(01-06-2012, 01:38 PM)Gors Wrote: I know it isn't a valid quality measure, but you can assume that if almost five million people have bought the game, then something in your game is doing very well. That, or five million people like to waste money.

Or it's an issue of popularity and peer pressure combined. That's why FPS sell so well in the US: Popularity, and friends making friends by the game to play with them otherwise lulnoattention4u

(01-06-2012, 01:38 PM)Gors Wrote: That, or five million people like to waste money.

Haha, America.

In my experience, Minecraft is very fun when you're first starting out and still have yet to discover everything. Unfortunately that phase ends kind of quickly because there isn't actually much that you can discover on your own; at a certain point the only way to figure out what else there is to do is to look online at a wiki or guide, which completely destroys any sense of discovery or accomplishment. Not to mention that aside from a shelter to use at night, the building aspect of the game is completely unnecessary. Even in the (tacked on and irrelevant) final boss fight, what is arguably the main appeal of the game, building, is completely unhelpful and mostly impossible, because the boss destroys almost every type of block it touches instantly. It's not "repair the ancient redstone circuitry to power a seal that banishes the monster!" It's not "build a series of obelisks with connecting spires that box the monster into a certain area!" Or "create a giant powered cage and lure the monster into it so you can deal damage before it breaks free!"

It's "beat it until it's dead." Sort of like the game itself.

Is the building aspect fun? Sure, it can be. I like making really nice houses and bases and secret lairs as much as the next guy, and while they look nice, and feel fun, in the end they're all really just the same thing. A box for your items and tools. You can't actually do anything with your creations except stand in them.

To be fair pretty much every enjoyable part of the game can have its life extended and fun increased when you have friends to play with, and I even still play by myself sometimes, in an Animal Crossing sort of way, to make a farm or harvest potions. (kind of cementing what Tyvon said about the game being a chore simulator) The potion update was probably my favorite update in a long, long time, it was really fun to play apothecary, but even that aspect of the game is hard to breach without a guide, and all potions do in the long run is just make it easier and quicker to do what you were already doing.

If you consistently find Minecraft a lot of fun, great, I'm not going to judge you for enjoying yourself. These are just my personal experiences. But just because the game is supposed to be about unlimited creative potential doesn't mean the developers should be allowed to leave it as a hollow shell.

(01-06-2012, 12:38 PM)Gnostic WetFart Wrote:

Quote:well, you're definitely allowed to have an opinion, but Minecraft is objectively a bad game with fake depth

clarification: you are allowed to like it, but that doesn't make it a good game

justify

combat is empty and lifeless, 90% of the items in the game are worthless, use of "programmer art" and calling it a "style" (it's ugly and lazy), absolutely no character interaction whatsoever (so why are the characters there), all conflicts are unexciting and the "AI" is bad, the Big Bad Dragon is nothing more than a simple enemy with tons of padding and is overall not worth being called a boss fight, and there are absolutely no rewards to beating him


and let's not forget how much of an awful developer and person that notch is, eh



It's Just Not A Good Game, Sorry

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"but the game is fun when you do multiplayer!!!" that's great and all but any game is fun with friends and dicking around. that doesn't excuse anything

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also it's $30 LOL

Red Dead Reddemption might probably be a better minecraft experience without all these things that make minecraft a bad game. like minning.

quick, someone criticize other popular games

(01-06-2012, 06:53 PM)Alpha Six Wrote: "but the game is fun when you do multiplayer!!!" that's great and all but any game is fun with friends and dicking around. that doesn't excuse anything

Example of this is when I'd play MW2 with Skype Krew

Normally I just cannot play the game but listeing to Kori whisper "Oh nooooo" in the mic and Morgan being Morgan

it was just good times.

(01-07-2012, 07:12 AM)Whack-Dat-Yoshi Wrote: quick, someone criticize other popular games

Terraria. It's popular only because it ripped a dimension off of Minecraft and fixed a few things, which balances out and makes it equally bad.

I hate every single Eye Toy game for the ps2 ecxept the Ape Escape one.
I just don't like them for some reason and I think the Eye Toy itself is rubish.

I could say the same for Move™, honestly. Ape Escape looks like the only worthwhile game to play. Playstation Move Heroes is more of a fancy tech demo than a true game experience.

(01-07-2012, 10:55 AM)puggsoy Wrote:

(01-07-2012, 07:12 AM)Whack-Dat-Yoshi Wrote: quick, someone criticize other popular games

Terraria. It's popular only because it ripped a dimension off of Minecraft and fixed a few things, which balances out and makes it equally bad.

When Terraria first came out I was completely on the hatetrain for it for being a bad minecraft clone and for the spritework, but then I actually played it and it's actually really fun. Not to mention that it has a ton more content now than it did then, which makes it even better.

I like Minecraft a lot and I'm not sure if I'd be willing to call it a bad game, but I'm really pissed off at what it's become (as in, they tried to take a game with a simple concept and went in 20 different directions with it, all of which went pretty much nowhere resulting in a final product which was a pretty sloppy mess and then calling it an official release) but honestly Terraria is pretty much the definition of what Minecraft could have (should have?) logically progressed to, except in 2D.

One of the biggest problems I have with minecraft is there's just so little actual stuff to get, as far as base materials go which really limits your options. Once you know how to play, you can go from brand new world to diamond tools in an hour or less, and while you may not have a complete set of diamond tools, you're definitely left with the feeling of "what now?" because that's it, you just got the best items in the game and can pretty easily get more.

In Terraria, I can't speak the same for everyone since I'm relatively new to the game, but I've played 22 or so hours, all of them in multiplayer, (therefore making it EASIER to gather materials) and I'm still only in the first armor tier and JUST got a higher-level sword. There are -at least- six more tiers ahead of me. I'm only playing on a medium sized map and I still haven't gotten close to reaching the map limits. There's just that much stuff packed in.

Another problem with Minecraft is that once you know how to play, the challenge of survivng the first night (which admittedly, used to be REALLY HARD until you could bake wood into coal because you either had to find a coal patch immediately or you couldn't see anything meaning you were locking yourself in a dirt hole for the night) is completely gone. I can have a functional base complete with torches and a full set of tools up in under 10 minutes. Considering the fact that I only play the game on hard mode, it's kind of bad that there's no real challenge anymore. I mean, there might be a creeper or spider that kills you sometimes but it's never actually a challenge to do much of anything anymore. Just kind of tedious, I suppose.

i'm kind of rambling here, but it was more "defend terraria" than "attack minecraft"

(01-07-2012, 11:05 PM)Vipershark Wrote: I like Minecraft a lot and I'm not sure if I'd be willing to call it a bad game,

but it is a bad game. again, liking a game does not suddenly mean it's not a bad game.

you know what else is a bad game?

Just Cause 2.

it's an open-world game in which you basically do the same fucking thing over and over for 50 hours. it's buggy and even has some gamebreaking glitches in it. enemy variety is nonexistant and the weapons aren't very different from each other either. it's packed with content and all of the content is essentially the same.


i love the shit out of that game. it's fun as hell. but is it good? no.

On a technical level it might not be good, but if a game has a ridiculously sized audience, something about it was successful.

When I read Alpha Six comments and assessments of games, I realize he's not just judging his experience with the game. Because of his profession and background, he's also assessing the techniques used to create the game and how well they were pulled off. Which will inevitably make his opinions different from somebody who doesn't know how to make games, but is still an avid gamer.

It's a lot like the writing community. A person who writes novels will be able to scrutinize every other novel under the sun without even really meaning to. It doesn't make their opinion any more or less valid than anyone else's, but it does mean that they'll have a completely different view of a particular work than somebody who just reads. Very rarely do these two opinions come together.

Neither opinion is right, and neither opinion is wrong. Ultimately it should be left to history to decide which material is good and which material is not. Whichever games are still household titles in twenty years (who doesn't know Pac-Man?) were good games.

That argument in your first sentence doesn't work. Twilight has a giant fanbase and there is nothing good about Twilight.

(01-08-2012, 08:59 AM)Kriven Wrote: On a technical level it might not be good, but if a game has a ridiculously sized audience, something about it was successful.

When I read Alpha Six comments and assessments of games, I realize he's not just judging his experience with the game. Because of his profession and background, he's also assessing the techniques used to create the game and how well they were pulled off. Which will inevitably make his opinions different from somebody who doesn't know how to make games, but is still an avid gamer.

It's a lot like the writing community. A person who writes novels will be able to scrutinize every other novel under the sun without even really meaning to. It doesn't make their opinion any more or less valid than anyone else's, but it does mean that they'll have a completely different view of a particular work than somebody who just reads. Very rarely do these two opinions come together.

Neither opinion is right, and neither opinion is wrong. Ultimately it should be left to history to decide which material is good and which material is not. Whichever games are still household titles in twenty years (who doesn't know Pac-Man?) were good games.

First: Success does not equal quality.
Second: You don't actually have to design games to know about game design.
Third: Tyvon's background makes his thoughts a little less opinions and a little more educated analyses.

People don't seem to realize that there is actually a difference between liking a game and that game being designed well. When someone says "this game is a bad game because of these choices the designers made and these things they overlooked" and you throw back "it's a good game because I like it" you are not talking about the same thing.

So yes, the opinion "it's good because I like it" can't be wrong, because "good" in that sentence really refers to whether or not you enjoyed it on a personal level.