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What are controversial gaming opinions you have?

Fourthspartan56 said:
This is a fair and completely true point but I feel like what's objectively needed and what the player feels like they need are very different things. For example, in AOE2 maintaining a strong economy and steady production of units is generally much more important then careful micro. Sometimes drastically so. However because of how much the game emphasizes tactics both visually and in terms of alerts there will be a consistent feeling that you're messing something up if you aren't microing sufficiently or if you're not doing it well enough.

It's not really a correct feeling (at least not usually) but that doesn't make it feel less significant. Which is I suspect a major part of why so many people bounce off RTSs, and why turn-based and pausable strategy games are so much bigger then RTSs. The feelings of pressure are so much lower and thus people can get into them easier.
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Aineko said:
Awareness isn't understanding, it's perception. You have to get the information that the attack is happening between the time doing so is possible and the time you have already lost, and that window can be very narrow.

Once you have the action on-screen knowing when something important is happening is trivial, but saving a squad from an instant kill ability while deploying your own and positioning your fire support and moving assault troops when the enemy is suppressed has a lot of moving parts all of which are simultaneously urgent.

It's oddly similar to one of those cooking time management games, except the timing of stuff lighting up is half random and half literal enemy action.
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That's why before I said this is a stress issue rather than a speed issue; your problem isn't "hitting button fast enough enough" but understand when and where you need to hit button and doing so in a timely manner. Spinning plates is hard, but you'll generally get more from technique rather than attempting to twirl them even faster!
 
Mutton said:
That's why before I said this is a stress issue rather than a speed issue; your problem isn't "hitting button fast enough enough" but understand when and where you need to hit button and doing so in a timely manner. Spinning plates is hard, but you'll generally get more from technique rather than attempting to twirl them even faster!
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I don't know what divide you're trying to draw, exactly. As far as I'm concerned 'I know what I want to happen but I can't execute all the right stimulus-response loops to make it happen' is a speed problem. Maybe some technique exists that avoids the speed problem instead of going right through it, but the existence of such is non-obvious.
 
Aineko said:
I don't know what divide you're trying to draw, exactly. As far as I'm concerned 'I know what I want to happen but I can't execute all the right stimulus-response loops to make it happen' is a speed problem. Maybe some technique exists that avoids the speed problem instead of going right through it, but the existence of such is non-obvious.
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The problem is not the total number of actions you're doing, it's mostly just knowing when you need to the do actions. The speed issue is in your brain, not in your fingers
 
Mutton said:
Brood War is definitely the most "you must be this fast to ride" game but then then you mostly settle into a groove. Modern RTS since then (at least since DoW1) are much less demanding
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Though do note, as it's been mentioned, that's largely just multiplayer. I've beat Brood War without the cheats on, and while I do largely enjoy RTS gameplay, I'm also quite bad at them -- even most normal difficulty bots in skirmishes will kick my ass better than half the time. Keeping the plates spinning for econ, recon, and combat all at the same time is just something I'm goddamn horrible at in a real time environment.

The campaigns, though? They were fine. Not necessarily super easy, but you demonstrably did not have to be particularly good at the game or possess even middling APM or rapid decision making (none of which I possessed to great degree even when I was playing BW for the first, much less as I've gotten older) to succeed at them. It sometimes took a few tries and the prescience that entailed, but, like... the campaigns were pretty accessible.

With fairly rare exception, I've found that sort of thing to be true for basically every RTS I've played, which a fair amount because as bad as I am at them I do enjoy playing them, and especially any that let you slow the game down (which a lot of the older ones in particular, did!). The genre is notorious for their campaigns basically being training wheels for the game proper (i.e. multiplayer), in a way similar to a number of competitive FPS games. You generally don't actually have to be "this fast to ride" until you get into the competitive cruft, and gods, you do not have to get into the competitive cruft, ha.
 
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Frumple said:
C'mon now, I'm pretty sure there's other real time games where half the cast is running around in lingerie. You got room for variety if that's your genre kink :V
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Assuming you're responding to me... Do what now? I don't remember *anyone* running around in their lingerie in that game...

Arden said:
There is only so much you can do to upgrade video game graphics until you approach photorealism to such a degree that there is literally nothing left to gain from pushing things further. At that point, graphics become an aesthetic choice, not a statement about pushing the envelope.
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I sometimes think maybe the big advancement from here isn't going to be graphics quality directly so much as improving some tricky bits of the physics simulation - stuff like hair, water, and loose fabric. (Not that those things can't be made to look good, but that usually involves cheating by limiting the available possibilities and then pre-baking animations for all of them.)

-Morgan.
 
Morganite said:
I sometimes think maybe the big advancement from here isn't going to be graphics quality directly so much as improving some tricky bits of the physics simulation - stuff like hair, water, and loose fabric. (Not that those things can't be made to look good, but that usually involves cheating by limiting the available possibilities and then pre-baking animations for all of them.)

-Morgan.
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Yeah, I do find it odd how games put so much into graphics and then just accept that hair and cloth are going to clip through people's bodies sometimes even during their fanciest cutscenes.
 
Arden said:
There is only so much you can do to upgrade video game graphics until you approach photorealism to such a degree that there is literally nothing left to gain from pushing things further. At that point, graphics become an aesthetic choice, not a statement about pushing the envelope.
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You can't get J.C Avatar quality in real time on consumer hardware. Game graphic quality isn't plateauing because it has achieved photorealism. It is plateauing because making the graphics more detailed has diminishing returns.

Computer technology no longer doubles in performance and affordability every two years.
 
There are a few multiplayer aspects, but the actual experience of play is identical whether or not you engage with them.
 
FelOnyx said:
It's a pretty common to accuse single player RPGs of being somehow like MMOs. Often either because they use a lot of small repetitive bear ass-style quests or someone thinks the combat is too much like a WoW rotation.
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Huh, don't really get that viewpoint, every mmorpg I've ever played I've more or less treated it like singleplayer; and it works most of the time
 
To be fair, the game that most often ate that comparison IME was Kingdoms Of Amalur, which was supposed to be an MMO and they basically just stripped out all the multiplayer bits and left you with basically 'what if WoW but no-one else was around'. I don't think I've ever played a game that felt so empty before.
 
Morganite said:
I sometimes think maybe the big advancement from here isn't going to be graphics quality directly so much as improving some tricky bits of the physics simulation - stuff like hair, water, and loose fabric. (Not that those things can't be made to look good, but that usually involves cheating by limiting the available possibilities and then pre-baking animations for all of them.)
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That is quite correct, I imagine, but it's fiddly detail work that doesn't make for as impressive an advertisement as the more bombastic stuff, so I imagine we'll be waiting on that stuff for a while.

Comrade Future said:
My brother can be wild - he called Dragon Dogma an MMORPG at minimum wage.
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It's funny, but when I first played the game, my impression was similar. "This feels like a single-player MMO somehow." It took a while for that impression to fully go away, but once it did, wow did I realize just how wrong that first impression was. Dragon's Dogma is great.
 
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Frumple said:
Though do note, as it's been mentioned, that's largely just multiplayer. I've beat Brood War without the cheats on, and while I do largely enjoy RTS gameplay, I'm also quite bad at them -- even most normal difficulty bots in skirmishes will kick my ass better than half the time. Keeping the plates spinning for econ, recon, and combat all at the same time is just something I'm goddamn horrible at in a real time environment.

The campaigns, though? They were fine. Not necessarily super easy, but you demonstrably did not have to be particularly good at the game or possess even middling APM or rapid decision making (none of which I possessed to great degree even when I was playing BW for the first, much less as I've gotten older) to succeed at them. It sometimes took a few tries and the prescience that entailed, but, like... the campaigns were pretty accessible.

With fairly rare exception, I've found that sort of thing to be true for basically every RTS I've played, which a fair amount because as bad as I am at them I do enjoy playing them, and especially any that let you slow the game down (which a lot of the older ones in particular, did!). The genre is notorious for their campaigns basically being training wheels for the game proper (i.e. multiplayer), in a way similar to a number of competitive FPS games. You generally don't actually have to be "this fast to ride" until you get into the competitive cruft, and gods, you do not have to get into the competitive cruft, ha.
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If anyone is saying single player RTS require real amounts of APM on regular modes you should probably check for gas leaks.
 
FelOnyx said:
It's a pretty common to accuse single player RPGs of being somehow like MMOs. Often either because they use a lot of small repetitive bear ass-style quests or someone thinks the combat is too much like a WoW rotation.
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LunaMoth said:
Huh, don't really get that viewpoint, every mmorpg I've ever played I've more or less treated it like singleplayer; and it works most of the time
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Doesn't that help get the viewpoint? If you can play an MMO as if it's single player (and I've done the same with a few), then why couldn't an actually single player game feel the same as that?
 
Morganite said:
Assuming you're responding to me... Do what now? I don't remember *anyone* running around in their lingerie in that game...
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I'unno, I just googled the thing out of curiosity and just about the entirety of the female (and some of the male) characters that showed up were depicted in stuff you'd see in a nightwear catalog, heh.

Checking again, Amoretta specifically is the most blantant (her outfit's literally an open robe over a type of bottomware I'm aware exists as a distinct style but don't remember and can't seem to find the specific name of... some sort of stockings, I think, but I haven't exactly spent a lot of time memorizing types of underwear :V), but the apparent MC has bloomers just kind of out there, there's another character wearing primarily a corset and bra with some seethrough gauze/lace over the top, etc.

Unless the remaster is considerably thirstier than the original, the game's design is, just. A good chunk of it is literally lingerie, like, not metaphorically or in terms of hyperbole but very much literally that stuff is sold as underwear. I'm not saying it's a bad thing or anything, but it's definitely noticeable, ahaha.
 
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Frumple said:
Checking again, Amoretta specifically is the most blantant (her outfit's literally an open robe over a type of bottomware I'm aware exists as a distinct style but don't remember and can't seem to find the specific name of... some sort of stockings, I think, but I haven't exactly spent a lot of time memorizing types of underwear :V), but the apparent MC has bloomers just kind of out there, there's another character wearing primarily a corset and bra with some seethrough gauze/lace over the top, etc.
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Okay, yeah, Amoretta's outfit is pretty revealing, but I don't think Lillet's design is supposed to come across as particularly sexually charged, and I literally have no idea who you're referring to with that last one. But more than just arguing over specific outfits, that just isn't the way the game comes across in actual play. (Or at least, not the original.) If someone went into it with "people running around in their lingerie" defining their expectations, I think they'd be very disappointed.

-Morgan.
 
Arden said:
It's funny, but when I first played the game, my impression was similar. "This feels like a single-player MMO somehow." It took a while for that impression to fully go away, but once it did, wow did I realize just how wrong that first impression was. Dragon's Dogma is great.
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Well, my brother used to love watching video game reviews, and he got this impression - and we don't like online games at all. I just mentioned that Japanese developers began to adopt elements traditional for "Western RPGs" (that is, plot variation, character generation, etc.), but this only made him grin - in fact, I don't remember him being interested in any games made in Japan.
In fact, he leans too much towards Fallout 2 (and even criticizes it for its linear approach to the ending). Here, however, as it turns out, we have different priorities. Brothers emphasize freedom of choice. It seems to me that the main thing is an epic plot, within the framework of which I can make choices.
 
Morganite said:
that last one
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Opalnaria, apparently. Necromancy teacher, or something like that? Seemed to be one of the major characters, but heck if I know with any certainty.

But yeah, if that's not how it comes across in play, eh, sure. The actual product can display differently than static screen shots, et al, and everything readily accessible seems to be from the remaster. It's also totes possible the original was less overt, heh.
 
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