Your most "controversial" opinion in gaming

The Mass Effect 3 ending was perfect.

Fable, Final Fantasy, Metroid, and Dark Souls series are overrated.

There is nothing wrong with easy mode.

The Sims are some of the best strategy games out there.

XCOM1 and 2 are RPGs, not strategy games.

Pre-ordering games makes no sense whatsoever (keep in mind I just ordered Cyberpunk 2077 about 15 minutes ago).

Sid Meier's Civilization Beyond Earth is excellent.

All of the Total War battles are overrated. They are promising at the beginning but always lead to a blob of units that I can't zoom into because I'm too busy managing the battle (keep in mind I'm playing Three Kingdoms at this very moment and loving it).

I couldn't care less about achievements in any game ever.

Playing a game on Easy Mode is fine. Sometimes you've had a hard day and just want to feel like a badass.

People who derive pleasure from "ganking" other players in multiplayer are psychopaths and no one should ever play with them.

tanstaafl wrote:

Playing a game on Easy Mode is fine. Sometimes you've had a hard day and just want to feel like a badass.

People who derive pleasure from "ganking" other players in multiplayer are psychopaths and no one should ever play with them.

Agree++ on both. Sometimes I just want to enjoy mechanics and story, or just blow crap up, without having to develop a whole new set of skills that I'm not particularly interested in.

And I steer clear of any game with significant nonconsensual PVP; in that game, I'm the content for someone else's game and if you want me to do that... well I'll quote John Scalzi again, from another context: F*ck you, pay me.

I’m so with you on easy mode. I am playing Wolfenstein II on Game Pass and I want my BJ Blaskowitz to be a holy terror who destroys Nazis while he laughs. Easy mode let’s me live that power fantasy.

Valve get far too much of a free ride for the way they basically get what they want from Steam (great big steaming piles of money) without making one iota of effort to make the experience of using their platform in any way pleasurable for their customers - both developers trying to sell their games, and the riff-raff who use it to buy them - they treat both with utter disdain yet the user base will defend their right to do so to the death.

Let's face it, 90% of the "reason" why people are so down on what Epic are doing right now is apathy. All our games are on Steam, f*ck anybody who wants to make me download another launcher just so I can play a new game.

I’m 100% with the easy-mode-is-fine people.

Easy-mode-is-fine is not a controversial opinion here. This site is full of scrubs. Saying that you play games for the challenge and hate easy modes is the controversial opinion here.

I find the increasing hyper violence in games detrimental to society, and fail to see any reason why there shouldnt be sex in games. As the graphics tend to become better and better, why not celebrate life, instead of the opposite?

It IS possible to make great games with conflict in them, without having to slice someone open with blades or shoot their heads off. Games like Subnautica and Spiderman are great examples of this.

edit: Changed "threatening to society" to "detrimental to society" - English not being my first language makes me come across somewhat more harshly than intended, from time to time!

I'll be the easy/hard mode hipster.

I only play the harder modes when there is a point to them. Example of this is ME2 and ME3. You need to put the game on Hardcore mode just so the enemies last long enough for you to actually use your powers together. They die too fast on Veteran or lower - usually one power application, sometimes less. But Insanity is just Bulletsponge Hardcore. No new wrinkle. You just have to do more of the same thing. Boring.

For the same reason, easy mode (Prince/Normal/Average) is where I default to in strategy games. I know enough that its going to be an easy win, and I only increase the AI's ability or bonuses if I need a beefier enemy for my troops to strut their stuff.

Actual controversial opinion: The Japanese Dating Sim game with the porn cartoons is fundamentally an okay genre that doesn't deserve its negative image here or in Japan itself. The games often contain way less actual pornography than is supposed, and especially in today's internet, is a much more roundabout way to get porn than just going for the search tab. The ironic thing is that since they're all narrative games banking on character development, they often feature way more plot and characters than other game types.

Sorbicol wrote:

Valve get far too much of a free ride for the way they basically get what they want from Steam (great big steaming piles of money) without making one iota of effort to make the experience of using their platform in any way pleasurable for their customers - both developers trying to sell their games, and the riff-raff who use it to buy them - they treat both with utter disdain yet the user base will defend their right to do so to the death.

Let's face it, 90% of the "reason" why people are so down on what Epic are doing right now is apathy. All our games are on Steam, f*ck anybody who wants to make me download another launcher just so I can play a new game.

As someone who wrote his Master thesis on the narrative structure of Half-Life 2, I could not agree more. They're very skillful at pandering to a certain segment of gamers with the faux libertarian free speech stuff, which in reality is just another excuse to not spend any money on monitoring their own store. And let's face it: plenty of gamers couldn't care less if developers get squeezed dry as long as they get their sweet sale discounts.

At least EPIC, a company with plenty of its own vices, shifts the balance towards developers a bit.

I'll leave this here as well.

This especially irked me:

A BEAUTIFUL FRIENDSHIP, WHERE WE WORK FOR FREE
Back in 2011, Good Guy Valve tore up the playbook again, (...) and let us play around in their magical worlds of Dota 2, Team Fortress 2 and, later, Counter-Strike GO.

And you can earn real money from it, they told us! Buy these items, and the 3D artists who made them will get 25 percent of the profits. We're all in this together!

Talented 3D artists surged out of the woodwork, and the airwaves were saturated with feel-good stories of creators making very decent, livable wages off the sales of Demoman swords, machine gun skins and wacky couriers.

Valve themselves eagerly trumpeted that they had paid more than $57 million to Steam Workshop creators over four years — an enormously impressive figure until you realize that it's only 25 percent of the sale price, which means Valve just made $171 million profit from ... setting up an online form where you can submit finished 3D models.

GOOD GUY VALVE WAS BACKED INTO A CORNER AND HISSED LIKE A CAT THAT DOESN'T WANT TO GO TO THE VET
As far as Valve is concerned, it's a fantastic arrangement: You do all the hard work for free, knowing that you might never be paid, but hoping you will at some point. This is called “speculative work” in the industry and it's hugely frowned upon as exploitative and unjust.

Valve sells your work to other people, and they take the overwhelming majority of the money from each transaction. Everyone's a winner ... but Valve, whose running costs for the store are essentially zero, and who have just tricked you into joining their content farm, is the biggest winner. You’re putting up your time and effort, and those have a very real cost for you. Valve has lost nothing other than the sunk cost of the employee time spent maintaining the store, while gaining a lot of revenue.

The agreement itself states that you have no specific right to any payment, outside of the ability to upload the item.

(...) Valve has just recently slashed royalties for Dota 2 creators to almost nothing, right on the eve of the next massive International tournament. According to this artist’s estimate, their share has gone down from 25 percent to more like to five percent or seven percent, and communication from Valve has been unclear or flat-out non-existent.

“Despite getting three times as many items in [to the latest Major], I'm getting a third less money,” they continue. “Things are effectively five times worse, and that's not factoring the fact that the sales themselves are worse.”

(...)

The Dota 2 Workshop brings in a lot of money, and creators are getting less Valve Software
Dota 2 continues to grow — not least of all because the prize money for the International tournaments is literally donated by us, the players, who purchase interactive Compendiums and Battle Passes to raise prize money for the competitors (from which Valve takes 75 percent).

When you decide to support Dota 2, Good Guy Valve takes your money, puts 25 percent into the prize pool for the players and keeps the rest for himself, and even then the prize pool was nearly $20 million in 2016. I'm sure you can do the math.

The numbers have stopped adding up. The International is a huge draw, Dota 2 is the most popular game on Steam, Steam Workshop artists are now being paid much less, and all the while Valve seems to scream blue murder if you ask impertinent questions like "Hey, listen: exactly how much money are you making?"

It gets worse. Four years ago in the Dota 2 First Blood Update, Valve announced to the world that Steam Workshop items could now be re-sold on the Steam Community Market. Item creators would receive “a share of each resale of their item,” the splash page promised, and those creators were excited at the possibilities.

The item re-sales are in full swing today, but that promised share of the profits for creators is still undelivered and Valve refuses to answer questions about where their money is. We emailed Valve for a comment on this issue before publishing the story, and have yet to hear back. After all, if you don't say anything, you can't tell a lie to the internet, right?

The artist I spoke to only agreed to being published on the condition that they remain anonymous, and the reason for that is clear: It's a fairly open secret in the creator community that our friend Good Guy Valve doesn’t take kindly to being criticized (and in fact, when the time came to finally air their concerns in public, a group of Dota 2 workshop artists decided it was safer if they created an anonymous Reddit account to do it).

I asked this Steam Workshop artist what rights they had when it came to disputing decisions or outcomes with Valve about their work.

“None,” they answered.

LarryC wrote:

I'll be the easy/hard mode hipster.

I only play the harder modes when there is a point to them. Example of this is ME2 and ME3. You need to put the game on Hardcore mode just so the enemies last long enough for you to actually use your powers together. They die too fast on Veteran or lower - usually one power application, sometimes less. But Insanity is just Bulletsponge Hardcore. No new wrinkle. You just have to do more of the same thing. Boring.

For the same reason, easy mode (Prince/Normal/Average) is where I default to in strategy games. I know enough that its going to be an easy win, and I only increase the AI's ability or bonuses if I need a beefier enemy for my troops to strut their stuff.

These days, I feel like enjoying hard modes is becoming the unpopular opinion, not the other way around! I understand why people enjoy easy-mode, a lot of folks around here talk about and I'm totally cool with it. Some days you just want to relax, feel like a super-hero, see the story. It makes total sense. I do the same.

But for the most part, I find hard difficulty settings help me fully engage with the game's mechanics. There have been a few games lately that I've not really enjoyed until I increased the difficulty (and thus was required to learn how to play more effectively, or use mechanics otherwise easily ignored on lower difficulties). Examples being Ys VIII, Horizon Zero Dawn, Witcher 3 and Dragon Quest XI.

I didn't care for Witcher 3 at all on normal, but Death March forced me to fully engage with the alchemy and oil systems, making me play the role of Geralt much more authentically. Beforehand, I could just click my way through every encounter.

Dragon Quest XI felt so much better with the "Tougher Monsters" draconian option (i.e. hard mode) that I genuinely feel like it was designed that way from the ground up, then changed last minute. On standard, there is minimal need to engage with the crafting systems or monitor your equipment. With harder monsters, it's a pleasant difficulty curve provided you take a little bit of extra time to have effective gear and use proper status effects. 2 - 3 bosses aside, it felt like slightly more difficult, but fair, classic JRPG.

Apologies if that sounds elitist or anything, I just genuinely enjoyed those games so much more once I tried a more challenging difficulty setting.

If you want a real big unpopular opinion you can judge me for, I think Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas are all dreadfully boring. I just never got behind the level scaling and wonky combat. I like the writing (especially in New Vegas), the world-building is great, and they can tell fun stories with the environment, but I can't stand actually playing them.

Maybe it was mostly due to the level scaling, but I never felt like the RPG mechanics had much "crunch" to them. I could just become a jack of all trades eventually, so I didn't quite care for making a specific build and seeing my strategy pay off.

It's my secret shame. I've only met a single other person who feels the same (my fiancee, so that's kind of special? I guess?) so I feel like I'm missing something. I just don't see the appeal.

Edit:

Another quick one: Short games rock. Give me more <10 hour games. Please and thankyou.

I get that. It's the "challenge yourself!" "git gud" crowd that gives us a bad name. When I was saying that Hardcore in ME2 was actually really easy, I couldn't get a lot of traction. And it's not like I don't understand enjoying the game a different way. Totally down with that.

HZD was the same for me. I started on Normal, because of my competitive CS experience, and only ramped it higher whenever I thought it would help make the experience nicer, not more frustrating or more "challenging."

In MHW, I make a conscious effort NOT to equip the meta builds just so I wouldn't be judged for it.

The "git gud" crowd is very noisy and very vocal, but they're also a small minority. Most people just wanna have a good time.

Yeah, I'm often wary of talking about some games being more fun on higher difficulty modes because I fear I'll get lumped in with that crowd. I'm not putting myself above anyone, I'm not trying to say I'm better at games, I just think some games are more fun on harder settings. Nothing "git gud" bout it.

Difficulty settings are there so people with different styles of gaming can have fun in different ways, I guess I just like to gently prod people into trying something a bit harder in certain games.

And personally, I derive fun from overcoming challenges, so I prefer non-meta playstyles and challenge modes a lot, so I understand your comment on MHW. Totally the same here.

Increasing budgets, graphical fidelity, and the need to have everything be voice acted has been detrimental to games.

Increasing budgets, graphical fidelity, and the need to have everything be voice acted has been detrimental to games.

There's something special about older games with no voice acting and lo-fi graphics. Like reading a book, you can sort of give the character a voice and persona you perceive them having. When everything is photo-realistic and acted out by an all-star cast, you lose a bit of that magic.

There's that, but it's more about spiraling development costs fostering conservative designs and making the cost of changes really goddamn high.

A_Unicycle, I totally agree with you about had mode and mechanics. When there’s a hard mode that forces me to learn a game’s systems better, I usually like it. DQ XI was a prime example.

I don’t know that hearing “I like hard mode” bothers anyone here (it might! I can only speak for myself) but I think that the “git gud” crowd falls into a fallacy that really irritates me: when people conflate “I like this thing” with “this thing is objectively good.”

Just to balance thing out, 8 to 10 hours usually feels too short for me. When I get to the end of games like that I’m always left with a, “That’s it?” Deflated feeling. Personally twenty to thirty hours is the sweet spot.

Also, I detest the ‘you just want value for money and don’t care about quality!’ argument. It’s used all the time and is a miss characterisation of why, I at least, enjoy a longer experience I can settle into and savour over a month or two.

I’m into games for combat mostly and so want a good fight and never want enemies to be too easy (I’ll always remember trying to play the original Halo on the normal difficulty and just not being engaged. I was worried I just didn’t like the latest game from Bungie until I moved the difficulty up to Heroic. It wasn’t that much tougher but the game was suddenly fun and I didn’t look back.) I adore the From games because they give me the meaty fights I crave along with great, tense exploration.

A_Unicycle wrote:

If you want a real big unpopular opinion you can judge me for, I think Oblivion, Skyrim, Fallout 3, Fallout New Vegas are all dreadfully boring. I just never got behind the level scaling and wonky combat. I like the writing (especially in New Vegas), the world-building is great, and they can tell fun stories with the environment, but I can't stand actually playing them.

Bethesda games are the gaming equivalent of Disney's MCU films - Well made (mostly), lots to see and do and extremely popular. However they ain't ever going to win an Oscar for scriptwriting or Screenplay, and when all is said and done they are basically the same film with different characters in it. Skyrim is a mediocre game when you look at other games that were coming out around then, especially The Witcher 2 which knocked Skyrim out of the park in terms of environment, story and combat model.

Still doesn't mean I've spent over 300 hours playing Skyrim compared to about 60 in The Witcher 2.

Alien Love Gardener wrote:

There's that, but it's more about spiraling development costs fostering conservative designs and making the cost of changes really goddamn high.

I've been replaying a lot of my favourite last-gen games recently, and the thing I've noticed in a lot of them - especially post-2008 - is that the artistic and technical design and lighting makes them look really, really good in 4K.

I would be very much interested in games at that level coming out today as we are reaching a nadir of "dated graphics" being overly distracting on these newer titles, as opposed to games that have much better textures and more realistic ambient occlusion but have done nothing new (or even gone backwards) when it comes to A.I. or destructive environments and are designed from the bottom up with the sales goal of 8+ million units with all the limitations that provides.

Razgon wrote:

I find the increasing hyper violence in games detrimental to society, and fail to see any reason why there shouldnt be sex in games. As the graphics tend to become better and better, why not celebrate life, instead of the opposite?

Because the violence in games is usually crass, pointless, stupid and in such outlandish quantities that it loses any impact. Why would you expect sex to be treated any differently?

kuddles wrote:

My controversial opinion - anyone wearing a gamer t-shirt should be sent to a re-education camp in Siberia.

*Looks down at Distant Worlds t-shirt*
*Wonders, in a non-moderator manner, if this thread is more suited for D&D*

I don’t get sports games. To me, they are the equivalent of Super Mario Party - something to play while I’m at a party and slightly drunk. If I’m going to watch sports, I just want to watch the real thing.

One day historians will point to YouTube personalities when talking about the fall of modern Western civilization.

I feel like a good parent when I play godawful kids games and Fortnite to connect with my son, but deep down inside I fear I’m being a horrible parent because we aren’t practicing Chinese or violin.

jdzappa wrote:

I feel like a good parent when I play godawful kids games and Fortnite to connect with my son, but deep down inside I fear I’m being a horrible parent because we aren’t practicing Chinese or violin.

I should be learning another programming language instead of gaming.

Eh. There's always something "better" you could be doing. e.g. You should be feeding the homeless instead of learning a new programming language (instead of gaming).

Game Pass for PC and the Windows Store are a much greater long term threat to Valve's core business than Epic's storefront.

Jonman wrote:

Eh. There's always something "better" you could be doing. e.g. You should be feeding the homeless instead of learning a new programming language (instead of gaming).

I've dealt with this feeling as well.

Then I figured out that gaming/relaxation/downtime is an essential part of my routine and if I didn't take time away from all the 'real life' sh*t I'm responsible for, I wouldn't get anything at all done because I'd be more of a stressed, broken mess than I already am!

TrashiDawa wrote:
Jonman wrote:

Eh. There's always something "better" you could be doing. e.g. You should be feeding the homeless instead of learning a new programming language (instead of gaming).

I've dealt with this feeling as well.

Then I figured out that gaming/relaxation/downtime is an essential part of my routine and if I didn't take time away from all the 'real life' sh*t I'm responsible for, I wouldn't get anything at all done because I'd be more of a stressed, broken mess than I already am!

The concept of "play" (spending time on leisurely activities that don't provide value through a form of self-improvement) is heavily undervalued as a mental health maintenance tool, particularly in nations and cultures with a "work, work, work 'til you die" mentality.