BaneFireLord

Another one that's more in line with the original intent of this thread: complaints about having to repeatedly tap A/X to spur a horse in Red Dead. I think it does a great job of making the horse feel like an animal you're guiding rather than a vehicle you're driving.

Outside of Respawn’s singleplayer efforts, nothing in their catalog is appealing these days. I used to enjoy Battlefield but none of them have clicked with me post 4. I also used to enjoy most of Bioware’s stuff but I have zero faith in them doing anything interesting ever again based on their track record over the last decade.

@justin258: I agree it's a little too "gotcha" about it and I understand why it landed sour with a lot of players (the "REVENGE SOLVES EVERYTHING" marketing certainly didn't help either). But the lethal approach being so much more fun and direct compared to nonlethal is exactly why I think it works so well as a thematic tool. Doing good is more often than not a tedious, thankless process, and seeing a game reflect this in an industry that has a tendency to treat all playstyles as equally valid ways to get to any goal remains a rare thing. Does it make for a particularly pleasurable game experience? Well, no. But as my take on Red Dead and Death Stranding indicates, I don't think fun and player gratification should always be the preeminent goal of game design.

I do agree, however, that this probably wasn't totally intentional on Arkane's part, as evidenced by how much stuff they put into D2 to make the low chaos approach a better time. But in an industry where the only difference between an evil playthrough and a good playthrough is typically a few dozen button presses on dialogue wheels, I still think what Dishonored did is cool as hell.

• Whenever anyone describes a game as being “like Skyrim” or “Skyrim but better” when the only thing it has in common with Skyrim is being open world and having a fantasy setting. If anyone apart from Bethesda has actually made a game that even tried to be an Elder Scrolls-style sandbox, let alone executed the formula better than Bethesda, I have yet to see it.
• Complaints about Dishonored having consequences for going on murder sprees. It’s almost like unfettered violence not necessarily solving problems is a major theme of the game and the mechanics do an excellent job of reinforcing that. I genuinely think the comparatively lukewarm critical reactions to Dishonored and Prey versus the fairly rapturous reception of Deathloop proves that a large swath of the gaming critical class don’t actually care about “ludonarrarive dissonance” or actually want games to have choices that matter in meaningful ways.
• Complaints about Red Dead Redemption 2 being slow and animation heavy and not prioritizing “fun” in its mechanics (see also: Death Stranding). You can dislike how it plays, certainly, but its mechanics are well considered for the type of game it is trying to be and far from a failure of design. It’s like going to see Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and complaining that it’s not a Bond movie, or Pig and complaining that it’s not like John Wick.
• Complaints from reviewers about recent Assassin’s Creed games being too big. I can understand the critique from the standpoint of someone who has to grind out a review in two weeks to meet an embargo, but that’s not reflective of 99.999% of players’ experience. The scope of Origins, Odyssey and Valhalla coupled with the live service-lite design encourages them to be leisurely enjoyed over the course of months instead of being binged. They fill the same slot in my life that MMOs do for other people and they work really, really well in that regard.
• Speaking of Assassin's Creed, complaints about game mechanics in a franchise from people who clearly haven't played anything recent in the series annoy me to no end. For example, in all the Elden Ring Discourse, I saw a number of posts criticizing the level scaling in recent AC games as an example of bad design compared to From's approach. I don't remember how it worked in Origins, but in Odyssey and Valhalla, level scaling is optional and adjustable, as is how much guidance you want in terms of quest objectives and open world markers. I generally feel like the quote about Twitter being a place where people imagine a guy, trick themselves into believing that guy exists, and then getting angry at that guy often seems to apply to a lot of game debates too.

I thought my 350 hours in Oblivion across all platforms was impressive, but good gracious. I bow in the presence of my superior.

AC4 somehow being a spiritual successor to Sid Meier's Pirates was cool and I loved the boat stuff. But I have zero interest in Boat Stuff: The Game. I predict this launches and shuts down within 12 months.

Granted, I'm a Noted Bethesda Apologist, but I'm not concerned. The lack of real footage is par for the course with their recent marketing strategy; even Skyrim was less than a year of marketing without actual gameplay until QuakeCon if I recall correctly. Based on what Todd's said in various interviews, it sounds like this is going to be much more of an RPG than Fallout 4 was, including not having a voiced protagonist this time, which is very exciting. Is it probably going to be janky as all get out? Oh yes, absolutely. But by this point I'm immune. Bring on the backwards-flying space ships, my body is ready.

Also, is Judge's Week even happening? I thought E3 was outright cancelled.

I'd be interested to know where the lore/story comes in the dev process at From and if it's changed over time. For all the praise Dark Souls gets for this aspect, playing it through for the first time recently gave me the impression that it was a bunch of great ideas for levels and enemies that then had a plot/lore grafted on later in development to make a throughline.

Also I'm convinced the difficulty thing is much more an effect of marketing that then created a self-perpetuating reputation via the elitist parts of the fanbase than it just being hard. If my memory serves me, Demon's Souls didn't attract nearly the same level of debate, but then the first Dark Souls leaned heavily on the PREPARE TO DIE stuff and how punishing it was, down to the back of the box copy. I feel like a lot of obnoxious discourse over the past decade might have been partially avoided if the framing was instead something like "BREAK THE CYCLE" or "KINDLE THE DARKNESS" or whatever. It's definitely much harder than a lot of mainstream stuff, I'm not trying to say it's aCtUaLlY eAsY or anything, but I'm impatient and very, very mediocre at video games and I had a much easier time with it than I did with pretty much any action roguelike or masocore platformer I've ever played.

This is a bit afield of the OP's original point, but there's a wealth of space between the icon-vomit handholding caricature of Ubisoft games* and the zero guidance, maximum opacity of a From game. Granted, I have yet to play Elden Ring and am basing this opinion on my recent experience with beating Dark Souls, but I don't think either approach is ideal because in both cases it often feels like I haven't actually accomplished something. To the former, I might as well be on rails; to the latter, the inconsistencies and lack of information often makes accomplishments feel like dumb luck rather than the natural result of my actions (the inscrutable nonsense of Solaire's questline in Dark Souls comes to mind, to the extent that even the presumably vetted wiki I was following fucked up how to do it).

I prefer the partial information approach, either giving clues that lead to something interesting when you put them together (e.g. Red Dead's treasure maps) or giving you a clear objective and leaving it up to you how to get there (e.g., Breath of the Wild, immersive sims in general). I find that sort of back and forth between the player and the game to be much more satisfying than either having an accomplishment handed to you on a plate or tripping over it by accident.

But my preferences aren't everyone's preferences. Ultimately, I think the answer is customization. When a game's design calls for a specific form of guidance or lack thereof, that's absolutely fine--the obscurity is a key part of the Souls design philosophy and while I criticize aspects of its implementation I'm not here to argue that it shouldn't keep doing its thing. But 9 times out of 10 a game's balance of guidance versus obscurity is not intrinsic to its purpose. In my view, the ideal solution is putting in as many options as feasible and presenting them all up front for the player to pick and choose rather than forcing a default. Either that, or release mod tools to let the community do what it will. That's what I think the "trust the player" idea should stand for, as opposed to its general use as an antonym for "handholding"--trust the player to know what's best for the player and accommodate a wide range of approaches.

(Also this conversation is really not about accessibility at all and the muddying of the waters over what accessible means in gaming, particularly as it keeps occurring in the Souls Discourse(TM), is really unfortunate.)

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*I say "caricature" because, while I can't really speak to Far Cry or any of the open world Clance games, the two most recent AC games have included a lot of options to customize your experience in terms of how much or little guidance you're given, what shows up and doesn't show up on your minimap, etc.

Anyone who uses this mod will not only have cheated the game, they will have cheated themself etc. etc.