Topic: Unpopular Gaming Opinions

I think this wrinkle is certainly an interesting one as well. Monster Hunter Rise has sold gang busters, and the PC version isn’t even here yet. It has won awards and will likely turn up on many GOTY lists, given it remains one of the highest reviewed games in the series.

But if you go onto a Monster Hunter subreddit, the most common thing you’ll see is “Rise bad, too easy”. I think because those voices can ring so loud, devs can become convinced that people want harder, more brutal, games but I think often in reality, those are of a niche audience. The majority want greater accessibility, freedom and choice. Games on their terms, not dictated to them. We only have to look at the countless number of games released and then subsequently rebalanced over following patches, due to player unhappiness.

I guess that is why the Souls like games are so fiercely protected and guarded, because they are the one slice of gaming who pander exclusively to the tiny, hardcore, minority and have thus far refused to budge in the slightest. Although I understand Elden Ring will include a bunch of quality life elements, which have thus far been absent from past titles.

@Sunsy thats a good way of looking at it. Although i'm having hard time imagining the troll in your profile pic gunning down demons in Doom. But rock on!

@Pizzamorg Yeah souls is definitely a weird niché anamoly. They can be......exhausting honestly. I have no idea how they got to be so popular. And i'm very interested in Elden Ring. I hope they do make it more approachable. My major criticism of FromSoft is that all of their games rely on that pacing and it gets monotonous.

That's pretty much the only reason why anyone would finish it. Well, that and there was a charity marathon sometime.

@Losermagnet Hehe, thanks. I love animated movies and cute characters, so Poppy from Trolls is one of my favorites. I love playing the Doom games, as well as other id Software games. Odd mix, but I like them both.

It's reasonably possible.

I think the real issue here is that its a tricky scenario in general. Because it is impossible for zero people to feel their art has been genuinely compromised while simultaneously zero people with disabilities (and without as well) are unable to properly experience a game they might otherwise love. Even in the best case scenarios. That might even be an understatement. Which does, in fact, suck.

I will say, barring extreme circumstances, I don't begrudge developers for not being the most accessible. Beyond any artistic intent, to do these things well is generally more work and time and money that a lot of developers either don't have or are not given.

I think the horror analogy is apt. I enjoy horror to some extent. Part of the reason why I love Metroid Dread so far is the horror aspect, but had it been any scarier I wouldn't have been able to play it.

Sure, saying a horror game shouldn't be horrifying is silly, but there are some of us who enjoy horror to an extent, but can't deal when it becomes too horrifying. I'm missing out on interesting games, series and movies because they're too frightening for me, although I do enjoy the genre to a certain degree.

This applies to almost any genre. You might enjoy romantic movies, but there comes a point for everyone where it becomes too mushy. You might enjoy action flicks, but there comes a point for everyone where it becomes too dude-bro. Every genre has their extremes, the same goes for every medium.

I think game developers should keep accessibility in mind when developing games, with that said many artists adhere to the "9 people's favourite thing, rather than a 100 people's ninth favourite thing" mindset. That's okay. Artistic freedom is a human right. The same as your right to criticize game makers for not including accessibility modes.

@Sunsy im kinda the same way. I'm Animal Crossing and Studio Ghibli films by day, and Xenomorph chest bursting cosmic horror by night. Gotta have a little variety in life.

@kkslider5552000 well said. I feel a lot of sympathy for people who physically cant play games. I mentioned my grandpa a few pages back and that was no joke. He speed runs Resident Evil 1-3. Had to stop because the games after that got too complicated and fast.

@Pizzamorg It does if they set out to make a hard game about unending death. Some creators actually have visions for hard games, like Hollow Knight, where a character literally tells you to "Git Guud", since it's a hard as hell metroidvania, and is meant to be challenging by design. Same with games like Metroid, where the game was built to be challenging to those playing it. Adding a difficulty mode to games like those would ruin the fun.

No, that's a myth. Team Cherry have clarified in interviews that it's actually just a gibberish word, like most of the dialogue in the game:

It's certainly an uncompromisingly hard game though, so I'm not surprised that many players have interpreted it as such. A 'happy coincidence', that's all.

Oh man, Hollow Knight is so much more difficult than Dark Souls imo. Top notch game, but woof is it mean.

@Matt_Barber Ah. thanks for clarifying. It's still a pretty hard game though, and adding an easy mode would kind of jeopardize the feeling the game has.

@Losermagnet Gonna have to get to that one day.

Well, it certainly looks like there's a few things that have been changed a bit from previous games, @Losermagnet .... I've pre-ordered, so I'll let you know what it's like when it's out! I died about a billion times playing Dark Souls Remastered, so there's some sort of benchmark for it

You have to see the difference though. To make something less scary would require them to physically change the text itself. You can make a game easier, without touching any other aspect of the game itself.

Especially as someone else explained, difficulty itself is also completely relative.

This goes out to @VoidofLight, too. Some people are arguing that an easy mode would take away the artistic intent of an encounter, say. However, they are making the base assumption that a person is going to cruise on easy and lose out on the experience. This is a fallacy, as I may need as much effort on easy as another may on normal.

To me, easy may feel like the right balance between challenge and fun. This is why an experience should always be tailored. Creating just a catch all difficulty setting is an inherently flawed idea, because it assumes everyone is of a base skill level/at a base level of physical ability.

I am not personally aware of how hard Dread is. I sort of get the general idea behind the incremental progress you make in a Metroid style game. I also understand there are instadeath stealth sections - probably the thing I like the absolute least in gaming, as I am total ass at stealth. The ability to turn off the instadeath would be nice, if not included, but I do feel like a change like that would meaningfully alter the text itself, so I wouldn’t necessarily push for that. I’d just accept the game is not for me. I do see a line between that and say being able to tailor a Dark Souls game to my skill level.

Speaking generally, I would say that if there isn’t a balance of pick up and play and of greater mastery, then I would suggest it needs an easier mode/experience tailoring. This is of course assuming you can still keep the experience intact.

No need to feel ashamed to play a Baby level of video games.
I have finished Pocoyo Party Switch version in straight 2 hours. Straight 2 hours and i finished the game. 😆
The games was too easy like it was a game for baby and toddler, but I enjoyed that baby game as I like to have experience in different games / obscure games as there are their beauty from them.

@Snatcher Hollow Knight comes highly recommended. But it's more of a twitchy old-school challenge imo, and I'm miserable at those types of games. Maybe that's why I gravitate towards Dark Souls - it's challenging but really slow lol. In any case Hollow Knight is probably the hardest game I've played and actually finished.

Reading all of this about Hollow Knight, my seemingly unpopular opinion is, am I the only one who didn't think it was THAT hard? Sure, I died quite a few times, but not once did I fail to get back to my shadow and re-collect my things, so it only wasted a couple of minutes to then try again. Maybe growing on the NES and having to restart the entire game if I died three times makes me think all the modern trappings make games easier, but I just didn't find HK to be incredibly difficult.

@Xyphon22 it may be me. I'm really bad at fast-reflex games. Fighting, hack 'n slash (i'd probably be able to play them, but i dont have the patience or will to learn). It was the bosses in Hollow Knight that usually blocked me. Contast that to Dark Souls, where I think the difficulty of the bosses is usually overstated and the hardest part of the game is actually just getting from point A to point B (but that I can do).

Follow up question: what game do you find hard? Now i'm just interested in the subject lol.

I found Hollow Knight fairly hard but not as hard as Super Monkey Ball 2.