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What are controversial gaming opinions you have?

Honestly, I've lost enjoyment in a lot of games recently. Feels more like a way to kill time than anything else.

Last game I enjoyed at all was Nier Automata, although I have some complaints about it.
 
pressea said:
For some actual controversy, I fully understand blaming them for lying and all that, but after the reaction they got after release I don't think anyone with a shred of empathy in their bodies can blame them for not talking to anyone for a while.

I don't think that silence should have lasted anywhere near as long as it did, though. At least the recent Waypoint interview is a good read.
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Which reminds me of an opinion I had that may be based on incorrect assumptions, but I can't think of a more plausible explanation:

A lot of smaller developers, especially in the gaming industry, seem to have this impression that PR and community relations is optional. It is really, really not.

It doesn't have to be an entire department, but there has to be at least one person who has some training in public/community relations, regardless if they're multitasking with other roles at the time. It would help so much with all these PR missteps and backlash, deserved or otherwise.

My guess is that the developers have the assumption that "everyone will be our friends", based on some imagined solidarity between fellow gamers. As has been demonstrated time and time again, this camaraderie does not exist, or is as fleeting as fairy dust and gossamer wishes.

This sort of thing keeps happening again and again, and the vast majority of the time, it's entirely preventable or manageable if a halfway competent media professional could have gotten in front of the message in time. Which would have been literally their job, hence the requirement to be halfway competent.

Obviously even huge companies with immense PR departments are not immune to PR backlashes either, but if we cannot eliminate the issue entirely, at least we can try reducing it.
 
Adloquium said:
Which reminds me of an opinion I had that may be based on incorrect assumptions, but I can't think of a more plausible explanation:

A lot of smaller developers, especially in the gaming industry, seem to have this impression that PR and community relations is optional. It is really, really not.

It doesn't have to be an entire department, but there has to be at least one person who has some training in public/community relations, regardless if they're multitasking with other roles at the time. It would help so much with all these PR missteps and backlash, deserved or otherwise.

My guess is that the developers have the assumption that "everyone will be our friends", based on some imagined solidarity between fellow gamers. As has been demonstrated time and time again, this camaraderie does not exist, or is as fleeting as fairy dust and gossamer wishes.

This sort of thing keeps happening again and again, and the vast majority of the time, it's entirely preventable or manageable if a halfway competent media professional could have gotten in front of the message in time. Which would have been literally their job, hence the requirement to be halfway competent.

Obviously even huge companies with immense PR departments are not immune to PR backlashes either, but if we cannot eliminate the issue entirely, at least we can try reducing it.
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Hell sometimes you just need to be honest with your players. You are going to get a lot of shit from people, thats just the internet. The very nature of the internet removes a lot of filters that would be there if you talked in person, add money and frustration to the mix and things get heated.

If you want to see a small but relvenet example of this, check out Star Traders: Frontiers on the steam forum.

STF is a small indie game from the Trese Brothers. It's a really cool universe sandbox game inspired by Rogue Trader. The devs are incredibly active with an update to the game every few days, and they are very active with the community.

Well one day they lock a previously open ship behind an achievement. This was a pretty popular ship, so it annoyed a good chunk of the player base and sparked heated debates about gating content behind higher difficulties. The devs wanted the ship to be a reward for doing difficult challenges to be unlocked in future playthroughs. After some drama the devs unlocked the ship, apologized, and promised that they would from then on only lock new content behind achievements in order to stay true to their development goals. They also noted that it was a mistake to lock previous content, and were sorry for not being clearer.

It was a neat microcosm of these kind of events. There were some very rude people reacting to the change, but the devs handled it well. They stayed polite, communicated their thought process behind the change, listened to feedback, and stayed true to their design decision going forward, but with a promise to better communicate. It was honestly nice to see the situation get resolved like that. No silence, no venom toward the players for not liking the change, and yet still sticking to their vision just with a little alteration from feedback.
 
Nashk said:
It was a neat microcosm of these kind of events. There were some very rude people reacting to the change, but the devs handled it well. They stayed polite, communicated their thought process behind the change, listened to feedback, and stayed true to their design decision going forward, but with a promise to better communicate. It was honestly nice to see the situation get resolved like that. No silence, no venom toward the players for not liking the change, and yet still sticking to their vision just with a little alteration from feedback.
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Exactly. That's the basic goal of communications: to make sure the message you want to put out is the one that everyone hears and remembers, rather than some other message that someone else came up with, or some speculation that the audience came up with on their own. And the best way to have your message be the dominant one is to be honest and forthcoming. (Obviously while still following the usual tenets of communications, ie Accuracy, Brevity, and Clarity.)

In the case of No Man's Sky, the message they should have put out as fast and as widely as possible should have been along the lines of "we overpromised, and we apologize for that, so we are working to rectify that" (or something; I haven't actually followed along with NMS development, so I am basing this on what I've heard), and tried to make sure this is what people think of when they think of NMS. Instead, right now we have words like "scam" and "lied" being thrown around, which is probably not the message they wish to have.
 
Ser_Serendipity said:
Umm... no, it's not. It's called getting dissatisfied with games. Sometimes they just don't feel like a fulfilling way to spend your time since you've already put so much of it into them. I was feeling the same way until I picked up the new God of War a couple weeks ago.
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I've kinda been dissatisfied with new games for a few years to be honest. Admittedly I'm a collector of old games, but I've found that most of the stuff in the past few years interests me less than stuff from the 90s and early 2000s.
 
Adloquium said:
Exactly. That's the basic goal of communications: to make sure the message you want to put out is the one that everyone hears and remembers, rather than some other message that someone else came up with, or some speculation that the audience came up with on their own. And the best way to have your message be the dominant one is to be honest and forthcoming. (Obviously while still following the usual tenets of communications, ie Accuracy, Brevity, and Clarity.)

In the case of No Man's Sky, the message they should have put out as fast and as widely as possible should have been along the lines of "we overpromised, and we apologize for that, so we are working to rectify that" (or something; I haven't actually followed along with NMS development, so I am basing this on what I've heard), and tried to make sure this is what people think of when they think of NMS. Instead, right now we have words like "scam" and "lied" being thrown around, which is probably not the message they wish to have.
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People are saying they lied because they actually did lie. It's not the usual claim where things are hinted at and players make assumptions based on hype (Although that did happen too). The devs literally lied that multiplayer was a thing. And they kept up that charade all they way up to the point that players literally proved you couldn't even see other players in NMS. I don't have an exhaustive list of their lies, and I doubt people want to get into this here, but its all out there if you care enough to look into it. Combine the lies with misleading trailers, and lots of hype and a shitstorm was created.

The only annoying thing about this whole game is that people keep trying to defend the actual lies. Like usually I can at the very least understand that devs have limited budgets and time and whatnot but it almost never gets to the point of outright lies, and even if they do I have never seen a dev lie about a game that is literally in the hands of their players before.
 
Let's not try to diagnose others on the internet. That's something no one wants to deal with.
  • Staff Post
    • Eopia said:
    This is called Depression.
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    and this is called armchair diagnosing Let's not do this, alright? Just because someone has lost enjoyment in games doesn't mean that you should automatically assume that it's depression.

    Let's just avoid giving medical advice in general, yeah? Much easier that way imo.
     
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    • Nashk said:
    People are saying they lied because they actually did lie. It's not the usual claim where things are hinted at and players make assumptions based on hype (Although that did happen too). The devs literally lied that multiplayer was a thing. And they kept up that charade all they way up to the point that players literally proved you couldn't even see other players in NMS. I don't have an exhaustive list of their lies, and I doubt people want to get into this here, but its all out there if you care enough to look into it. Combine the lies with misleading trailers, and lots of hype and a shitstorm was created.
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    Which is fair, and as I said, I haven't kept track of the development process for NMS. But the point of my posts about PR management is that having someone in charge of that (again, with the caveats that the PR person is competent and listened to) would have prevented more or less all of that, including the lies.

    If a dev says something stupid, standard damage control would be to apologize for it, minimize the exposure of that stupid statement (while acknowledging that it was said and apologizing for it), and pushing exposure of other topics. Proper damage control would be to prevent the dev from saying something stupid in the first place, but we can't predict everything.

    It is doable, and it has been done multiple times before, so whenever something like this happens when it could have been so easily prevented simply by looking at previous examples and following the well-established steps, I have to wonder why it happened at all.
     
    The Council is a lurching monument to Eurojank in which the lipsync just flat-out broke consistently multiple times in the same scene for me but I welcome it with open arms because it still handily blows every other Your Choices Matter videogame out of the water by having choices that actually matter and very rewarding exploration and RPG mechanics. The character models are barely capable of emoting and I love it.
     
    Adloquium said:
    If a dev says something stupid, standard damage control would be to apologize for it, minimize the exposure of that stupid statement (while acknowledging that it was said and apologizing for it), and pushing exposure of other topics.
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    That's what he's doing. Just... years late. Hah. The funniest part is that they haven't hired someone else to do PR.

    And regardless of their mistakes, game is still sitting at the top of the best-selling list as we speak and probably will be again the next time they release a major update. :V
     
    Stat buff/debuff abilities in Total War games suck and add nothing to the experience half of the time they feel like a placebo and I don't feel they add anything to a game that's supposed to be more about simulating an unobstructed, physical battle where it's the actual concrete stuff that matters, not how many attack points a unit has.

    It works better for Warhammer because it has wizards in it. But I feel there's still a lot of placebo effect spells over ones that actually let you alter the battle in a cool way.
     
    I've been starting to wonder...

    What exactly is the point of EXP and levelling, beyond making numbers go up?

    The standard design for RPGs (and a lot of games with RPG mechanics thrown in) is for the player character to steadily grow bigger in HP, in attack power, etc. The thing is, the standard design is also for the enemies to become bigger in those same numbers (bigger attack power, bigger buckets of HP, etc). The result being that...the difficulty level stays basically the same as the player progresses.

    I was struck by this when playing Nier: Automata. As I played, I steadily accrued bigger numbers, better swords, the ability to take more damage...but I progressed through the story, the enemies were steadily replaced by higher level versions of themselves. As in, these "new" enemies were mechanically identical, but with bigger numbers. And I thought to myself: why? What purpose is EXP and levelling serving here? Couldn't the game have just ditched those particular RPG mechanics entirely and just...not have lost anything?

    This aspect of RPGs is at its worst when using level-scaled enemies. You know, when enemies automatically get stronger to keep up with the player, thus meaning that character progression...isn't. The player is esentially put on a treadmill. But I'm wondering if levelling for the PC should just be ditched altogether.

    I think I'd like to play an RPG without the make-the-numbers-go-up aspect. Give me a character creation screen that allows me to create an extremely powerful character right at the beginning - choosing between diplomacy skills, fighting skills, hacking skills, whatever - and then let me loose in the world. If content has to be gated off until later, it can be done through quests, or hunts for certain key items. A sense of progression and strengthening can be gained through the acquisition of new and better/more flexible gear, through gaining allies, and so on - through organic means that fit into the fiction of the game world, rather than the PC mysteriously getting bigger buckets of HP as s/he kills more things.

    (Fortunately for me, Miyazaki and FROM Software are making Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, which looks like a soulslike game without EXP/levelling. So I am certainly interested as to how that plays out.)
     
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    Is there an RPG where numbers don't matter? A big reason why I like games where how good you are with a weapon is because I've played so many games, I'm pretty good with any virtual gun or sword. But give me numbers where I'm not strong enough to hold a gun? I'm cool with that.
     
    Hykal94 said:
    Is there an RPG where numbers don't matter? A big reason why I like games where how good you are with a weapon is because I've played so many games, I'm pretty good with any virtual gun or sword. But give me numbers where I'm not strong enough to hold a gun? I'm cool with that.
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    Er, I suspect you haven't read my post that thoroughly? It's not "numbers" in an RPG that I am questioning - it's "numbers going up." It's the stat based difficulty treadmill that I think could stand to be junked.

    By all means, force the player to choose between proficiency in guns, swords, medicine, speech etc. Just make the choice be entirely at the character creation screen.

    To put it another way, SPECIAL stats remain mostly static from character creation to the final battle. Why not do the same with skill points, HP, etc, and balance the game around that?
     
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