Your Unpopular Gaming Opinion(s)

ThatNickGuy

ThatNickGuy

PC Gamer published an article recently on unpopular gaming opinions. I thought it might make for a good discussion thread.



Here's some of mine:

1) I miss the days when collecting stuff in game unlocked stuff. Not just gave you experience and an achievement/trophy. Every 10 or so packages collected in GTA 3 gave you a gun in your hideout. Now, it's XP and a trophy. The same goes for unlocking costumes. Before, it was collecting certain things or unlocking certain things in-game. Now,it's just DLC. I loved unlocking costumes in the first PS1 Spider-Man game. Each outfit had different abilities, too!

2) Most AAA games kind of blend together these days. They're very corporatized. Indie games have had the most innovation in the past decade. And wind up having more replayability than games with budgets larger than a small country's GDP.

3) Many Assassin's Creed games could easily be their own, new IP with a little tweaking. AC IV: Black Flag was great when it was just the pirate stuff. The assassin stuff dragged it down. Remove it and you have a great, new pirate game. Look at Origins. It could have had a great new Egyptian themed game. Just use the same engine, tweak it with new features and abilities, and boom. New IP rather than jumping on the AC dead horse.

4) Pre-rendered cutscenes are completely unnecessary today when the same thing can be achieved with the in-game engine. Cutscenes are generally annoying and a waste of time, anyway. It'd be better to incorporate it into the game itself and let the player experience it.

5) Now HERE'S an unpopular opinion: annual sports games (are they still a I thing? I don't pay attention to them) should be replaced by a service with an annual fee. Basically an online game like Overwatch or Dota2. Game and roster updates, patches, etc.

6) Any new generation of console should allow you to carry over your digital purchases from the old system. It's why I didn't get a PS4: I couldn't carry over my PSN games from my PS3. And yet, I can still play games on Steam I bought 10 years ago. ALL HAIL THE PC MASTER RACE.

7) Here's a doozy: if your game is entirely online and has microtransactions? Let it be free to play. You'll make your money back fast with the microtransactions. Looking at you, Overwatch.
 
DarkAudit

DarkAudit

ThatNickGuy said:
Every 10 or so packages collected in GTA 3 gave you a gun in your hideout
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Vice City would give you a helicopter for getting all of them, IIRC. After playing through normally, I used a trainer to teleport to all the packages before starting a new game. So OP for those first few missions. Mua ha ha. :D
 
Gruebeard

Gruebeard

ThatNickGuy said:
5) Now HERE'S an unpopular opinion: annual sports games (are they still a I thing? I don't pay attention to them) should be replaced by a service with an annual fee. Basically an online game like Overwatch or Dota2. Game and roster updates, patches, etc.
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I would be against this because I still break out F1 2010 instead of the more recent ones, but, well, auto racing isn't a sport. :awesome:
 
Gruebeard

Gruebeard

By the way, apart from the sports subscription and microtransactions, it looks to me like your opinions would only be unpopular with game makers.
 
mikerc

mikerc

Valve should not make Half-Life 3. It's been 14 years since HL2, 11 since HL2E2 - are any of the team that made it even still at Valve? It would just be a disappointment, leave the series dormant rather than damage its legacy with a poor sequel.
 
Denbrought

Denbrought

Half-Life 1 was pretty shitty, and its main redeeming value is in facilitating the existence of Counter Strike and Team Fortress Classic, and later on the Source engine and its offspring.

PopCap and Candy Crush-type games are just as legitimate as your indie darling of the week, and people that spend time playing them are gamers.

Tracer's ass is boring, I'd rather oil Bastion's sweet sweet posterior.

We need better and more detailed age ratings and content warnings.
 
figmentPez

figmentPez

Staff member
ThatNickGuy said:
1) I miss the days when collecting stuff in game unlocked stuff. Not just gave you experience and an achievement/trophy. Every 10 or so packages collected in GTA 3 gave you a gun in your hideout. Now, it's XP and a trophy. The same goes for unlocking costumes. Before, it was collecting certain things or unlocking certain things in-game. Now,it's just DLC. I loved unlocking costumes in the first PS1 Spider-Man game. Each outfit had different abilities, too!
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I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, unlocking stuff is fun. On the other hand, there are some games where the requirements to unlock stuff is insane. (I'm looking at you Mario Party 2. Having to finish the Mini-Game Coaster on Hard to unlock Battle mini-games, including the amazing Bumper Balls? That's just stupid unfair.)

My list of unpopular opinions:

1 a. The Steam Controller is the best innovation in controllers since dual analog sticks.
b. Using gryoscopic fine aim on controllers should be standard for all FPS and third-person shooters. It's ridiculous how few console games support this. The Dualshock 4 has the motion control to do this, but I can only find evidence of a handful of games that do so (and mainly from Nintendo. Most notably Splatoon.)

2. Shorter games are better games. No game benefits from having over 100 hours of content. Most games don't benefit from having over 50. A good number of games are better, or would be better, because they're under 20 hours to complete. The number that benefit from being under 5 hours to finish is not insignificant. More games need an editor to cut the fluff. Just like Robert Jordan needed someone to tell him that the Wheel of Time books were just getting ridiculous, a lot of games need an objective eye to say "is this fun? is this necessary? is this really good enough to keep in?" More is not better.

3. a. Games don't have to be difficult in order to be fun.
b. If a game isn't difficult enough for you, even on it's hardest setting, then make up your own damn rules to make it harder. Act like an adult, handicap yourself. If the OP gun is OP, then don't use the damn thing. Create a Nuzlocke version of the game. Speed run. Low percent run. Whatever. Stop demanding that everyone else cater to your poor self control.

Gruebeard said:
By the way, apart from the sports subscription and microtransactions, it looks to me like your opinions would only be unpopular with game makers.
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I think you mean game publishers.
 
Dei

Dei

figmentPez said:
2. Shorter games are better games. No game benefits from having over 100 hours of content. Most games don't benefit from having over 50. A good number of games are better, or would be better, because they're under 20 hours to complete. The number that benefit from being under 5 hours to finish is not insignificant. More games need an editor to cut the fluff. Just like Robert Jordan needed someone to tell him that the Wheel of Time books were just getting ridiculous, a lot of games need an objective eye to say "is this fun? is this necessary? is this really good enough to keep in?" More is not better.
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This is one of those things that depends on game genre I think. Some games are artificially long because they pad out their content with grinding. That shit needs to go. Some games aren't super long, but have a lot of replayability. Some games are short, and have no replayability because it's just a linear story delivery device. Some games span 50 - 100+ hours, but you barely feel the time go by because the journey was compelling enough to hold your attention.

The criticism for short games comes in when you have a game that is basically a two hour linear story device and costs more than a movie ticket or a DVD/movie download/BluRay/whatever. There are plenty of short games that many people would consider perfection. (Undertale, Portal) Same with long triple digit spanning games. (Persona games come to mind here) I would say, any game can be a good game, as long as you aren't trying to appease the market by adding artificial bloat.

My unpopular opinion is that all console games should be able to use keyboard/mouse, since there all consoles have the USB inputs anyways. But it should be an option for games, never a requirement.
 
ThatNickGuy

ThatNickGuy

Ooh, another unpopular opinion:

I'm NEVER impressed by games touting gigantic maps. You spend half the game just getting from one destination to another or watching loading screens from fast travel. The locales rarely differ from one another, too. Most of it is bland as hell, with long stretches of absolutely nothing interesting.

I'd love a game with a smaller, more detailed map where every inch of it is important and unique. For example, I always thought a small town setting where you play a sheriff would be interesting. You could design the interior and exterior of each house or store with each townperson playing a role. Solve mysteries, etc.
 
figmentPez

figmentPez

Staff member
Dei said:
Some games aren't super long, but have a lot of replayability.
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A 90 minute movie doesn't become 180 minutes of content just because you can rewatch it.

Some games span 50 - 100+ hours, but you barely feel the time go by because the journey was compelling enough to hold your attention.
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Yeah, I struggled a lot with the wording of my post because there are differences between genres. Still, I stand by what I said. Any game that's got over 100 hours of content has got something that should have been cut. I have never played an RPG that long that didn't have something that was just pointless and detracted from the game. Even Planescape: Torment, my favorite RPG, which is 40-60 hours for a first playthrough, had stuff that would have been better left on the cutting room floor. I'm not saying being over 100 hours makes a game bad, I just think it's impossible to reach that length without accumulating some crud that needs to be scraped off.

Being short doesn't make a game good, that's true, just as a short story isn't better than a novel. However, a really long novel pretty much always needs to be cut. Same goes for a video game. At some point every medium starts to collapse on itself from the weight of trying to fit too much into one single work. What's too long for a song may be a lot shorter than what's too long for a movie, and even shorter than what's too long for a book, but there's a limit somewhere, and most works in a genre will want to stay far away from that limit.

Video games are really weird that way. Most of them try to push the limit because gamers are often obsessed with the value proposition of how many hours they can get for their dollar, or otherwise valuing longer games as better. We don't do the same thing with music or movies. "American Pie" (8:37) may have spent four weeks at #1, but it's a rare exception for a song that long to be that good. No song over 10 mintues has ever cracked the top 100 Billboard hits. Most songs are 3 - 4 mintues, because that's what works. Fiction novels rarely top 1,000 pages, and most come in much shorter. Movies rarely go over 3 hours, and most come in around 100 minutes.

So, yes, I stand by my unpopular opinion that shorter games are better, because the length of games has been over-inflated for too long, and the market as a whole needs to stop encouraging that.
 
Gruebeard

Gruebeard

figmentPez said:
I think you mean game publishers.
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Sure.

Also, I'm gonna take this opportunity to confirm that, yes, that is my actual (and clearly unpopular) opinion of Portal. I sleepwalked through it, uninterested, only playing it because everyone was talking about it. I've been waiting years for a chance to express that opinion in a suitable conversation.
 
PatrThom

PatrThom

Denbrought said:
Tracer's ass is boring, I'd rather oil Bastion's sweet sweet posterior.
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I don’t get the amount of attention she receives, either. Maybe it’s the accent and the fact that she’s a teenage stand-in.
Denbrought said:
We need better and more detailed age ratings and content warnings.
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See above.
figmentPez said:
At some point every medium starts to collapse on itself from the weight of trying to fit too much into one single work.
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Lookin’ at you, Victor Hugo!
stienman said:
You are dead to me.
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And while he’s dying, you’ll be still alive.

—Patrick
 
ThatNickGuy

ThatNickGuy

Denbrought said:
Half-Life 1 was pretty shitty, and its main redeeming value is in facilitating the existence of Counter Strike and Team Fortress Classic, and later on the Source engine and its offspring.
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Man, I respectfully disagree on that. So many people (not saying you, specifically) forget how revolutionary Half-Life for FPS games. Nothing held a candle do it at the time.
 
Dei

Dei

figmentPez said:
A 90 minute movie doesn't become 180 minutes of content just because you can rewatch it.



Yeah, I struggled a lot with the wording of my post because there are differences between genres. Still, I stand by what I said. Any game that's got over 100 hours of content has got something that should have been cut. I have never played an RPG that long that didn't have something that was just pointless and detracted from the game. Even Planescape: Torment, my favorite RPG, which is 40-60 hours for a first playthrough, had stuff that would have been better left on the cutting room floor. I'm not saying being over 100 hours makes a game bad, I just think it's impossible to reach that length without accumulating some crud that needs to be scraped off.

Being short doesn't make a game good, that's true, just as a short story isn't better than a novel. However, a really long novel pretty much always needs to be cut. Same goes for a video game. At some point every medium starts to collapse on itself from the weight of trying to fit too much into one single work. What's too long for a song may be a lot shorter than what's too long for a movie, and even shorter than what's too long for a book, but there's a limit somewhere, and most works in a genre will want to stay far away from that limit.

Video games are really weird that way. Most of them try to push the limit because gamers are often obsessed with the value proposition of how many hours they can get for their dollar, or otherwise valuing longer games as better. We don't do the same thing with music or movies. "American Pie" (8:37) may have spent four weeks at #1, but it's a rare exception for a song that long to be that good. No song over 10 mintues has ever cracked the top 100 Billboard hits. Most songs are 3 - 4 mintues, because that's what works. Fiction novels rarely top 1,000 pages, and most come in much shorter. Movies rarely go over 3 hours, and most come in around 100 minutes.

So, yes, I stand by my unpopular opinion that shorter games are better, because the length of games has been over-inflated for too long, and the market as a whole needs to stop encouraging that.
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We'll have to agree to disagree, I think that cutting games down to the bare necessities does a lot of games a disservice. I'm not talking about needless grinding or things like that, but some amount of "fluff" can give a game character. Which I guess, again, I'm thinking of the Persona series, all games which easily take me over 100 hours to complete.
 
Denbrought

Denbrought

ThatNickGuy said:
Man, I respectfully disagree on that. So many people (not saying you, specifically) forget how revolutionary Half-Life for FPS games. Nothing held a candle do it at the time.
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Duke Nukem 3D, for one, struck me as distinctly better (both back when they were coming out and now). Half Life feels closer to a demo for the engine that gave us (other) fantastic games.
 
GasBandit

GasBandit

Staff member
I feel like I got nothing to put here, you guys have already heard all my unpopular opinions, because I spout them off all the time :p
 
Terrik

Terrik

I think 4x games are often needlessly complex and often get way too bogged down in minutiae by the time you finish the game. On paper they seem fucking great. When I imagine them in my mind they seem fucking great. Yet every single time I try to play them, I'm super interested for the first hour or two and then either the game has so many areas/planets/armies/etc that I need to check on that I lose focus on the overall state of my game or a player/CPU has basically death-snowballed the entire match with no hope of recovery.
 
Squidleybits

Squidleybits

Dirona said:
Oh I've got one: Chrono Trigger is boring.
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That makes me sad, but this thread needs to remain a safe place to express unpopular game opinions.

I think I may be alone in liking FF VII.

I also don’t get sports games, but then I don’t get sports lol.
 
Terrik

Terrik

Squidleybits said:
That makes me sad, but this thread needs to remain a safe place to express unpopular game opinions.

I think I may be alone in liking FF VII.

I also don’t get sports games, but then I don’t get sports lol.
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Wanna know an unpopular gaming opinion? I liked final fantasy XIII
 
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