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  1. #1

    How did we reach the point where games with okayish gameplay get lots of praise?

    Why have we reached a point where games with less good gameplay, but an excellent story, are seen as better games than games with great gameplay, but a story that is only secondary or even non-existant?

    Just look at the last 5-10 years to see what kinds of games get the most praise, especially among the masses; games with a focus on an emotional story, where the gameplay takes a backseat and is, at most, functional but with a terribly low skill floor AND ceiling which gives you no incentive to play the game over and over again to become better at it.

    Games like Red Dead Redemption, The Last of Us 2, Ghost of Tsushima and Gone Home are seen as better games than DooM Eternal, Devil May Cry 5 and Gravity Rush 2 because they focus on invoking emotions rather than giving you satisfying gameplay that asks you to get better and master them.
    The games are good on their own merits, but since we are playing GAMES, the most important aspect to them is the gameplay loop and how much flexibility it gives you in improving your skill. So when talking about the best GAME, those games shouldn't even be a part of the equation because their gameplay is like a 7/10 at best, even if their story is a 9 or a 10.

  2. #2
    Herald of the Titans Nutri's Avatar
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    The examples you give are completely different games and genres tho.

    Thats a bit like stating, why are there more people playing football instead of basketball, both are ball games and one is clearly more engaging.

    Also ‘the best’ is completely in the eye of the beholder. Look at music top 40, the Oscars, dj lists etc.

  3. #3
    Quote Originally Posted by Deathknightish View Post
    Why have we reached a point where games with less good gameplay, but an excellent story, are seen as better games than games with great gameplay, but a story that is only secondary or even non-existant?

    Just look at the last 5-10 years to see what kinds of games get the most praise, especially among the masses; games with a focus on an emotional story, where the gameplay takes a backseat and is, at most, functional but with a terribly low skill floor AND ceiling which gives you no incentive to play the game over and over again to become better at it.

    Games like Red Dead Redemption, The Last of Us 2, Ghost of Tsushima and Gone Home are seen as better games than DooM Eternal, Devil May Cry 5 and Gravity Rush 2 because they focus on invoking emotions rather than giving you satisfying gameplay that asks you to get better and master them.
    The games are good on their own merits, but since we are playing GAMES, the most important aspect to them is the gameplay loop and how much flexibility it gives you in improving your skill. So when talking about the best GAME, those games shouldn't even be a part of the equation because their gameplay is like a 7/10 at best, even if their story is a 9 or a 10.
    Hmm...personally I enjoy a good story more than gameplay, which is why I'm quick to dump games like Hades simply because they're all gameplay and little to no story and character interactions.

    And also the reason why I'm no big fan of Diablo games and only playing them for the story, really not caring at all for endless loot and events designed to artificially extend the game's life.
    Last edited by The Butt Witch; 2020-12-14 at 08:06 AM.

  4. #4
    Pretty sure Doom Eternal, Devil May Cry 5 and Gravity Rush 2 are well reviewed and regarded games.

    I mean its subjective of course. But one could think Ghosts of Tsushima and Doom Eternal are good.

    Its not like there are a wealth of games with great gameplay being panned for not having "emotions" but great gameplay. Almost always great gameplay is praised in video gaming still.

  5. #5
    Quote Originally Posted by Deathknightish View Post
    Why have we reached a point where games with less good gameplay, but an excellent story, are seen as better games than games with great gameplay, but a story that is only secondary or even non-existant?

    Just look at the last 5-10 years to see what kinds of games get the most praise, especially among the masses; games with a focus on an emotional story, where the gameplay takes a backseat and is, at most, functional but with a terribly low skill floor AND ceiling which gives you no incentive to play the game over and over again to become better at it.

    Games like Red Dead Redemption, The Last of Us 2, Ghost of Tsushima and Gone Home are seen as better games than DooM Eternal, Devil May Cry 5 and Gravity Rush 2 because they focus on invoking emotions rather than giving you satisfying gameplay that asks you to get better and master them.
    The games are good on their own merits, but since we are playing GAMES, the most important aspect to them is the gameplay loop and how much flexibility it gives you in improving your skill. So when talking about the best GAME, those games shouldn't even be a part of the equation because their gameplay is like a 7/10 at best, even if their story is a 9 or a 10.
    As long as there is hype surrounding a game, it could be a literal turd and people would gobble it up. See CP77, TLOU2, F76.

  6. #6
    Quote Originally Posted by Fencers View Post
    Pretty sure Doom Eternal, Devil May Cry 5 and Gravity Rush 2 are well reviewed and regarded games.
    Not only this, his comparison instantly fails when you realize Doom Eternal reviewed better then Ghost of Tsushima... https://opencritic.com/game/9592/ghost-of-tsushima https://opencritic.com/game/7410/doom-eternal

  7. #7
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    Quote Originally Posted by Deathknightish View Post
    Why have we reached a point where games with less good gameplay, but an excellent story, are seen as better games than games with great gameplay, but a story that is only secondary or even non-existant?

    Just look at the last 5-10 years to see what kinds of games get the most praise, especially among the masses; games with a focus on an emotional story, where the gameplay takes a backseat and is, at most, functional but with a terribly low skill floor AND ceiling which gives you no incentive to play the game over and over again to become better at it.

    Games like Red Dead Redemption, The Last of Us 2, Ghost of Tsushima and Gone Home are seen as better games than DooM Eternal, Devil May Cry 5 and Gravity Rush 2 because they focus on invoking emotions rather than giving you satisfying gameplay that asks you to get better and master them.
    The games are good on their own merits, but since we are playing GAMES, the most important aspect to them is the gameplay loop and how much flexibility it gives you in improving your skill. So when talking about the best GAME, those games shouldn't even be a part of the equation because their gameplay is like a 7/10 at best, even if their story is a 9 or a 10.
    wait until you get older. you'll love the pace then.

    slower games like rdr2 are meant to immerse yourself into the experience and really enjoy the great outdoors of a beautifully crafted world paired with a movie-esque story. also, these games don't aim for competetiveness or if you can master them. they provide an experience not so unlike to an interactive movie.

    a game like doom eternal has a tacked-on "story" and some great graphics. but the gameplay surely isn't okay. it confines you to use up your ammo, use your bloody chainsaw to get more ammo, use that up too and fly around like in a fucking circus. doom 2016 was great, eternal overdid it with dumb golden rods hanging around to reach certain stuff.

    and these are two very big game titles with a vast difference between a storytelling game and bullet hell that you can enjoy them both without suffering from imaginary skill ceilings. not every game has to be played like you could improve a meaningful skill as a human. but those that can - stick to those. let us unwashed masses enjoy our games which stories take us away.
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  8. #8
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    Quote Originally Posted by Deathknightish View Post
    Why have we reached a point where games with less good gameplay, but an excellent story, are seen as better games than games with great gameplay, but a story that is only secondary or even non-existant?

    Just look at the last 5-10 years to see what kinds of games get the most praise, especially among the masses; games with a focus on an emotional story, where the gameplay takes a backseat and is, at most, functional but with a terribly low skill floor AND ceiling which gives you no incentive to play the game over and over again to become better at it.

    Games like Red Dead Redemption, The Last of Us 2, Ghost of Tsushima and Gone Home are seen as better games than DooM Eternal, Devil May Cry 5 and Gravity Rush 2 because they focus on invoking emotions rather than giving you satisfying gameplay that asks you to get better and master them.
    The games are good on their own merits, but since we are playing GAMES, the most important aspect to them is the gameplay loop and how much flexibility it gives you in improving your skill. So when talking about the best GAME, those games shouldn't even be a part of the equation because their gameplay is like a 7/10 at best, even if their story is a 9 or a 10.
    Because different people like and look for different things... something you think is the cat's meow someone else might judge at best as meh; something someone else loves you might judge as meh.

    The reality is If we all thought the exact same way then there would be a shitton of people not thinking at all.

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  9. #9
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  10. #10
    Quote Originally Posted by The Butt Witch View Post
    Hmm...personally I enjoy a good story more than gameplay, which is why I'm quick to dump games like Hades simply because they're all gameplay and little to no story and character interactions.

    And also the reason why I'm no big fan of Diablo games and only playing them for the story, really not caring at all for endless loot and events designed to artificially extend the game's life.
    I also tend to enjoy a good story more than gameplay,but not in games...having a good story in a game is just not the best medium to tell a story,because of the nature of games,gameplay will always get in the way,it will put the story on breaks,and it can be weird when the character ends up doing stuff that you as a player wouldnt have

    i feel like the only games that fit a story are visual novels,and i would hardly even call those ''games''

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    Quote Originally Posted by sylenna View Post
    wait until you get older. you'll love the pace then.

    slower games like rdr2 are meant to immerse yourself into the experience and really enjoy the great outdoors of a beautifully crafted world paired with a movie-esque story. also, these games don't aim for competetiveness or if you can master them. they provide an experience not so unlike to an interactive movie.

    a game like doom eternal has a tacked-on "story" and some great graphics. but the gameplay surely isn't okay. it confines you to use up your ammo, use your bloody chainsaw to get more ammo, use that up too and fly around like in a fucking circus. doom 2016 was great, eternal overdid it with dumb golden rods hanging around to reach certain stuff.

    and these are two very big game titles with a vast difference between a storytelling game and bullet hell that you can enjoy them both without suffering from imaginary skill ceilings. not every game has to be played like you could improve a meaningful skill as a human. but those that can - stick to those. let us unwashed masses enjoy our games which stories take us away.
    I dont think he even made any issue out of the pace of the games,but the fact that many games atempt to tell complex stories that just dont work in a game medium,the pacing of games will always lead to awkward story pacing

  11. #11
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    It is like...people don't all like the same exact thing as you, and there are a variety of games to cater to the variety of people.

    I mean, I wouldn't expect this concept to be new to someone who is presumably at least 25 years old (assuming you were 13 or older when you made your account here). Yet here you are, apparently baffled by the concept that people like different things. Games are not solely their gameplay, or their story, or their art, or their sounds, or their music; they are a combination of all of those things. It is the combined experience that makes a game, not just one aspect of it.

    Why do you care about what other people perceive as better? Isn't your own opinion the most relevant one to you when you're judging a game?
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  12. #12
    Opinions, how do they work...it's a mystery.
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  13. #13
    Quote Originally Posted by Deathknightish View Post
    The games are good on their own merits, but since we are playing GAMES, the most important aspect to them is the gameplay loop and how much flexibility it gives you in improving your skill.
    This is what you think a good game is. That is most definitely not what everyone else thinks.

  14. #14
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    It kinda started when gaming became more mainstream and we started seeing those games that were more movies than games - like The Last of Us. It kinda passed a threshold.

    So gaming stopped being mostly about fun gameplay and started being about lots of other things. The umbrella expanded.

    But praise is irrelevant, game journos are known to be whack. Go play what you want.

  15. #15
    Apart from whether something actually functions on a basic level, every review is a subjective opinion of the person giving it. Aggregate scores are just collections and averages of the majority of opinions.

    It's just that your personal view of what games should be is now further from the popular opinion among most game critiques. It's not a big deal at all. There's obviously quite a lot of people who value the narrative over gameplay in games. That's neither right or wrong, it's just people looking for different things in their pastime.

    On a wow forum we are probably more gameplay centered, so I do agree that this is what I enjoy more in games, but a good story and narrative is also something I can appreciate. I mean come on... Doom and Devil May Cry are just mindless borefests with no story. Sure, this kind of thing can be nice from time to time, but I would never say these are "best" in any meaning of the word. Again, just an opinion, it's fine to have a different one.
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  16. #16
    There is plenty of praise to go around for games the focus more on the story and for games that focus more on the gameplay. Play whatever game you like and don't get so bothered because other people don't like the same games you do.

  17. #17
    Videogames broke into the mainstream around 2007ish, old media bought shares in videogame companies and they overtook movies in profitability and the rise of the "moviegame" followed. Compounding this was companies like polaris using actors on sets posing as teens in bedrooms marketing whatever products these people could be easily coerced to buy and theres your one-two punch of the modern "get hype" culture which in reality is just a new media form of advertising. With it came the old media concept of "the blockbuster" and thats where you get your "a talking head told me to get hype for [BRAND] because it is this years [MOST IMPORTANT] game". Whatever that actually means of course.

    Which means you will now always have videogames be sold in two ways "the heavy consumer" who are essentially the passion project audience. People who will buy things like fighting games, jrpgs or various types of indie game who are more likely to buy in through word of mouth or demos and get seen as less important for publishers to directly influence the purchases of through marketing. Then there is the modern "watercooler gamer" who are for lack of a less insulting term seen by the publishers as "the cattle" as opposed to the "wild vermin" of the former. The people expected to be convinced to buy a game because its "important", but they don't know why only that a streamer was paid to drop various payload triggerwords like "get hype" and "[insert brand] army" and an unshakable feeling that they "dont want to be left out" of what is seen as a form of communal dialogue starter rather than a solitary experience between player and media. They want something they can finish, if they ever do which is a rarity, in a day or two then flip on craigslist which of course leads to even greater reliance on those day one sales numbers of said games by the publishers which in turn makes the meta-marketing all the more invasive and severe. They don't want gameplay they want "the experience" which people that don't will often deride as "moviegames". See The Last of us, Days Gone, Red Dead Redemption and so on. Games that are designed with the player following a script in mind to offer a very specific experience closer to a movie with interactive sections between the cutscenes.

    Now there isn't really a "wrong" option here, more greasy marketing with the options closely aligned with AAA but thats marketing for you its always one hustle or another. But if there is an audience a product sells and if they sell clearly there is an audience. You can't blame a developer or publisher for chasing an audience they know will be there, even if that audience is not you. No medium that thrives chases one audience. Just look at the shitshows of dc and marvel comics over the last few years from doing just that and see how its not sustainable in the longform.

    But why does one get critical praise over the other? probably a combination of two things. First numbers. Just as there are more people that will go and watch the next ten MCU films to clap while they recognise brands than will go to an arthouse cinema to watch some independent thesis statement by an artist they have never heard of there are going to be a lot more people that will buy the next dragon age for a guilt free dating sim for millenials wrapped around a mediocre rpg for the 4th time than will buy any fighting game ever made regardless of quality. Though it isn't always about quality. You could be a snob and say "more people eat at mcdonalds than a five star resturant" but you can also say "more people eat at mcdonalds than whimpy" and the points still the same. There is a larger audience because the gameplay is more vanilla which means it has cast the largest net of potential audiences.
    Go look at any third person game with guns from the last 10 years and 9 times out of 10 their default button layouts are identical and often so is the gameplay. Because you catch a larger audience that want a movie with interactable options between cutscenes by making said gameplay as familiar and penetrable as possible. You dont sell millions of copies of a game by expecting the "watercooler gamer" to ever look at a controller layout or have to do something like "lab time" to get around the basic inputs. Its just not done. So you aim for accessibility for the widest market possible. A larger audience naturally means, unless you really fuck it up like Fallout 76 or something, the general positive world of mouth will naturally be in greater numbers as well to get the snowball rolling so to speak.

    Second you have the issue of 'generational games journalism'. We have all seen the webcomics that go "journalist in the 90s: that game you like is awesome!, journalist in the 2000's: that game you like sucks, journalist in the 2010's: that game you like is racist, and thats not okay" and the like and thats because like any industrys generations shift as old guard get aged out and new blood comes in. Trouble is in modern games journalism in recent years its seen a lot of a new crowd that seem to see games journalism as an "in" to "real tech journalism". They don't actually care about videogames and in many cases have not played them before. But its a stepping stone to free laptops and cell phones. Trouble for them is thats a industry that has far slower brain drain than games journalism so you end up with 1 open position and 30 social studies drop outs chasing it, 29 of them stuck in videogame journalism purgatory till the next position opens. So they are stuck doing what they don't like, growing bitter at the medium and the audience all the while being desperate to be seen as "legitimate" and why is it any surprise that the people like that will push the "moviegame" over anything else at places like Kotaku or Polygon? we've seen the cuphead and doom videos. They can't actually play most videogames but the games like The Last of Us are specifically made to be accessible as its all about leading the player by the hand to the next high quality mocapped cutscene. Which naturally they love because its like movies, they know movies and that means they can go "look at us, we are like movies, we are art too, take us seriously!". Just look at this weeks game awards. What the fuck does Christopher Nolan have to do with what game is game of the year? nothing.

    Unless you want to be taken seriously and compared to movies. and which type of game is most comparable in that regard?

    So you got an audience that will buy it and a media desperate to be seen as something the equal of the film industry that videogames long outstripped in profitability. Its a pretty basic two point reason why some games will always be automatically seen as critical darlings regardless of content or quality over others. Rarely does it have to do with the game being some new benchmark for the medium. Just close enough to a more mainstream medium to check the right boxes. Theres a reason people called The Last of Us "Oscarbait" and its gameplay wasn't a selling point. Because the point was never really to be a videogame at the end of the day. But theres an audience for that.

  18. #18
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    Quote Originally Posted by Deathknightish View Post
    The games are good on their own merits, but since we are playing GAMES, the most important aspect to them is the gameplay loop and how much flexibility it gives you in improving your skill. So when talking about the best GAME, those games shouldn't even be a part of the equation because their gameplay is like a 7/10 at best, even if their story is a 9 or a 10.
    They are called MOVIES, short for MOVING PICTURES, the most important aspect to them is the visuals and how great they look. So when talking about the best MOVIE, those movies shouldn't even be a part of the equation because their visuals are a 7/10 at best, even if their story is a 9 or a 10.

    See how foolish that sounds? Games have been about more than just gameplay for a long time. When was the last time you played a game just to get the high score? To many people the story is just as important as the gameplay, more so in some cases. Not everyone looks for the same things in entertainment. The world would be a far more boring place if that were the case.

  19. #19
    Quote Originally Posted by Deathknightish View Post
    Why have we reached a point where games with less good gameplay, but an excellent story, are seen as better games than games with great gameplay, but a story that is only secondary or even non-existant?

    Just look at the last 5-10 years to see what kinds of games get the most praise, especially among the masses; games with a focus on an emotional story, where the gameplay takes a backseat and is, at most, functional but with a terribly low skill floor AND ceiling which gives you no incentive to play the game over and over again to become better at it.

    Games like Red Dead Redemption, The Last of Us 2, Ghost of Tsushima and Gone Home are seen as better games than DooM Eternal, Devil May Cry 5 and Gravity Rush 2 because they focus on invoking emotions rather than giving you satisfying gameplay that asks you to get better and master them.
    The games are good on their own merits, but since we are playing GAMES, the most important aspect to them is the gameplay loop and how much flexibility it gives you in improving your skill. So when talking about the best GAME, those games shouldn't even be a part of the equation because their gameplay is like a 7/10 at best, even if their story is a 9 or a 10.
    You fundamentally misunderstand what a game is to most people: something you do once in a while.
    Not something where you do the same thing over and over and over. The very concept of repetition is tedious and boring to most people.

    And while i do agree gameplay deserves better consideration diffuculty, skill-requirements and all that sorta stuff are at best only tangentially related to quality, and at worst directly opposed to it (see old arcade games).

    So yeah, you might want to fix that disconnect before trying to change anyone's mind, or it'll just be an excercise in frustration for you mainly.
    And that while the actual problem persists unchanged.
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  20. #20
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    Quote Originally Posted by paragraphgorilla View Post
    As long as there is hype surrounding a game, it could be a literal turd and people would gobble it up. See CP77, TLOU2, F76.
    *adds 85% of Japanese and Korean games here*. Shit graphics and even shittier gameplay and most shitty story with horrible world and character building but still people play the games because either they love the franchise for that one or 2 games that came out in the 90s or they just wanna see "cute" shit.

    I don't have anything against anime or anything related to it since I am somewhat weeb myself. But the games that comes from Asia are like watching CGI animated anime with dubs = pure horror and laziness.

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