- Location
- The Hague
- Pronouns
- He/Him
Controversial gaming opinion: video games are good.
What are controversial gaming opinions you have?
Hykal94
Orange Estus Kitteh
- Location
- Firelink Shrine
Fallout New Vegas is considered the best Fallout game by the majority of the fandom. The only games to top it would be FO1 and FO2.
An RPG is not the main quest alone. The idea that the modern RPG is 50% main quest is frankly ludicrous. Not even Baldur's Gate with its epic dungeon crawls was this true. A good RPG is 20% main quest and 80% everything else, whether that be sidequests, character interaction and others.
But you know what? Even if I played NV for the main quest alone, it would still prove superior to the main quest of every game Bethesda made post-Morrowind.
New Vegas, Morrowind and other games like it follow a relatively simple formula in constructing quests. The player starts off somewhere, goes to a nearby settlement, and plot hooks would dangle in front of them to the next settlement. However, because the game is filled with sidequests in each town, the player would do these quests before proceeding on with the main quest.
Bethesda does not this formula at all.
In Skyrim, you seek shelter in Riverwood and immediately are told to go to Whiterun, then go to Bleak Falls, then fight a dragon, then go to the High Hrothgar, and so on until you kill Worst Dragon Villain ever at the end. You barely cared about anyone because the game doesn't even try to convince you.
In New Vegas, you wake up in the town of Goodsprings and are immediately allowed to go to Primm. But the game doesn't do that, and encourages you to do the tutorial, interact with the townsfolk, in which you would find the mayor arguing with a Powder Ganger, in which you would get entrapped into either defending the town or joining the bandits which then affects the ending of said town 80 hours later.
New Vegas does this for every single town. You interact with the people, you get to know about them, their situation, the political opinions of the big factions before you even meet a single one of them.
You do this until you get to Vegas, confront Benny, and then the game branches into FOUR branches: Independent, NCR, Legion, or House. Which THEN leads to dealing with the many other smaller but still signifant factions in the Wastes, from the Brotherhood to the Boomers, it gives you the incentive to experience the world.
The questlines do interact and overlap, but the fact you can complete every single one of them differently gives the game depth. House treats you like an employee, the Legion treats you like a saboteur, the Republic treats you like a soldier/diplomat and the Independent route gives you the choice to say, "Nah, I don't wanna deal with those guys" or "Let's kill every single one of them."
The Yes Man route is basically the Bethesda ending but actually done fucking well. Something Bethesda until today does not comprehend. No, I don't want to be the goddamn General/Director or whatever. Even if I were, there's jack shit I can do in calling the shots. That's why the game wisely ends afterwards (also they had time constraints and had no budget to do a lot so diverted their time to make good DLCs).
What other Bethesda game does this? None of them do. Because Bethesda has lost its spirit of creating proper quests. You can see the dying sparks of it still though. Oblivion had you hotel ship taken over by pirates. Moira's quests is the most dialogue heavy in FO3. Skyrim, well I actually struggle to remember any quest that's good as the quests in Oblivion actually.
And that's why New Vegas remains one of the best RPGs ever made. It respects the inhabitants on the world, it respects the themes, it respects the lore, and it respects YOU.
New Vegas has such respect for the player, you actually have a quest to convince a raped soldier to take therapy, and treats it with the utmost decorum for an extremely serious subject.
In Fallout 4? Uhhh ..... another settlement needs your help?
And that's the difference between an average game and an excellent game.
Vindictus
XENO
- Location
- Texas
See, that's a good argument! It still relies a lot on contrasting New Vegas with Bethesda titles, but it's much more convincing, and not reliant on weird 'It's better because you can fail to find the interesting bits' logic.
Hykal94
Orange Estus Kitteh
- Location
- Firelink Shrine
That is actually the point that Tumblr post was making. The reason why people "don't get" New Vegas was because they refuse, or don't care to, give a crap about the game. They are too stuck with Bethesda's mindset of making a playground of a Wasteland.
Because that's what FO3 and FO4 is: a playground, not a world. Granted I actually love the playground that is FO3, it's only until FO4 that they drop the ball on almost everything save the combat and crafting (and even the former is more shallow than NV's DT and multiple ammo types system).
Bethesda wants you to see everything. They want you to do everything on a first playthrough. New Vegas, understanding that replayability is a virtue, that different paths make for different stories, understood this, and crafted their game as it is.
And you know what? I think Bethesda knows this. I think a lot of people working on FO4 realises that it was a dissapointment to the fans. Todd Howard more or less says "Yeah the voice acting (for the MC) a was really bad idea" in an interview with Neogaf.
Hopefully, and I pray to God, that the next installment in either ES or FO goes back to its roots, and stops being a playground and starts being a proper world with real people inhabiting it.
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Night
Widow Null
- Location
- Hoff
The argument "no, you are playing the game wrong" is not an argument, it's an indictment of the game creator. If there was supposed to be only one "proper" way to play the game, then they fucked up when they made it possible to do something else and they should have been designing King's Quest games.
(And "the voiceacting is bad" is far from the sweeping indictment of FO4 you made or want them to endorse.)
So if someone says that Halo is terrible because the aliens will kill you if you just run straight at them trying to melee them to death, your response is...? Or, hell, what if someone complains about Halo because you can't befriend your enemies, talk to the, convince them to join you?
Hykal94
Orange Estus Kitteh
- Location
- Firelink Shrine
The voice acting was in reference to the MC being voiced, but I should have made that clearer.
If you decide to go ahead and slaughter every single person in the first town then does not mean you're playing the game wrong?
No, that's entirely within your power to do so. But are they playing incompetently? That's an absolutely fair assessment to make.
Because who decides to go around murdering every single person they meet anyway? Well maybe that one guy, but that's different.
Night
Widow Null
- Location
- Hoff
And if you make ridiculous strawmen, you should rightly be ignored.
No. Because this is a big open-world game they made with vague objectives and little reason not to do that or anything else in the end unless you actually are deliberately trying to play the story and you don't have to do that. You can totally Grand Theft Auto it up if you like. You have all the tools to do so. NV was a fool's errand, making a massive open-world map and then trying to dictate to the player a progression along certain lines and gate them out of certain other areas and lines via the use of "T-rex on the plains" mechanics like I'm literally watching a GM railroad me in D&D.
"Depopulate the world" was actually my first self-imposed Morrowind challenge after I beat the game the first time.
- Location
- Drachyench on Discord
To get a controversial Fallout opinion out of the way: Fallout 3, even (barring the unofficial patches) vanilla, is a moderately decent game...
If you assume it to be a reboot of the franchise (versus a continuation, to the prior games what Human Revolution was to Deus Ex) and that it's set something like 100 years earlier chronologically (mostly to explain why some PCs utterly exposed to the elements since the bombs dropped are still fully functional and why everyone's looting in-date cereal boxes from over grocery counters).
The gameplay isn't terrible (keep in mind that it came out roughly around the same time as Oblivion, of which I'd argue its mechanics are a sometimes worse but overall a moderate improvement), the story can work (if people have beaten to death the subject of how its world does not feel like a world but a set piece for an overly elaborate play), it has some fun quests and moments, and at times it captures some of the cheekiness of FO and FO2 quite nicely. But while I'd probably rate it somewhere between a 7.5 and 8.5 with the above two caveats, I have to downgrade it roughly -.5 to -1 when taking its plot in consideration to prior games and the relative plethora of moments that threaten to break the suspension of disbelief.
EDIT: Since some people apparently had this break the game for them and turn it into a complete "NO FUN ALLOWED I HATE IT NEVER TOUCH AGAIN": You can get 1-2 Stealthboys in very close proximity to Goodspring. Using them (you can get more later, don't worry about it) after taking the path to the north and hugging the cliffs is a very valid way to reach New Vegas early on. On my most recent play through I did just this (well, technically: I took the far more dangerous "Past the Quarry" route because I was an idiot and one unlucky house full of Powder Gangers was apparently fated to have me run through the lobby with an irate Deathclaw in pursuit) and didn't even touch Primm or the main plot until Level 20-something with ~1/2 the map's quick travel nodes revealed.
It takes some trial and error, but once you have a basic path worked out and get a hang for the Stealthboys' duration it's a quick run (don't run when a Deathclaw's in render distance: Sneak predominantly) to a landmark near New Vegas and then you're set.
If you assume it to be a reboot of the franchise (versus a continuation, to the prior games what Human Revolution was to Deus Ex) and that it's set something like 100 years earlier chronologically (mostly to explain why some PCs utterly exposed to the elements since the bombs dropped are still fully functional and why everyone's looting in-date cereal boxes from over grocery counters).
The gameplay isn't terrible (keep in mind that it came out roughly around the same time as Oblivion, of which I'd argue its mechanics are a sometimes worse but overall a moderate improvement), the story can work (if people have beaten to death the subject of how its world does not feel like a world but a set piece for an overly elaborate play), it has some fun quests and moments, and at times it captures some of the cheekiness of FO and FO2 quite nicely. But while I'd probably rate it somewhere between a 7.5 and 8.5 with the above two caveats, I have to downgrade it roughly -.5 to -1 when taking its plot in consideration to prior games and the relative plethora of moments that threaten to break the suspension of disbelief.
EDIT: Since some people apparently had this break the game for them and turn it into a complete "NO FUN ALLOWED I HATE IT NEVER TOUCH AGAIN": You can get 1-2 Stealthboys in very close proximity to Goodspring. Using them (you can get more later, don't worry about it) after taking the path to the north and hugging the cliffs is a very valid way to reach New Vegas early on. On my most recent play through I did just this (well, technically: I took the far more dangerous "Past the Quarry" route because I was an idiot and one unlucky house full of Powder Gangers was apparently fated to have me run through the lobby with an irate Deathclaw in pursuit) and didn't even touch Primm or the main plot until Level 20-something with ~1/2 the map's quick travel nodes revealed.
It takes some trial and error, but once you have a basic path worked out and get a hang for the Stealthboys' duration it's a quick run (don't run when a Deathclaw's in render distance: Sneak predominantly) to a landmark near New Vegas and then you're set.
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So... It is a bad game because it allows you to try to play as a pacifist, but it isn't a fun experience? Or is it the pacifist player's fault for having expectations mismatched to the virtues of the game?
Night
Widow Null
- Location
- Hoff
It actually doesn't allow you to play as a pacifist. The game mechanics are not there to allow you to progress in several instances with an attempted pacifist run.
You may have noted an earlier allusion to King's Quest, which typically had immediate and lethal consequences for attempting out of sequence events or stepping off the rails. Note that nowhere did I say that was a bad game. (Incredibly frustrating, but if it wanted something from you it made it clear.)
- Location
- Drachyench on Discord
I feel like MrBTongue's video on the different types of replayability could be particularly valuable here. Specifically how there's two dominant thoughts of "replayability": That different options exist just to go back and see what would happen (usually with a negligible failure state presence) and that different options exist to simulate potentially drastically different outcomes. The first is what you generally see in stuff like Mass Effect (wherein what changes are made are often completely segregated from the action you chose), the second earlier Fallout games or Morrowind or whatnot (wherein they can have rather reaching and, sometimes failure-inducing, consequences either long or short term).
EDIT: Fallout: New Vegas does not allow a true pacifist run to my knowledge, but then I don't think any of the Fallout games since the first have allowed such without a lot of skirting around various obstacles and sometimes quite loose definitions of the word "Pacifist". That said there are various quests that can be resolved without the shedding of blood both minor and plot-related. Far more than most other games of the type, excluding obvious exceptions such as Undertale.
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Hykal94
Orange Estus Kitteh
- Location
- Firelink Shrine
Dictate what? Gate how lol? It's entirely possible to fuck off to Vegas at level 3 and get yourself a suit of advanced combat armor mk 1. ManyATrueNerd did exactly this in one episode of his latest NV playthrough.
You wanna ignore the southern-western-highway route, YOU ARE FREE TO DO SO. There is absolutely nothing stopping you from playing NV like FO3. Unlike FO3 however, NV gives incentive to stay in a town and do the quests and get to know people. That's the "railroading" people whine about, but those people stick to it anyway instead of trying to sneak through Black Mountain like MATN did. It's not Obsidian's fault that you followed the route. Hell that's what Drachnyech did like four posts above.
And even if so? So what? Fallout 1 was like that. Fallout 2 was like that. Fallout 3 was like that (but you could at least find your Dad immediately if you knew how to). I guess BioWare games are bad RPGs too because they don't allow you find a suit of power armor in 5 minutes in like FO2 did.
This Guy Beat Fallout: New Vegas With Zero Kills.
Fallout New Vegas: No Kill Run.
Granted I don't find it particular FUN to play the game with no kills. But guess what? I never expected through NV without killing anything. The game wasn't designed that way, and it's not the game's fault for giving you a false impression you could do so.
The hilarious thing here is that I was responding to your asinine strawman. And that despite that I was making a point: games are experiences. And you can certainly approach them in a way that means not enjoying it isn't really an indictment of the game. Going into Halo expecting satisfying melee clashes, or meaningful conversation and diplomacy, will leave you frustrated and upset with the game. Another good example is stuff like Dark Souls or some similar games, which if approached like many other combat titles are impenetrable. But they're still good experiences for many. You didn't engage with the experience, but no experience works for everyone. To imply otherwise, as you did, is ridiculous.
The Englanderish
Schrödinger's Kuudere Kitty Caliph(a)
- Location
- Califat de Chats
Can we please be nice to each other? Please?
mothematics
How wide is the concept of "you"?
- Location
- the bottom of a coffee cup
- Pronouns
- She/Her
as we are all aware the single greatest video game of all time is the ballad of gay tony
not base gta iv
just the ballad of gay tony
meet me afterschool in the parking lot if u disagree
not base gta iv
just the ballad of gay tony
meet me afterschool in the parking lot if u disagree
Night
Widow Null
- Location
- Hoff
Which is why you said something actually false? (In literally the second area, landing on Halo, there are several points where the game will not call in a Pelican to pick up some Marines unless you clear the area of Convenant forces. The mechanics to play a pacifist Halo do not exist; the result is a perpetually frozen game failure state.)
Meanwhile, my argument was that saying "NV is not meant to be a playground" when you have literally everything at your fingertips to treat it as a playground, and that's not one you addressed at all, so...good job? You actually didn't understand things at all.
No actually it wasn't. There are very few places where you won't encountered leveled enemies in FO3, and even fewer where they'd be deliberately beyond a low-level player. If you exit the first town in NV moving in the wrong direction you will get giant radscorpions or deathclaws or cazadore groups before you travel too far. The fact you may successfully evade them only means you're smarter than the game designer (almost inevitable, you have a lot more time to try and break his work than he did to make it), not that they genuinely didn't try to block you. The fact you can reach Vegas is because the game actually intends for you to be able to reach Vegas safely if you so choose; it's such an obvious thing to do that it was made a safe option because a significant portion of players would try.
So you haven't really offered any useful evidence. You say it's not a playground, but they built a map and gave you the ability to go anywhere as if it were, and then you say it's not meant to be a playground, despite having everything you need to make it a playground. If it's not meant to be a playground, don't give people the option to play it as a playground, and don't half-ass it trying to stop them.
(And don't link things of people treating it as a playground.)
So that was about Cosar's Halo strawman. You should probably follow the threads of discussion that lead to what you reply to.
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Well, first off, you'll note that I wrote two sentences there. The first one was regarding melee combat, and melee combat both exists and is a means to kill aliens. This is all stuff in the game, and technically it's possible to complete the game with just melee. So that statement is not false, but it hasn't been answered. Just dismissed on your part with no response.
Secondly, you'll note what I said in the second sentence. I didn't say that those mechanics were in the game: I said that someone could complain because they were not in the game. This was of my overall point, which I did bolster with another example of a game where someone can play it wrong and still get to the end if they're determined enough.
So perhaps before you accuse others of stuff you should really try and make sure that you're not projecting as bad as Trump.
No it asserts the game is perfect, and then goes on to ad homenim the detractors as if them "not getting it" is their fault rather than the game's. When you compare it a well written game's main plot, like any of the Witcher games (hell, I'll be utterly fucking condescending, and use the first Witcher game as my example rather than the second or the third), that claim falls apart.
If you haven't played it, the first Witcher game's main plot is literally, "a dude stole your drugs, go get them back", but during the set up of that plot it builds the major relationships between the characters, and use the main character to demonstrate the stakes of the main plot, oh, and you play most of this sequence, so this is all happening in "real time" to the player. In New Vegas, the main plot is set up mostly in a cutscene (well, depending on what we count as the main plot, it's actually arguable that the game doesn't set up the main plot until you get to Vegas) , the relationships it and the rest of the opening sequence build are essentially non-existent, and the game never establishes any stakes (though again, depending on what you count as the main plot, the trip around the map could count as setting the stakes). In both games the player is asked to come to the table and help write the story some, but in one what you are expected to be writing is made clear as early as physically possible, and in the other... that it's possible to debate what the main plot of the story is was probably the biggest sin New Vegas ever committed.
This is why I can't get into the game, and why I consider it badly written, essentially it doesn't tell me anything about how the calibrate my expectations until after the point I've stopped caring.
Hykal94
Orange Estus Kitteh
- Location
- Firelink Shrine
And this is bad game design how? This is the traditional game design for a lot of RPGs. Hell, Deus Ex even does this to an extent.
And guess what dude, just because you outsmarted the monsters don't you mean you're smarter than the developer. If Obsidian really wanted to not allow you to skip the eastern side of the map, they would put a Deathclaw every three feet. It's expected game design. It's going after the Rite of Kindling in Dark Souls at Soul Level 10. It's getting the good stuff early in an RPG before beating the first boss. It's really good game design.
The game gives you two routes: the intended path following the highway or the dangerous route. The former engages you with the setting, the world, the politics, and the people. The latter is something veteran players do to Sequence Break. Neither are wrong, both are rewarding in their own way.
Nowhere does the post say that.
The main plot is the clash between the New California Republic and Caesar's Legion over the control of Hoover Dam, and with it Vegas and the Mojave. This is hammered to you repeatedly. Every civilian you encounter has some sort of opinion about the NCR and the Legion. Every soldier is anticipating a big clash between the two major powers. The chip at its center is a trump card made by House, for House, or if you choose to, by you.
You are literally missing the sack of Nipton, of Ranger Station Charlie, the skirmishes, the people trying to get Helios to work, the situation between the Kings and the NCR, the raids by the Fiends, the history of the Khans, the problems of small towns, the espionage by the Legion, the secrets of the gangs in the city. All of this tie the game together about the themes of war and politics over a changing world. And all this you find out by just doing the main quest!
The fact that you are arguing like the plot is non-existent is bad faith debating. How can you engage with the story when you don't even give it a chance.
Is it because I used a Tumblr post? Is that why you're so salty? I didn't do anything to garner such hostility from you.
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Nowhere does the post say that.
The main plot is the clash between the New California Republic and Caesar's Legion over the control of Hoover Dam, and with it Vegas and the Mojave. This is hammered to you repeatedly. Every civilian you encounter has some sort of opinion about the NCR and the Legion. Every soldier is anticipating a big class between the two major powers. The chip at its center is a trump card made by House, for House, or if you choose to, by you.
You are literally missing the sack of Nipton, of Ranger Station Charlie, the skirmishes, the people trying to get Helios to work, the situation between the Kings and the NCR, the raids by the Fiends, the history of the Khans, the problems of small towns, the espionage by the Legion, the secrets of the gangs in the city. All of this tie the game together about the themes of war and politics over a changing world. And all this you find out by just doing the main quest!
The fact that you are arguing like the plot is non-existent is bad faith debating. How can you engage with the story when you don't even give it a chance.
Is it because I used a Tumblr post? Is that why you're so salty? I didn't do anything to garner such hostility from you.
All of this attacks the people who don't agree with the writer rather than attempting to address any argument, even a constructed one. It is literally, "the arguments aren't worth considering because the people haven't played the game" which ignores that people form these opinions from playing the game. I didn't go into New Vegas expecting it to be a shit game I would hate, I expected a good story with interesting characters and good plot with important decisions, since that's what everyone who I've seen discuss the game outside of Yahtzee talk about, and then I went 9 fucking hours without seeing any of it. Roll that around in your head, my longest playthrough, 9 hours from start to the most recent save after talking to House, and I see none of what this game is lauded for, and that was after hours of trying to force myself to play to figure out what I was missing. Trying to find the same game everyone else was playing has literally and permanently burned me out on the game. Booting it up after my big post last page explaining my issues and answering why I'm being so hostile to you specifically, I tried again, but after finding that the game bricked my saves in loading screens I started over, again. Because part of me still holds out hope that one day, I'll play it, and find the game you all have played. This time didn't last 20 minutes.
But no matter how I say it, everyone only seems to read "NV is bad" instead of what I actually write. So maybe there's no point in bothering to try to explain that I made the decision to kill the Legion after learning about the sacking of Nipton, or when I finally got to New Vegas, got the chip and got ambushed by another Legion higher up the flare of emotion almost made me shoot him on the strip, only staying my hand because I didn't want to risk fighting my way off the strip. After all, if someone doesn't agree that the game is 10/10, they must hate it and want to see the developers nailed to crosses, right?
I've played the game, I spent hours trying to like the game, the only reason I'm missing stuff is because I can't enjoy the game enough to get there, and I can't enjoy the game because it takes to fucking long getting to main plot.
Stop: Good idea
Generic_Generica
Notice me Senpai~
- Location
- Right behind you
good idea
We've recieved a spate of reports recently with regards to uncivil behavior. Oh, and bad-faith debating. Allow me to make the following statement.
"Howdy-do folks. I'm Moderator Generic_Generica. Be good, or I'll infract you."
That's all for now. General notice. Y'all can go about your business as y'all are wont to.
Just keep it clean and tighten up those debating skills.
We've recieved a spate of reports recently with regards to uncivil behavior. Oh, and bad-faith debating. Allow me to make the following statement.
"Howdy-do folks. I'm Moderator Generic_Generica. Be good, or I'll infract you."
That's all for now. General notice. Y'all can go about your business as y'all are wont to.
Just keep it clean and tighten up those debating skills.
- Location
- Texas, US
Can I just say I liked FO3 more than NV in terms of actually playing the game? Because, yeah, a lot of FO3's story is clunky.
But it's like, roving the Capital Wasteland and meandering through the Mojave are so different and the former is a lot more satisfying to me. There was one time I was looking for Fort Independence and the Brotherhood Outcasts because someone advised me to get good items there. En route, I ran into an Enclave camp, my first ever Deathclaw and in the course of struggling with all of that, a Giant Radscorpion wandered in.
That was more memorable to me than any random stretch of exploration inf New Vegas. I learned quickly to compulsively save in FO3 because death might be a moment away. New Vegas was a land of peace and happy bunnies by comparison.
But it's like, roving the Capital Wasteland and meandering through the Mojave are so different and the former is a lot more satisfying to me. There was one time I was looking for Fort Independence and the Brotherhood Outcasts because someone advised me to get good items there. En route, I ran into an Enclave camp, my first ever Deathclaw and in the course of struggling with all of that, a Giant Radscorpion wandered in.
That was more memorable to me than any random stretch of exploration inf New Vegas. I learned quickly to compulsively save in FO3 because death might be a moment away. New Vegas was a land of peace and happy bunnies by comparison.
Dark Abstraction
Infrequent Participant
- Location
- United States
Can we talk about literally any-fucking-thing else other than the Fallout games please? It's clearly a contentious subject, and it's also clear that despite this thread being the place for voicing contentious opinions, people are not mature enough to accept the opinions of others in regards to Fallout games.
I find the idea of leveled items in RPGs, such as weapons and armor, to be incredibly annoying. I don't care that it's meant to address balance concerns, having to postpone doing fun quests and area exploration so that I can get the objectively best version of a daedric artifact or suit of power armor is fucking annoying.
I find the idea of leveled items in RPGs, such as weapons and armor, to be incredibly annoying. I don't care that it's meant to address balance concerns, having to postpone doing fun quests and area exploration so that I can get the objectively best version of a daedric artifact or suit of power armor is fucking annoying.
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VolantRedX
Official Conscience of Worm Fanfiction!
Fallout 2 and maybe Fallout 1 (I haven't played it) is so clunky in terms of interface and control that it's basically unplayable.