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What are controversial gaming opinions you have?

vicky_molokh said:
I have, but I guess that's different circles we communicate with.
(Was about to give another reference but the cover seems to support your experience somewhere between partially and completely.)
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Entirely possible. I only really learned about Alpha Centauri when it came out on GOG, and later when people started mentioning it when talking about Civilization Beyond Earth. So I wasn't really into the Alpha Centauri fandom as such, and of the places I saw it discussed, it was mostly referred to as "SMAC", so that's what I picked up.
 
Adloquium said:
Entirely possible. I only really learned about Alpha Centauri when it came out on GOG, and later when people started mentioning it when talking about Civilization Beyond Earth. So I wasn't really into the Alpha Centauri fandom as such, and of the places I saw it discussed, it was mostly referred to as "SMAC", so that's what I picked up.
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There's also a distinction between the specific game and the franchise/setting in general. E.g. GURPS Alpha Centauri is alternatively referred to with (on the cover) and without (elsewhere) adding the 'Sid Meier' name before AC. Like, here the abbreviation is AC and the decryption is just 'Alpha Centauri', even though it's about Sid's setting.
 
Zeful said:
Bullshit. Plenty of games demonstrate that less restrictive save systems make for dull gameplay because assuming players won't take the easy way out is just stupid.

For instance. Lockpicking and Hacking minigames with any consequence for failure just don't work in a game with unrestricted saves because the only thing keeping a player from resetting to get it right is the player, and plenty of players will play a great game in the least interesting way because it's efficient, and then go on to complain about it being boring elsewhere. Horror games don't work with functional checkpoint system because the Icon telling you that quitting the game will corrupt your save signposts that something's about to happen and changes the atmosphere.

How and when you can save games can define genres; so saying that games that don't let you constantly quicksave and quickload are shit is like saying any game where you can't get a gun is shit. It marks you as someone who is fundamentally small minded about what games are.
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I can see the point of horror games not wanting saves, sure.


But lockpicking/hacking? The usual rewards of such aren't that big a deal. If someone wants to save scum that, hows is it a problem?

This is exactly the attitude I am complaining about. Some people are perfectionists who are willing to spend time on savescumming for the best result. That's okay.

It doesn't make the game more legit if you prevent super-caution/perfectionist game play. And calling it difficulty (my actual original complaint) is just insulting.
 
The stupid thing about how Kingdom Come handles saving is that not only is the recipe for the save potion not a big deal, but it also saves you when you sleep and at certain points in missions. So it doesn't even make the game actually harder, it just introduces fucking busywork and makes you run around to beds for the privilege of saving before a fight with a random bandit mob.

"We made the game unnecessarily tedious therefore hardcore" is the Dark Souls of stupid game design practices.
 
Yet people aren't that bothered with bed-saving in Fallout 4's Survival Mode. I wonder why that is. It may be because Kingdom Come is a slower game while FO4 is faster paced. FO4's Survival even disables fast travel yet people sing it high praises.
 
Honestly while KC's saves system would be shitty no matter what but having the game's many horrific game breaking bugs constantly fuck up the game in places that ensure you're fucked out of 2 or 3 hours makes it a living hell to play.
 
Hykal94 said:
Yet people aren't that bothered with bed-saving in Fallout 4's Survival Mode. I wonder why that is. It may be because Kingdom Come is a slower game while FO4 is faster paced. FO4's Survival even disables fast travel yet people sing it high praises.
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It's mostly because it's a selectable option rather than a mandatory thing that needs to be modded the frick out.
 
Hykal94 said:
Yet people aren't that bothered with bed-saving in Fallout 4's Survival Mode. I wonder why that is. It may be because Kingdom Come is a slower game while FO4 is faster paced. FO4's Survival even disables fast travel yet people sing it high praises.
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If you're playing survival mode, you deliberately made the choice to play the game mode that introduces several tedium factors to the gameplay loop. Whereas with Kingdom Come there is no choice to not have to deal with a tedious method of saving. Even the Metroid series which has long used save stations as its primary method of saving has started to introduce more generously located checkpoints to the series. And starting with the Prime series, saving also rewarded you by fully restoring your health to make you want to visit save stations anyway. And also Retro studios was great at level design and made sure to place its stations very generously.
 
Hykal94 said:
Yet people aren't that bothered with bed-saving in Fallout 4's Survival Mode. I wonder why that is. It may be because Kingdom Come is a slower game while FO4 is faster paced. FO4's Survival even disables fast travel yet people sing it high praises.
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That's because it's voluntary, so the people who use it are the ones who inclined to use it in the first place.

Also Kingdom Come insists on an overly long getting into bed animation that's shorter or longer depending on the bed and it makes you wait for the hours wheel to turn instead of just having it be the hour you want to sleep to immediately.

The game just has way too many little pain in the ass quirks about it that it doesn't need but puts them in anyway because hardcore survival or something. It just makes me want to play Gothic 2 or Risen again, which did the same style of making your way through the world gameplay but better because their world's were well designed and it didn't need millions of stat buffs and debuffs and weapon degradation to do it.

The biggest thing is that unlike Gothic or Risen, you don't even have to do half the shit the game expects you to do to get by or get through the story. My favorite example is getting out of Talmberg. The game expects you to jump through hoops but instead I just jumped off a bridge and ran away. And that's the main quest, side jobs and the games entire economy can be disregarded entirely.
 
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Zeful said:
Bullshit. Plenty of games demonstrate that less restrictive save systems make for dull gameplay because assuming players won't take the easy way out is just stupid.

For instance. Lockpicking and Hacking minigames with any consequence for failure just don't work in a game with unrestricted saves because the only thing keeping a player from resetting to get it right is the player, and plenty of players will play a great game in the least interesting way because it's efficient, and then go on to complain about it being boring elsewhere. Horror games don't work with functional checkpoint system because the Icon telling you that quitting the game will corrupt your save signposts that something's about to happen and changes the atmosphere.

How and when you can save games can define genres; so saying that games that don't let you constantly quicksave and quickload are shit is like saying any game where you can't get a gun is shit. It marks you as someone who is fundamentally small minded about what games are.
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Man, I don't save scum because it's efficient. I save scum because failure isn't fun, and I don't want to fuck up something I could have gotten because some stupid minigame was too hard. Don't pretend people are ignorant idiots because they don't ironman like you. It's not interesting to me to fail picking a lock when I'm supposed to be a badass thief. It's just annoying. I don't, generally speaking, play games to feel like a failure.
 
foamy said:
Because breaking a lockpick in Skyrim or FO4 is *such* a loss, eh? Heaven help you people if you try FTL.
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um, foamy, the discussion isn't Skyrim? He said games with actual consequences. I've played games where losing the lockpick/hack would shut off an area permanantly, losing some upgrade or another. Why did you assume the most insulting possible interpretation of what was being said? Do you just want to brag about playing real games?
 
foamy said:
Because breaking a lockpick in Skyrim or FO4 is *such* a loss, eh? Heaven help you people if you try FTL.
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An FTL session is short and you can just get into it with zero preamble, so when you get screwed over by its difficulty it's not two hours of progress just gone because you figuratively tripped over your own shoelaces.
 
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Kaiya said:
um, foamy, the discussion isn't Skyrim? He said games with actual consequences. I've played games where losing the lockpick/hack would shut off an area permanantly, losing some upgrade or another. Why did you assume the most insulting possible interpretation of what was being said? Do you just want to brag about playing real games?
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foamy said:
'Any' (the word actually used, instead of, well, 'actually') consequence of failure includes trivial ones, @Kaiya.
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Apparently yeah, that was the goal.
 
Nicholai said:
Which doesn't address the point. You chose the most insulting, trivial interpretation of what Kaiya said as the basis of your attack.
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I'll note that @Kaiya says this:

Kaiya said:
It's not interesting to me to fail picking a lock when I'm supposed to be a badass thief. It's just annoying. I don't, generally speaking, play games to feel like a failure.
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This doesn't actually require any consequence at all if it's purely the failure that upsets them. If it's the loss of access to gameplay content then why bother to say the above at all when the rest of the post explains that perfectly clearly?

A thing you cannot fail removes any feeling of accomplishment at doing the thing, in my books, and in well-designed games there's usually an alternate path to anything actually critical, it just might take more time or other resources instead.
 
foamy said:
A thing you cannot fail removes any feeling of accomplishment at doing the thing, in my books, and in well-designed games there's usually an alternate path to anything actually critical, it just might take more time or other resources instead.
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Some people don't need to feel accomplishment at doing the thing, they just enjoy the process itself rather than the fact they did it. That's why I turn on keepInventory and turn off Creepers when I play modded Minecraft, I enjoy building and designing things, and not the end-result of me having gotten a nuclear reactor.
 
foamy said:
I'll note that @Kaiya says this:



This doesn't actually require any consequence at all if it's purely the failure that upsets them. If it's the loss of access to gameplay content then why bother to say the above at all when the rest of the post explains that perfectly clearly?

A thing you cannot fail removes any feeling of accomplishment at doing the thing, in my books, and in well-designed games there's usually an alternate path to anything actually critical, it just might take more time or other resources instead.
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It is great that you are trying to defend your argument, Foamy, but you didn't actually explain that. You threw out a pithy one-liner that, again, took the most insulting and trivial interpretation of what Kaiya said.

Your follow up comments make it clear that you really are talking about how you want to play games. That's your choice. You don't get to make that choice for other people.

Hell, isn't this kind of argument (My viewpoint is the only valid one! / No mine is!) why we have a banned topic in this thread?
 
Funny story about inability to manual save wherever, relating back to Vampyr which has come up before;

Vampyr exclusively uses autosaves (and a backup hidden in the files) and does not allow you to load your game in order to force you, or at least make it exceedingly difficult not to, deal with the consequences of your decisions. However, sometimes the implementation of this leaves something to be desired - e.g. some Hints are permanently locked off if you choose wrong during certain dialogue options, and the logic as to what does or doesn't often comes down to extreme guesswork and blind reaches.

There are also the times like what happened to me in one sidequest, in which I went to pick up some anti-vampire posters for a citizen and was given the option to either actually hang them up for him or destroy them. However, the quest log only changed to reflect that I had a choice after I had picked them up, and one thing led to another and while I was hitting interact while trying to loot the environment... whoops go all these anti-vampire posters into a furnace with no confirmation input, clumsy me.

I mean that turned out to be the correct option as Doctor Johnathan Reid appears to have a little Mister Bean DNA in him like all good British gentlemen but the lesson remains, sometimes stupid shit just happens that's only tenuously under the player's control, so it's just better to give them more power over saving for the sake of their peace of mind.
 
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