unpopular gaming opinions - here's mine, share yours

[bugarup]

49 minutes ago, majestic said:

Looks like some posters here just need to git gud.

Hey, maybe Katphood likes his booze rancid. 

[Humanoid]

I have a deep hatred of the concept of "S tier". S is the 19th letter in the English alphabet, not the 0th. You start with 'A'. If you need to retrospectively add something ahead of it, make it 'A+'. There, simple.

Not strictly a gaming thing I know, but probably the most common association.

Edited May 12, 2023 by Humanoid

[Malcador]

5 hours ago, Gorth said:

RTS games suck... all of them. Even Dawn of War games despite being set in the 40k setting. I make a bi-annual exception for Age of Empires 2, because it's so slow it might as well have been turn based, so the RTS aspect is less noticeable.

That's not unpopular, that's just wrong.

[the_dog_days]

4 hours ago, Humanoid said:

I have a deep hatred of the concept of "S tier". S is the 19th letter in the English alphabet, not the 0th. You start with 'A'. If you need to retrospectively add something ahead of it, make it 'A+'. There, simple.

Not strictly a gaming thing I know, but probably the most common association.

Much like western numerals, Japan struggles with romantic letters order. I pray for them everyday.

[Hurlshort]

Difficulty modes in games directly reflect your mental health. 

Easy = Happy

Normal = Normal

Hard = Using games to get over trauma

Nightmare = Criminally disturbed

[Gromnir]

2 hours ago, Malcador said:

That's not unpopular, that's just wrong.

possible, but am tending to agree as a general proposition with only a few extreme limited outliers which functional prove the rule. 

dark omen and shadow o' the horned rat were re-defined after-the-fact as real-time tactical by some folks 'cause they eschewed the resource gathering and building construction features o' many contemporary rts games. is maybe a couple other titles which rank as exceptions.

HA! Good Fun!

 

[Sarex]

9 hours ago, Gorth said:

RTS games suck... all of them. Even Dawn of War games despite being set in the 40k setting. I make a bi-annual exception for Age of Empires 2, because it's so slow it might as well have been turn based, so the RTS aspect is less noticeable.

Red Alert 2?

[Gromnir]

2 hours ago, Hurlshort said:

Difficulty modes in games directly reflect your mental health. 

Easy = Happy

Normal = Normal

 

hurl's psychiatrist scribbles something on her notepad and then peers over the top rim of her glasses. "so," she says in a calculated laconic tone, "you chose to categorize "happy" distinct from "normal?" 

@Sarex

am personal not a fan o' the construction and resource gathering mechanic which is a staple in most rts. functional is a race to generate resources and any kinda battlefield strategy is secondary. in classic turn-based strategy games, the player is often commanding squads or full armies w/o the baggage o' needing maintain the perfect ratio o' peasant farmers to sawmills to barracks... or whatever.  is no city planning and development in panzer corps 2. no need to search for quadrilonix ore and hydrogen 3 in battletech. yeah, many tb strategy games has resource gathering and base building elements, but is rare the core gameplay feature and is almost never the rush to generate essential units one sees in rts.

red alert 2 is an excellent game but for us it is enjoyable in spite o' the all too familiar and kinda twitchy construction and resource elements. 

HA! Good Fun!

[Malcador]

1 hour ago, Sarex said:

Red Alert 2?

Starcraft, SupCom or TA, World in Conflict...

 

[Sarex]

1 hour ago, Malcador said:

Starcraft, SupCom or TA, World in Conflict...

Ah, but Red Alert 2 was, for me, the perfection of the singleplayer RTS formula.

@Gromnir Tbh, looking back on it I couldn't tell you how I felt about resource gathering in the game. I didn't mind it, I guess.

Thinking about it the only game where I would say resource gathering was done particularly well is Homeworld 2, but in multiplayer. Because you could salvage your shipwrecks and probably because that led to the best pvp match I had in any game.

For context and on a tangent, my main strategy playing pvp in Homeworld was to rush battlecruisers. The usual guy I played against liked to build out the normal path, fighters in to mid tier units. Our matches usually ended up with me building the first bc and running away with the game, or him managing to harass me enough to overwhelm my early fighter/bomber combo. One day he decided to try my strategy which led to epic fights culminating, at one point, with around 10 bc each a **** load of destroyers and a lot of fighter/bombers on my side and a bunch of flack frigates and missile launchers on his side. He had better unit control and effectively targeted my bc modules and weapons, but I had better positioning. All in all what we had leftover was not enough to finish off the others mothership and at this point we drained the whole map of resources, but at the middle of the map there were a LOT of wrecks. Enough to unit cap for the next fight. We agreed that the next fight was to the last ship and the winner would take all. So we hyperspace in and start closing in on each other and...the game crashes...

I guess it's for the best as it left something to the imagination and no one lost.

Edited May 12, 2023 by Sarex

[Malcador]

1 hour ago, Sarex said:

Ah, but Red Alert 2 was, for me, the perfection of the singleplayer RTS formula.

TA and RA2 are probably my most played, fond memories of playing the latter instead of studying for AP Calc.  I liked TA's resource system, costs are just rates.  And the game encourages environmentalism, through recycling and renewable energy!

 

[Humanoid]

The remarkable thing about TA is that it genuinely felt like it was two generations ahead of its contemporaries (as opposed to TA Kingdoms which required hardware two generations beyond what was available at that point in time). Mechanically everything just felt so unified, where other RTSes felt like they consisted of a bunch of different systems bolted together haphazardly. Notably, the three vectors of land, sea and air existed in the same virtual space, where other games would have each of them essentially behave as if they existed in a parallel universe, where the only possible interaction between them was "shoot".

This unity is reflected in individual unit interactions. When a unit was being transported, the unit as a 3D object was moved within the bounds of the game physics, whereas any other game would just instantaneously disappear the unit in the blink of an eye, and have it magically rematerialise later when you unload - recall the meme of ten War Elephants entering a Tardis-like transport ship barely the size of one elephant. A simpler example would be "corpses" existing actual obstacles instead of just being mechanically irrelevant set decoration. Missed projectiles continue to exist and their impact simulated instead of just cosmetically missing and ceasing to exist.

The UI was ahead of its time too. The command queue in particular was so elegant, in an age where something like Age of Empires could barely manage a functioning movement waypoint system. You could automate repairs either by setting travelling repairmen or setting up repair facilities, etc.

Despite all that praise though, the game never fit my gaming style. I don't do competitive multiplayer, and the AI was a complete embarrassment. It literally consisted of: step 1, build random unit; then step 2, send unit towards nearest valid target, as the crow flies. Anyone who's ever attempted to play a water map will easily observe the result of this "logic" as units just swarm onto the beach as if it were spring break. That made the game completely unsuitable for just sitting down a playing a casual skirmish against AI, or any sort of co-op.

By contrast, I've played hundreds of hours of AoE2 within the past few years simply because it does function extremely well in that gameplay mode. AI scripting by modders kept the game alive during the decade of abandonment by Microsoft, and when support resumed with the arrival of the remasters, those modders were employed by the developers to implement the new official and extremely good AI. Right now if I have an hour or so to burn and nothing else I particularly want to play, I'll fire up a simple skirmish like this and it remains a fresh experience 25 years on.

[Katphood]

Now that Obsidian is developing Avowed, Bethesda should start developing a 2.5D isometric turn-based Elders Scrolls game.

[Lexx]

On 5/12/2023 at 10:38 AM, Gorth said:

RTS games suck... all of them. Even Dawn of War games despite being set in the 40k setting. I make a bi-annual exception for Age of Empires 2, because it's so slow it might as well have been turn based, so the RTS aspect is less noticeable.

I think this is too extreme of a comment, BUT there is one point where I always feel let down with every single RTS game that I ever played... the ai tactics are always terrible. Like, seriously. It sucks all the fun out of me if I see the enemy ai rush all his units into my killzone *yet again* for half an hour straight. Like, bro, why is it so hard to react on my trap that isn't even a trap, but an exploit of your stupid ai.

This is why story mode is really the only way for me to enjoy an RTS game. Skirmish works for me for like 2 or 3 games, before I get bored.

I've enjoyed the story missions of DoW1 and .. I think the first DoW2... but once they switched to generic skirmish missions with bits of story in between, it started to suck as well.

tl;dr .. the only way for me to enjoy RTS games is if there is a story and unique gameplay mechanics in every scenario. If you try to give me some generic crap-ai skirmish game, I'm out.

[Mamoulian War]

8 hours ago, Katphood said:

Now that Obsidian is developing Avowed, Bethesda should start developing a 2.5D isometric turn-based Elders Scrolls game.

That might be good idea, IF Beth ever learns how to write non-eye-rolling dialogue

[bugarup]

Is it unpopular to hate on new but deliberately pixelated games? In any case, do I hate those things.  It's like using rotary line phones in 2023, also if I wanted a blotchy, blurry incomprehensible mess on my screen I could simply take my glasses off.

[uuuhhii]

26 minutes ago, bugarup said:

Is it unpopular to hate on new but deliberately pixelated games? In any case, do I hate those things.  It's like using rotary line phones in 2023, also if I wanted a blotchy, blurry incomprehensible mess on my screen I could simply take my glasses off.

pixel or early 3d are just torture for eye

low budget game should be more cyoa book

[Humanoid]

I can understand it in certain circumstances as I'm not sure it'd be practical for, say, something like Minecraft to look like Skyrim. But if it's just done as nostalgia-bait then eh, it's not a dealbreaker but probably means the game will turn out worse than it could have been. It's just voluntarily making your game less readable.

Speaking of making your game less readable, I'm feeling the same about the much-praised Persona 5 UI. Weird pulsing off-angle text is somehow praiseworthy? Naaaaah, it's a crime against usability. As is its insistence on not letting you use the analogue stick to navigate menus. Awful.

A tangential peeve: text that's slowly printed across the page, forcing you to click to have it display in full, or even worse, just forcing you to wait it out.

[majestic]

Every time you navigate menus with analogue sticks God kills a kitten. Do not kill kittens!

[Humanoid]

I mean, it falls outside the topic of gaming opinions, but will be unpopular nonetheless, but cats should certainly be exterminated completely in Australia.

[Katphood]

On 5/18/2023 at 2:49 PM, Humanoid said:

I mean, it falls outside the topic of gaming opinions, but will be unpopular nonetheless, but cats should certainly be exterminated completely in Australia.

I agree, nobody likes Australia really. Let the rats take over. 

 

[uuuhhii]

2 hours ago, Katphood said:

I agree, nobody likes Australia really. Let the rats take over. 

 

does australia have a lot of snake or lizard

maybe mouse overpopulation will turn into snake overpopulation

[majestic]

Well, Austrialia does suffer from cat and rabbit overpopulations, as far as I know, as they simply lack natural predators to keep their populations in check. They're an ecological menace, really.

Although I think Australia wants them gone purely because they're not deadly to humans.

[Keyrock]

Crafting has been more damaging to video games than opioids have been to West Virginians.

[Katphood]

On 5/23/2023 at 7:07 PM, majestic said:

Well, Austrialia does suffer from cat and rabbit overpopulations, as far as I know, as they simply lack natural predators to keep their populations in check. They're an ecological menace, really.

Although I think Australia wants them gone purely because they're not deadly to humans.

I think it's because of their possum population getting hit by cats. Pretty sure cats were completely gone in kangaroo Island, hunted down to the last one. Yeah, not sure how they deal with mice in kangaroo Island.