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What are controversial gaming opinions you have?

LordInsane said:
You didn't fight Mannimarco in Daggerfall. You met the King of Worms in the main quest, but there weren't any quests that had you go up against him (in fact, you do more for him than against him).
He did look a lot more like a questline end boss than he did in Oblivion, though, that much is true.
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Fair point.

The Englanderish said:
Also ESO was after Skyrim so he'd only appeared twice prior and was hardly some overly spammed thing.
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Certainly was, still glad.
 
Miath said:
Certainly was, still glad.
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My point is, I don't think there was any tangible likelihood or danger of getting Mannimarco again. He was a major character from Daggerfall who was brought back to have his end in Oblivion. While it wasn't impossible for him to somehow show up in Skyrim, I don't think it was an especially realistic concern no matter what they did with the college.
 
DestinyPlayer said:
Honestly, enchanted items needing to be reloaded with soul gems always felt to me like an incredibly gamey mechanic
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Yeah, that is probably the most immersion breaking thing in Oblivion and Skyrim, enchantments are so much more fun to use in Morrowind and do a lot to make the setting feel more fantastical- it makes logical sense to me that magical items recharge and allows for cooler things to happen lorewise. I'm pretty sure the using soul gems to recharge magic items is a gameplay balance thing, that only results in making enchanted weapons feel downright awful to use.

Also the thing about morrowind is that enchanted items felt like they were a much more present part of the setting, because they essentially made it possible to put a fireball spell on a ring or robe, enchantments on clothing/armor weren't forced to be passive in nature. One of the easiest ways to feel like an arch-mage in morrowind is just have a bunch of enchanted gear with you.
 
Ford Prefect said:
The reason being that it let's you do too many things?
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The game world largely does not react to you and your choices. If you're the Arch-Mage of the Mage's Guild, you'd want the game to acknowledge that somehow. Have NPC's dialogue talk you up as this important, powerful mage. Open up new opportunities and close others due to your status. Have the world recognize and acknowledge you as Arch-Mage. Instead, it doesn't matter. Skyrim lets you become the head of all four guilds because it's a sandbox first and foremost. It doesn't want to punish the player by restricting them from doing any of its content, but that also means it doesn't reward players for playing a certain way, either.

It's not a bad design, but it's not what you'd want in a game designed for roleplay.
 
The sticking point is that the Oblivion thieves had jobs escalating towards full ass daring heists. While in Skyrim you get some heists, but they're broken up by a lot of thieves guild narrative quests and jobs that are closer to errands than anything else.

Whereas one of the penultimate jobs leading to you becoming the Guildmaster is delivering moon sugar to a khajiit caravan. Or breaking into a warehouse. Vs robbing a wizard's Dwemer ruin lair earlier in the questline. Like come the fuck on.

If anything the small jobs should have all been front loaded and the bigger jobs and story jobs be prerequisite on putting in the bitch work.

Part of the problem is that the freeform and sometimes dynamic quest structure is kinda half baked. There are lots of other free floating quests that could apply to any of the guilds. For example if you join the companions and haven't done the Redguard quest first, the game could just decide that that counts as a Companion quest towards advancement.

That would give the factions more meat and add well needed pacing to the story paths. But it would also require putting actual thought into the design over just putting shit in the game and leaving it at that.
 
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Derpmind said:
It's not a bad design, but it's not what you'd want in a game designed for roleplay.
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The one thing I've learnt from playing and running loads of TTRPGs is that everyone roleplays different. For some people, they want their character to have a strong arc defined by their GM which they can pepper with interesting characterisation in between, Mass Effect style. For some people, they want loads of things to do, even if they don't fit together all that well, it's fine, they can self-curate, but raw number of options is what they want to roleplay with, and so they like things like Skyrim. And there's those who very specifically want to make an action and have it reflect itself as change in the world, except of course these people seldom agree on what is an appropriate reflection (GMing for them is a pain). Fortunately, games like Tyranny exist, but doing this is hard enough as a GM who can make whatever changes I like on the fly.
 
Derpmind said:
The game world largely does not react to you and your choices.
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Okay, but that's not really a roleplaying thing. It's probably pointless to argue this as everyone is pretty set on this topic, but you can roleplay in the theatre of the mind where there is nothing at all to react to you mechanistically. Roleplaying is something that you do, something you imagine. You are describing a whole different matter.
 
It is fair to say that is bad for immersion when you save the world or whatever and people are still like "Saw a mudcrab the other day"

The Fable games have the renown & opinion alignment system so you might get nearby NPCs spontaneously cheering for you or fleeing in terror depending on your in-game reputation.
 
tbf why would they think you saved the world. After all, the hero is like 7 feet tall, is way more jacked than you, and has much better hair.

And it was a very big mudcrab. You don't see a mudcrab like that every day!
 
The absolute quickest way to make me check out of a plot completely is for it to introduce 'save the entire ass world' stakes. No, please pick a section or portion of the world for me to save and actually make me care about it beyond a vague sense of 'well I keep all my stuff on the world, so it ending is bad.'
 
To be fair, a lot of the RPGs that have you saving the world first have you exploring the world and presumably making connections?

There are absolutely some RPGs where "save the world" is your goal from moment one, but usually it's a thing that comes up later on, once you presumably/hopefully have a connection.
 
The Laurent said:
To be fair, a lot of the RPGs that have you saving the world first have you exploring the world and presumably making connections?

There are absolutely some RPGs where "save the world" is your goal from moment one, but usually it's a thing that comes up later on, once you presumably/hopefully have a connection.
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Yeah you're not wrong, I suppose I've just got a sense of burnout toward overly high stakes. 'Save the whole world' is just the beige paint of plots to me at this point. It makes for dull motivations and lacking dynamics between characters since 'well the worlds gonna asplode' tends to spackle over a lot of more interesting conflicts.
 
Destroy the world plots work best when you explore said world first in pursuit of a lower stakes conflict, and only finding out the greater threat once you're invested. Final Fantasy 7 is a good example of this where you started out with a more personal fight against Shinra with world destruction being their long term threat. And it's only after spending a lot of time in the world that you discover the full threat of Sephiroth, who himself feeds back into the personal story.

I kinda think Mass Effect does this a little badly because it's so eager to start talking about the Reapers. It tells you the entire galaxy is under threat before you see much of it. And Shepard can come off as kinda wacky in the early game doomcrying about the visions they had. They could have just as easily kept the threat level at just Saren going after human colonies at first and feed in the hints more gradually. Legion flying around is already enough of a hint and things should start falling into place when you meet Liara.
 
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Reveen said:
Destroy the world plots work best when you explore said world first in pursuit of a lower stakes conflict, and only finding out the greater threat once you're invested. Final Fantasy 7 is a good example of this where you started out with a more personal fight against Shinra with world destruction being their long term threat. And it's only after spending a lot of time in the world that you discover the full threat of Sephiroth, who himself feeds back into the personal story.

I kinda think Mass Effect does this a little badly because it's so eager to start talking about the Reapers. It tells you the entire galaxy is under threat before you see much of it. And Shepard can come off as kinda wacky in the early game doomcrying about the visions they had. They could have just as easily kept the threat level at just Saren at first and feed in the hints more gradually.
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Save the galaxy, in the abstract, works fine for ME because you can go around the galaxy quite easily and you quite early on get to find out you're part of a galaxy-wide organisation. I guess you could zoom 'down' to 'Save Citadel space' or 'Save System Alliance space' but I don't think people perceive that as a meaningfully different scale (in the same way that WWI is a 'World War' once it spanned more than one continent).

Now, whether we should have focused on Saren more before the Reapers came in is a different question, but that would simply be 'save the known galaxy from Saren' instead.
 
MrCogmor said:
It is fair to say that is bad for immersion when you save the world or whatever and people are still like "Saw a mudcrab the other day"

The Fable games have the renown & opinion alignment system so you might get nearby NPCs spontaneously cheering for you or fleeing in terror depending on your in-game reputation.
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Erebeal said:
tbf why would they think you saved the world. After all, the hero is like 7 feet tall, is way more jacked than you, and has much better hair.

And it was a very big mudcrab. You don't see a mudcrab like that every day!
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One day when I make an RPG of my own I'll introduce this sort of system

And have everybody revere your accomplishment except this one guy who only talks about that mudcrab he saw that one time

"Huh? You saved the world? Yeah that's okay I guess but like at this MASSIVE MUDCRAB-"
 
And then you have Slay the Princess.

You're told literally at the very beginning that you have to kill the eponymous Princess to save the world.
 
Reveen said:
I kinda think Mass Effect does this a little badly because it's so eager to start talking about the Reapers. It tells you the entire galaxy is under threat before you see much of it. And Shepard can come off as kinda wacky in the early game doomcrying about the visions they had. They could have just as easily kept the threat level at just Saren going after human colonies at first and feed in the hints more gradually.
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It would have been good to stretch out the mystery, though I think something to keep in mind here is that the real reveals in the game are not so much that the Reapers exist but what they are and that Saren is also pursuing a course that he thinks will save galaxy, and you learn both of these things on Virmire, which is pretty mid-game. Not that you couldn't construct the mystery differently even with the selectable level format, but it isn't really the critical thing imo.

I think also it's kind of hard to string the quest along on the premise that Saren is a threat to human colonies, as while Anderson suggests that Saren has it in for humans specifically, that isn't really true and Eden Prime and Feros are kind of incidental to his actual goals. 'What is the heck is the Conduit?' is maybe enough to string the player along though, combined with Shepard's visions.
 
Surviving Mars is a tedious slog. It's a resource collect-a-thon and the whole gameplay loop of building and maintaining life-saving infrastructure gives it a very dry Euro-game feel. If I wanted that I'd learn and get into Factorio. Its aesthetics are too cartoonish, almost a mobile game vibe, which undermines any tension the infra-maintenance loop might have had. Say what you want about Outpost, its NASA-advised hard sci-fi fetishism gave it a distinct and clear vibe, and the sprites in Outpost 2 were quite nice and it has a retro charm for playing third violin to StarCraft. Surviving Mars just feels so underwhelming for its premise.
 
Yeah, I was a bit disappointed by it. I don't even know why, I just... didn't click with it as much as I would have liked, especially if you compare with... say, Planetbase, which I had played at lot around that same time.
 
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