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What are controversial gaming opinions you have?

Who Broke the In-Game Economy? - Shamus Young

Relevant.

Basically, the reasonable-on-the-face-of-it expectations people have here - to be able to loot the enemies you mow through and the world around you, and to not be given onerous carrying capacity limits - leads to some fairly absurd results regarding game balance and economy.
 
searcher8 said:
Speaking of RPGs, games that have a limit to the amount of items you can carry, either a weight limit such as the newer Fallout games, or an arbitrary limit to the number of items you can carry like Dragon Age: Origins, need to be taken out behind a shed and shot like they deserve.

I'm perfectly fine with doing like Dark Souls does, where items you actively have equipped on your person can encumber you, while you have infinite space in your inventory for the rest of your gear, but otherwise limiting the amount of items you can have in a genre that has "looting anything and everything that isn't nailed down" as one of the cornerstones of it's gameplay is one of the biggest examples of "forcing needless realism down the player's throat at the expense of fun" that I can think of.
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I disagree. The point of the inventory limits is that you need to triage what you carry, adding an element of resource management to things. Otherwise -- and it's what happens in e.g. Fallout once I get enough ranks in Strong Back -- people just pick up everything.
 
My favorite inventory system is inventory Tetris, with things taking up more slot as their value grows instead of just weight. Ideally this is combined with stacks for things they want to restrict that are small, like consumables.

Weight is a kind of boring management - dump the cheapest thing to make room every time. With inventory Tetris there's some rearranging that goes on, and it gives more metaphorical weight and importance to the big items in an easy to read way.
 
NemoMarx said:
My favorite inventory system is inventory Tetris, with things taking up more slot as their value grows instead of just weight. Ideally this is combined with stacks for things they want to restrict that are small, like consumables.

Weight is a kind of boring management - dump the cheapest thing to make room every time. With inventory Tetris there's some rearranging that goes on, and it gives more metaphorical weight and importance to the big items in an easy to read way.
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No, not necessarily. It's cheapest per weight you want to toss, with modifiers for how rare the thing is to acquire (which is, e.g., the only reason to pick up armour in Skyrim -- it has an enchantment you need to learn, it's a rare drop e.g. Daedric, or you intend to use it yourself instead of selling it).

Random-ass vendor trash with minimal weight are just fine.
 
In Skyrim, the game doesn't encourage you to steal everything. The game encourages you to steal VALUABLE things. Nobody wants to buy a ton of calipers but they would buy jewelry and enchanted gear. That's good design not bad.
 
Hykal94 said:
In Skyrim, the game doesn't encourage you to steal everything. The game encourages you to steal VALUABLE things. Nobody wants to buy a ton of calipers but they would buy jewelry and enchanted gear. That's good design not bad.
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The best things to steal are actually arrows, since in the base game they're weightless, stack infinitely, and have a reasonable unit cost so they can be offloaded easily.
 
Seems like weight limits are basically about what works for your game. They wouldn't make sense and wouldn't help in, say, Disco Elysium.

People have created Mods for it, but Fallout sensibly doesn't give bottlecaps a weight. :p

(Even though, practically speaking, a thousand bottlecaps would both start to have some heft to it, even if it's not super heavy... and would be incredibly fucking awkward to have jangling around.)
 
New Vegas had a cut Brahmin companion called Betsy, and it's basically what you think it is.

I don't see why Bethesda style dungeons doesn't have better implementation of this weight carry thingy considering in Daggerfall, you could literally own a horse and cart, and a ship.

The most popular horse mod for Skyrim turns your horse into a container. There's a mod for Fallout 4 where you can leave a beacon in a container, and a settler will go pick up everything in that cointaner back into your settlement. It takes time and is an investment, and it gels well with FO4's (underdeveloped) settlement system. Not only would it save the hassle of micromanaging in the dungeon, the managing happens after the action.
 
Hykal94 said:
New Vegas had a cut Brahmin companion called Betsy, and it's basically what you think it is.

I don't see why Bethesda style dungeons doesn't have better implementation of this weight carry thingy considering in Daggerfall, you could literally own a horse and cart, and a ship.

The most popular horse mod for Skyrim turns your horse into a container. There's a mod for Fallout 4 where you can leave a beacon in a container, and a settler will go pick up everything in that cointaner back into your settlement. It takes time and is an investment, and it gels well with FO4's (underdeveloped) settlement system. Not only would it save the hassle of micromanaging in the dungeon, the managing happens after the action.
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cows aren't containers

people are containers. that's why they let you have companions
 
Wootius said:
cows aren't containers

people are containers. that's why they let you have companions
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Yeah except a companion can actually decrease your overall carryweight in 4's Survival mode, which is where it's most important. That +100 carryweight from Lone Wanderer is huge and once you've kitted a companion out, that's about all they have left in spare room.

The real trick is to max out Strong Back and your AP ASAP and then just ignore being overencumbered forever. You can't sprint-sprint, but the ordinary run speed is plenty quick enough. Especially if you pick up the gear that makes you go faster... :D
 
ZerbanDaGreat said:


Yes.
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Yeah..

This is the reason why I stopped playing Borderlands 3 rather early.

I seriously wanted to punch Claptraps writer in the throat, after a non stop barrage of "WHY ARE YOU IGNORING OUR QUEST INSTRUCTIONS" being spammed in claptrapese, because I was too busy trying not to get eaten then to climb up and do their stupid quest.
 
Fivemarks said:
The writers for Borderlands feel like the kind of people who want you to know how smart they are.
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The writers for Borderlands think character development means 'becomes more of an unlikeable asshole,' and that forces them to make the villains worse, so we don't start cheering for them.

(also seriously Instagrammers as the main villains "
 
Fivemarks said:
The writers for Borderlands feel like the kind of people who want you to know how smart they are.
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I don't know if it's smart so much as it's an attempt to seem witty and irreverent. Like the games don't dump a shit ton of facts at you just to show that they have Google. It's just one shitty ironic wink towards the camera after another. It almost feels like they're trying to be an over the top parody of the Joss Weadon type writing style that had come into vogue at the time, but there's no evidence that you're supposed to do anything but laugh at this stupid shit that comes flowing out of their mouths.
 
Hykal94 said:
Spiderman PS4: Side villain is an influencer. Wacky but dangerous.

Borderlands: OUR VILLAINS ARE INFLUENCERS HAHA GET IT GET IT LOOK HOW FUNNY WE ARE
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To be fair Screwball is also a cancerous blight of a character and yet another reason the DLC arc was abysmal was because instead of getting to full-force roundhouse kick her in the skull you got a lame parkour pursuit setpiece ending in a limp cutscene of tackling her and gently pushing her into a cop car.
 
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See, It's okay when villains are annoying and make you want to kick your ass... when you get to kick their ass. When you don't, it's just the people making the game blowing smoke up their own asses.

LOOKIN' AT YOU, FABLE.
 
I mean aren't villains supposed to be unlikable, annoying, or dickish? That to me makes it far better writing-wise. Like it's easy to get people to root for the hero when the villain is trying to set a deadly plague on humanity or is a wanton murder with no logic or reason, but having people root for the hero because the villain is just an asshole people don't like is a lot harder.
 
VolantRedX said:
I mean aren't villains supposed to be unlikable, annoying, or dickish? That to me makes it far better writing-wise. Like it's easy to get people to root for the hero when the villain is trying to set a deadly plague on humanity or is a wanton murder with no logic or reason, but having people root for the hero because the villain is just an asshole people don't like is a lot harder.
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Reaver, from Fable II and III, is intensely evil and dickish. He's also beloved by the creators so you never get to kill him for the numerous evil shit he does directly to you and to innocents directly in front of you. Oh and he's immortal too.
 
VolantRedX said:
I mean aren't villains supposed to be unlikable, annoying, or dickish? That to me makes it far better writing-wise. Like it's easy to get people to root for the hero when the villain is trying to set a deadly plague on humanity or is a wanton murder with no logic or reason, but having people root for the hero because the villain is just an asshole people don't like is a lot harder.
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No?
Needing all the villains be terrible people in every possible way is a crutch, and can easily lead to questions like "why does nobody just shoot the Joker?" being asked.
It also limits the realistic interactions the heroes can have with the villains, and can make any screentime with the villain less enjoyable for the reader.
Also, having readers root for the heor because the villain is a dick, makes me wonder just how heroic he hero is, and how villainous the villain?
 
Valmond said:
No?
Needing all the villains be terrible people in every possible way is a crutch, and can easily lead to questions like "why does nobody just shoot the Joker?" being asked.
It also limits the realistic interactions the heroes can have with the villains, and can make any screentime with the villain less enjoyable for the reader.
Also, having readers root for the heor because the villain is a dick, makes me wonder just how heroic he hero is, and how villainous the villain?
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I...literally just made that point in the post you quoted. Like my point is that having villains who don't actually do anything all that evil, are largely just annoying, and how people want to see lose just because they're uncool asshats is a much finer line than just having someone skin people alive and monologue about it.
 
VolantRedX said:
I...literally just made that point in the post you quoted. Like my point is that having villains who don't actually do anything all that evil, are largely just annoying, and how people want to see lose just because they're uncool asshats is a much finer line than just having someone skin people alive and monologue about it.
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Villains don't need to be so over the top. A bank robber is perfectly fine villain.
Now, if you want someone who is opposed for personal instead of moral/ethical/legal reasons, then you should be using the term antagonist, who is defined largely by their opposition to the protagonist, terms hero/villain create expectations.
 
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