Your most "controversial" opinion in gaming

I believe I backed an "Ultima nostalgia" project recently on KS. It looked like a C64 game, which you don't see too often.

It's so weird thay they made Ultimate Nostalgia: The Movie and The Book before they even made the game.

I’m both excited and dreading going to PAX West. Ten years ago it was just pure joy, but the crowds and over commercialization have soured me a little. That and the fact I can’t go party till 3 a.m.

jlaakso wrote:

I am a filthy skimmer but I've had success with my "Bioware was actually never any good with story" line.

They've been good at throwing large amounts of questionably written dialogue on screen, yes, and somehow that equates to "good" for players. Major caveats: I haven't played Dragon Age (no RPG has made me as bored, ever) since the first one, and I gave up on Mass Effect at 2.

For me Bioware has made one actually good game, being Knights of the Old Republic. I liked Mass Effect a lot but boy was that a broken mess of a game when it came out, where the actually good story bits were all hidden in the codex. And then some prior configurations of Bioware had success in the sweet AD&D times of CRPGS, granted, but it's a different company now.

I think this a very accurate description of what I feel towards the entire Assassin's creed quality in story, characters and dialogue.

beanman101283 wrote:
jlaakso wrote:

I haven't played Dragon Age (no RPG has made me as bored, ever) since the first one, and I gave up on Mass Effect at 2.

For me Bioware has made one actually good game, being Knights of the Old Republic.

KotOR is (so far) the only Bioware game I've disliked.

Dragon Age Origins, KotOR, and Anthem (!?) are the only Bioware games I've ever finished.

Agathos wrote:

Dragon Age Origins, KotOR, and Anthem (!?) are the only Bioware games I've ever finished.

I have never in my life played a single second of a Bioware game. Weird.

imbiginjapan wrote:

Dead Cells is overly random and repetitive and a full run takes too damn long. The weapon & item variety barely makes a difference as it's better to settle into a favored approach and just get good at that.

I'm playing Dead Cells now on switch and I agree with this.

The popularity of Assassin's Creed continues to baffle me. The first game was interesting if flawed, and I enjoyed the pirate game, but the actual "core" of these games, the computer simulation stuff, it just has exactly zero appeal to me. For a game supposedly about "assassins" what I do is usually fight big old crowds of guards in plain sight (with poor controls).

jlaakso wrote:

The popularity of Assassin's Creed continues to baffle me. The first game was interesting if flawed, and I enjoyed the pirate game, but the actual "core" of these games, the computer simulation stuff, it just has exactly zero appeal to me. For a game supposedly about "assassins" what I do is usually fight big old crowds of guards in plain sight (with poor controls).

I can get behind some of this, I do agree for games about being assassin's there is very little that makes them feel like you are performing assassinations.

I think generally the games control pretty great though. The appeal to me is I that I just enjoy these big budget beautiful games and exploring these historical locations. Exploring France in Unity was gorgeous, Italy in Brotherhood or Egypt in Origins. These are places I've only read about or seen in documentaries and the care the team gives to realistic environmental design is beyond anything being done in other games. Story wise, and even kind of game play wise I'm just using that to have an excuse to look around the world.

Tanglebones wrote:
Valmorian wrote:
PaladinTom wrote:
Agathos wrote:

I never did play Jade Empire so I can't speak to that, but Anthem is at least on par with Dragon Age: Inquisition.

Agreed, if by "on par" you mean bad.

Here's a Controvertial gaming opinion: Dragon Age Inquisition is more fun than Dragon Age Origins.

Dragon Age 2 > DA:I and DA:O combined

:micdrop:

You've got to be joking.

It was terrible.

strangederby wrote:
Tanglebones wrote:
Valmorian wrote:
PaladinTom wrote:
Agathos wrote:

I never did play Jade Empire so I can't speak to that, but Anthem is at least on par with Dragon Age: Inquisition.

Agreed, if by "on par" you mean bad.

Here's a Controvertial gaming opinion: Dragon Age Inquisition is more fun than Dragon Age Origins.

Dragon Age 2 > DA:I and DA:O combined

:micdrop:

You've got to be joking.

It was terrible.

I played through DA:O once and liked it. I played through DA2 three separate times and loved it. I still haven't finished DA:I because it became such a slog to get through. DA2 is definitely the best of the DA games.

"Slog" is the perfect way to describe DA:I. I found the exploration/discovery incredibly boring, but the kicker was that style of combat has just never clicked with me. For RPGs, I prefer either a strategic zoomed out style, or actual action combat. This combat was just like an MMO which is the weakest option imo. I was interested in the characters and story, but I felt like the rest of the game was just getting in the way.

strangederby wrote:
Tanglebones wrote:
Valmorian wrote:
PaladinTom wrote:
Agathos wrote:

I never did play Jade Empire so I can't speak to that, but Anthem is at least on par with Dragon Age: Inquisition.

Agreed, if by "on par" you mean bad.

Here's a Controvertial gaming opinion: Dragon Age Inquisition is more fun than Dragon Age Origins.

Dragon Age 2 > DA:I and DA:O combined

:micdrop:

You've got to be joking.

I guess quality RPGs do make you angry.

On a personal note, I find DA2 easily the most interesting DA game. I can probably say that I enjoyed the moment-to-moment gameplay of the others more, but DA2 is the one that resonates and has stayed with me the longest. One of the sidebars of that huge in depth Schreiber article on Anthem talks about DA4, and it sounded like they were making an iteration on everything I loved about DA2. I hope we still get that game.

DA2's narrative and character interactions are the best the series has had so far. I like all three games (though notably DA:I is the only one I haven't played more than once), but 2 is the one that really sticks in my mind the most.

Vector wrote:
Sorbicol wrote:

It's not it's fault The Witcher 3 came out about 3 months later and blew it out of the water.

Witcher 3 came out 6 months before.

Mine hasn't changed from earlier. I still don't like Outer Wilds despite a lot of people falling head over heels for it. I'm also not a fan of Slay the Spire but that's purely because the Defect class is completely unfun and I'm not willing to bang my head against a wall to learn it.

I think all GTAs in the modern era are bad to play and bad for society.

Dragon Age Inquisiton was release the back end of November in 2014.

The Witcher 3 was released in May 2015.

Mass Effect: Andromeda was far more enjoyable than any of the Dragon Age games.

jlaakso wrote:

The popularity of Assassin's Creed continues to baffle me. The first game was interesting if flawed, and I enjoyed the pirate game, but the actual "core" of these games, the computer simulation stuff, it just has exactly zero appeal to me. For a game supposedly about "assassins" what I do is usually fight big old crowds of guards in plain sight (with poor controls).

The actual assassin sect from the middle east tended to make their killing quite public to have the biggest impact. They were not the silent killers in the night that people assume.

DA2's characters to me stood out the most because (spoiler alert), they all have their own completely separate and understandable motivations, if you took the time to get to know them. So they're all friendly to you at one point or another, but they won't all eventually turn out to be your friend, depending on how you think about what they did and why they did it. They are the most proactive of all the Bioware sidecast, IMO. You don't need to help them achieve their goals. They'll do them regardless, sometimes inspite of you.

Some people didn't like that because they sometimes ignored a character and then that character does something seemingly out of the blue, even though the writing was on the wall if you were paying attention.

The thing I liked the most about it was that it WASN'T a hero story. It was a Seconds From Disaster story. Each act established a factor that went on to contribute to the ultimate clusterf*ck that happens at the end. That's not a spoiler. The story begins with Cassandra questioning Varric about it.

LarryC wrote:

DA2's characters to me stood out the most because (spoiler alert), they all have their own completely separate and understandable motivations, if you took the time to get to know them. So they're all friendly to you at one point or another, but they won't all eventually turn out to be your friend, depending on how you think about what they did and why they did it. They are the most proactive of all the Bioware sidecast, IMO. You don't need to help them achieve their goals. They'll do them regardless, sometimes inspite of you.

Some people didn't like that because they sometimes ignored a character and then that character does something seemingly out of the blue, even though the writing was on the wall if you were paying attention.

The thing I liked the most about it was that it WASN'T a hero story. It was a Seconds From Disaster story. Each act established a factor that went on to contribute to the ultimate clusterf*ck that happens at the end. That's not a spoiler. The story begins with Cassandra questioning Varric about it.

Fully agree. From a story standpoint, it came close to ME 2 in terms of strong characterization.

Too bad the level design and combat was so blah.

I though the combat itself was quite good. At least much much better than DA3. And aging better than DA1.

I also thought the combat in DA2 was much better and more interesting in DA1.

Hot take 1: the combat in DA1 straight-up sucked. Or, perhaps, something's wrong with me. But something about: (1) real time with pause, (2) AI that never seemed to work the way I intended it, (3) consumable items as the limited resource to be monitored (rather than MP, which renewed), and (4) the weird way that aggression worked, all combined to form this cocktail that led to my super-powerful characters getting mauled every time I was swarmed by enemies. It just wasn't fun for me.

And here's my new controversial opinion: for most games, procedural generation is a bad way to add replayability and makes the game less interesting than a carefully designed experience.

Sorbicol wrote:
Vector wrote:
Sorbicol wrote:

It's not it's fault The Witcher 3 came out about 3 months later and blew it out of the water.

Witcher 3 came out 6 months before.

Mine hasn't changed from earlier. I still don't like Outer Wilds despite a lot of people falling head over heels for it. I'm also not a fan of Slay the Spire but that's purely because the Defect class is completely unfun and I'm not willing to bang my head against a wall to learn it.

I think all GTAs in the modern era are bad to play and bad for society.

Dragon Age Inquisiton was release the back end of November in 2014.

The Witcher 3 was released in May 2015.

How the hell did I f*ck that up when I had both wikipedia pages open? Garsh.

Yeah. DA1 was Baldur's Gate combat without the D&D logo on it. And it kinda sucked? There was a lot of brokenness going around. DA2's combat is combo-based, very similar to ME3 combat, though much less flexible. Fighter characters generally had setup powers, and casters generally had exploiter powers, so your frontline sets it up, and your backline knocks them down. This isn't entirely accurate though, since mage Hawk had AoE setups which could be exploited by multiple characters. The combo nature of the combat meant you had to build your entire party as a unit, but if you did, you could absolutely destroy even Insanity encounters in literal seconds.

The other thing I liked about it was the AI script management. Like, it's manual. By default the AI was kind of stupid, but if you set your AI right, you can control only Hawke in real-time combat, and your crew basically acts based on what Hawke does. You're controlling them by doing certain attacks and movements with Hawke. It's incredible what you do with it. Not only can you set them up to exploit your setups, you can set them to heal you, remove debuffs, and defend themselves as a group more or autonomously.

Of course, you can still do it all manually, and depending on your script, you can shift from character to character and change how your team is performing based on which character you're directly controlling. The sad thing is that nearly no one really used the AI script part of the game, so it got stripped.

Do you mean their "gambit" system - a list of conditional commands? I remember fiddling with that for quite a while but never being quite able to set it up how I wanted. I wish they had given us a full blown scripting system to play with, crazy as that would have been.

Anyway, nice to see the DA2 love, it was my favourite of the 3 games as well. I wish they had just called it DA: Kirkwall and made a series of smaller scope games in the DA world.

The scripting system was actually fairly functional, but it also essentially involved high level coding since you're inputting algorithms into the AI.

The next step forward should not have been to automate everything, but to have macros of the best scripts in the community. That way you can plug in "Cassandra defends Varric" without having to input all the lines. Having them be macros means you can build and customize your party in various ways.

It's really too bad they abandoned the concept. It was super fun to watch your macros obliterating the AI. Kinda like watching dominoes. Except it's fantasy hack and slash and your pieces are heroes.

Controversial opinion: I'm not going to get involved in another Dragon Age thread.

Me, three hours later and kinda drunk:

IMAGE(http://giphygifs.s3.amazonaws.com/media/aG3ktjLp5I3g4/giphy.gif)

LarryC wrote:

The scripting system was actually fairly functional, but it also essentially involved high level coding since you're inputting algorithms into the AI.

The next step forward should not have been to automate everything, but to have macros of the best scripts in the community. That way you can plug in "Cassandra defends Varric" without having to input all the lines. Having them be macros means you can build and customize your party in various ways.

It's really too bad they abandoned the concept. It was super fun to watch your macros obliterating the AI. Kinda like watching dominoes. Except it's fantasy hack and slash and your pieces are heroes.

That would be cool, one of the problems I had was always wanting to change out party members. It's such a character focused game, you don't want to be discouraged from swapping them around to suit the current quest. Ideally the scripts would support swapping characters in combat depending on the situation.

jlaakso wrote:

I believe I backed an "Ultima nostalgia" project recently on KS. It looked like a C64 game, which you don't see too often.

I remember this - I remember reading they went into total radio silence - did anything ever come off it?

I want to like the new Gears of War, but I fear disappointment.

I prefer Twilight Princess to Ocarina of Time.