why do so many people here hate modern games ?

[Bad Sector]

IMO Krome's BT remaster outclassed InXile's BT4—which to me seemed like a Frayed Knight's clone.

Frayed Knights is good though (i haven't played Bard's Tale 4 to judge it).

 

[Glop_dweller]

But is is Bard's Tale? Is it at all familiar, fitting, or the least bit series appropriate when you play 1, 2, 3, and then 4 consecutively? Not at all. It doesn't match the series.

Being a good [even great!] game is not enough for an official sequel; as any TES fan would doubtless suddenly agree if shown an official TES 6 that mimics Myth:TFL, Diablo 3, or Disciples 3 gameplay.

*And sequels to these three games above could not be made from either of the other two or from TES, or BT4. They are each just too different, and specialized [apart] from each other.

______________

BT4 review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=V4oc1MUcN9Y

The art is pretty good; the gameplay is entirely alien. They did the same thing with Wasteland 2 & 3.

 

[Mig]

Edgelords

Cope

Most of the forum is afraid to admit they even like certain games because they may no longer be seen as cool.

You're like those snowflakes who believe the racism in GD is only ironic.

Here's the games people who are members of the Steam RPGCodex group are playing right now:

Good thing I was playing Elex otherwise my reputation would've been ruined. Ruined!

 

[Absinthe]

i know that most modern games rarely come up with something new , something that puts our mind to work but everytime a new game releases people on this forum like to shit on it especially rpgs

There are a couple of reasons for this. First, this is an oldschool forum. Many of the forum members here remember when RPGs were actually interested in being good games rather than self-piloting vehicles for story exposition. This makes the decline in videogame design quality more apparent and easier to criticize when you've played some of the best and can see how far the bar has dropped since then. We've also seen hype machines too many times for most posters here to fall for it, so we tend to pick apart games pretty fast. Really, most modern games tend to be a mess of bad cargo cult design decisions that aim for mass-market success by mindlessly copying other games and generally dumbing down complexity and difficulty. The thing is, decision-making and challenge are the pillars of what makes a game a game. And when you're good at games, playing a stupidly easy game just isn't any fun. When there's no challenge, all of the gameplay starts to feel like busywork, a waste of time, because you're underengaged and still have to expend time going through the motions to progress. It's like the brainless gameplay is only there to pretend it's still a game while you're on your way to a participation award and, all-too-often, a cutscene where the game reveals that its real appeal is supposed to be its B-movie pretensions rather than the gameplay. The game actively gets in the way of the "game" parts of it, and your successes don't feel earned. They are handed to you. As if you deserve them just for having the game, rather than needing to earn them by triumphing over it.

Second, we're big on open discourse, picking apart game design, and having well-reasoned arguments, unlike many other forums where people are afraid of arguing or having strong opinions because they're too busy trying to reduce everything into a circlejerk. As such, you're much more likely to see open, unvarnished criticism of whatever on the Codex, regardless of the game or thread. That's a good thing.

Third, some people (usually noobs from the past 5 or so years) are just idiots who think the RPG Codex is a place to be an edgy kid and act like you're too cool for everything and are really obsessed with "fitting in" for some stupid reason. They think the purpose of the Codex is just hating on things, and those people are just retards.

As for the games you mention...

the witcher 3 - shit on

The Witcher 3 IIRC had the problems of a bad main campaign which didn't really make sense (especially when the game encourages you to go out of your way to explore the countryside and sidequest despite the fact that you are nominally under time pressure to find Ciri) and a combat system that was pretty much a joke (somehow from The Witcher 1 to the Witcher 3 they just kept dumbing it down...) where your protagonist gets to be superman without much effort. The expansions had much better campaigns, though, and I think there are some mods to improve the combat. TW3 also caught flak for lying to consumers about the graphics downgrade they performed over the course of development and claiming they did no such thing, so that resulted in some goodwill lost.

The best parts of The Witcher 3 were pretty much the side stories, I believe.

DOS/DOS2 - shit on

IIRC Divinity: Original Sin 1 was actually regarded as fairly decent, even if it had some issues here and there.

D:OS 2 on the other hand had a much more ridiculous writing tone that made it hard to take the game seriously (which is a problem when the game itself has moments when it wants you to take it seriously) and a rebalanced combat system that by all accounts wasn't fun to play, well-designed, or well-balanced and suffers from ludicrous number bloat to boot. IIRC the opening prison island level was also not believable as an actual prison when security is such an absolute joke.

Dark souls - shit on

Dark Souls is a solid game iirc. The only real hate for it I can imagine is that unlike its memetic reputation as a super-difficult game, it's actually pretty fucking easy if you know what you're doing. Most of the sarcastic Dark Souls references though aren't shitting on Dark Souls. They're shitting on retarded videogame journalists who just can't help declaring every remotely difficult game they encounter to be "like Dark Souls" or "the Dark Souls of [genre]" and it's completely fucking retarded. Dark Souls difficulty is a goddamn meme, and a widely reviled one at that.

dragon age inquision - shit on

The combat is fucking shit man. It makes Witcher 3's combat look good. You have a retarded AI that runs into AoEs and traps, a tactical camera that is too fucking zoomed in on open terrain (and fucking ceiling glued whenever you're indoors, making it completely worthless for anything other than receiving close-ups of your character's head) which makes it annoying to coordinate your party manually, health sponge enemies and bosses, ridiculous combat animations that make animation cancelling into a major source of bonus DPS, and an overall easily cheesed combat system. It's a shitty DPS fiesta into health sponges. None of it is engaging or fun, unless you've never experienced a good combat system or are very easily entertained maybe. Shit's boring as fuck and basically unplayable if you're used to a decent combat system that actually makes you use your head.

And that's just the combat. Let's talk about the Forces system in Inquisition: It's basically a fucking Facebook clicker game. You click where to assign forces and then have to wait 10 minutes to an hour of fucking realtime until the quest magically resolves itself. It's completely fucking annoying, stupid, and painful.

Let's not forget about the story either. The main premise is already sketchy as fuck. You're playing as the leader of the inquisition, but unlike a normal inquisition, you're not purging heretics or enforcing the church's will or shit like that. No, son, you are the heretics. Why call a game like this inquisition? It makes no sense. Call it something else. Why your character is the leader is also basically bs. Seems like just about everyone around you (Leliana, Cullen, Cassandra, maybe even Josephine who at least has administrative skills) is more qualified to do your job, really. But that's just the opening premise being stupid. What about the plot proper? Well it makes zero fucking sense. There is basically no plot. Corypheus, your archvillain, doesn't really have a plan as much as he has a random list of shit he tries and then apparently had the power to just take on the inquisition in a frontal assault all along, but is content to wait until the last minute when the Inquisition is way the fuck stronger before he does it, even though he recognized them as his adversaries all along. Suspend your disbelief all the way, because none of it makes sense once you start asking questions. Some people are cursed with a need to make sense of things (as opposed to passively consuming or rationalizing whatever you see), and this game is clearly not for them.

As for the companions, well, the companions include utter weirdos like Sera the whiny, immature kid with authority problems (solid inquisitor material right there, like giving a kid with a gun a badge and a license to kill), Dorian the token homosexual (his entire fucking story is basically about how gay he is), and Iron Bull, another fucking weirdo who seems to be adding to the constant retcons Dragon Age is doing to the Qunari since they were introduced in Dragon Age: Origins (Consistency is clearly overrated in Dragon Age anyway).

How about the exploration DAI is big on? Well, it's really just an assload of walking and the like, and moving off the beaten path is only good for minor pickups and absolutely nothing else. It's boring as fuck and a waste of time.

So you wonder why Inquisition gets shat on, and the answer is "Of course it gets shat on. The game is just shit."

pathfinder - shit on

Dunno much about this one. All I recall are some complaints about weirdo companions and a really shitty approach to the alignment system.

Baldurs gate 3 - shit on

That's easy. Baldur's Gate 3 is supposed to be a sequel to Baldur's Gate 1 & 2, but it's not, at all. Story, gameplay, the lot of it, it's not there. It also has that Larian studios writing which completely kills the story for a lot of people. And D&D 5E has the most undercooked combat system of just about every edition of D&D to have ever been made into a computer game.

He basically made another Divinity: Original Sin 2 kind of game wrapped in D&D 5E content but billed it as a sequel to the Baldur's Gate series.

pillars of eternity - shit on

IIRC PoE's combat system was ruined by its trash-tier encounter design and the writing was pretty bad too.

solasta crown of the magister - shit on

Don't know too much about this one.

and many more , i agree that games like horizon forbidden west suck because of the bland story and characters but the one from above are really good , the only modern rpg that seems acceptable here is elex

I'm pretty sure you haven't played a lot of good games, causing you to have a rather low bar for what is a good or impressive game.

 

[Denim Destroyer]

Multiple times my friends have commented on how I tend to only play older games while hating new ones. Truth of the matter is I like video games so long as I find them good. Every game I consider good respects me as the player. My choices are not ignored, belittled, or absent. Whatever I want to do in game does happen by my own volition and not some developer forcing me down a particular path. Developers respecting this desire for freedom is hard to find in modern games so logically it makes sense to play older games where these traits are more common.

 

[madrigal]

My choices are not ignored, belittled, or absent. Whatever I want to do in game does happen by my own volition and not some developer forcing me down a particular path.

Disco Elysium often ignores choices and has a lot of fake choices, it is also heavily railroaded. Still considered by many to be a good game.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

Still considered by many to be a good game.

There's a whole lot of dumb people out there, it's very sad.

 

[Absinthe]

Multiple times my friends have commented on how I tend to only play older games while hating new ones. Truth of the matter is I like video games so long as I find them good. Every game I consider good respects me as the player. My choices are not ignored, belittled, or absent. Whatever I want to do in game does happen by my own volition and not some developer forcing me down a particular path. Developers respecting this desire from freedom is hard to find in modern games so logically it makes sense to play older games where these traits are more common.

Pretty much, yeah. We're just interested in good games. And if you like good games, you often find yourself going back to the time when developers weren't afraid of having their own ideas and working out for themselves what it meant to make a game as opposed to today's design-by-committee, cargo cult, dumb-it-down-for-mass-market, "Skyrim was a good game" school of game design.

Modern games, really?

May as well go through a few of these.

Arcanum-shit on
PST-shit on

Both of those games are usually respected for the quality of their writing and, in Arcanum's case, quest design, but they also have bad combat. Arcanum especially has horrible combat that is completely unbalanced and broken, especially if you play real-time combat (which is the game's default), but even when you play turn-based mode there is way too much ridiculously unbalanced shit that keeps the combat from being much fun.

NWN oc-shit on

No shit? The NWN singleplayer campaign, by all accounts, is fucking shit. You don't buy NWN for the official campaign. You buy NWN for the giant amount of mods, custom campaigns, and online servers.

The only perfect game, according to these forums, is Dark Souls. So, everything should be compared to it and it should be mentioned in every other post no matter how tiresome and trite these comparisons have become.

And here the problem comes into view. It looks like your problem is your insistence that if people like a game it must be treated like it's perfect even when it obviously isn't. Many games are flawed and you seem to have trouble accepting people pointing that side of things out.

Sorry to burst your bubble but games aren't perfect, and they shouldn't be treated like they are either. Just because we like a game doesn't mean we won't criticize it.

My choices are not ignored, belittled, or absent. Whatever I want to do in game does happen by my own volition and not some developer forcing me down a particular path.

Disco Elysium often ignores choices and has a lot of fake choices, it is also heavily railroaded. Still considered by many to be a good game.

I liked Disco Elysium well enough, but calling it a game is a bit of a stretch. They kind of cut out the entire game part of it. It's more like a Visual Novel, really. And the fake C&C is one of the things that gets criticized heavily around here. That and the fact that it's a pretty lousy detective game or detective story, because the investigation is largely pointless and as a story it violates the detective genre's rules of making the mystery actually solvable to the reader.

 

[Harthwain]

My choices are not ignored, belittled, or absent. Whatever I want to do in game does happen by my own volition and not some developer forcing me down a particular path.

Disco Elysium often ignores choices and has a lot of fake choices, it is also heavily railroaded. Still considered by many to be a good game.

This seems to be the lot of narrative-driven RPGs. The reason it's considered good is because it gets the RPG aspects very well (for a cRPG) and the writing is interesting enough to make up for Disco Elysium's other flaws.

I liked Disco Elysium well enough, but calling it a game is a bit of a stretch. They kind of cut out the entire game part of it. It's more like a Visual Novel, really.

But would adding some sort of horrible combat (in the vein of Arcanum or Planescape: Torment, as you have mentioned yourself) would really be beneficial? I always said I would welcome a decent combat system in addition to what Disco Elysium did, but in absence of that I don't see the point of including shit combat just for the sake of being able to say "It has combat! Sadly it's shit, so you better ignore it".

 

[rusty_shackleford]

no combat = no rpg

it's like calling your game a FPS but it's actually a walking simulator

 

[madrigal]

I always said I would welcome a decent combat system in addition to what Disco Elysium did, but in absence of that I don't see the point of including shit combat just for the sake of being able to say "It has combat! Sadly it's shit, so you better ignore it".

When I first played DE at the Evrart encounter I thought that was going to be the combat system. Surviving encounters by using a mixture of skills and the attacks would be psychological and from inanimate objects like uncomfortable chairs. That would have been cool. Then it all fell apart, health and morale are pointless and can be healed after the fatal blow with an abundance of freely available healing consumables.

 

[monilloman]

no combat = no rpg

it's like calling your game a FPS but it's actually a walking simulator

considering how shit combat is in most rpgs, removing it would be a service to the genre

Sent from my ONEPLUS A6003 using Tapatalk

 

[rusty_shackleford]

no combat = no rpg

it's like calling your game a FPS but it's actually a walking simulator

considering how shit combat is in most rpgs, removing it would be a service to the genre

Sent from my ONEPLUS A6003 using Tapatalk

but it's not an RPG without combat.
That's like saying shooting is shit on most FPS games so they'd be better without it. They'd stop being FPS games.

 

[monilloman]

I never disagreed with you

Sent from my ONEPLUS A6003 using Tapatalk

 

[Rincewind]

But would adding some sort of horrible combat (in the vein of Arcanum or Planescape: Torment, as you have mentioned yourself) would really be beneficial? I always said I would welcome a decent combat system in addition to what Disco Elysium did, but in absence of that I don't see the point of including shit combat just for the sake of being able to say "It has combat! Sadly it's shit, so you better ignore it".

But it's supposed to be a detective game, and there's literally zero detectiving going on. It's basically click click click until the case "solves" itself. I got a fair bit of amusement out of DE, but it's a stretch to call it a "game", it's more like an "experience". It would need at least a few puzzles or some actual detective game mechanics to become an actual game (note I'm not talking about combat at all).

 

[Zarniwoop]

i know that most modern games rarely come up with something new , something that puts our mind to work but everytime a new game releases people on this forum like to shit on it especially rpgs

the witcher 3 - Codex GOTY
DOS/DOS2 - Literally BOTH Codex GOTY's
Dark souls - The first one was greatly loved by the Dex, the sequels are shit cash-ins
dragon age inquision - shit on Because it's fucking shit
pathfinder - Kinkmaker was massively fellated on the Dex
Baldurs gate 3 - Not even out yet
pillars of eternity - shit on 80% of the game is the Endless Dungeons of Kickstarter Kombat
solasta crown of the magister - shit on what even is this?

and many more , i agree that games like horizon forbidden west suck because of the bland story and characters but the one from above are really good , the only modern rpg that seems acceptable here is elex

Forbidden West has been out less than a week. No way you finished it and definitely the Kodex Kritical Konsensus on the story isn't out yet.
ELEX is awesome.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

But would adding some sort of horrible combat (in the vein of Arcanum or Planescape: Torment, as you have mentioned yourself) would really be beneficial? I always said I would welcome a decent combat system in addition to what Disco Elysium did, but in absence of that I don't see the point of including shit combat just for the sake of being able to say "It has combat! Sadly it's shit, so you better ignore it".

But it's supposed to be a detective game, and there's literally zero detectiving going on. It's basically click click click until the case "solves" itself. I got a fair bit of amusement out of DE, but it's a stretch to call it a "game", it's more like an "experience". It would need at least a few puzzles or some actual detective game mechanics to become an actual game (note I'm not talking about combat at all).

which is why game journos and storyfags loved it, they just want to read a book while pretending it's an rpg

 

[JDR13]

Oldfag Syndrome.

 

[JDR13]

the witcher 3 - shit on
DOS/DOS2 - shit on
Dark souls - shit on
dragon age inquision - shit on
pathfinder - shit on
Baldurs gate 3 - shit on
pillars of eternity - shit on
solasta crown of the magister - shit on

Have you actually played DA: Inquisition? Of the games you listed, that one definitely deserves to be shit on.

the only modern rpg that seems acceptable here is elex

Not even the Oldfags that rule this forum can deny the power of Elex.

 

[Kruno]

Have you actually played DA: Inquisition? Of the games you listed, that one definitely deserves to be shit on.

Agreed. I fell asleep playing it. I didn't even know that could be possible.

 

[Absinthe]

I liked Disco Elysium well enough, but calling it a game is a bit of a stretch. They kind of cut out the entire game part of it. It's more like a Visual Novel, really.

But would adding some sort of horrible combat (in the vein of Arcanum or Planescape: Torment, as you have mentioned yourself) would really be beneficial? I always said I would welcome a decent combat system in addition to what Disco Elysium did, but in absence of that I don't see the point of including shit combat just for the sake of being able to say "It has combat! Sadly it's shit, so you better ignore it".

That's the kind of poor thinking that contributes to the plague of RPGs that have tons of combat but never do anything decent with it because killing hordes of enemies is the "RPG" thing in their stupid heads. It doesn't need combat. It just needs some form of gameplay. In this case it'd be better suited to detective game style mechanics, maybe some adventure puzzles, probably also some kind of challenge to navigating dialogues for certain successes and information, and it certainly needs some actual overall reactivity to your choices, character build, and discoveries rather than just rolling dice at everything while your choices don't really matter, the game moves ahead on its own, and the mystery pretty much solves itself for you.

 

[rusty_shackleford]

I liked Disco Elysium well enough, but calling it a game is a bit of a stretch. They kind of cut out the entire game part of it. It's more like a Visual Novel, really.

But would adding some sort of horrible combat (in the vein of Arcanum or Planescape: Torment, as you have mentioned yourself) would really be beneficial? I always said I would welcome a decent combat system in addition to what Disco Elysium did, but in absence of that I don't see the point of including shit combat just for the sake of being able to say "It has combat! Sadly it's shit, so you better ignore it".

That's the kind of poor thinking that contributes to the plague of RPGs that have tons of combat but never do anything decent with it because killing hordes of enemies is the "RPG" thing in their stupid heads. It doesn't need combat. It just needs some form of gameplay. In this case it'd be better suited to detective game style mechanics, maybe some adventure puzzles, and probably also some kind of challenge to navigating dialogues for certain information and overall reactivity to your choices, character build, and discoveries rather than just rolling dice at everything while your choices don't really matter, the game moves ahead on its own, and the mystery pretty much solves itself for you.

What you're describing is an adventure game.

 

[Absinthe]

Largely, yes, but it'd be better for it to have gameplay mechanics that involve more actual detective work and environment interaction. Making dialogues involve more player skill instead of dice rolls (which are ultimately inconsequential anyway) is also recommended. And you can still work with things like skills in a concept like this.

 

[warcrimes666]

It is not that we hate modern games.

It is that we hate you.

And everyone like you.

Amen

 

[samoilaaa]

It is not that we hate modern games.

It is that we hate you.

And everyone like you.

Amen

but i love you