Your opinion: Negative things in gaming that we have come to accept

[CaitSeith]

I'm talking about things that probably you have thought are negative, and you react as either not being a big deal or a sad but necessary evil. Or even it just makes you angry that gamers around you seem to have that attitude. Here are a couple of things:

- AAA games and consoles don't need to work on day one release. So, publishers promise the best experience, and with a budget of hundreds of millions of dollars and teams of hundreds of people we get instead games so unpolished that it seems the QA team was fired just before the game was ready for testing. It wouldn't be much of a bad thing if it has been like that forever. But in the past it wasn't. There is no argument that can deny that.

- It doesn't matter if kids' games are garbage. You know: glitchy, faulty controls, unengaging mechanics, lazy story, zero effort, poor visuals and, overall, bad quality in general. None of those should be justified in any game just because it's for kids (as there exist good-quality games for kids). As a gamer I care if my kids can play other than third-rate poorly made games.

- Platform-preference-shaming is part of the gaming culture. This is a big one. I don't think I need to explain how frequent, annoying and absurd the insults towards those who prefer a specific platform (console, PC, etc...) can get. And yet this is one of the oldest things (older than the SNES) in the gaming community.

Which other seemly negative things we have come to accept have you seen in gaming?

 

[Casual Shinji]

- Games having an expiration date.

It's kind of preposterous that a title can become rare or even go extinct entirely once a console stops being manufactured. This is mostly tied to consoles ofcourse, but there's even older PC games that you apparently just can't run anymore. And I know you can emulate a lot of console games on PC, but the average gamer isn't gonna know how to do that or that it's even a possibility.

I guess even a lot movies and books are going to disappear one day, but with games it seems to happen within our lifetime.

 

[Tuesday Night Fever]

- Buying licenses to play a game rather than actually buying games

What other form of media regularly deals with this bullshit in both digital and physical forms? If I buy a DVD, I can always watch that movie as long as the disc is still in good shape and I've got a device to play it. Because you're paying for licenses to play games these days, even with physical copies, you've really got nothing tangible to hold on to. Your access to the game can be restricted at any time and for any reason, and if the developer/publisher choose to make a change to the game you're often forced to go along with it with no ability to play an older version. Complete bullshit.

- Physical copies of games still requiring you to run them through Steam/Origin/uPlay/GFWL/Etc., often with day-1 multiple-gigabyte patches

Steam/Origin/uPlay/GFWL/etc. are all DRM, and an extra hoop you're forced to jump through to play a game that you've got in your hands. What happens when these services cease to operate?

- Being nickel-and-dimed with expensive DLC that offers very little content

Gone are the expansion packs of yesteryear which were often practically full-length games on their own. These days you pay $10 or $15 for DLC that offers maybe an hour or two worth of content. Sometimes content that's actually already on the disc, no less. Even worse are the hideously expensive cosmetic DLC packs, the pay-to-win skinner-box bullshit like Mass Effect 3's multiplayer cards, and the store-exclusive DLC (which is often only a timed-exclusive, because hey, MORE MONEY!!!). We're paying a premium for something the development team probably whipped up during a lunch break, and we ultimately don't actually own anything for the money we spend. Hooray.

- Publishers restricting the modding community's creativity so that they can sell more lackluster DLC

Self-explanatory. They don't want the players producing more and higher-quality FREE content when they can instead nickel-and-dime us with that expensive DLC crap they churned out over a weekend. And they'll use those EULA's they make us agree to in order to play their licensed product to take away the games of anyone who has the gall to try to mod anything.

 

[Erttheking]

Harassment and trash talk on online gaming.

Every time I bring this up I'm constantly told to just ignore it, with those people themselves ignoring that sometimes you really can't just do that.

 

[StoleitfromKilgore]

Accepting bad writing in games as normal, or praising average writing.

Holding games that try to innovate to the same standards as games that couldn't be more boring in their "normality" (dependent on magazine/site etc.)

Holding "indie"-games to the same standards as AAA-games (depending on the magazine in question).

Reviewers and gamers not being able to play/judge games on their own terms. Petty complaints and purely subjective perspectives being sold as objective or at least as somehow legitimate.

Games getting high scores if they fulfill some kind of checklist of what a game should be ("fun" for example). It feels like a lot of reviewers don't even notice some issues or don't attach much importance to them. On the other hand, as mentioned, oftentimes there seems to be a lack of tolerance for innovation. Especially when it involves complex systems, which don't work as intended or as expected.

In general, standards in some areas being quite low: Writing, story, believability etc.

P.S.: I think that some of this criticism applies more to the german-speaking press. On the other hand, in the case that I talk about below, all reviews I read except one, were english.





Personally I don't really trust reviews anymore and most scores have become all but meaningless to me. I almost never get hyped for anything. The more advertisments/positive opinions are teh more distrustful/negative I become about it. A recent example:

I have heard a lot of negative things about Dragon Age: Inquisition, yet I have only read one negative review and there was also a part of the "eurogamer"-review, which was quite negative. Unfortunately the negative review (from 4players.de) is only available in german. Personally I think the reviewer got a bit too carried away with the negative aspects of the game, but considering the fact that most of the other reviewers didn't even raise these issues, I felt justified in my distrust after reading this review.

 

[Something Amyss]

- Games having an expiration date.

It's kind of preposterous that a title can become rare or even go extinct entirely once a console stops being manufactured. This is mostly tied to consoles ofcourse, but there's even older PC games that you apparently just can't run anymore. And I know you can emulate a lot of console games on PC, but the average gamer isn't gonna know how to do that or that it's even a possibility.

I guess even a lot movies and books are going to disappear one day, but with games it seems to happen within our lifetime.

Part of that may come down to....

Game companies treat their titles like they have a shelf life.

And then they wonder why there's no interest in buying AC 2K15 when we know 2K16 will be out with newer, shinier stuff. Multiplayer games often become ghost towns in weeks or months unless they're huge or have a dedicated niche audience, and resources go to those things which are going to be dated almost immediately. And both the companies and fans defend it.

 

[Dalisclock]

Games getting high scores if they fulfill some kind of checklist of what a game should be ("fun" for example). It feels like a lot of reviewers don't even notice some issues or don't attach much importance to them. On the other hand, as mentioned, oftentimes there seems to be a lack of tolerance for innovation. Especially when it involves complex systems, which don't work as intended or as expected.

Well, It totally depends on your priorities and tastes. One can observe that a game has plot holes galore, simplified gameplay from it's predecessors, and is extremely linear, yet still love the game and find it a wonderful experience despite these flaws because it hits all the right notes for them and feels that the good parts more then make up for the flaws. IE, my feelings about Bioshock: Infinite over Bioshock. Or there are many things I liked about Singularity, yet it just never clicked for me.


Along the same lines, the fact that almost no reviews use anything below a 7 on the 10 point scale, and fanboys getting all buthutt if a game gets anything less then a 9/10 on a review.

Right now I can only think of Jim Sterling as a example of someone who using the entire 10 point scale in his reviews, even if he hasn't done enough reviews to actually make much use of it.

 

[Dalisclock]

- Games having an expiration date.

It's kind of preposterous that a title can become rare or even go extinct entirely once a console stops being manufactured. This is mostly tied to consoles ofcourse, but there's even older PC games that you apparently just can't run anymore. And I know you can emulate a lot of console games on PC, but the average gamer isn't gonna know how to do that or that it's even a possibility.

I guess even a lot movies and books are going to disappear one day, but with games it seems to happen within our lifetime.

Part of that may come down to....

Game companies treat their titles like they have a shelf life.

And then they wonder why there's no interest in buying AC 2K15 when we know 2K16 will be out with newer, shinier stuff. Multiplayer games often become ghost towns in weeks or months unless they're huge or have a dedicated niche audience, and resources go to those things which are going to be dated almost immediately. And both the companies and fans defend it.

This is part of the reason I don't play Mutiplayer, even if there are MP games I'd love to try. Essentially the feeling that I have to play a MP game while it's still new and while there's still a userbase to interact with, even if I'm not really feeling in the mood to play it right now. If I wait too long, the MP game will be dead as most of the people will have moved somewhere else. Eventually, the server will shut down and I won't be able to play it at all.

This is a problem Single Player will never have(unless set up in some BS way that you have to log into a server to play, for no good reason) and since I have more then enough SP games to fill my time and hold my attention, it's why I will probably never play MP.

I'm not trying to bash MP, but there's the inherent flaw. A game that doesn't require a server or depend on a user base will theoretically be playable until the disc wears out and the last backup disappears, while a MP game ceases to really exist once there's no one else to play with.

 

[freaper]

I don't know why there hasn't been a bigger stink about this, but lately Ubisoft (and I imagine other publishers, too) has been selling their games at 60?/$ instead of the usual 50?/$. For me this means that I will not be buying their products on launch, if at all.

 

[senordesol]

Fee to Pay

I've given you $60. What kind of balls does it take to try to fleece me for non-permanent resources in the game I just paid $60 for?

And how have companies been seeing enough success with that model for them to keep trying!?

 

[Something Amyss]

I'm not trying to bash MP, but there's the inherent flaw. A game that doesn't require a server or depend on a user base will theoretically be playable until the disc wears out and the last backup disappears, while a MP game ceases to really exist once there's no one else to play with.

Not that it matters as much these days, when content is tied to accounts and more and more your SP game can be ruined with a flick of the switch, so to speak. This sucks with MP, but there's absolutely no reason for it in SP.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

Harassment and trash talk on online gaming.

Every time I bring this up I'm constantly told to just ignore it, with those people themselves ignoring that sometimes you really can't just do that.

because it isn't exclusive to gaming, not by a longshot, it has happened across history in any sort of human vs human competing event. harassment has a fine line of going way too far, by making it personal or beyond that lobby/game (sending private messages of harassment as an example.), but otherwise it's most likely grouped into trash talking, in which case the mute button has become very use friendly in most competitive games that can allow it.

at the end of the day, all trash talk has the same intent, it's to show superiority and get a rise out of you, you could switch the words out with nice and far fetched synonyms and they'd be getting across the same point.

(not that you don't know any of this, just reitterating for the sake of it I suppose.)

But it's not going away anytime soon, alot of people don't consider trash talk a negative (I actively avoid multiplayer and I purposefully don't join overly-competitive sports leagues IRL because I don't want to deal with the harassment.)

OT: sequels to otherwise deadset singleplayer games including a multiplayer mode. I fucking hate the fact that they are shoving fucking multiplayer into damn near everything now-a-days. (kotor never got its much needed kotor 3, instead, a fucking mmo that nobody asked for.) oh dragon age, you look like you could use some multiplayer, right? how about you mass effect? Fuck that bullshit.


the existence of multiplayer in these respective IP's doesn't bother me, it's that it is forcibly attached to these games or OUTRIGHT REPLACES THEM, and the publisher seems to think that it somehow boosted sales or people wanted it at all. it would be hilarious to see the sales numbers if they released dragon age inquisition seperate from the MP, or if they sold kotor 3 seperate from the TOR mmo bullshit.

 

[Ronald Nand]

There's so many crap trends in modern gaming, but some of the big ones for me are:

Micro Transactions in AAA Games

They really have snuck in microtransactions in AAA games, its been in AC Unity, Far Cry 4 and Dragon Age Inquisition and there really hasn't been enough of an uproar over it, and these games have still sold well simply because these franchises are big and people don't want to miss out on them. We can't oppose microtransactions in AAA games without punishing publishers that put them in by not buying there games, however people don't want to miss out on the sequels of their favorite franchises.

I get the feeling things are going to get worse, currently microtransactions are not neccesary, but slowly publishers are going to make earning resources harder and harder until they become more and more viable purchases. If we don't do something as gamers this is going become reality, we can't just continue ignoring microtransactions saying that only people who are lazy will buy them and they don't affect us.

The Death of Gaming History

Whether its shunning backwards compatability or online DRM, our history is going to die faster than other mediums. This makes me sad that in 10 or 20 years time the great games we're playing now will be forgotten because they cannot be played or its so difficult making it work that no-one will bother playing them. Its happening right now, were forgetting the earliest games in gaming history now.

Emulation and the thing were not allowed to talk about are the only way our history will be stored and remembered, Emulation pretty much saved all the Nintendo Games of the past from fading into obscurity only to be remembered by those whom played it.

 

[StoleitfromKilgore]

Well, It totally depends on your priorities and tastes. One can observe that a game has plot holes galore, simplified gameplay from it's predecessors, and is extremely linear, yet still love the game and find it a wonderful experience despite these flaws because it hits all the right notes for them and feels that the good parts more then make up for the flaws. IE, my feelings about Bioshock: Infinite over Bioshock. Or there are many things I liked about Singularity, yet it just never clicked for me.

You are right, of course. Generalizing isn't very helpful. Maybe I should've phrased it differently. I also love Far Cry 2 in spite of its numerous flaws and hate Dragon Age: Origins, even though I know it is not quite as bad as I perceive it to be. The key factor is probably how one weighs certain positive/negative aspects of games. Personally I attach a lot of importance to atmosphere, good writing and originality (depends: important when fantasy, for example). Gameplay should at the very least not be annoying, but I can live with something like the combat of Bloodlines, for example.

I agree with most of the 'P.S.' section but the rest of the comment comes dangerously close to the "fun is a buzzword" type mentality. First of all, I don't see why Indie games should be judged by a different standard than other games. In fact, I'd go so far as there's a larger problem of Indie games being overrated much higher than they actually are than them being underrated nowadays. Also, I like a good story and all but I think a video GAME'S gameplay should be first and foremost in its creation. Is it nice to have both? Sure. But I'd rather play a game that has good gameplay but a nonexistent story than a game with a good story but nonexistent gameplay.

No, not really. Or maybe, I don't know. It would be helpful to know what exactly you mean by "buzzword". Personally I think it's not a very useful term and in the end there is often too much importance attached to a term which isn't even defined very well.

I like to have "fun" in Far Cry 2 for example, but sometimes I'm also in the mood to walk through the jungle for 15 minutes and enjoy the atmosphere. Is that "fun"? "Fun" shouldn't be an excuse for slamming something for not having been made first and foremost with accessibility in mind. I'm just arguing for patience and forebearance in judging games, I guess. Looking over my post again, I don't think that it is mostly about the issue of "fun as a buzzword".

The part about indie-games and AAA-games from my post is too general and actually redundant. The following paragraph says it a little more specific. Indy-games often being overrated doesn't really apply to the german-speaking gaming press. It often becomes very apparent that there are double-standards, which automatically give bigger productions and edge (a systematic fallacy, so to speak) On the other hand, other aspects like good writing and believability seem to often not even have been considered to any meaningful degree. Some of this is true for most of the bigger sites.

Gameplay: I already adressed that earlier in this post. I just wanted to add that not every game needs great gameplay. Also, while being able to have fun is important, in the end I always ask myself what the lasting importance of a game is. If I end up not being able to have respect for a game, then that also ruins the fun for me. In the end I would rather play a "flawed gem", than some polished AAA-game with great presentation and so on.

 

[f1r2a3n4k5]

Steam is not responsible for the quality of the products sold on its platform (i.e.) No refunds.

There's a lot of companies that are set-up mostly to manage distribution. A strong force for distribution is a great thing for an industry so small-time creatives can focus on the production.

Places like Amazon or Barnes and Noble are primarily responsible for peddling a wide-range of products from both large companies (Pearson) and individuals (e-books). Here's where Steam could learn from them. They have GREAT customer service. Have you ever had an item delivered broken and called Amazon? They replaced it, right? They expect to eat some losses by being a distributor. And they do. To build a reputable brand.

Steam has conveniently set-up a system where Steam (the House) always wins. Sell anything at all. Take their cut. "Oh, the product doesn't meet your expectation? Or is broken? Or is actually not what was advertised? Hey, it's not up to us. Here's the developers number. Go try and get a refund from them."

This is especially bad with their fairly toxic early-access program. Somehow, they manage to say, "You're not buying a full-game, but the product as is," while still letting developers advertise how great the full game will be. And charging for a full game. Even worse, they tell the developers "This should not be a source of revenue. You should be able to complete the game without Steam income" while letting them put the early-access games on sale. If it's not supposed to be a source of revenue, WHY would you let your developers try to push extra copies of it?


In short, if Steam wants to be a distributor. Fine. But they need to take responsibility for it. Can anyone honestly give a good reason how Steam is a better choice for purchasing a game rather than direct from dealer anymore?

 

[stroopwafel]

The biggest one is probably that there is very little point buying a physical copy of a game, since what you get on the disc is incomplete code anyway. So you might as well just buy games digitally. I used to always prefer physical copies just in case servers got shut down or servers would no longer host the game, but now when you can't download the patches most modern games are broken anyway.

Others are minor annoyances like constant firmware updates, locked out content, on-disc DLC, integrated online play in SP campaigns(Souls started it and now it seems to be in almost any game) and emphasis on online sharing I don't give 2 shits about(keep Failbook outa my games!).

Technology gets more advanced but also more 'annoying' in many ways, however in the last 5 years or so I played games I could only dream about growing up on 8/16-bit games. So the good still outweighs the bad.

 

[Dizchu]

Consoles

I'm not bashing console games or console gamers, but think about this for a minute. Most films are released on DVD/Blu-Ray/are digitally distributed. Most music is released on similar formats. Now this is form of "standardisation" for those media is made possible due to the relative ease in which they can be transferred. This means two things, they can be converted to other formats and they can be played on various devices.

Gaming is a bit more complicated. While PC gaming is relatively flexible (if you have the right hardware and technical know-how to run and patch old games), console games are extremely restricted. If you only have one machine, a huge library of games are essentially withheld from you. None of the other "popular" distributable media have this problem.

Now I know why this is an inevitable aspect of gaming but it's also a negative thing for many reasons. To play old games, you either have to hope that they have been ported to more recent systems or you have to grab one of the old consoles, sometimes decades after they've been discontinued. This is a phenomenon unique to gaming, you don't have to grab a TV from the 70s to watch things that came out in that decade.

 

[stroopwafel]

Gaming is a bit more complicated. While PC gaming is relatively flexible (if you have the right hardware and technical know-how to run and patch old games), console games are extremely restricted. If you only have one machine, a huge library of games are essentially withheld from you. None of the other "popular" distributable media have this problem.

I'm afraid it will stay that way, mostly for marketing reasons(similarly as PCs won't see console exclusives). Without the support of a huge corporation like Sony or MS many developers simply won't have the resources or expertise to create the kind of high-profile games we've come to expect. And even if its not total exclusivity, then there might be like exclusive additional content. Corporations have money and power and popular consoles have huge install bases; both necessities for expensive game development.