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What are controversial gaming opinions you have?

Personally when it comes to voiced player characters I think it really only works if none of the characters are voiced. Having a NPC lock eyes with you and say lines while you reply seemingly through telepathy is jarring and feels off-putting. A better way to do it would be if all the lines had to be read by the player. Tedious, yes, but at least it feels like we're a part of the world and not an empty vessel that characters react at.

Also as a tax: I think the general rose tinted glasses of gaming is ridiculous. Like talk about classic games and stories all you want but a lot of classic games are so archaic and broken by today's standards it's less like watching a classic film and more like trying to read a Greek play where two thirds of the scrip was burned in the Library of Alexandria.
 
VolantRedX said:
Personally when it comes to voiced player characters I think it really only works if none of the characters are voiced. Having a NPC lock eyes with you and say lines while you reply seemingly through telepathy is jarring and feels off-putting. A better way to do it would be if all the lines had to be read by the player. Tedious, yes, but at least it feels like we're a part of the world and not an empty vessel that characters react at.
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Voiced dialogue doesn't just spring from the foreheads of the writers fully formed and ready to be painlessly slotted into the videogame. It takes time and money and effort. If you make your PC voiced in the kind of big RPG that gives you a meaningful amount of dialog options, that massively eats into the budget for everyone else's lines. It's the difference between 800,000 lines of dialogue being other characters saying like 700,000 unique things to you or only half that because the other half is you responding.
 
Otherwise known as The Fallout 4 Problem. I imagine most people will take a variety of silent options over a few voices ones any day.

(Not to mention, a voiced protag gets in the way of role play: how a line is delivered matters just as much as the words in it)
 
I think there's merit to not having voice acting for games where the PC is supposed to be a blank slate, but a lack of voice acting really hurts the experience in say, the Metro series with Artyom. Some games need voice acting.
 
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Cmd. Frost said:
I think there's merit to not having voice acting for games where the PC is supposed to be a blank slate, but a lack of voice acting really hurts the experience in say, the Metro series with Artyom. Some games need voice acting.
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Hell even games like Mass Effect, where Shepard isn't intended as an avatar of the player, but a character in their own right that you guide through the story. There are times where games have choice and dialogue options but are intended to be more like films that control over anything else. The Life is Strange games are another great example.
 
I do think there's more innovation out there than ever before for video games... it's also the fact that a hell of a lot of that innovation is coming from the Indie scene, while microtransactions and repetitive design choke a lot of AAA games... but it's not as if AAA games have ever been the be-all, end-all of innovation, trying new things, etc.

Rather the opposite.
 
The Laurent said:
I do think there's more innovation out there than ever before for video games... it's also the fact that a hell of a lot of that innovation is coming from the Indie scene, while microtransactions and repetitive design choke a lot of AAA games... but it's not as if AAA games have ever been the be-all, end-all of innovation, trying new things, etc.

Rather the opposite.
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It's also never been easier to try to be an Indie game developer. Digital distribution, online classes on game development, tools like RPG Maker for getting your feet wet, online media you can potentially advertise your game through without dealing with big publishers or anything. Hollow Knight is three guys working on their first big game and it sold 2 million copies and everyone knows about it.

I don't know if any of you guys don't like Moviebob, but I did like this video he made a while back.



Basically talking about some of the same stuff I did.
 
Warhammer derived games aren't at all new, and in fact have always been mainstream.

it's just the serial numbers were filed off before.

(this observation brought to you by playing Warlords 3 again for the first time in over a decade and going 'wait a second...' in new, exciting ways! But no seriously Warcraft and Warlords are very Warhammer...)
 
I'm really not a fan of pursuer type horror games. I just don't feel they're all that scary and a lot of times feel very tedious. Having to spend the entire game playing Grandmother's footsteps while an invincible enemy follows you everywhere just gets boring. The scary parts quickly get dull after you get caught three or four times because you dared to travel two feet without crouching or ducking into every spare closet you pass. It's not effective when the only outcome of getting caught is death. At that point just reset the player from the last checkpoint and skip the stupid death animations. Like in the Resident Evil 2 Remake having Mr. X follow you around wasn't scary most of the time, it was just a pain in the ass because you were now leashed to him and had to constantly stop what you were doing to run away from him, often getting bullshit hits from zombies or lickers because you can't stop long enough to fight. It was far scarier when you were in desperate straights, not because of some jackass with an invincibility trait was following you, but because you had low ammo no healing items and had three zombies between you and the next objective. There's no desperation or choice when dealing with Mr. X, either he kills you or you kite him around for a bit and lose him in the other rooms.

Same goes for Alien Isolation, where the Alien quickly stops being some extra worldly horror whose bloodlust will end you the instant it sees you and more an annoyance that you have to work around and will just send you back a few rooms when it kills you. The horror doesn't last and after a while, it becomes more silly than scary when it keeps turning up like a bad penny.

Having a monster that jumps out and goes boo is certainly startling, but it's not scary. A horror based around jump scares is amateurish at best. A raccoon can be startling if it jumps out of the darkness and makes a loud noise. True horror comes from an escalating sense of wrongness that builds until the world around you has lost just enough grounding to make you feel unmoored from reality while still surrounded by the familiar or the terror of being trapped in a dangerous situation while your ability to survive slowly dwindles away.

Survival horror games work best not when you spend two-thirds of the game ducking inside hiding spots while some monster stomps about making a whole big production about where it is. They work best when you constantly feel a few bullets too short to deal with the threats you face.
 

Or, in other words: God stop making me run around with obnoxious psychopaths in my good runs, KTHXBAI.
 
VolantRedX said:
Survival horror games work best not when you spend two-thirds of the game ducking inside hiding spots while some monster stomps about making a whole big production about where it is. They work best when you constantly feel a few bullets too short to deal with the threats you face.
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You're almost there, but not quite. What makes Mr. X different, and not an example of the thing you're talking about, i.e. the various Amnesia-clones popping up in the 2010s in every moderately shady place like some kind of fungus where it really is just playing Red Light Green Light in your fucking basement with the lights off, is that he isn't the only type of threat in the game. Zombies and Lickers and doggies and whatever are your primary threat and you can shoot them and kill them just fine. RE2 Remake is about making you stressed about your ammo supplies, inspiring you to seriously consider if that zombie is really worth one of your precious bullets when it's possible you could sneak past or juke around, and learning how to prioritise the pathways through the levels you really need cleared because you simply expose yourself to too much danger if you have to keep running back and forth past enemies. The longer you play, the more resources you accumulate, the more free you can get with your pathway-clearing. The point of Mr. X is to then show up and say X GON GIVE IT TO YA CLAIRE YOU HAVE OVERDUE LIBRARY BOOKS "THE REAL DARK SOULS STARTS HERE".

When you have 100 handgun rounds and 30 shotgun shells/grenades, a couple zombies and a Licker aren't that much of a problem if you can pick your battleground. They're more of a minor speedbump. But when an eight-foot-tall man who just got finished moving all the Bibles from Religion to Fiction is stomping toward you from behind and your only paths are either directly through him or through corridors you haven't cleared yet, suddenly you're afraid and stressed about your ammo again. A zombie pops up, you need to get past to escape Men's Big-'n-Tall, you delete its skull with a shotgun, or you fret over whether you need that shell too long and get munched. Maybe you pop that flashbang you were saving for a rainy day, which is of dubious use as a defence weapon but fantastic at stunning crowds long enough to sprint past. Maybe you equip a knife and yolo into the darkness because now cheapshots from zombies actually don't exist. Mr. X is a mechanic that forces you to engage with the game in a new way, and yeah he's stressful and he can get frustrating to deal with, which is why he's not around all the time.
 
ZerbanDaGreat said:
But when an eight-foot-tall man who just got finished moving all the Bibles from Religion to Fiction
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Gotta say this is the strangest way to say "wearing a fedora" that I still instantly understood.
ZerbanDaGreat said:
RE2 Remake is about making you stressed about your ammo supplies, inspiring you to seriously consider if that zombie is really worth one of your precious bullets when it's possible you could sneak past or juke around, and learning how to prioritise the pathways through the levels you really need cleared because you simply expose yourself to too much danger if you have to keep running back and forth past enemies.
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This is really the root of it; the games that punish you for messing up by "killing" you, i.e. forcing you to reload a checkpoint, just don't have as much room to escalate tension as the games that have multiple finite resources you need to manage: ammo, healing items, battery for your flashlight, whatever. If there's no margin for error, and you end up eating the one-size-fits-all punishment a few too many times, it loses all its teeth and becomes just transparently the game wasting your time and forcing you to replay the same section over and over.
 
pedanterrific said:
This is really the root of it; the games that punish you for messing up by "killing" you, i.e. forcing you to reload a checkpoint, just don't have as much room to escalate tension as the games that have multiple finite resources you need to manage: ammo, healing items, battery for your flashlight, whatever. If there's no margin for error, and you end up eating the one-size-fits-all punishment a few too many times, it loses all its teeth and becomes just transparently the game wasting your time and forcing you to replay the same section over and over.
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How is this any different to dying from lickers, zombies, dogs, whatever?
 
I hate games forcing me to juggle finite resources when there is potentially infinite use for them.
I'd rather the game just tell me i failed and need to start from earlier checkpoint thanfind out 5 hours after having failed that i have done so because i lack the resources to keep going.
 
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