Games Suck Now - Part 2
I wasn’t planning on writing a follow up to Games Suck Now, I didn’t want to write a book, but there’s so much more to be said. So here we are.
I don’t want to bash the casual community. I like casual gaming as well. I picked up the Torchlight III beta to waste some time, not that long ago. I just have a problem with people calling games competitive, when they aren’t. Well that and how competitive gamers have been more or less forced out of gaming. FPSes have become casual and whole genres are just gone like RTSes. I get it, they aren’t money makers, the pool of players is smaller, but we used to be able to co-exist.
And then Fortnite swept our hearts… or something like that. I avoided it at first, but ended up joining in season 3, and I have to say, it wasn’t that bad. That was before airplanes and mech suits though… ugh. Outside of that nonsense, I grew more frustrated with the franchise by the end of that season, until I quit early into the 4th, thanks to RNG. Randomness has no place, or should have very little influence over a “competitive” game. Fortnite, and other BRs for that matter have RNG in their core though. Random loot.
Spawn in, you drop into one house, an enemy next door, you find the only chest in your house and… shitty grey pistol. Your neighbor spams 5 rockets at you, because he got lucky with his chest, and you die. He had to vaguely aim at you… out skilled bitch! Right. Then he probably does some stupid dance he paid $7 for and some other highly skilled player snipes him in the back.
That’s not the end of the RNG though. At least in FN, but probably all of the shitty BRs out there, the guns are random. Okay, make main competitive mechanic in the game… random? In what world does that make sense? Do you see the NBA putting a gyroscope in the ball to make it bounce randomly? And Epic went as far as to invent a term “bloom”, oh it’s just bloom okay, that’s called spread + recoil, buddy.
And honestly just forget about other BRs, like super competitive game known as Apex. There’s no point in playing them.
Counter strike has had it’s flaws, but they learned their lessons. 1.6 was great. CS Source had HUGE hitboxes and flashes that blinded half the map for far too long. Hardly any pros played it for this (and a few other) reasons. They almost didn’t move over to CS:GO, too, it was almost another CS:S, until people started complaining. It’s now one of the biggest actual eSports out there and still going strong. My point here is that devs can learn from their mistakes.
I talked some shit about R6:Siege in the last, so let’s make things a bit more clear. They are awful excuses for competitive games. If you don’t know what “death holes” are, they are one of the major factors R6 will never be competitive. You can shoot a tiny hole in a wall, and put your face up to it, like a peep hole they can’t see you. And since you can wallbang in that game, you get the easiest kill(s) of your life. Zero skill needed. All of the other gimmicky things like RC cars are just a distraction to how piss poor that game is. It wants to be the next Counter Strike, but has no idea what components make a game like that work.
I was also planning on talking about Valorant a bit, but do I really need to? The casual player base, yes casual, is made up of 3 types of people: Riot fan boys, 30-somethings that thought they were good at CS (but don’t play it for some reason now, hmmm…), and little kids that don’t know better. The pro scene is filled with ex CS “pros”, but really players that should have never made it on to a team, and never made it anywhere. I can’t believe I spent that much time and energy talking about that pile of garbage…
Oh, I forgot something about CoD yesterday. In an absolutely scummy, penny pinching move, they removed dedicated servers in favor of p2p.
Under absolutely no circumstance, ever, should one player have a 0 ping, when others do not. The advantages aside, it opens up hacking like FPSes have never seen before.
Annddd lastly, something I totally missed last time was community servers. It was the only way to play UT back in the day, and you got to choose who you spent your time time. It was a great way to meet other like-minded people. It’s all died in favor of match making, unfortunately. And games like CS:GO that do support it, often tuck it away – it’s really sad. I only ever found one good community server in the many years I played CS:GO, there are more alive and kicking in the original UT!
In closing, game still suck. And if you’re one of the people that labels an RNG ridden game, with BS mechanics competitive, for the love of god, just stop already.