Topic: Unpopular Gaming Opinions

Astro bot is not a celebration of Sony IP.
It's a scandal in my opinion.

I think we have a winner of the thread 👆.

@Th3solution if it makes you feel any better, they can gatekeep it through the hardware itself via firmware, so whether digital or physical there’s no way around it

@BearsEatBeets indeed we do.

@Th3solution Oof, that is something I fear a lot. I don’t have any PlayStation console anymore, but the fact that a guy lost his games and account thanks to an age verification system is so scary and must have given him an awful feeling. I feel very bad for him. I am digital only with my console, but I think a digital only future would be concerning, and seeing physical media get gradually phased out is very worrying, since your digital games could be lost forever if you lost your account in some way, like of course the age verification thing but also through getting hacked.

I would call myself a security freak. I have never been hacked (and I pray I don’t), but I started to take account security and emails more seriously after I read a story on Pure Xbox last year that said that someone lost their Microsoft account to a hacker, and although the hacker was locked out of the account, the original account holder was unable to get back in and it ended with Microsoft having to permanently ban the account. The person never said anything about whether their security was weak or not, but people speculated that either the person didn’t have a long password, have some type of authentication, or a combination of both. Although it wasn’t me who had anything bad happen, I got so freaked out and imagined the possibilities of that happening to me, so I made my Microsoft account and other accounts more secure, but it really made me feel extremely anxious and terrible, since I fear that there could be a small chance that someone will get unauthorized access to my Xbox account somehow and lock me out despite how strong my security is, and then Microsoft can’t do anything about it and will have to resort to closing or banning my account permanently. I also fear someone will steal personal info and vandalize my account to something hateful or impersonate me. I have a Series S, so I am at more of a risk since everything on there is digital-only and I can’t buy anything physical. I’m so obsessive and I always make daily checks on my accounts to make sure they aren’t on the dark web. The news story really messed me up and made me scared…to add, there was a pretty lengthy Xbox outage yesterday that didn’t allow people to log in or access games, and although support didn’t give a reason given for what caused it, people speculated and said it was a DDoS attack, so that did somewhat make me worried but I was surprisingly able to stay calm after reading a few answers experts gave online, but I think that is one of the issues with needing a digital account for everything.

Although there are some downsides to physical (like games wearing down and becoming unplayable over time) one of the things it does better than digital is being able to keep the games even when your account and data is gone or you are locked out permanently. I really want to feel less fearful and anxious, but it just is so hard to do and I don’t know how to not feel this way anymore…I just wish big companies would care more about physical media nowadays and that they didn’t always have to require accounts for everything since it can pose a big security risk, especially for those that are digital only.

Not sure if this is an unpopular opinion or a pet peeve, or both — I don’t like “Wanted” or “Bounty” systems in games.

This occurred to me during recent discussions about GTA and I got thinking about the whole gameplay loop of doing something illegal or nefarious in a game and then having to deal with a blinking red screen and enemies / law enforcement are now hyper-aware (and even superhumanly psychic) and hunting or chasing you down. It’s all quite annoying.

Versions of this are done in a lot of games — not only GTA and RDR but also the Assassin’s Creed games, Need for Speed, and many RPGs in general.

The idea seems sound - make your actions feel like they have consequences in the game world. The problem is that usually the systems are inconsistent and even arbitrary at times. And if the balancing isn’t done well, then you can do some petty violation like loiter too slowly while walking by a cop and all of a sudden you have the US Marshall’s swarming you (or the royal guards in fantasy RPGs, or whatever) for nothing. And you have to either perform mass murder and destruction to escape or you have to run and hide for 30 minutes until your “Wanted” clock ticks down.

It’s one of the things that I remember put me off about AC 4: Black Flag. It’s one thing to be seen and chased down by guards when you’re an assassin in town, but it’s a whole other level of annoyance when you’re trying to sail from one island to another and 12 enemy ships spontaneously appear to surround you out of nowhere because you’ve triggered a “wanted” status.

I understand the attempt at realism, but I just think the implementation isn’t fun. So I usually try to always “be good” in such games, and avoid the law or the ruling body.

The only interesting wrinkle on this that I’ve played is the nemesis system in the LotR Shadow of ___ series where the individual orcs will form a personal vendetta against you and hunt you down based on some of your actions. I don’t mind that. But I dislike gameplay where you have an honor system that is fragile and can trigger an event that ruins the next hour of your game time running away and not being able to advance the story until your level drops down again.

@Th3solution

Nah I kinda getchu don’t worry.
Dropped Kingdom Sleep Deliverance because of this.

@Yousef- Uh oh — don’t tell @Ravix 😅 Rav loves KCD

I will add an addendum though — I find it equally off-putting in games when you can just barge into people’s homes and they’re sitting there watching you while you completely loot all their possessions right in front of them and they don’t trigger any response at all. Sometimes you can even talk to the NPC after you’ve ransacked his house and he still ignores the fact that you probably just ruined his life and stole his life savings.

Genius idea to ping them. That’ll make them less likely to find out.

No, see, you just don’t get it. I barge into people’s homes to say hi.

I think in GTA the wanted system works as well as is needed. People actually call the cops on you and you can eventually lose them. In fantasy or historical games it is a little weird though, I agree @Th3solution @Yousef-

And nothing will make me not like KCD, even if the town's guard can sniff out a stolen cheese next to a legally acquired cheese in my very large cheese carrying pockets 😂😂

Anyway... I have been given a secret task.

That usually resolves any criminal investigation in KCD.

@Ravix @Yousef- I’ll keep an open mind, but watching the preview of Star Wars Outlaws it seems like they really double down on a Wanted system between the different factions, replete with immediate “game over” scenarios if you wander into an area where you’re wanted.

Eh… it saps some of the excitement I had for the game. I’ll see if it’s implemented well, but whereas the challenge of balancing reputation status between different factions sounds like a deep gameplay mechanic, we’ll have to see if it results in a fun game.

I don’t mind it when I can try to get in the good graces of multiple NPCs or factions with the use of charm or doing them favors, etc but I dislike it when I automatically lose reputation points with one faction if I help another faction.

So I appreciated the ability to simultaneously date all the girls in Persona 5 at the same time. 😂 Just trying to keep everyone happy.

@Th3solution mate, trying to get me to say anything positive about a Star Wars game that isn’t called “bounty hunter” or “revenge of the sith” is nigh impossible 😂. So I sympathize with you there.

@Yousef- I’ve actually really liked a lot of the SW games — Jedi Fallen Order, Jedi Survivor most recently. Both were good Souls-likes.

The Force Unleashed games were quite good too.

I was ‘meh’ with Battlefront and Battlefront II, but I’m not much of a FPS fan.

I’ve been meaning to play Squadrons. Other games just keep taking priority.

@Th3solution
I'm playing a game with such a wanted system like you described currently, it's Rustler on PS4 and its not great. Having to horse around town with imprecise controls to meet timed targets and one civilian crushed and the medieval horse cops are on me and I have to restart... So yeah I kinda know what you mean. It's does have horses that flash red and blue lights though!

Since it appears our “Gaming pet peeves” thread has disappeared… I’ll share my recent thoughts here about something that annoys me and is, perhaps, an unpopular opinion —

A lot of boss fights are too difficult. And I feel like they are often artificially enhanced to be difficult just because developers think that’s what gamers want. I suspect it’s because of FromSoft’s success that many developers now mistakenly assume that satisfying = difficult, but I don’t think that’s necessarily true. Lately I’ve been running into boss fights (and also hoard enemy encounters) that are just made hard for the sake of ticking some box on a list of attributes they are trying to shove into their game. At least that’s what it feels like.

The tactic seems to be:
Make the enemy’s health bar really large and make your attacks do very little damage so just a sliver of their health goes down with each attack. And give the enemy a huge unavoidable attack that knocks down 70% of the players own health bar. Make it a process of attrition where the player has to patiently endure a long drawn out battle so that it gives a false sense of an “epic boss battle.”

To me, combat encounters don’t have to long and arduous to be satisfying. I think what makes the From bosses and combat encounters so satisfying is that they actually feel like your figuring out how to approach an enemy by watching for patterns and reacting appropriately. When you strike an enemy, you do feel like you’re making progress. A lot of boss battles feel like you’re not making any headway, and if you do, then you realize that you actually are just through the boss’s first phase and you have two more to go.

There’s lot of other tactics that game makers use to make boss encounters drag out, like puzzling out something in the environment, having minions join the fray, or bosses that heal. I don’t have an issue with using some of these mechanics, and I don’t mind if a battle is long, but make it so that I feel like I’m actually making progress and have a chance. I want to feel that power fantasy that we are all playing these games for.

I honestly have this problem with game difficulty in general to be honest. I'm in a weird place in my life, where I am not as young as I used to be so hard modes are generally too hard for me, but I also dedicate a lot of my time to playing games, so I'm alright at them, usually meaning easy modes are usually too easy for me (especially if its a game with mechanical depth, whether I really want to explore and push against the systems), but normal mode usually feels only good for the first two acts of a game, with this common trope I am coming across of really significantly ramping up the difficulty in the last act, meaning normal is no longer a sweet spot and it effectively locks me out of a difficulty mode that feels good for my skill level (which is why I love granular difficulty options in games like Control, that let you tweak every aspect of things, rather than just a binary normal, easy, hard etc)

For all the advancements in gaming, difficulty design seems to remain often really rudimentary and lazy. Whether it is wearing the player down with every increasing waves of enemies watching your resources dwindle as each wave of stronger enemies comes in fresh, or forcing you to face enemies that have some sort of multi life, shield, self heal combination (while also having more health and damage than your entire party or whatever combined) or whether its just allowing the boss to cheat the limitations of the mechanics by being able to skip turns, or move faster and attack more than the player physically can - just a few off the dome from some recent games I've played where these sorts of things just made me say 'I'm out' right at the end of a game I was otherwise really enjoying.

I guess its just easier to make a boss fight a massive sponge with the ability to one shot your party than it is to programme an intelligent boss and its wild that seems to have been true for like three decades now.

@Pizzamorg Yeah, I’m with you. The game I played recently that prompted these thoughts is Immortals of Aveum. I played on the “normal” default difficulty, and I flew through the first half without too much trouble, some encounters actually being a little too easy but most felt fair and balanced and then the last couple chapters I was struggling and came very close to decreasing the difficulty to “easy”. But because there was a silver trophy on the line for finishing on “normal” and I had made it through 30 hours at that difficultly and didn’t want to give up now, I pushed myself through a couple B.S. encounters by respawning over and over until I eventually prevailed, somewhat by sheer luck and somewhat by just grit and perseverance. Whereas in a FromSoft game when I’ve run up against a difficult encounter or boss, I feel a dopamine rush when I finally prevail, but with these scenarios I was just annoyed and a little bit angry at the game for trolling me into feeling stuck at a difficulty level that did not feel appropriate and also at the battle which was just a smorgasbord of spongy overpowered enemy types.

I think that is important too, cause the main argument I see for the whole Souls thing is that immense satisfaction, joy, pleasure etc one gets from overcoming a boss they have been stuck on for hours, days, weeks, whatever it is. And I'm just not wired that way.

My sense of self value, or self worth, or accomplishment in life doesn't come from my gaming. And if yours does, then okay then. For me, in my gaming, I just want to have fun. I want to escape from the bad stuff in my own life.

And like I say, each to their own, different strokes for different folks. I think its just become a problem for me because it feels like the Soulslike is now every other game that hits the market. So many games over the last few years have looked so good and then you see in the description "soulslike" and I'm just like... yeah I'm out.

I have to agree with @Pizzamorg and @Th3solution. Sudden difficulty spikes in the latter part of a game is some of the most frustrating game design out there. A game's latter portion doesn't need to be incredibly hard to be satisfactory. If I made it that far with the way the difficulty was, obviously I was enjoying the game the way it was.

A Plague Tale: Innocence is a perfect example of this. I loved the game up until the last couple of chapters. Then you get the whole cart sequence followed by the final boss, and it nearly completely ruined a game I otherwise would've loved. I literally just pushed through it to finish, not enjoying a moment of those sequences but not wanting to waste the hours I put into it otherwise. I haven't played Requiem yet mainly because of that experience. I have it from when PS Plus gave it away for free a while back, but fear of Asobo creating an endgame like they did for the first one all over again has kept me from playing it yet. I probably still will at some point and hope the experience is much more balanced this time around.

I am also with @Malaise though on FromSoft games. Even though they create games I would otherwise love if they weren't purposely designed to be insanely difficult, especially Elden Ring, I have no desire to ever give their games a chance. Like I've always said, I play games to have fun. Not to bang my head up against a wall for several hours before I magically somehow progress through mostly sheer luck or just an insane amount of attempts over and over again. I don't want to spend hours accomplishing nothing. Unlike some people, I don't have all day every day to game, so wasting the time I do get to game is a big deal.

@KilloWertz
I think everybody hated that kart sequence, just so random that if you weren't crouching in exactly the right position it was death and try again... I don't recall Requiem having anything like that annoying so you should be happier when you get around to it.