Topic: Unpopular Gaming Opinions

@Zuljaras
haha. Well, physical media or not, the experience itself is all the same.
I personally couldn't care less about modern PlayStation plastic myself. It's boring soulless throway clutter compared to what we got in the 80's & 90's. You've still got that resale value though which is a big bonus, at least with PS5. So ya, PS6 being all digital has zero effect on me.

But I won't be getting one either way unless Sony does something wildly innovative. PSVR3 or glasses-based stereoscopic 3D flatscreen games are the only two ways to get me on board. If not, I'll just roll with a PC(5070 Ti which slightly edges out PS6 in power according to rumours.) and roll with Steam Frame, or possibly Quest 4, basically whatever the latest and greatest headset/VR glasses are. And then have NS2 as my main for new wave retro titles & Nintendo's Exclusives.

But ya, MGS back in 98 was amazing on PS1. The PS2 sequel was a huge letdown though. When i first caught a glimpse of it at my cousins, in action, i was so underwhelmed. I had Dreamcast like 2 years prior, so of course nothing on PS2 was really going to blow me away at that point. Plus, MGS2 felt soulless and void of any charm compared to the OG MGS.

@WaveBoy I agree that the later iterations of the Playstation were underwhelming. The PS3 in particular was really badly designed with a really crappy launch.

The modern consoles now are more like revisions than being a completely new products BUT I honestly can't think of what they can do better. Graphics don't mean anything to me anymore as art style is way more important.

VR is cool but I don't see them heavily investing in it as there are many people who have motion sickness and they don't know how to fight with it. That alone could just KILL any potential once the word spread out. You know how feeble people are to word of mouth.

AND it will rise the price even more. VR will be a side thing for another 10-20 years

For me console will always be about physical games otherwise I will just invest in PC + Controller and be done with it.

@Zuljaras
Wonder how they'll find a way to combat VR motion sickness in the future for those that get it. I'm not one of them, unless it's a VR rollercoster sim. On the flip side, Meta is finally creaming the headset & weight barrier, by opting for a tethered puck that clips on to your waist for the 2027 Meta Pheonex, which should carry on over to Quest 4.

VR 'headsets' are a thing of the past, with Steam Frame being the last. . Pheonex will be 100-110g light, in the form of thick glasses. MicroOLED, 2.5K per eye, 2-3x the stand alone power of a Quest 3, Eye Tracking + DFR.

Steam Frame will be the best all-rounder for now purely in terms of Stand alone VR & PCVR.
SF remedies Quest 3's issues, like Q3's weaker 3D depth perception(Low stereo overlap), lack of Eye Tracking + DFR, and noticeable image compression and higher latency for PCVR(SF using a 6ghz adapter to lessen both. it's lighter, smaller and more comfy too. And for those not interested in pairing it to a PC for Steam VR, you can use it as a stand lone. It's SA power is better than Q3, and you get a performance boose with ET + DFR, and you can play flatscreen Steam games on it, and pair with a Steam Machine for Steam VR and get plug 'n play console power that gets closer to a base PS5.

Once that drops, I'll be selling my PSVR2. And probably just keeping my Q3 for now for everything it can do beyond VR, like Mixed Reality games, Online shopping, exclusive apps like Theatre elsewhere, which should all carry on over to Pheonex before Quest 4 eventually drops. Meta's Connect Conference will tell all this Sept 23rd.

Feels like Christmas for me this month. 2 Nintendo directs just around the corner, Capcom's Showcase on the 16nth(More Mega Man 12 Robot Master & Stage theme reveals, Resident Evil Veronica footage and hopefully RE9 Requiem PSVR2 mode included in the upcoming RE9: Gold Edition) and then Meta Connect on the 23rd, where they'll focus on Pheonex and may reveal Quest 4.

To be fair to Xenoblade X, it has got significant stealth mechanics. Enemies can only see in their cone of vision, or hear you if you make a lot of noise near them. Plus you can use augments and adverse weather to further reduce detection ranges. If all else fails, there's the Shadowrunner art that can make you invisible for a short time.

The other Xenoblade games don't really do stealth. You just have a bunch of late game monsters wandering around most of the areas and you're probably going to have to learn how to give them a wide berth the hard way.

I can assure you this made little to no difference to those segments.

I can assure you, 95% of players did not do this for these segments, and the game did a poor job of indicating you can do this or doing things to remind you its a viable strategy in this part of the game that suddenly is about stealth, in this sidequest driven JRPG.

I would've had a better chance remembering the joke panel puzzle from Undertale when it came back, where the entire joke is that you won't remember what to do for it, than this.

@kkslider5552000 It might have made no difference to you, but there are lots of people who managed to complete the game's supposed "stealth" missions using only the basic spotting mechanics, and no arts or augments. Some of them even went to the trouble of putting videos of them on YouTube as an example to others.

And sure, Xenoblade doesn't have the greatest tutorials, and putting a build together is generally left as an exercise to the player. Still, if one was to read the descriptions, terms like things like "Disables enemy detection" and "Reduces detection by shrinking enemy field of view" ought to give you enough to get started.

For my part, I'll often recommend Shadowrunner to new players as it's a great early game crutch for getting to otherwise hard to reach treasures or FN sites. It is very much an optional mechanic in a game that gives you plenty of other options, though, and plenty of people still manage to beat the game without it, so I might quibble where you got that percentage from.

I never really considered Xenoblade X a stealth game honestly. I always just went into places guns blazing and walked out just fine.

Yeah I don't remember any mandatory stealth section in Xenoblade X, or even being aware of an Art that affected stealth levels or made you invisible.

It is mostly based around the parts where you have to explore a significant portion of a continent before you're allowed to continue story progress IIRC. Which I dislike both because its really annoying to do for the reasons stated and it feels like a bunch of small areas in those continents would be much cooler to see for the first time while doing these quests.

@kkslider5552000 Yeah, that's fair comment.

The game soft gates a lot of areas by high level enemies who can potentially be stealthed past at a much lower level. However, you've always got the option of leaving them until later and coming back with a bigger gun so I don't think it's fair to characterise it as mandatory stealth.

I'd think that Monolith moved away from a fully open world design because it really tied their hands when it came to story progression. X hits a lot differently from the other games and I think that a lot of people bounce off it because it puts exploration over story.

I love and respect the heck out of what they were going for and I wouldn't mind another attempt one day, partially because it is a genuinely weird game. I've never played a JRPG before or since that is so overly focused on its side content over its main story. I associate that idea more with western RPGs if anything.

I never understand the appeal of AAA games.
I despise them.
A lot of them are disgusting adult games with very negative contents and no positive effects whatsoever.
Not to mention they are usually in gargantuan GB size, such a storage waster.
That's why I prefer unpopular games with smaller GB size, doesn't care what other people said.
It's unpopular, it's being played by less people or almost nobody and so what?
I don't care.
It makes me feel better.

From everybody's replies I think the consensus is that stealth is contentious. It can enhance an exeperience or make things very tedious.

@kkslider5552000 I totally get that strategy game tediousness. I loved Baldurs Gate 3, but some of the battles took a very long time and if I lost (which happened often on the chapter end bosses) I had to redo the whole thing. I often just put the game down for awhile instead of trying again.

Alright...I have to admit it....I like the Federation Force in Metroid Prime 4. HOLD IT before you throw things at me let me explain [wipes sweat from forhead]

I dont like that Myles tells you where to go every 5 minutes. Thats annoying and unnecessary (yeah Myles I prolly have to go to one of the five landmarks that exist in this desert, thanks pal). Other than that I dont mind Myles though. I actually like Tokabi. You can find him camping out in the desert and he talks to you about religion which really caught me off guard. I'm not particularly religious myself but I have a soft spot for characters who value faith. I felt like he, and to a lesser extent the other Force members, added to the Metroid universe in a way that Samus can't by herself. And I thought the ending was sweet.

Alright, resume throwing things at me.

My hot take since even before the game came out was that the NPCs in Prime 4 were not worth having thoughts or feelings about at all and it almost makes me think they showed off the worst of Myles before release specifically to hide how underwhelming the desert was. If you think its cringe, maybe you can't think they wasted their time on trend chasing nonsense instead of the good Metroid game they were otherwise making.

My hotter take was that I also didn't understand why Titanfall 2's story with a focus on generic space marines was so beloved but this one with a focus on generic space marines was bad. I think outside of Halo this is an inherently mid direction for storytelling, at best, space marines are boring stories for boring people. The open world Zelda games whose stories I think are disappointing compared to past 3D Zeldas are better stories than the beloved FPS campaign Titanfall 2.

My even hotter take is that the best part of Titanfall 2 didn't involve the giant mech suit but instead the time travel focused level. I would've played an entire game based off of that level.

Alright, been a bit since I last shared a hot take, thought I'd so so again:

There is a part of me that is glad when DLC is announced for a game before it releases

I think back in particular to the time when the DLC for Legends Z-A was announced. A ton of people were like "They're taking content from the main game and charging extra!" And just being negative about it. On the other hand, I was like "Okay, this is good to know" and I was only a tiny bit negative about the fact that there was DLC in the first place. You all know me 😉.

Anyway, I was originally planning on getting Legends Z-A digitally because of DLC, but then it was revealed like a week before the DLC released that it was going to massively involve time limited exploration and I didn't like that, so I decided to not buy that. Also ended up getting the main game physically instead 😊. So I kinda wish they had revealed the time limited exploration stuff sooner.

Also, a game getting its DLC revealed before launch will help you decide how much of the game you want to get in advance, instead of avoiding a scenario where you buy a game and DLC gets announced for it a few months later but you didn't plan for it.

Yeah, DLC being announced beforehand is mostly a non-issue to me. "Oh but it means they're holding back content to make you pay extra" no it means they already made a full game but have resources to justify a few extra months of development ahead of time to make more. That's it. In past decades, it would've instead meant either cut content anyway (ala the missing dungeons in Wind Waker for example), or ideas not used until a sequel or worse, added in a still full priced re-release in a year or two.

It's only awkward because Pokemon games on Switch don't look like worthy full priced games, so telling people to pay more just feels tone death when you're already paying full priced for questionable looking content (especially since I maintain the cheaper DS games just aesthetically looked better).

My take on it is that the DLC announced before the release is the extra greed from the corporate idiots. The devs will not be paid more for that.

And most of the DLC is either cut content from the main game OR reused assets and other stuff that is NOT worth the extra money anyway like the famous Horse Armor DLC.

We have too much toxic positivity nowadays and because of that the dev/publisher teams are fine with increasing unfinished crap and fix it later.

I mean that's not untrue, but it is based more on the marketing being most focused on before the game is out and thus it is the best time to announce DLC so people actually know DLC will exist before the game is yesterday's news. If the DLC releases the same time it always would have, then there is a reasonable risk less people will know DLC exists, for no one's benefit.

And yeah the dev should be paid more that's true of nearly all employees in profit driven corporations. If you are buying a product of any type, statistically, the employees are not getting more money just because the company is.

@Zuljaras This isn't really true. Not all DLC is purposefully cut content from the game that gets resold to the player. Day 1 DLC tends to be, or digital pre-order bonuses sure. However actual DLC tends to be developed outside of the scope of the initial project. Stuff that was planned to expand upon the game but couldn't fit within the actual game itself, or content that was created independently of the base game.

I agree that devs do deserve to be paid more, but just because DLC gets announced before launch doesn't equate to that being cut content. If that were the case, then Xenoblade's DLC expansions would be "cut content," even though they're literally their own standalone games most of the time (and yes, these expansions are announced before the game releases). Hell, Torna the Golden Country is sorta evidence of them developing a DLC alongside a game- because its story content that didn't fit within the actual narrative of Xenoblade 2 due to pacing issues that it created.

Every game gets to a point where the developers have to stop adding new features and concentrate their attention on fixing bugs and polishing up the game for release.

That usually will mean a whole bunch of art and audio assets that are left unused and the people who aren't directly involved in coding and testing are going to be at a bit of a loose end, because they aren't really that much of a part of the pre-release sprints.

As such, some of those items can go in as pre-order bonuses, and the remainder of the team can work on the DLC, a lot of which will be things that were de-scoped from the original game in order to get it finished.