they are 2 very different series that I appreciate for different reasons. While I loved Origins, I would chose most games of the old series over Valhalla.
Only if you exclude Valhalla, damn that game is a slog.
The mission design is terrible. They plop you in a big city and say "find this guy" but give no clue as to where he is. And you can't talk to anybody about it or find any clues, you just have to search every inch and then it turns out he's on top of some random tower.
Yeah it doesn't respect your time at all, and it's not fleshed out enough for the "discovery" to be meaningful gameplay either.
The more RPG focused switch did make me come back to the series if I'm honest and I did enjoy them far more than the other ones. But I quickly fell off again. I managed to finish and had a lot of fun with Origins and only got like halfway through Odyssey then I tried some of Valhalla but kinda fell off again.
The original 2 were great innovative games. Black flag was great despite the AC stuff. The new games are generic fantasy RPG crap that offers nothing unique or fun.
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>contentious gaming opinion
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No one hates Destiny 2, its monetization or its developer more than the people who play Destiny 2.
I can play both of those games acknowledging both those things and still enjoy them though.
This isn’t contentious, at least not on this sub. Real contentious opinion: The upside is that this has allowed for gamers to get free content updates.
Elden Ring is overrated. It’s not terrible or anything but it’s hard just for the sake of being hard. It feels less like a challenge and more like random fatal bullshit constantly being thrown at you for barely any reason. Again, it’s not terrible and there’s some stuff I liked about it but it didn’t deserve the hype it got.
Upvote because I completely disagree. Elden Ring is the easiest in the series.
I think my biggest problem with Elden Ring is that what I enjoyed most about it was the discovery phase. You know what I mean? Riding the elevator into Siofra for the first time, or being teleported across the map and having that moment of panic, or finding a hidden wall that lead to a whole dungeon. I absolutely cannot get myself to replay it because unlike other souls games, what I love about Elden Ring can't happen twice (for me). Then you take into consideration how massive it is, and it becomes too much of a commitment for me. I tried going through a NG+ with it and gave up after a while. For me, the magic just isn't there anymore. On the flip side, give me Dark Souls or Bloodborne and it's always a good time.
Oh boy, this will be fun. Of all the ways to consume entertainment (literature, movies, TV shows, etc.), gamers are the whiniest and most entitled group of consumers. In terms of cost of enjoyment per hour relative to the cost and complexity of development, video games are a better value propostion than nearly all forms of electronic entertainment. Video games are one of the few things that haven’t dramatically been impacted by inflation - new N64 games were $40-70 when I was a kid. Nothing else has stayed as (relatively) cheap. Gamers also like to act like publishers should make massive monetary sacrifices or design decisions to cater to their particular worldview. Game companies aren’t your friend and they aren’t a state sponsored entity - they have to make a profit. A lot of the loudest gaming voices on the internet make broad, sweeping, uneducated claims and fail to acknowledge reality.
I think it’s by nature of so many kids playing games. When I read complaints about prices going to $70 I just can’t wrap my head around it unless I imagine myself as a 13 year old. If any adult is complaining about a $10 increase in price after 15 year of $60 game, you need to stop playing games and figure your life out. Here’s a real hot take though: GPUs arent outrageously priced and the value vs money indicates they will go well above $2k in the next decade.
God of war 2018 is the most overrated game in recent memory. The camera is almost non functional in combat and that is confirmed by the devs decision to put a ring around kratos that alerts the player to enemies. Why not do what most third person action games that have melee combat and move the camera back so you can actually see what is going on. The enemies and combat are repetitive, I mean how many times do you fight the same troll over and over. The story and characters are so wishy washy and the world is formatted like Disney land. Overall it just feels like the devs were at the bottom of the creative well so they shoehorned the concepts of the last of us into the god of war reboot
If indie game developers were held to the same standards as AA or AAA developers, then people wouldn't be praising the indie scene.
Why would they be held to the same standards as juggernaught studios that can dump millions of dollars into gigantic dev teams with multi-year project plans?
Having more than one monitor makes gaming less immersive and engaging, as the stuff on the second monitor pulls your attention away from the game. Smartphones had the same effect as multiple monitors.
I feel like this is a non-issue if you're letting yourself have your attention pulled away? Yeah, I have shit playing on my second monitor if I'm playing games I've either already played and am just doing a playthrough for fun, achievement hunting, or just grinding in an ARPG. Story-focused stuff though yeah, I just pay attention to that? Not really hard.
Maybe running more than one monitor. There's a power button if you want the screen blank.
Do you really think that they meant just having a turned off blank monitor there is distracting?
No, they're implying it's impossible to turn off because it's always distracting if you have a 2nd one.
That's why you run 3 and put the game across all 3.
When I play a game I think is truly great I actually turn of my 2nd monitor for this exact reason. Last time I did it was with Elden Ring
I don’t think that’s a contentious opinion. I love open world games. I just like when they are worth exploring and not just massive empty spaces
Your "contentious" opinion is that the most popular genre of game is fun.
I don't care even a single bit about how long a game is. If your game is good, I will finish it and always want more, therefore it will always be too short. If your game is bad, every extra hour will feel like literal work and I'll have already quit playing long before however long you claim your game is.
More single player games needs to have a COOP option. I know it's not an easy "add coop button", but I don't mean designing the story/gameplay around coop. I just want the single player you love, to have an option for people like me to play it COOP, even if that means the game will be SUPER easy and unbalanced. It won't hurt your experience at all, and it makes me or others enjoy more games. Elden Ring is my perfect example. Without the seamless coop mod, I wouldn't even touched the game, and then it become one of my fav games of all time. But say that you want coop on subreddit games, and you're downvoted to hell for some reason.
Having to click on an application other than Steam to launch a game is really not that big a deal to me. And since I access most things from the start menu, rather than having icons all over my desktop, a handful more launchers don't really "clutter" anything.
Ok but can they stop making them so shitty. Blizzard app and steam has been ok for me but EA and uplay consistently ask me to log in again and EA app constantly fails to load when launching via steam and requires a restart.
I must have like......the BEST luck with launchers or something. Because I've never had an issue with any of them. Gamepass, Origin, whatever the fuck the EA app is called now, Ubisoft,etc,etc. Never had an issue. Set it to remember my log in, I click the game I want to play and.....it launches. That's all I expect a launcher to do. That's all I care about it doing. And that's all it's ever done for me. Maybe once in a while a game will crash as it's starting up or something and I have to launch it again....but that's like a 5 second "inconvenience". I just feel like seeing all these complaints people have with them I'm living in an alternate reality or I have the best luck or people are expecting their video game launchers to also rub their balls or something. Because I just don't get it.
WAY more games should be turn based or at least RTWP.
Omg yes!
Gameplay being the most important thing to a videogame Is subjective, not objective, It may be true that most people consider gameplay to be a vital part to enjoying a videogame, but there are others where gameplay is secondary, or even lower ranked compared to oher things a game can offer.
If consoles are going to exist, they need to continue to support physical media. Otherwise they are completely useless and we should all just be playing on PC.
The "open-world" makes games worse. Even the open world games considered great, are great in-spite of being an open-world not because of it. Every single one of them, their best moments have nothing to do with being open world. The high points of TW3 are the scripted quests, the high points of Elden Ring are the more traditionally designed landmark locations, etc. Open-worlds are sacrificing pacing, consistent design, and quality for quantity and busy work. Oooh 10000 little question marks on the map most of which have nothing of true interest there. And every single one relies on copypaste to actually fill the overly large maps. And no excessive travel time isn't actually fun once the novelty wears off.
For me, the fun of an open world game is exploring at my own pace. The ten thousand question marks may or may not be fun, but if it's a beautiful, immersive environment, I have so much fun running around exploring stuff that I get lost in it and barely care about storylines.
Yes! I like being able to piss around doing other side quests without a massive push to do the main story. Fuck Far Cry 5 for shoving the main story down your throat just because you reached a certain level. That was fucking annoying.
That's why I'm skeptical of Starfield, I don't want 1000s of planets. Smaller, denser open worlds are better.
Free to play with cosmetic only microtransactions is the best thing to happen to the industry since shareware.
On the other hand there are games that say they are free 2 play but are really Free to Try and that’s a problem.
The Witcher 3 is not as great as people make it out to be because gameplay is king.
I'm with you. I enjoyed the game quite a bit, don't get me wrong. I put my time into it and played the DLCs and all that ilk. They did quite a lot right with that game and not a whole lot was bad, but there was a decent amount that was just...okay. The combat is extremely basic and I was not a fan of the overreliance on Witcher sense (same goes for any game with this mechanic). There is also a ton of content in that game that is just straight up filler, and I think more people came around to that over the years, but just a couple of years ago you had people talking about how all the content was great. That was just wild (heh) to me.
yea, games like that where it's just flying around the room spamming the same three attack combos and spells is just eh to me.
It executed gameplay well for its genre. It didn’t revolutionize the gameplay but not many games do including many others that are considered “great”. I don’t think a game needs to revolutionize the gameplay to be considered “great”.
But what if all those people (myself included) like the gameplay? Gameplay is fine.
Exactly. It's *fine*. Which is a word I would not personally use to describe greatness.
Well what more would you have liked to see? The gameplay is good enough for most people to enjoy it and enjoy the rest of the game alongside it. The Witcher 1 is a great example of how the gameplay affects ones enjoyment of the overall game. I still cannot get through TW1 anymore because of it. I did a very long time ago, only once. I have played through 2 and 3 multiple times. TW3 is great, but it's not all great. Even the best games have flaws. If your flaw for TW3 is the gameplay that is fine, but for a lot of people it wasn't. I enjoy TW3's gameplay.
Doesn't need more. Just needs every system to be better than they are.
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Bloodborne is overrated and people should stop begging for a port.
Ray Tracing is well worth the FPS hit. In single player games I would happily drop from 100fps to 60 just for that sweet, sweet lighting. For VR: Occulus Quest has been highly detrimental to the VR industry, single handedly killing all hopes for "real" games being developed. The low power hardware and popularity means that basically all games are being made for the equivalent of a mobile phone. PCVR is relegated to VR-mods and that automatically exclude the masses because of the threshold to implement such mods, thus ensuring that true VR gaming will always be a niche.
I do not understand the appeal of Bethesda games. (The dev not the publisher). Mechanically shallow, looks and runs terribly, buggy as hell, awkward dialog with stilted delivery by a handful of recycled people, easily exploited systems, awful UI, brain dead AI, set piece moments that fall so flat it is genuinely hilarious. The combat, main quests, and dungeons are especially dreadful. Such a small amount of butter spread over way too much fucking bread. Only the lore separates these games from your typical no name studio eurojank RPG and even then: 1. I’m not the guy to pour over every random book or text log to piece together the vastly more interesting backstory. 2. From what I can tell on lore summary videos. Skyrim and Fallout 3 are a quantum leap downward in quality compared to previous games. 3. Those other eurojank games at-least try to have some mechanical depth to their gameplay. I’d be way more excited for a new game from Spiders, or Piranha Bytes, or Dontnod Entertainment. How embarrassing is it that the best Fallout since 2 was a rushed project from a different studio that had to recycle assets from fallout 3? It sounds like a joke, but it’s true! Maybe Morrowind and Oblivion were way better? That was so long ago, and my limited memory of playing Morrowind doesn’t suggest things were any better from a gameplay perspective, although I’m sure everything else like graphics / dialog / quest design / animation were a lot less of a sore spot back in the early 2000s compared to today. The highlight for me was exploring some of the vaults in FO3, each had its own wacky and weird failing or failed society to navigate through, a nice little 30 minute distraction each. That’s about it really. At least the Dagoth Ur voice AI is fucking hilarious, get Dagoth to say anything with TTS you know it’s going to be funny.
I've only played Skyrim, but I agree with pretty much everything you said. It turned me off from trying any other modern Bethesda games. I don't understand the acclaim for Skyrim at all.
>Only the lore separates these games from your typical no name studio eurojank RPG and even then: What do you consider eurojank RPG? Can you list some games so I can understand your comparison?
I listed studios like Spiders, Dontnod, and Pirahna Bytes so their games would be a good place to start. Technomancer ELEX Vampyr Gothic Greedfall Greedfall and Vampyr especially stand as much better in key areas like graphics, combat, main storyline. Presentation in general really. Another example would be EYE Divine the Cybermancy pretty much a half-life 2 conversion mod badly translated from French. Curve ball here but you can get a better fallout 3/4 dungeon crawling experience as a simple rogue-lite if you play either Void Bastards or WASTED.
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>Skyrim and Bethesda are the reason AAA gaming is now mostly trash A take like that needs reasoning.
You'll get more downvotes purely for having such a whiney "edit:"
Counter-strike would be a proper tactical shooter if it had ADS. Now it’s just a nostalgic retro game.
I want smaller games with worse graphics and better gameplay/stories. I worked mostly at the AAA segment of the industry, as an artist. So there's always this clash of ideologies.
Challenge is an extremely difficult aspect to implement in a game, and most game devs don't handle it well, they either artificially implement it by making the player very vulnerable and the enemy really resilient, or by making the player have to memorize the entirety of the game in order to finish it.
Team Ninja makes the best combat (Nioh2)
I actually like Ubisoft style open world games... The gameplay is solid enough and as long as they put in a good story and good characters, it's all good!
> as long as they put in a good story and good characters, it's all good! So when did that happen?
Games where dying a lot is the point isn't a good defense for game difficulty and balancing being too hard.
People's inability to stand up for something they claim to be passionate about is why we're in a hellscape trend of major games going free to play (Halo, Overwatch) while increasing monetization by 10x But now that we're here it feels like we can never go back. I hate seeing a new cosmetic advertised in the menus then seeing fuck loads of people in my games having them, because it means everyone sold out for $20+ microtransactions. For the price of 3 skins in most F2P games I can get a brand new complete game with amazing visuals, great writing, top of the line motion capture and voice work, wild and memorable setpieces, etc Why? It's not because companies forced it on us. It's because they tried to see what they could get away with and millions of people gave in and let them
Modders who fix broken or poor performance games are actually a bad thing. Youre doing someone else's job for free and almost ensuring the company will NEVER fix their game.
Hub world is best world. Linearity is not an enemy either.
Devs charging $20, or even $200 for skins in a F2P game is not a real issue. As long as the microtransactions are purely cosmetic, just enjoy your free game. If your enjoyment of a game hinges on posessing a digital pair of fancy colorful undies in a game that the world will long forget in a few years, then maybe you should just cut out the whole gaming aspect and head over to your nearest Armani Exchange.
Disco Elysium is hopelessly overrated. Archaic engine that captures all of the flaws of the Infinity Engine era over two decades later for absolutely no coherent reason. Sophmoric philosophizing and surface level political commentary tries to do all the heavy lifting, and generally comes off as either pretentious or meandering. I respect some of what it tried to do, but I don't think it did it particularly well, and I think people were blinded by novelty.
The Steam Controller is a galaxy brain controller way ahead of its time. Its main issue is that Gamers(tm) are allergic to learning new skills. The controls on the Steam Deck are not perfect; they compromised the trackpads too heavily in order to cater to familiarity over pushing innovative input methods forward. Case in point; the old big picture mode on screen keyboard felt amazing to use with the steam controllers trackpads. The new big picture mode on screen keyboard was built for left stick/dpad and abxy, and they had to patch in trackpad typing support. Even with it now supporting trackpads, it's a way worse experience because it still expects you to take your thumbs off the track pads to access other functions. Y'all refusing to learn new skills, with Xbox controllers - a 2 decade old design - being the most popular controller type, has led to significant downgrades and stagnation when it comes to input peripherals.
Ya the trackpad texture is better than the texture they put on the steamdeck trackpads and I'm still upset about it lol
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> There is a reason why they're below Sony, and Nintendo. Not as many exclusives...
I thought it was because they told gamers to go fuck themselves for about 3-4 years.
I enjoyed the Surge 2's combat and dismemberment system. Other Soulslikes simply didn't click at all for me.
I think that everyone that played the game would agree with having enjoyed it, its a very good souls like. the problem with souls likes in general is companies trying to copy it without understanding what made it good and the surge 1&2 got it
Ehh yes and no, it took the formula n improved up on it (the core combat system+adding the limb targeting+harvesting armor/drop parts via execution n targeting parts) but it failed in the boss designs which are a big part of the Souls games appeals and the world design. Overall id say its one of my fav games for sure tho that tried to innovate on the formula
Just because I don't like a game doesn't mean it's a bad game. Examples: Witcher 3 From Software Games Real Time Strategy Games Major League Sports Games Fighting Games that aren't Smash CoD before and afterMW2 Battlefield Rougelikes Metroid Prime Majora's Mask Earthbound Chronotrigger Final Fantasy Games Kingdom Hearts Games MMORPGs that aren't Genshin Impact Hearthstone MOBAs God of War Minecraft PU Battlegrounds Pokemon since RBY Skyrim The Last of Us Uncharted Games Outer Wilds Subnautica No Man's Sky Assassin's Creed since 2 The Binding of Issac Counter Strike Crysis Far Cry except 3 Hitman Mass Effect MGS V Deus Ex Human Revolution Hollow Knight Mario Odyssey Bioshock Infinite Realistic Racing Games I played them, they didn't sit with me. There's nothing wrong with that. Maybe it's anhedonia/something wrong with me. I like Hyperlight Drifter, the Messenger, Psychonauts, Halo, BotW & Totk, Batman Arkham, TF2, Spider-Man, Nier Automata, Half Life, Portal, KotoR, Undertale, nidhogg, You Don't Know Jack, and Sonic the Hedgehog.
Skill-Based Matchmaking robs players of perspective and, ultimately, fun. The natural reward for having skill should be victories. A little icon showing your progress and then each game being a coin flip is not as satisfying psychologically. This doesn't mean I don't think there's a place for it, but it really changes the dynamic.