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What are controversial gaming opinions you have?

Cici said:
Yes and no. They do usually have a real reason, but the games tend to be snapshots of a specific time period rather than feeling like an actual, living world. Take your earlier example of Gears of War; you've got the Locust and the COG fighting and dying on the same battlefields, over and over, ad nauseum with no resolution, progression, or sense that all of these things are actually happening within the setting. It's just the exact same battles, fought over and over, on repeat until the servers shut down. By contrast, the framing of Splatoon's battles as a sort of sport within the setting, along with the nonlethal nature of the events within the game, means that each of your play sessions could plausibly just be one day in an Inkling's life.
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That doesn't seem to be any more immersive to me than the idea that you're playing out a historical battle, but hey, if it feels right to you then I'm in no position to gainsay it.
 
Vindictus said:
Also, people hate being outsmarted by AI, and actually smart AI will probably outsmart the vast majority of people.

Like in Chess. You have to force the AI to make mistakes, or you'll never win against them.
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The only thing harder than making good AI is making good flaws in AI. People don't want to see AI randomly go braindead every few minutes. That just feels like the computer is letting you win. But making realistic flaws is hard. It takes time to get an AI to look like it has tunnel-vision, gets cocky, or likes to switch tracks too often. Ironically, it's easier to weaken a Chess AI in a human way. Lower the max depth of the search trees and remove some of the rarer openers from it's opening book, and you have simulated a player who cannot think as many moves ahead and is more surprised by rare moves.
 
My controversial opinion of the day is that I personally prefer a controller over a mouse and arrow key setup. The latter may be more precise but I feel more in control with an analog stick over what is essentially a dpad. Only games I would prefer the latter is with strategy games.
 
I honestly like Bioware before they started making their own IPs.

I hate the fact that Dragon Age doesn't have NG+ like Mass Effect does.
 
Judging by the apparently decent sales of Kingdom Come, I guess "don't give money to Czech nationalists" is a controversial stance.
 
The_Knowing said:
I feel that giving context should be a encouraged part of posting in this thread.
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The Czech creators of Kingdom Come Deliverance has come under fire for a multitude of reasons, ranging from "there's no black people in 14th century Bohemia" for not allowing character customisation to being "we really like our history so we're gonna make it as historically accurate as possible, damn political correctness".
 
Hykal94 said:
The Czech creators of Kingdom Come Deliverance has come under fire for a multitude of reasons, ranging from "there's no black people in 14th century Bohemia" for not allowing character customisation to being "we really like our history so we're gonna make it as historically accurate as possible, damn political correctness".
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I don't know enough about the developers or the game to have an opinion on them, but those criticisms are incredibly stupid. Not having black characters in a medieval Central-European setting isn't racism, it's basic authenticity.

By the same standard, Bioware's Jade Empire was racist for not allowing you to make your protagonist Caucasian.
 
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We've dug up Chinese people out of Roman Londinium.


Somehow I think this bad action movie storyline where you are some schmuck drinking healing potions wouldn't completely fall apart if at one point you saw a black guy.

E: also Vavra is an open supporter of gamergate, he IS sexist, he IS racist, his words can NEVER be taken strictly at face value
 
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Rodyle said:
Somehow I think this bad action movie storyline where you are some schmuck drinking healing potions wouldn't completely fall apart if at one point you saw a black guy.
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Of course it wouldn't. One such character, given sufficient justification why he or she is there, would be a far cry from something that would meaningfully threatening verisimilitude. Might make for a good side-quest or two.

That doesn't make the absence of such a black guy racism. Not meeting such a person in this particular setting is the statistically probable outcome, nothing more, nothing less.
 
Driven by Apathy said:
If there were any in Bohemia in the time period the game takes place in, I suspect you could have counted their number with the fingers of one hand.

If you disagree, please cite the evidence.
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Look up Sir Moriaen some time.

Or perhaps you don't like the idea that a character from literal Arthurian myth be used, seeing as that was myth? In that case you might prefer to take a look at John Blanke, a musician of the court of both Henry VII and VIII.

Or, more broadly, look up 'Moors'.

The notion that Europe, a country literally physically next to Africa, would not have African adventurers and travelers, is honestly one of the weirdest absurdities of the modern era. It's literally right next door to them geographically.
 
Driven by Apathy said:
Of course it wouldn't. One such character, given sufficient justification why he or she is there, would be a far cry from something that would meaningfully threatening verisimilitude. Might make for a good side-quest or two.

That doesn't make the absence of such a black guy racism. Not meeting such a person in this particular setting is the statistically probable outcome, nothing more, nothing less.
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And do you understand that there is a difference between this and the developers attempting to take the authoritative stance that none existed there at the time, or that presuming that traders from North Africa were present is identical to presuming that there were lions in the woods?
The_Knowing said:
Citation for those claims?
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If you are asking for citations of him supporting gg, see above or Google. If you are asking for citations for gamergate being about sexism/racism, please find someone else to humor you.
 
Rodyle said:
E: also Vavra is an open supporter of gamergate, he IS sexist, he IS racist, his words can NEVER be taken strictly at face value
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That is utterly, massively disjointed and makes no sense. Gamergate, from the pro-Gamergate side, had nothing at all to do with race, sex, religion or anything else. It was dipshits like Anita Sarkeesian and blame deflecting from the media that brought race and sex into it. The LiterallyWho hashtag existed because Gamergate was about journalism, not development, so the radical feminist developer-associates had nothing to do with who Gamergate was going after and thus pro-Gamergate people set to work trying to eject them from the conversation.

And even if he is sexist and racist, that actually has no bearing on the validity of his opinion, which is something the modern bigoted left (go ahead, explain how Affirmative Action or welfare based on race isn't racist) fails to understand. It vastly increases the likelyhood they're talking out of their ass when race and sex are relevant. However, that just means you should fact check... Which should be the default whenever listening to a person about something they are not professionally trained in, regardless of what it is or what their beliefs are.

Vindictus said:
The notion that Europe, a country literally physically next to Africa, would not have African adventurers and travelers, is honestly one of the weirdest absurdities of the modern era. It's literally right next door to them geographically.
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The important thing is that geographic mobility was limited mostly to merchant and ruling classes, due to the expenses involved and the fact that almost everyone outside of those was either extremely poor or had a location-dependent job. You might see merchants or seamen from Africa, but you're vastly more likely to get Arabs or white people in those jobs because Bohemia is far enough from the Mediterranean coast that the dominant behavior of merchants selling to merchants so that rapid iteration of profit happens makes North African traders unlikely to make the full trip.

They'd cross the Mediterranean, or go to the Middle East, sell their goods to another merchant, then that merchant would head farther north. They certainly existed, but they're so rare you can legitimately ignore that they existed when making a game.
 
Boy, I know where this is going.

But for thread tax: The 'Souls-like' genre are having the equivalent of follow the leader type games that 'Doom-clones' had in the 90's.
 
Vindictus said:
Look up Sir Moriaen some time.

Or perhaps you don't like the idea that a character from literal Arthurian myth be used, seeing as that was myth? In that case you might prefer to take a look at John Blanke, a musician of the court of both Henry VII and VIII.

Or, more broadly, look up 'Moors'.
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Firstly, most people whom Medieval Europeans would have classified as "Moors" weren't even black. (As an aside, the fact that Medieval Europeans didn't bother to be more specific with their classifications should tell you something about how much contact they had with the people thus classified, i.e. not a lot)

Secondly, two individuals, one of whom is a fictional character, do not make for a statistically significant segment of the population.

Thirdly, neither of those two ever seem to have been in Bohemia.

Fourthly, you seem to be completely missing my point: I'm not objecting to the possibility of black people being depicted in a Medieval European setting - as long as it's done sparingly, there is no reason why you couldn't do it and still remain more or less authentic.

I'm objecting to calling the absence of such racism. Because that's absurd.

foamy said:
[stop=Stop]We're not having the 'it's actually about' debate here.[/stop]
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Sorry, what precisely do you mean by that? What's the "it's actually about debate"? Do you want us to drop the entire subject, or are you referring to something else?
 
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Driven by Apathy said:
I'm objecting to calling the absence of such racism. Because that's absurd.
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It's not so much that the absence of black people in a medieval game is being called racism as such, and more the fact that he seemed to be making a cheap and fairly offensive joke about how 'The SJWs' get bent out of shape about that sort of thing, to my understanding.
 
...Black and coloured people in Europe were a thing. They frequently crossed the Mediterranean, travelled along the northern coasts all the way up to Hanseatic cities, were sent as envoys to royal courts, and were frequently hired as mercenaries or exotic servants. There were also the Nubian Christian kingdoms at the time of the Crusades. Literal medieval black Christians. Italians and Spaniards were considered Europeans, and many of them would look like what we call "people of colour" today.

Like, anybody trying to claim that medieval Europe was in any way "white" is peddling bullshit.
 
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