- Location
- The Hague
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Controversial gaming opinion: video games are good.
What are controversial gaming opinions you have?
Not that it matters for RTSes vs MOBAs, but RTSes are one of the ten youngest genres, not one of the most venerable.
Maybe even among the five youngest? Aside from MOBAs and MMORPGs, the only genres I can think of that might be younger are Visual Novels (if you consider them distinct from earlier text adventures and Japanese-style graphic adventures), Bullet Hells (if you consider them distinct from shmups), 4x (if you consider them distinct from turn-based strategy games as a whole), digital CCGs (if you consider them distinct from other digital card games), and graphical roguelites (if you consider them distinct from ASCII roguelikes).
- Location
- Russia
I guess that there is definitely some bias on my part, because to me, RTS games are something that existed since I started gaming altogether, and had ended up forming my tastes. So it is a genre that is extremely close and dear to me, and it really pains me to see it be brushed aside and abandoned for something that doesn't provide even a tenth of what a good old strategy game can provide.
How are we defining Genre here? Since the RTS has been around since the 80s with the most recognizable form in the early 90s. You have to really limit genre to "shooter, fighter, racer, sports, RPG, platformer, puzzle, action" or so if you want to make it new
AmineHsu
A worm, not a man, scorned and despised.
- Location
- NoVA
While Utopia was released in 1981, I don't really consider a timer enough to be truly RTS, so I'd give the distinction of first RTS to Bokosuka Wars in 1983, incidentally the same year The Portopia Serial Murder Case came out. Now, Both of those are pretty iffy with regards to being codified examples of their genre. Dune 2 is the first time a game was designed and marketed as a RTS in 1992, in the same year Otogirisou came out, marketed as a 'Sound Novel', another name used for Visual Novels in Japan, so either way, RTS and Visual Novels are about the same age. (( And really with examples as far back as '81, I think RTSs are probably older than you think))
Ashaeron
Lurker in the Abyss
The problem with RTS' is that the most common 'gamer' demographic has shifted from teenagers/young adults to older adults and even the middle-aged as those original teenagers grow up. The older you get typically the less time you have to devote to it, and RTS', as a genre, can take a long, long time to get into at a level that feels good to play. MOBAs are just an easier version of the same - micro v macro, resource management now v better value/econ later - because you don't need remotely as much mechanical or strategic skill.
I'd say Bokosuka Wars has about as much in common with Command and Conquer and Starcraft as, say, 1986's Mail Order Monsters has in common with a definition of MOBAs broad enough to include both DotA2 and Battlerite.
If you're using that broad of a definition of RTS, then it's broad enough to include current Steam bestseller Total War Warhammer and perennial bestsellers Europa Universalis and Crusader Kings. Which... it arguably should be, in which case RTSes are still one of the more popular genres on PC.
AmineHsu
A worm, not a man, scorned and despised.
- Location
- NoVA
Hence why I included Dune 2 as well.
Hykal94
Orange Estus Kitteh
- Location
- Firelink Shrine
Stop comparing every game to Dark Souls you hack journalists. Just because a game is "mildly challenging" doesn't mean it's automatically Dark Souls.
But nooooo you gotta get in those clickbaits because none of you gits can't think of anything clever to title your article.
This is why this has become a meme. This is why "video game journalists can't video games" is become popular. Because you don't put time and effort to enjoy and try to rush the damn review as quickly as possible.
It shows a total lack of integrity of these sites as a whole. Remember that time Dean Takahashi said Mass Effect 1 was shit because he didn't realise you can level up? Also recently how he can't get pass the fucking tutorial for Cuphead? Or that time Polygon published that video where the guy behind the controller of DOOM hasn't clearly played a single FPS in their entire life?
I know jack all about MOBAs and fighting games. If I were to review one, it would be bad because I'm absolutely not familiar with it and my review will reflect that.
If you're shit at this particular genre of games, get someone else to goddamn review it.
Ser_Serendipity
Building Character
A: This isn't really controversial, at all, it's extremely mainstream nowadays
B: That video's hilarious, thank you Yung
C:
D: The Dark Souls meme goes beyond difficulty, at this point it's just become a catchall term for any game that challenges genre conventions or doesn't hold the player's hand so hard it's a wonder it doesn't pop off.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
Though, the mildly challenging thing seems like... bluh. I dunno. Putting it in scare quotes doesn't help.
Also, some of those examples might actually be valid. "X owes a lot to Dark Souls/is like Dark Souls" might well be true for a few of the games. I mean, comparing Nioh to Dark Souls isn't apparently as out there as comparing a racing game to Dark Souls.
Edit: I mean, that said, the phrase still needs to go away.
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ZerbanDaGreat
Daemon Noble of D E M O G R A P H I C S
- Pronouns
- They/them
What you need to understand is that games journalists hate their jobs and lives. They know they eke out a sad, miserable existence being paid peanuts if at all, utterly incompetent at what they do, bitterly jealous that people on youtube that actually enjoy what they do are far more visible and successful than they ever will be, circling the wagons and violently lashing out at every perceived slight which only makes them greater and greater lolcows. Abandon all hope, ye who would call it 'ableism' when a game is harder than average instead of something valid like "We need fully remappable keys for lefties/people without full function in both hands and colourblind modes for games with colour-coded visual cues and some form of substitution for audio cues for deaf/hearing impaired gamers", because your last bastion against self-reflection is to hold up those less fortunate than you like a shield.
Hykal94
Orange Estus Kitteh
- Location
- Firelink Shrine
Every time someone says "Dark Souls" combat, what they really mean is "third person melee maybe with lock on and maybe with a stamina system".
Monster Hunter did that (minus lock on, which is kinda why most games don't have it) yeaaaars before Dark Souls did.
Shammy did a review of The Surge and didn't mention Dark Souls once. It's like 30 minutes long, extremely detailed, and not once has he brought it up in the video at all. The comments were very amazed at this.
I know. I just wanted to rant a bit.
Reveen
Castro-Trudeauist
It annoys me because there things that are actually identifiable with Dark Souls that I want to see more of in more games. The weighty, ungamified combat, passive mystery driven lore and story, gothic fantasy. That's what I want to expect when a game as described as Souls like.
Instead all I get is white noise from everyone calling everything Dark Souls for stupid ass reasons. Like it being hard. Video games have always been really hard you dumb tit.
Instead all I get is white noise from everyone calling everything Dark Souls for stupid ass reasons. Like it being hard. Video games have always been really hard you dumb tit.
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To be super nice, the issue is that there are multiple types of "games journalists" under the same umbrella. The people who report industry news are different from the people who talk about the culture within are different from those who review who are different from those who critique. The "I'm worse at problem solving than a pigeon" guy was an industry news person who should have never been given a hands on.
Nah.
It's close but the lack of quips by the PC kill it. Failed attempt at being a DMC, 2/10.
Like, sometimes the comparison is reasonable shorthand. If a game has that kind of slow, positioning-heavy third person combat that Souls or MonHun do, it's probably much more likely that your comparison lands if you compare it to Dark Souls than if you compare it to Monster Hunter, seeing how a lot more people have played Souls. If a game drinks from the same sort of melancholic ruination aesthetic, like Hollow Knight does, then a comparison to Dark Souls probably will land easier on your audience.
But if you're comparing Cuphead to Dark Souls the only possible thing you can mean is that it's hard, and not even then it works, because the ways Dark Souls and Cuphead are hard are in fact entirely different!
But if you're comparing Cuphead to Dark Souls the only possible thing you can mean is that it's hard, and not even then it works, because the ways Dark Souls and Cuphead are hard are in fact entirely different!
Hykal94
Orange Estus Kitteh
- Location
- Firelink Shrine
Hollow Knight = Dark Souls is an interesting comparison. Not because Hollow Knight is that hard (though I admit, not able to use a controller puts it on par with Dark Souls 1 for me), but because of its atmosphere.
Hollow Knight takes place in the ruined kingdom of Hallownest where many inhabitants have become insane. Learning the lore of the land is not done through item descriptions (though it has those), but mostly through conversation and environment. Hollow Knight's story is pretty straightforward, almost Demon's Souls straightforward though good luck finding the good ending without a guide or someone telling you.
But that atmosphere? Exploring a ruined land with the best level design that puts it on par the first Souls and early Metroid games? That's one of the most amazing feelings in the world. The music, the level design, it's just gosh dang beautiful. It may not have third person melee with stamina management, but the accomplishment you feel is very comparable.
Hollow Knight takes place in the ruined kingdom of Hallownest where many inhabitants have become insane. Learning the lore of the land is not done through item descriptions (though it has those), but mostly through conversation and environment. Hollow Knight's story is pretty straightforward, almost Demon's Souls straightforward though good luck finding the good ending without a guide or someone telling you.
But that atmosphere? Exploring a ruined land with the best level design that puts it on par the first Souls and early Metroid games? That's one of the most amazing feelings in the world. The music, the level design, it's just gosh dang beautiful. It may not have third person melee with stamina management, but the accomplishment you feel is very comparable.
- Location
- New Delhi, India
Also, comparing Bloodborne to Devil May Cry is ridiculous, and I can tell you the rough difference between the combat, story and tone of both by comparing them to White Wolf RPG's:
Devil May Cry is (VERY ROUGHLY) Exalted: you are Dante, a nigh unstoppable demon slaying badass with dumb one liners and ridiculous weapons. The combat is incredibly responsive and your moves are fast but the enemies have large amounts of health and this, combined with a score system, encourages flashy, long and incredibly complicated combos. The story is almost meaningless; yeah, sure, there are multiple attempts at conveying human emotion and actual themes through Dante's relationship with Vergil, but that's never the focus. The focus is on the style and ridiculous characters over substance.
Bloodborne is more like Hunter: The Vigil. You are the Yharnam Hunter. Yeah, you're a demon slaying badass with ridiculous weaponry- Ok, now I see where the comparisons come in, but still, you're not treated as unstoppable. You're instead treated as a scrappy underdog in a world that's bigger, nastier and scarier than you. Combat is high commitment, meaning your moves are slow and not very responsive but your moves can actually do a large amount of damage to enemies which, combined with the stamina system, means that the system is built less around combos and more around hit and run tactics. The story is also deeply meaningful, even if it's hidden in the background, unlike the Devil May Cry games.
Devil May Cry is (VERY ROUGHLY) Exalted: you are Dante, a nigh unstoppable demon slaying badass with dumb one liners and ridiculous weapons. The combat is incredibly responsive and your moves are fast but the enemies have large amounts of health and this, combined with a score system, encourages flashy, long and incredibly complicated combos. The story is almost meaningless; yeah, sure, there are multiple attempts at conveying human emotion and actual themes through Dante's relationship with Vergil, but that's never the focus. The focus is on the style and ridiculous characters over substance.
Bloodborne is more like Hunter: The Vigil. You are the Yharnam Hunter. Yeah, you're a demon slaying badass with ridiculous weaponry- Ok, now I see where the comparisons come in, but still, you're not treated as unstoppable. You're instead treated as a scrappy underdog in a world that's bigger, nastier and scarier than you. Combat is high commitment, meaning your moves are slow and not very responsive but your moves can actually do a large amount of damage to enemies which, combined with the stamina system, means that the system is built less around combos and more around hit and run tactics. The story is also deeply meaningful, even if it's hidden in the background, unlike the Devil May Cry games.
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- They/Them
I've actually heard a somewhat interesting little snippet talking about Cuphead's difficulty, and the way that, despite being rather difficult in a somewhat old-school platformer way, the way it's designed (and modern games of that type) make it less likely to be a frustrating chore. (Specifically, if you die you can try again immediately, and the boss battles have enough strategy that each death feels like you're tweaking your way closer to actually beating them. Battles are designed, if successful, to last just a few minutes, so if you lose, there's no long slog like there might be with a longer platformer level, where you're just, "Yeah, yeah, c'mon, get me back to the boss already so I can try again.")
It was short, but kinda interesting, at least in the way it made me think about the way games have changed.
That last bit is commonly called "iteration time", and it's a fairly accepted thing that a low iteration time is extremely helpful in making mechanically demanding tasks less frustrating.
Super Meat Boy is kind of my usual standard example for explaining this. By the time you finish SMB, you will probably have died a thousand times, if not twice that. And every time, you will look at the number (you get a death counter when finishing the game) and go "what? That has to be wrong, I can't have died that much!". Because levels are like fifteen second long and the entire die-respawn process takes two seconds flat, you can die fifty times in a stage and barely even register it. You just... keep playing.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
So yeah, my maybe-unpopular opinion is that games are legitimately getting better. I mean, overall, from where they once were.
...this is, admittedly, a moving-target unpopular opinion, and one that does have counter-evidence in plenty of bad games out there... of which there were none back in the good old days, I'm sure.
Daniel Estacado
ZA WARUDO
A game isn't a Soulslike if the journalists writing about it call it as such, a game is only a Soulslike if the developers call it such.
Vindictus
XENO
- Location
- Texas
No, a game is Soulslike if it has specific, identifiable gameplay traits which are similar to or identical to corresponding traits within the Souls series of game.
- Pronouns
- They/Them
My controversial opinion is that the whining about games journalism is incredibly out of proportion. Somehow a couple people being bad at games or saying stupid shit has developed into a toxic mess of a debate. There's zero reason trying to talk about games journalism should elicit opinions as strong as religion and politics do.