What are controversial gaming opinions you have?

DestinyPlayer said:
...I'm not seeing the connection.
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You want to know why the genre of 4X is associated with space, why people think of Stellaris and not Civ 6, and, well, that's at least half of why. MoO is the foundational, and it has more in common with Stellaris, both aesthetically and unfortunately at this point in terms of mechanics given its strong lean into warfare as the only way to play.

For all that conquest victory has existed in Civ and its many successors, it has never really committed to the last X. That has always been part of its appeal, in fact!

And in the end grand strategy games aren't actually the same thing as 4X either. You can describe something like MoO or like Civ 6 as a 4X, though the latter is deliberately tilted away from the last X honestly. But Vicky 3 is absolutely not a 4X even as it is absolutely a grand strategy game.
 
VoidUtopian said:
How so? I've played a bit of Civ 6 and there's quite a bit of exterminating.
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In a 'traditional' 4X there's no such thing as a victory without eliminating the entire opposing team(s) down to the last unit and city, whereas it's entirely possible to win a game of Civ without ever being at war with anyone other than the barbarians.
 
Haven't alternate victory conditions been a recurring element of several games in the genre for ages now?
 
hghwolf said:
In a 'traditional' 4X there's no such thing as a victory without eliminating the entire opposing team(s) down to the last unit and city, whereas it's entirely possible to win a game of Civ without ever being at war with anyone other than the barbarians.
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Wot? First Civ had alternative options, and so did first MoO. A "peaceful" victory has always been part of 4X
 
VoidUtopian said:
How so? I've played a bit of Civ 6 and there's quite a bit of exterminating.
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It actually allows for cultural and diplomatic victories, if I'm not mistaken, which classic 4X games rarely did. I suppose you could call that a departure from the core values of the genre. Maybe. If you squint real hard.

I mean, really, it's not like it isn't your own fault for being insufficiently dedicated to the driving-before-you of enemies if you actually use those options.
 
I don't think it really counts as a diplomatic victory if you don't have to do any actual diplomacy with the AI players, which was typically... challenging, at the time, due to how they were programmed. Technically there, yes, but in most games, it was such a pain that nobody ever bothered.
 
Night said:
You want to know why the genre of 4X is associated with space, why people think of Stellaris and not Civ 6, and, well, that's at least half of why. MoO is the foundational, and it has more in common with Stellaris, both aesthetically and unfortunately at this point in terms of mechanics given its strong lean into warfare as the only way to play.

For all that conquest victory has existed in Civ and its many successors, it has never really committed to the last X. That has always been part of its appeal, in fact!
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Are ... are you claiming Stellaris leans more heavily into warfare than Civ?
 
Terrabrand said:
I mean. There's a difference between 'this is Street Fighter, a fighting game' and 'this is Street Fighter, a game of the Street Fighter Genre in the Street Fighter series'. Which 'metroidvania' is at one step of remove from. This is metroid, a metroid game of the metroidvania genre. Yeah.
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I wouldn't mind saying that. Maybe it's a skill issue 🤷‍♂️
 
Aineko said:
Morrowind, famously, is pretty up there.

Any% 'no major glitches' speedruns are under 4 minutes.

...Though arguably this kind of 'non-linear' fails the @Terrabrand test if interpreted degenerately because the critical path, while short, remains linear. It's just that more than 90% of the game is technically optional.
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That's a whole other kettle of fish in terms of discussing non-linearity because that gets into abstract concepts like 'what even is the core of the game'. A lot of things like open world games or survival games or the like either don't have an actual way you Win The Game at all or very clearly have the ability to Win The Game be sort of a formality and consider the meat of the game to be side quests or dungeons that are all optional or whatever.

You also wind up getting into topics like what do we mean by optional- I alluded to the Might and Magic games, for example, and they make a great example of the point on multiple levels. They match to all the prongs I'm gonna lay out in a second here.

Bluntly, I would consider a game at least somewhat non-linear if it meets any of the following prongs;

  1. There's a series of tasks you must do to win the game or advance to the next stage, but these tasks can be done in any order- A classic Megaman game is mostly non-linear, even though it's composed of linear stages, because only the end game can be clearly numbered as the stages you have to do at X point in the progression. Your first 8 stages are all options to be the first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh, or eighth stage you clear, you can make arguments about which you should do first or which was imagined to be first or which is canonically first but without any game breaking exploits or even ignoring the games guide-rails you can start with any of them first, then do any of the remaining second, and so on. In the case of Might and Magic games, there's generally a series of tasks where you gain access to multiple of these dungeons if not at literally the same time then certainly without having to do one to gain access to the next, and thus a run could naturally do mandatory steps 'out of order' compared to what a guide says.
  2. There's a series of tasks you strictly must do... a portion of. I can't offhand think of a non-Might and Magic example of this (though I know they exist) so I'll cut straight to a Might and Magic example- in World of Xeen (might and magic 4 and 5) you have 'king's megacredits' in Clouds of Xeen and 'Energy Disks' in Darkside of Xeen which you must collect a minimum number of to win the game. This minimum number means by definition that there's a number of areas you can go and side content you can do where most of it is clearly not necessary- in the sense you can pick any five Energy Disks and cut them from your route planning, so only things that yield more than five (when most sources are pairs) are actually completely necessary, but you still must do some of that content so you can't simply place it in the box of 'side content', thus opening up inherent non-linearity due to the existence of semi-mandatory content that can neither be sorted as 'a step you must do at x point' (even if there's only one chance to do something, for example) but nor as 'things you can skip all of'.
  3. The thing that a lot of more open world sort of games fall under, actually: most content is technically speaking optional but the game is designed where it is either literally impossible or requires playing well outside the developer intended framework of how to play- most classic RPGs function mandate at least a little grinding, if only in the sense of actually fighting random encounters, at least from a non-pro player kinda perspective because you need a certain minimum level of character power to win at all, and a level above what 'mandatory' content will naturally give you. If enemy defense can be so high you literally can't hurt them, or enemies one shot kill you and you can't just maneuver your character to dodge, then you must gain a lot of power to be able to win. King's Bounty: The Legend is built on this kind of non-linearity, for example, as are its sequels- you can clearly say that you must be a minimum level of power to even finesse a given fight, so even though you can sort most fights and conversations in the game into things that either can be completely skipped or must be tackled in a fixed order, it's borderline impossible to have a powerful enough character with a large enough army if you try to skip all optional content. Likewise, in the classic Might and Magic games it's going to be fairly difficult to gain enough experience and gold (because you need gold to level up at all, at trainers) to achieve a high enough level without doing some individual tasks that are all things that, individually, you could have skipped, and rather unlikely to have good enough equipment to hold up without some of the same.
The thing is though, my primary point was people tend to hold up metroidvania games as particularly non-linear, but they tend to be at most average compared to say RPGs that in these same discussions will get referred to as linear- if Super Metroid is non-linear because you can go explore side areas and don't always have clear direction and can gain character power to make the game easier via exploration, then so too is something like Final Fantasy 5. If Final Fantasy 4 is a linear game because every plotbeat and boss fight must occur in a certain order or else is part of the games optional, missable content, then so too is Super Metroid which matches the same criteria.

What people object to in eg Fusion and Prime seems to be entirely the explicit guidance, rather than just giving you the implicit guidance of new abilities and figure it out- and this by the way actually describes a number of open world games as well, at which point something like Morrowind is probably at least as non-linear.

Where again the thrust of my point is that metroidvania games- the principle examples people most consistently count- are at best pretty average in actual non-linearity compared to other games, not extravagantly, atypically non-linear affairs. Thus making it clear that non-linearity per se is at most a small part of the genre's identity, since any standard that would consider Super Metroid a highly non-linear game would consider a whole lot of other games normally positioned as linear stories and such also highly non-linear if applied equally.
 
grommile said:
In the classic classic M&M games, you can level grind :)
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Yes. At which point you have engaged in non-mandatory content- killing the same early game goblins two thousand times or whatever- except you did it mandatorily, and could only have avoided it by doing some other non-mandatory content. Thus, non-linear.

Like. That's a major part of my point? Gaining enough strength is a mandatory task, no method of gaining that strength is individually mandatory, including manually grinding for levels, but collectively you can't just skip it all. Non-linearity in that form.
 
Terrabrand said:
If Final Fantasy 4 is a linear game because every plotbeat and boss fight must occur in a certain order or else is part of the games optional, missable content, then so too is Super Metroid which matches the same criteria.
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I will point out that while there is a rather obvious progression, walljumping, shinesparks, and ice beam are all intended mechanics which make it fairly reasonable to choose the order for Kraid/Phantoon and Ridley/Draygon.

I don't necessarily disagree with the wider point--I'd have to think about it more--but this is something I think bears mentioning.

Edit: Though I suppose thinking on it more that Kraid/Phantoon stretches at the run to get speed booster, since most players would need a sizable amount of energy tanks to really do that without Varia.
 
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My opinion is that game genre labels are basically slang and slang only works if you can just use it loosely goosey based on vibes. Once you start trying to hyper-specify the slang into little micro categories it loses any real descriptive power because no one's going to use it. If no one uses it there's no real meaning because it has no presence in the collective culture.

Also just so everyone's aware, people who are hyper pedantic about trying to correct informal language are all going to hell. It literally says so in the bibble.
 
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Terrabrand said:
Yes. At which point you have engaged in non-mandatory content
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I don't see "fly to C3, meet wyverns, lighting bolt wyverns, collect loot, fly back to Sorpigal, repeat" or "fly to the Ice Tundra, implode the Cuisinart with Photon Blades from Dragon's Dominion, fly home, repeat" as "content" any more than I see repeatedly killing the 396 berserkers in Harkyn's Castle, or finding a group of three Dream Mages in the Maze of Dread and casting Disrupt Illusion, as "content".
 
Everything in video games is "optional content" cause you can choose to stop at any time.

Edit, my lawyer is advising me to specify this post is in jest.
 
grommile said:
I don't see "fly to C3, meet wyverns, lighting bolt wyverns, collect loot, fly back to Sorpigal, repeat" or "fly to the Ice Tundra, implode the Cuisinart with Photon Blades from Dragon's Dominion, fly home, repeat" as "content" any more than I see repeatedly killing the 396 berserkers in Harkyn's Castle, or finding a group of three Dream Mages in the Maze of Dread and casting Disrupt Illusion, as "content".
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'it's not content because I consider it repetitive or boring' is not a useful standard to judge the linearity of a game, as at that point you've tossed things too firmly into subjective to have a useful discussion. If a mandatory plot sequence is extremely repetitive and boring are we now to throw it in the non-mandatory box, because though completely required and a unique block of content, it's boring and so Not Content?

Even if so, this does not seem to sustainably lead to the conclusion that the need to gain power is not a contributor to the non-linearity of the system. Or rather it does but only if you somehow consider non-linearity to mean 'there's EXCITING, QUALITY CONTENT that cannot be skipped or replaced by more boring content but can be tackled in variable orders' to be the only form of non-linearity that exists.

Like. Subjectively considering one of many paths to adequate power, of which you must engage in at least some optional content to realistically get strong enough to win the game boring, and this therefore making the game more linear is a strange take to say the least. That some of the ways you can gain enough power which are still distinct game content and still consume player time are boring, and therefore the game is more linear? I genuinely can't see how one could hold that position while having actually followed what I was saying.
 
grommile said:
I don't see "fly to C3, meet wyverns, lighting bolt wyverns, collect loot, fly back to Sorpigal, repeat" or "fly to the Ice Tundra, implode the Cuisinart with Photon Blades from Dragon's Dominion, fly home, repeat" as "content" any more than I see repeatedly killing the 396 berserkers in Harkyn's Castle, or finding a group of three Dream Mages in the Maze of Dread and casting Disrupt Illusion, as "content".
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Side note, while boring in a sense, doing a actual Let's Play of MM series, finding Wyvern Peaks was a absolute delight. Yes, it got boring but each time I find a better grinding spot I was like "Yes, finally this is SO MUCH BETTER THAN THE LAST ONE".
 
A few reasons people might see metroidvanias as more nonlinear than they look when put under the paring knife.

Experiential nonlinearity: if you are playing without a guide you may not readily differentiate "the one path forward" from "the one path forward that I discovered first". Some games make sure to signpost the presence of such options so you know they are there, but stereotype metroidvanias don't clarify that either way.

Spatial nonlinearity: If you keep going back through familiar places your track is a line in space-time but not so much in space.

Soft criticality: While health upgrades and such may be demonstrably possible to progress without, many players are not going to get good enough for that - so 'leveling up' by finding heart pieces or whatever becomes part of their path with similar non-linear nature to the M&M powering up.
 
Eh.

I think the main reason why Metroidvanias are usually considered non-linear is because people like them, and non-linear is considered a positive quality despite just being a quality. This is also why people will fight tooth and nail to preserve the idea of them being non-linear despite being obviously linear; if the game is linear then that is a flaw, and we can't have (game I use to define myself) be FLAWED.

Linearity or non-linearity aren't in and of themselves positives or negatives; you can make a poor non-linear game and a great linear game but, much like 'open world', 'crafting', 'deckbuilder' and 'survival' 'non-linear' has just become this meaningless mirage of quality.
 
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VoidUtopian said:
Haven't alternate victory conditions been a recurring element of several games in the genre for ages now?
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It's more common than there not being one, as far as I'm aware. Just about every 4X with any sort of tech tree (which I'd probably be comfortable betting is most of them) allows for a tech victory just at a minimum, and plenty do something beyond that as well, though the exact something varies a fair amount. 4Xs that only allow for conquest victories (and especially "kill to the last man" ones, since it was noticed a long while ago that can slog like absolute hell) are kinda' rare, at least in my experience.

It's not just a recurring element, it's a predominate design point seen in what I'm pretty sure are a majority to supermajority of the games associated with the genre.
 
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Frumple said:
Just about every 4X with any sort of tech tree (which I'd probably be comfortable betting is most of them) allows for a tech victory just at a minimum,
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MoO93 didn't, and MoO2's approximation to it was still fundamentally a military victory – you had to go beat up the Antareans with your dimensional portal.
 
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