What are controversial gaming opinions you have?

[Ford Prefect]

Controversial gaming opinion: video games are good.

 

[grommile]

Ammo butlers wouldn't be a problem if games just gave you full magazine amounts only instead of arbitrarily deciding to give me whatever random-ass number of bullets they want in a pickup.

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The handgun takes 17-round mags. The SMG takes 30-round curved mags. They're both in 9x19mm Parabellum. What do?

 

[AKuz]

Honestly I like the system from the first Mass Effect game.

instead of switching to ammo, they should have just used the heatsinks as optional thing to instantly dump heat and made them harder to come by.

 

[Mutton]

Red Orchestra does magazines well but honestly it would feel pretty terrible for most AAA stuff

 

[Reveen]

The handgun takes 17-round mags. The SMG takes 30-round curved mags. They're both in 9x19mm Parabellum. What do?

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Just have separate ammo for each weapon like a normal shooter. Common ammo pools for weapons is stupid and dumb and I don't like it.

In fact, unless it's (again) like Stalker and there's a whole bunch of different weapons and different types of ammo don't even tell me the caliber. Don't try to be all gun porny if you can't back it up with variety.

 

[Hykal94]

Make every firearm accept Glock mags. Fixed.

 

[Valmond]

No magazines, frontloaded blackpowder weapons only.

 

[Mopman43]

I think if you did it, it'd have to be a slower game. Not slow-paced or anything, but a game where holding down the trigger is already usually a mistake. So that you're already encouraged to take care with your ammo, and thus reloads are part of the mechanics. Every shot counts and all that.

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Fallout? The later ones I mean. No universal ammo, have to keep track of it, etc.

 

[BossFight]

But if it's what a liberal would say, it's probably incorrect. That's what I'm warning you about.

Also, that's not what makes an empire. Sending ISIS fighers weapons and funding and "moderate rebels" (Uyghur, Tajik, etc.) to Syria to topple the rightful government in that country would be an example of imperialism, which the United States did after they (probably) staged the false-flag of 9/11 in order to justify subsequent wars on Iraq and Afghanistan while ignoring terrorist totalitarian (I use this word loosely as I don't believe in totalitarianism) empires like Saudi Arabia, all of which we already do.

Otherwise, the multipolar order that Putin wants to bring about would be imperialism. It's not.

(I'm using the more colloquial definition of imperialism, not Lenin's, btw.)

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Hegemonic empires are a thing.

 

[Zeful]

Oh that's something that I think should change in many MMOs, and should be avoid in multiplayers games in general: following the tank/dps/structure too closely.

I understand why it exists, but if the system has to force a player to play a role they don't like because it's "needed" then I think the system should change somewhat.

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I mean it has to happen because in most games the Tank is the one determining if the group succeeds or fails, with the Healer determining how effective the Tank is long term, which makes it easy for performance anxiety to prevent people from playing Healer or Tank, suppressing the numbers for that class.

That said, with the growing number of MMO's with more action based combat (Terra, Blade and Soul, Skyforge) it should be entirely possible for games to focus more on active combat principles like Outward, Nioh, Code Vein and so on, where active defenses through dodges, parries, or blocks are more effective than passive defenses (HP and Armor). In such a system you might even see a switch to a set of archetypes that support that through managing party buffs and enemy debuffs, and a more sensible enemy attack system than aggro and tankbusters.

 

[grommile]

Fallout? The later ones I mean. No universal ammo, have to keep track of it, etc.

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There are three broad tiers of ammo management:

• Guns fire forever until out of ammo. (Doom, Quake)
• Guns have to be reloaded after N shots, but your ammo for a given gun is pooled. (Half-Life)
• The ammo level of individual magazines is tracked. (military simulators)

(Then you get weird ones like Oni, where reloading a part-empty gun throws away any remaining ammo with no way to recover it. Also weird in Oni is that the projectile magazines are these weird clarketechy universal mags that fit in anything from a semiauto handgun to the "mercury bow" and missile launcher.)

 

[Mutton]

I mean it has to happen because in most games the Tank is the one determining if the group succeeds or fails, with the Healer determining how effective the Tank is long term, which makes it easy for performance anxiety to prevent people from playing Healer or Tank, suppressing the numbers for that class.

That said, with the growing number of MMO's with more action based combat (Terra, Blade and Soul, Skyforge) it should be entirely possible for games to focus more on active combat principles like Outward, Nioh, Code Vein and so on, where active defenses through dodges, parries, or blocks are more effective than passive defenses (HP and Armor). In such a system you might even see a switch to a set of archetypes that support that through managing party buffs and enemy debuffs, and a more sensible enemy attack system than aggro and tankbusters.

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Honestly these days tanking is boring in most MMOs; it would be my role of choice but too often is there a lack of mechanical complexity in both it and the encounter design. Exception made for WoW's M+ which is pretty cool by putting a lot of pathing on the tank in addition to really pushing your survival instincts.

 

[SeptimusMagisto]

Borderlands tracks the magazine thing. Mostly for the sake of Tediore weapons, whose discarded magazines explode even harder than usual if there was still ammo left in them.

 

[hghwolf]

The only implementation of magazine management that hasn't been a massive drag for 'muh realism' but rather an enhancement of the combat mechanics I've personally experienced was Cataclysm DDA. Which is a turn based roguelike.

 

[Adloquium]

What's virtually non existent are critiques of American Empire.

No one particularity cares about "oh no, americans died RIP" or even "lol, killed some Americans". But "Why the fuck are the Americans even here?" is a vanishingly rare thing to see. Spec-Ops: The Line is one of those rare works that is critical of the American Empire, and is also Not Fine with the voyeuristic love that games have for experiencing the American Empire by pretending to kill brown people while not even questioning the morality of American Empire.

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I admit I can't think of many examples in video games, but I know there are plenty in other media, albeit mostly Japanese anime and light novels due to my own personal media consumption.

I'm not saying the point is invalid because of this, but more that I'm curious why I can't think of many examples in video games, when it's so prevalent outside of it. Maybe part of it is my limited experience, since I don't do war-shooters anyway.

Final Fantasy XIV is revolutionary in terms of MMO's and I am honestly shocked no one is talking about it.

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Are they not? It seems to be in the position of a game which everyone (or at least a lot of people) know about, but may not have a personal interest in playing due to tastes. (For example, they might prefer urban environments as per The Secret World.) But "nobody is talking about it" seems to be an exaggeration at the least; its new content and expansions get quite a bit of hype from the usual gaming news outlets, as do its (frequent) developer interviews.

Videogames shouldn't have assault rifles.

That is to say, a videogame focused around you shooting people and things with a variety of weapons at your disposal should never give you an assault rifle. Because in those sorts of games, nine times out of ten, the assault rifle is always the answer, and outperforms every other weapon by dint of its sheer versatility.

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I did notice that games where the assault rifle is overshadowed by other shooty weapons tend to be the ones with a more RPG-like mechanic of adding skills and abilities specific to the weapon type. Hence Alpha Protocol, where the "newbie-friendly super-powerful weapon" is the Pistol, due to Chain Shot. Or the aforementioned The Secret World, at least last I checked (which was when the combat system was way too obtuse and arcane for my liking).

 

[Susano]

Honestly I like the system from the first Mass Effect game.

instead of switching to ammo, they should have just used the heatsinks as optional thing to instantly dump heat and made them harder to come by.

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The really weird thing was how in ME2, where they switched to ammo, you also got replenishing health.

So, it's like... instead of replenishing ammo and health resource management it switched to replenishing health and ammo resource management. I get they wanted to make combat more fast paced, but if you have one part replenishment and one part resource management anyway, surely something could have been done with the old system. Instead of making it like any other damn shooter at the time.

 

[stormbringer951]

(Then you get weird ones like Oni, where reloading a part-empty gun throws away any remaining ammo with no way to recover it. Also weird in Oni is that the projectile magazines are these weird clarketechy universal mags that fit in anything from a semiauto handgun to the "mercury bow" and missile launcher.)

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Losing all the ammo left in the mag on reload was also the way Battlefield games did it; I think this style is a good compromise between universal ammo pools and tracking individual magazine contents, without the added interface cruft for managing magazinesin in a fast-paced FPS.

I think Halo's assault rifle tends to be pretty damn well balanced. Though most of the time it tends to end up being more an SMG+ anyway.

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Halo's equivalent to the Assault rifle is probably something like the Carbine/Battle Rifile, which are actually pretty dominant, especially on multiplayer. Stuff like the Sniper or Rocket are still useful, but the BR/Carbine are super well rounded and good at almost any range. The exception is if someone gets the drop on you with super close range stuff(like dual smgs), but even then you might pull off a win.

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Halo 1 is fun because the plasma rifle and the assault rifle are close-range weapons that are more consistent to execute with, but the pistol was the utility weapon that was good at all ranges against which everything else was measured because you started with it. It also had a high skill cap chance at outplays in disadvantageous engagements if you had good movement to dodge and could land a 3 headshot kill (even if in practice a 4-5 shot kill was more realistic) which made people use it even when another gun might have been more advntageous. It filled the role the BR/DMR would have in later games.

The power weapon in Halo 1 was the rocket, which would auto-win fights and was the best anti-vehicle weapon for banshees/warthogs, with the sniper and shotgun behind as the best guns at their ranges, and almost everything else having some sort of niche, but the Magnum was the utility gun.

 

[Mechasaurian]

I might have gotten into Halo: Reach multiplayer when it released on Steam, but for the DMR dominance.

Forget about assault rifles, plasma swords, or any of that. Just get 3-hit killed by a pinprick on the other side of the map while you trudge across to the engagement zone with your sedate Halo speed. Learning to git gud at Reach multiplayer means learning to use the DMR exclusively.

 

[Sightedjt]

I do recall the BR and DMR just ending up being too good that basically any non-them gun was only worthwhile if it was a niche encounter setup or if it was a power weapon. Which wouldn't be so bad, if it wasn't for the fact that 90% of playlists just gave you one to start with.

 

[TheColorPurple]

Hegemonic empires are a thing.

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I think we already agree on that, though our definitions of what makes a "hegemonic empire" probably differs.

 

[cB557]

Yeah, Halo is about precision primary gunfighting, for the most part. Personally, I really like that about it. Reduces rock-paper-scissors type matchup stuff, makes it more about positioning and coordination.

 

[TheColorPurple]

Modern-day MMOs > 2000s MMOs.

I find today's MMOs just more interesting and refined. I've never really seen them as being inferior to the previous era of MMOs. And I'm really glad that we have games like New World coming up, though it does have its fair share of problems as well.

 

[kokuenDG]

let's put a hard stop on this kind of rhetoric please and thank you

Gonna make this short and sweet, but this:

But if it's what a liberal would say, it's probably incorrect. That's what I'm warning you about.

Also, that's not what makes an empire. Sending ISIS fighers weapons and funding and "moderate rebels" (Uyghur, Tajik, etc.) to Syria to topple the rightful government in that country would be an example of imperialism, which the United States did after they (probably) staged the false-flag of 9/11 in order to justify subsequent wars on Iraq and Afghanistan while ignoring terrorist totalitarian (I use this word loosely as I don't believe in totalitarianism) empires like Saudi Arabia, all of which we already do.

Otherwise, the multipolar order that Putin wants to bring about would be imperialism. It's not.

(I'm using the more colloquial definition of imperialism, not Lenin's, btw.)

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It's called a "false flag."

It's when a group (think: CIA or Mossad) stages an event in order for their own gain through covert means.

I'm basically saying the CIA (probably) did 9/11.

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All of this? This is a hard no. None of this is kind of conspiracy theory crap is acceptable, and it won't be acceptable in any thread of SV.

So don't do this. If you do do this, then, like Zhang Jiao you will be shut down hard and booted from whatever thread that you chose to spread this kind of rhetoric in.

That's all I wanted to say. Move along folks, and continue on topic please and thank you.

 

[Night]

It's also damn hard to actually hit shit at that distance and would change the whole pace of the game making it less fun to play.

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It's hard to see anything at that distance if they're making the slightest effort at concealment. This was the mistake everyone made going into WW1, where people were like "Smokeless powder! Our rifles are effective up to a kilometer and a half! Design sights for it!" and it turned out that 400-meter battlesight zero was two hundred meters beyond actual engagement range so everyone had to learn to aim lower than their actual minimum sight settings.

One of the widest but most unacknowledged military revolutions is that in the last ten years everyone has an optic on their gun now. Everyone, they're all over the place, scope the world. Even so most firefights take place at 300m or less because nobody's walking around in the open standing upright if they can help it.

 

[Alex]

Videogames shouldn't have assault rifles.

That is to say, a videogame focused around you shooting people and things with a variety of weapons at your disposal should never give you an assault rifle. Because in those sorts of games, nine times out of ten, the assault rifle is always the answer, and outperforms every other weapon by dint of its sheer versatility.

Pistol: I mean duh on the pure power basis, but also because 'emergency backup pistols' are so often completely unnecessary past like two hours into that sort of game because you've got so much ammo for everything else.

SMG/LMG: If you have an automatic weapon with a lower per-shot damage output and shorter range but higher firing rate, no matter how fun it is to use it'll chew through ammo like crazy and require concentrated fire to put enemies down, whereas an assault rifle is an all-range weapon that always has the option to just hold down the trigger and mag-dump for big damage spikes. Conversely you can have bigger machine guns with much higher damage per shot with the same fire rate, but they'll also be woefully inaccurate at longer ranges on top of no doubt having much more precious ammo supplies, whereas in almost any game where enemies drop ammo they'll drop it for what they're using, which is invariably also an assault rifle.

Shotgun: Everyone loves shotguns, but videogame shotguns are notorious for being outranged by spitting particularly hard, and forget getting any kind of adequate return on the lost shell if only like two pellets wing a guy who's standing fifteen feet from you. So what tends to happen is either you only switch to it if one of the This Enemy Is Trained To Fuck Your Mouth guys comes sprinting across the battlefield directly at you, or you have to knowingly put yourself in harm's way just to use the gun you like. An assault rifle is again able to just hold down the trigger in the same situation, because the closer an enemy is the less recoil matters, and recoil is what slows down your damage output with an automatic weapon.

Sniper Rifle: A lot of the time these things are situational bordering on useless anyway. The vast majority of videogame shootouts take place at the equivalent distance of being locked in the same mid-size room as each other, where scoping in on a sniper rifle can be disorienting enough to hinder more than it helps, not to mention often having very slow rates of fire and/or needing to take extra time aiming for the head to make it count. Yet at these same distances, in so many games it is just as easy to sit there with your assault rifle at maximum accuracy and steadily pop away, because it has decent damage per shot and the recoil is very easily managed and the crosshairs are perfectly adequate for lining up shots, let alone games that let you attach extra optics such as red dot sights or ACOGs or what have you.

Explosives: You completely forgot this was an option because you shot the enemies to death one by one as they came running in before they could bunch up, don't lie.

In conclusion, look at objectively the best videogame ever made, Resident Evil 4. Its gunplay redefined the industry and its weapon variety made progression and customisation a treat. But no assault rifle. It knew never to give you an assault rifle because an assault rifle would've instantly outclassed all of Leon's other weapons. Instead he only has a selection of handguns, shotguns and rifles with a single SMG he can throw a stock on which nonetheless will never outdamage the unupgraded pistol he started with, and they all have different roles to play in his arsenal. If RE4 had an assault rifle, the second you got it the only thing that would prevent you from exclusively using it in every situation - aside from invariably getting it incredibly late, but being able to NG+ on higher difficulties is a thing - would be ammo restrictions. Unless the player knew how to manipulate the game's loot RNG.

TLOU1 gets a pass because you only get an assault rifle in literally the last combat few combat encounters of the game so it's effectively an eleventh hour power-up.

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If I remember correctly this was basically valves logic when making team fortress 2. They wanted each of the classes to have a unique feel to their weapons and there to be a clear rock paper scissors dynamic to engagements so they consciously left out a bread and butter assault rifle.

 

[Triggerhappy]

If I remember correctly this was basically valves logic when making team fortress 2. They wanted each of the classes to have a unique feel to their weapons and there to be a clear rock paper scissors dynamic to engagements so they consciously left out a bread and butter assault rifle.

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It's the ultimate expression of the evolution of SV/SB dialogue.

Early SB : These guns and vehicles are SOOOO UNREALISTIC!1!1!1!1!1!!!!! No REAL werld Militry would ever use them!1!! ART STUDENTS FAIL! ENGINEERS RUULLEEE!

Modern SB/SV : Yes, these weapons and vehicles are not realistic! That is because a video game has very different criteria for successful vehicle and weapon design, including a distinctive profile readily identifiable at all angles from a distance and distinctive, often exaggerated, strengths and weaknesses to inform the player's strategy for and against.

That is to say, a videogame focused around you shooting people and things with a variety of weapons at your disposal should never give you an assault rifle. Because in those sorts of games, nine times out of ten, the assault rifle is always the answer, and outperforms every other weapon by dint of its sheer versatility.

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I think the Metro Games do the assault rifle pretty well. Assault Rifle + military ammo is basically your get out of jail free card. But you're literally burning your money to use it. Monsters can be put down more economically with the shotgun, and humans are better handled with silenced weapons like the air rifle or Hellsing.