I've always found the Uncharted 4/The Last Of Us/God of War 2018 to all be decent, but all those games are kinda lacking in imteresting gameplay and are basically the video game equivalents of "Oscar bait"
I've always found the Uncharted 4/The Last Of Us/God of War 2018 to all be decent, but all those games are kinda lacking in imteresting gameplay and are basically the video game equivalents of "Oscar bait"
This thread might be unintentional :bait: for treat defenders to get mad at posts made in it, but I'll bite anyway.
To me, both DOTA2 and LoL are stripped back subgenre of a more complex and satisfying RTS game genre that got very repetitive very quickly for me, and then the Epic G*mer toxicity and the :soypoint-1: ESPORTS :soypoint-2: hype wave made them outright repulsive, and for a while copycats were everywhere.
Even as an animated series that I hear is actually interesting with good fight choreography and worldbuilding, I simply can't shake that "this is a stripped down RTS with toxic assholes and OMG ESPORTS hype."
I enjoyed some parts of LoL, specifically because it was basically what I liked about RTSs, with most of what I didn't like stripped out.
Now, that's not to say LoL good; it certainly sucks in a lot of ways. But I did like being able to chill with friends and play a game where I only need to focus on micro-ing a single character and not stress about controlling 200 different things all across the map as well as managing like 10 resources and their respective buildings all simultaneously.
Honestly, I'd love a game that was a turn based strategy game on the resources level, but with simple one-player real time combat. Almost like Total War, but the combat is MOBA-like.
That might potentially be fun if any corpos bothered to finance an attempt at it.
I was huge fan of Natural Selection 1 and 2 which is probably the only successful attempt at RTS/FPS hybrid. It's definitely not for everyone, but it was really satisfying after getting burnt out on TFC/TF2/CS back in the day. There's just so many fun tactics you can employ as a squad or alone that impact the overall flow of a match. I never really got into playing the commander role though (the main RTS-like player role). In NS1 the aliens don't have a comm, just a weaker builder/healer class. I did enjoy taking that role when it was tactically advantageous to the team.
Something I look for now in competitive action games is this balance between tactics/strategy and twitch. I think twitch got too strong in the design of many competitive games after CS was successful, but 'outsmarting' your opponents via things like feints and such is really fun if the design makes space for it, which NS1 & 2 do really well.
Hadn't heard of Natural Selection, but did play some Tremulous back in the day, which looks like basically the same game idea. It's pretty cool, and a really great idea for a game system, though I'm not that into FPSs.
Yes, I always forget about Tremulous since I never got around to playing it. Very similar conceptually in many ways.
I'll die on the hill that dota (and Dota 2) are the greatest multiplayer games ever made. It's not stripped down, it just distributes the tension and challenge across 5 people. It's beautiful, it's complex, it's extremely rewarding for both solo and team play, there is soon much space for expressing yourself, every game is different and all of that for free.
Sitting at 2 am with 4 friends clutching a victory from 5 other dudes after 60 minutes of struggle is about as emotionally invested as I will ever be in any game.
So with a heavy heart I have to mostly agree. The toxicity in most solo queue games is unbearable. The fetishisation of esports hurt the game in many ways, even though the resulting competition is very beautiful. The culture around it deep garbage and it brings out the worst in people.
I do wonder how much of it is due to the underlying stresses and atomisation of capitalism. And if a better culture could be shaped if the people who run it actually cared.
Average eat sports fan vs average FGC enjoyer