yup, turns out theyre not stereotypical vicious savages, they have nuance and its like oh shit they were being manipulated

@@MDHDH-iy7nm I honestly really fucking hated that Sylvanas took over as the leader of the Horde, she’s so insanely evil and was an awful choice. She’s like Season 8 Cersei

I don't think that it really did, the game's storyline made it VERY clear that Iron Horde != Regular Horde. One might say that it's usually the Horde characters that go nuts, but imo that's just because they're the actually interesting ones. Aside from Jaina, all the fan favourites appear to be Horde. But, if you dive a bit deeper, I think that's because the Horde was always Blizzard's "protagonist" faction.

@@TheLittlestDuck Oh yeah, WoW lore now is a joke and it makes me sad to see how far they fell in terms of storytelling. Wotlk was the last great bit of story we got and thats when the cracks started to show. Cata had some excellent moments but thats when you could really start to see the writing on the wall... A sad end to one of my favorite stories ever

Thrall is litterally Jesus

You are very intelligent.

I'd go out on a limb and say he probably feels the same way about diablo 2(considering a lot of the time, if you want specific loot, you have to grind bosses...a lot.)

I feel his problem is fighting damage sponges for 15 mins straight as opposed to grinding levels over and over

Yeah, also he mentioned time gating as being the most bullshit part right?

@@Davzzy grinding for bullshit is the ultimate time gate.

Hopefully Microsoft can turn them around

@@finleysmurflton4851 I kinda hope Microsoft just disolves the company, keeps the IPs they want, and sells off the rest for extra cash. You can't turn around Blizzard because they have always been this bad. It's baked into their DNA. To turn it around they'd pretty much have to fire and replace everybody who isn't a minimum wage coder.

After years of rampant abuse and sexual harrassment of their employees, why would anybody expect that Blizzard can turn around at this point?

He has summoned the BCBTW mob

I only grind in ffxiv when i want to

Vaush bad

Hopefully XVI is better.

The entire game itself is a grind. Like progressing is a grind. The number of pointless sidequests is a grind. Lots of the main quests are the exact same thing and so many of them are pointless like a grind. Lmao you can like the game but its either gaslighting or lack of perspective to act like the game isn't really really grindy

I did catch that too but I think what he means is time gating low level stuff is bad but high level stuff isn't time gated because Those guys are so skilled they don't need the gear behind the time gate anyway.

Right lol. Time is the worst way to compare the 2 games raids because of how different they are. Also the fact that third party add-ons that tell you what to do for each mechanic is pretty much mandatory for wow raiding is, for me, all I need to hear to say ff raiding is better.

@@booleanillogical4757 It's no longer third party. It become so mandatory that Blizzard added it to the base game.

I swear, the mental gymnastics people come up with to go Bae ending is ridiculous sometimes. Just admit that the pretty lesbian is more important than your morals and nobody will complain

That's a really good example. I picked the bad ending and instantly regreted it, because I wanted to believe there was another way or it wouldn't be thaat bad. And I think so many people picked it because they can relate to the feeling of being unable to let go, not wanting to sacrifice something so important, even if it's the right choice

@@potentiallyRealWarrenGraham I mean, your time fuckery has caused nothing but destruction. There is little reason to assume that one more dicking will fix everything. It does of course, but I always found the bay ending disingenuous.

@@quinnrosenberg3500 I certainly won't accuse the game of being subtle, but they made it clear (to me) that Max was meant to get to the cliff with Chloe. Destined to, even. She needed the alternate timeline to solve the disappearances around town, but time travel is weird and love is weird and together you coooould break the timeline... but here's how bad shit goes when you do. It's a pretty standard component of long-running time-travel stories; Flashpoint comes to mind.

Maybe I just didn't care about the town or any of its inhabitants and just wanted an ending where my girl Max got some ass. Is that so wrong?

Dunno, the dialogues and especially the pacing for me are just mediocre at best and atrocious at worst. I like the overall story and I like the characters but holy fuck do they take 50 back and forths to tell me that the bad guy I just encountered is a bad guy. I feel like I'm not missing anything by just skimming and skipping instead of sitting through a 5 minute cutscene before the next 10 minute cutscene starts.

I just cannot get invested in the story just because at the end of the day it's an MMORPG. Like I can go through all this heartbreaking stuff in these cutscenes but then at the end of it I'm just spat out into the same world with 100k of me that have gone through that exact same thing. Just kills any sort of immersion I can have

There are people who skip the story, just go right to endgame raiding, and have a fantastic time.

The 2.0 story is held by what was written in 1.0 but 3.0 and onwards are leagues above. There’s a reason people refer to the ARR grind. What I like is there’s an “endgame” for a lot of people. You can just be there for fashion or role play in restaurants and clubs, you can enjoy crafting or extreme raids. Some people just walk around the housing districts with friends and take screenshots.

FF14's story was the blandest thing I'd ever experienced (I got up to the middle of Heavensward I think, this was years ago). And it had some of the worst excessess of Silent Protagonist writing too. Alphinaud is the real protagonist, you're just a person-shaped block of meat that basically stands there, occassionally nods or shakes their head, and then obediently goes and kills whatever the REAL protagonists point at. If it 'got better later', I don't care, if should've gotten good sometime way before the expansions.

It's by far my least favorite genre description because it's so vague.

Tbh video game genres are kinda dumb in general. Bigger games are oftentimes so long and diverse in terms of gameplay that it's hard to find the right combination of tags to label it with. For example, Red Dead Redemption is a western with some historical fiction, you shoot guns, you use melee weapons, you fight with your fists, you hunt and forage for survival, you build and take care of a camp full of people, you ride and take care of horses, Arthur Morgan is a set character but you can still customize his look and make a few choices here and there, there's roleplaying, there's action, there's puzzles, there's comedy, there's drama, there's horror, it can be played first person, it can be played third person... so on and so forth. So yeah, I can personally see why the industry likes to use terms such as "Action-adventure"

@@Monomiknose Reminds me of the difference between "grand strategy" or other strategyesque games genres like 4x. Grand strategy is fairly arbitrary and it usually refers to just "games but more complex" lol Also I find that it tends to be applied to Paradox games specifically. Civ and it's like are 4x, despite the fact you could argue that Paradox games could be considered 4x and vice versa.

@Sandra Penn 4x is turn based, grand strategy is realtime with pause realtime 4x is rts. Also grand strategy has more spreadsheets! Hope this helps

I feel like genres have expiration dates. They're useful until a new era starts, and you need new genres.

I think that’s a very good point. Raids in 14 are much more difficult because they require a lot more active engagement with the fight. I feel like Vaush Would rage quit lol

Yeah last I remember gear in WoW is so heavily gated you could be spending months to fill out your raid gear. On the other hand, I was ready for savage after a couple of weeks in ff14

OR The combat in FF14 and WoW is different, and saying x or y is harder is useless and ridiculous. I agree on the gearing, and WoW players constantly say stupid shit about FF14 but lets take a more nuanced approach over WoW bad FF good that the internet seems to shove these days ey?

I find it really wild that he makes fun of people for enjoying the story. I know that WoW has conditioned him to not pay attention to the story because WoW's is utter dogshit, but not every mmorpg is alike lmao

@@graves141 I think the issue here is he thinks that there is only the story to enjoy there, as that's all he hears about. He is wrong about it, but I can see why he has just assumed the end game isn't anything to talk about, because he hasn't had anyone talk about it around him.

@@Crawver I'd be inclined to forgive him for it if he didn't go so hard against the endgame before knowing anything about it lol.

@@graves141 Paying attention to the story in WoW just makes it hurt more.

Welcome to Vaush I guess, ALL of his media takes are garbage.

That really does increase the difficulty of the game :/ Even getting everyone to show up on time is hard with 20. Lots of drama because with such a big group it's extremely rare they all get along. Subgroups forming that think they're better than the rest etc. 8 felt like such a relaxing number to get things done.

He's back to playing it now, but he's also skipping story because "lol story in MMOs" and just gunning for the endgame He's free to do what he wants, but like Massive missed opportunity

@@Dendrago0 oof yeah, as a political streamer I'd have liked to hear his takes on the refugee crises in uldah, the plight of the ala migans, and other such cases that have obvious real world parallels. Oh well, his loss.

Yo. So when does FF14 start being fun? My girlfriend is *obsessed* with it and I decided I'd at least give it a shot. Admittedly, I'm only Level 20ish...but I haven't like *really* had fun playing.

I smoke weed everyday so I decided to make my very expensive habit into something productive so i smoke weed on my KZfaq channel to make some money back 😎🏆

@@Dendrago0 I’m all for him playing the game however he wants, but I both love the story of Final Fantasy XIV, and would be really interested in hearing a political perspective on the story, so hearing that he was outright dismissive of the story is a slap in the face.

I second this.

The boss thing is true.

@@weirdo3116 The bosses, as i said, are puzzles, they all depend on you doing something specific to trigger their phases. Bosses that you need to deal health damage to beat, like the liches, sisters, lephantys (normal one or the event one) or the eidolon limbs can be one shoted in multiple ways

I like that you can choose to do stuff like that and then get to choose any ending you want. Its like you are writing different themes for the game.

Also that game is amazing.

Something I noticed is that whenever people criticize the moral choices in Spec Ops it's exclusively the white phosphorous scene

@@Argacyan most people are complaining about the lack of choice with the white phosphorus scene in Spec Ops. I get why, but that scene is the focal point of the entire plot so you can't really put branching choices there.

Not really, in one interview devs said that they wanted to give player a choice, but because of the time constraints had to cut it out.

You win the internet today.

Whoever explained D2 to him has no idea how it works lol

@Cornelia disagree, but I see your perspective

true, idk what bosses take 15 mins to beat unless you are under leveled or you havent got the right weapons, D2s biggest flaw is being really hard to follow what quests you are meant to do as a new/returning player and there is no reward for sherpering friends.

Or doesn’t know how to debuff/buff stack. I swear Vaush got all his opinions on Destiny from someone who hates it and never gave it a proper chance. The discussion around destiny right now is raids are too easy. Day 1 raids in Destiny are cleared before 12 hours, with the one exception of Last wish taking over 18 hours. Raids meant for six are often cleared by fireteams of three or even two players only a few days after they’re released. He complaining about bullet sponges meant to me he hasn’t heard any discussion around the game since like 2015.

You haven't said why that's harder than WoW content besides the 20 min fight length. Healers and tanks having to interact with the fight besides their assigned role is in WoW too and brute forcing is only available after weeks of grinding previous content.

@@Xeridanus the mechanics are harder to perform correctly. High level raiders from WoW have already admitted this. In fact, I would bet that the amount of time spent directly figuring out the fight, rather than just grinding gear and leveling is probably close to 2:1 for FFXIV. That might be a bit hyperbolic, but I'd like to see the stats. And I'd bet my life savings that FFXIV takes longer to learn the fights.

@@Xeridanus I think ff14 is stricter with banning add-ons and helpers than WoW is. It also feels more like an action game than an RPG in some fights due to all the platforming and interactivity. Then you have batshit good Blue Mage players that solo whole dungeons. FF just throws an entirely different genre of game at you and demands you git gud at that too

It feels like geometry dash. Where messing up is instant death and you basically have to just do it over and over again until you get it right. Also the music slaps.

Sure, but I think it's a reasonable enough distinction. First person games are extremely varied and so it's a bit deductive to still be lumping in things like prime and Portal in with Doom and Halo as though they really had that much in common mechanically, although granted I only played the first prime so maybe they went in a more FPS-y direction as it went on. Like Bethesda has no such marketing concerns yet surely nobody would consider the Elder Scrolls games to be FPSs just because you're in first person and can shoot people in the head with a bow, shooting in first person is an element but hardly the most important one from a genre standpoint.

The distinction was made because at the time "First Person Shooter" effectively meant "Doom Clone". So fast movement speed, relatively low player health, with hordes of enemies that rarely required more than pure firepower to beat. Nowadays, the FPS genre has diversified enough in terms of gameplay styles and pacing that referring to Prime as a "First Person Adventure" is unnecessary.

Good example. To be fair though, the way the game presents narrative information can make it pretty difficult to even tell what's happening or what anything means, technically the player has the means to find out enough to make better decisions but it's easy enough to miss it that I'd consider people making "bad choices" to be more like a toddler crushing ants from a moral analysis perspective. They're wrong, but it's easy to understand why they'd do the wrong thing without realizing it.

@@TheSquareOnes I agree, and I see the distinction you’re making. While the idea of a world where the propaganda and framing are so strong that you’re lead down a road to make a ‘moral’ choice without even realizing it is definitely present, it isn’t exactly the same as using those tools to coax players into intentionally doing something immoral with the belief that they’re behaving morally.

@Oswald Cobblepot plenty but a pretty simple one is "Alphascape O12S (Omega) what a stupid name. Who's gonna remember this next to Onyxia's Lair" As if the names from one Fantasy series are somehow inherently more dumb sounding than those from another to an outsider.

I suspect it has something to do with his autism. Like politics usually involves facts and evidence, so it is a lot more objective in the sense that there is an obvious right or wrong, good or bad. No problems for Vaush there. But stuff like media analysis is a lot more personal and subjective, and Vaush doesn't realise that there is no objective right or wrong way to enjoy or experience media. So he comes across as condescending and arrogant because to him there is only his way of enjoying media, and everyone who disagrees with him is wrong.

While I think it’s reasonable for someone to not play/watch everything, you can’t shit on something without having tried it. FFXIV may be a love letter to Final Fantasy, but it’s also a radically different Final Fantasy game. Edit: this marks the beginning of the Asmon-style FFXIV arc, I guarantee it.

@@rpglover101 My problem with that is that Asmon sat down and gave the games story a genuine chance from the beginning. While it seems that Vaush skipped to Endwalker and then started talking about how terrible the writing is. Ultimately it's a "to each their own" situation but it seems that once Vaush has a certain notion about a piece of media in his head it's unlikely he'll ever be moved over on it.

@@Vidaxer the funniest thing was when vaush said the reason why FFXIV WF's take so long is because the FF players spend so much time staring at the character models and shit, and are garbage (he said it in a joking manner, but it's nonetheless harsh, and isn't too far off of what vaush actually thinks of FF players) which couldn't be further from the truth, as WF players are insane cutscene skippers, i remember watching a world first prog and the players were actually confused as to who E12S's second boss was, because they didn't bother with the story but yeah, vaush's tendency to just generalize community hurts him, it's a tendency that not only extends to media but also his politics (like characterizing criticism as being from wokescolds). something that's definitely turned me off from him

I disagreed on his point about borderlands 2 bosses basically just because borderlands 2 is only bad when normal enemies are bullet sponges, not bosses

@@katethegoat7507 God point as long as the bosses who are sponges change their attacks/defences throughout the 10 min fighting

Legion was great

Cataclysm was where is lost the magic for me. Still play it occasionally though lol

@@RemixedVoice I could never get back into WoW after the lich king expansion. Halfway through wotlk they made leveling and dungeons way too fucking easy. Leveling and heroics literally became non-content because you NEVER had to fucking concentrate whatsoever. Then cata came out and leveling got EVEN worse and more streamlined and they removed all the cool old quests I used to like. Like, I just can't force myself to play for hours and hours through absolute braindead shit just to get to the endgame content. Just feels like a chore when the journey there isn't interesting anymore

@@MrRazmut leveling 1-50 takes about 10-15 hours casually. Another few for 50-60. Leveling has been shortened dramatically. The game used to be about leveling now leveling is means to an end. Just different.

Nah legion was probably the best expansion they ever had. Yea sure, it started off rocky as fuck with legendaries being gimped. But once that got rolling... wow. Mythic+ dungeons felt fresh, daily emissary quests that felt rewarding, the cosmetics that came from a really challenging fight in the mage tower WHICH they didn't had to nerf because it became more accessible on its own as people climbed in gear. The raids. each one was really memorable. Although it did trade very heavily on TBC nostalgia so maybe thats why it felt so good. Problem with TBC was a problem with the era of gaming tho, everything had to be super grindy. Yea, artifact weapons were grindy but not for the entire expansion long. Only at the start of each patch.

Yes, Nier Gestalt is a very good game, shame about the remake though.

@@genyakozlov1316 Why shame about the remake its a pretty good remake

Lmao Vaush equating time spent beating the hardest content with quality. This is such a surface level take. Then he goes to rant about names...that's when you know he's not taking any of that seriously.

The only thing i'm missing form wow is a substitute for mythic+. We had regular group of 5 where to tried to complete higher and higher keystones in time, improving rotation and how to do faster pulls. Especially interesting at the point where gear isn't a limiting factor anymore and it's just improving skills. there isn't really something similar in ff14. We just clear savage and that's it.

Yea that part was so frustrating to listen to. There's a Preach video (or two) where he kicks himself for having that exact same take that Vaush just did because he ended up being so wrong about it. The difficulty of raids in WoW and FFxiv just isn't comparable. They're both difficult but in different ways. I'd add that the difficulty of WoW raids is also increased because there are a lot more players to coordinate and who have to execute during a single pull. 20 players all doing their job for the same 5-10 minutes is harder to achieve than 8 players. There's also a lot more RNG in WoW raids, sometimes to the point that it becomes impossible to beat if all the wrong people are picked. And then part of dealing with that RNG factor of WoW is getting addons that can coordinate the raiders automatically so a world first guild has to wait for their programmer to create their weakauras. Also WoW raids tend to be stupidly overtuned when the raid tier opens so the world first guilds end up at a wall and literally need to stop raiding to wait for hotfixes. A lot of this difficulty just feels artificial. I only just started raiding the harder stuff in FFxiv. Savage afaik feels like late Heroic up to late-mid Mythic difficulty. But it seems like it's balanced well and the RNG is never impossible. The fights are also balanced so addons are completely unnecessary and that's really nice that I don't need Bigwigs just because SOME mechanics are particularly nasty. It means I'm expected to be smart and that's a nice feeling. Having the trust of your team that you can execute your job, and that you trust your team will execute theirs. Having only 8 players means each person is given more mechanics to execute in succession too; every boss has like triple the number of unique mechanics which does make it harder for each individual player, which is pretty fun. These raids are so much busier than most of the Mythic bosses I did in WoW. The only one that feels kind of comparable was Fallen Avatar which did feel like a constant choreographed dance that every player had to execute perfectly. But even though it had constant movement, there were only 4 mechanics that were repeated for like 5 minutes straight; it's not hard to understand 4 mechanics, it was hard to get all 20 people to do the dance in the same pull which just made the fight more frustrating than fun. The only "artificial" difficulty FF maybe has is when the most difficult parts of a fight are near the end so you have to drudge through 7+ minutes of easier mechanics just to get to the progression part. Haven't even tried Ultimates yet so maybe my take is wrong too. Oh and unrelated to raid difficulty, I fucking love that BiS lists are a thing in FF. Gear RNG was the bane of my WoW experience. If I had gear that wasn't titanforged, it was always nagging me at the back of my mind, like I should be grinding out mythic+ to "finish" my gear set. Being able to acquire my BiS for an entire gear set is such a relief for my dumb monkey brain.

Not to mention, I don't have to walk all the way back to the boss when I die. I don't have to do a fuckton of chores every week to get geared.... I just... Go raid. I fight the bosses (the fun part) until I'm done.

I mean, just because it is bad/unfun difficulty, at the end of the day it is still difficulty. And when people still played WoW, that was less of a thing than you are suggesting. I think it was Battle for Azeroth, where top guilds started doing "split runs", so that within 1-2 weeks most of the raid team was already in near BiS by the time they got to the last boss in the raid. Still took a long time, (and a race change) to actually get it down.

i played both mythic raiding in wow and savage raiding in ff. They have both different aspects that are harder. For wow i had more trouble keeping a good damage rotation up while doing mechanics, and it's harder in wow to play more classes well (in ff a lot of the same role feels a bit alike when playing them). In ff it's more about fast positing and good awareness at all times. Mythic raiding in wow felt for me a bit harder in general than savage ff14 raids(even months after it came out when gear wasn't the issue), i needed less time to prepare for them to clear. But that can be different for someone else. Getting a bit tired of the whole '''which of the two is harder?" discussion. It doesn't really matter.

WoW did have engagement mechanics even then. Mostly the raid resets and the fact that you got less XP if you didn't rest at an inn regularly. Although, it's also possible that they were more of an attempt to dissuade people from playing too much, which was considered a genuine problem with MMOs in the 00s. Of course, it's nothing close to the insane micro-management they do with players these days.

It started out as crazy time consuming, then with each expansion that got less and less. Until legion I wanna say. Thats when they added a "you have to farm each day to get player power" to the game. And its been a thing for 3 expansions now. And with every expansion announcement they are like "we arent going to do that again this time folks, we learned our lesson." only to do it again either through points or through upgradable ability items. I am SO glad i quit.

Until you are doing it for the 10000th time to get one piece of decent rolled armor

@@mitchhudson3972 Nothing about armor stats is a genuine necessity though. It makes a difference, but points in Discipline and points in a traditional MMO's Strength stat aren't even comparable. Destiny stats help you very passively, and while they're a grind I participate in myself, it's nothing so critical that you should feel in any way compelled to grind for it if you don't enjoy what you're doing.

@@djempathicmind8317 first of all, you need to grind for light level to begin with. Then once you're done with that, if you want to get the best gear (the whole point of mmos) it's shit tons of grinding the same boring ass raid/whatever

@@djempathicmind8317 I've had friends do the same raid a dozen times just to get the one piece of armor they wanted in the first place, regardless of roll

@@mitchhudson3972 I'm familiar with the issues presented, but that's not the same as complaining about how difficult it is to obtain a good stat roll. People do a single raid a dozen times in WoW or FFXIV for a single piece of armor they want as well. It's not 100% the same, but the grinds are similar. The same could be said with Power vs XP grinds. The difference is how it's implemented, but given how much of the XP grind in FFXIV can be Duty Roulettes that send you back into old content, it's not much different than Powerful/Pinnacle grinding.

The only good thing about Pandaria was the Pandaren finally becoming playable and the unique factor that they could join either side once you finished the starting missions

I stopped at the end of WotLK/ beginning of Cata, came back about 2 years ago for a month or so and it was rough lol.

I mean the endgame is the best part in most MMOs. Can't blame a guy for wanting to play the best content.

@@ThePsychoRenegade Most, but FF is widely known as the exception.

@@ThePsychoRenegade WoW maybe but FFXIV and City of Heroes it was more of a journey

@@ThePsychoRenegade keyword being: most. There's a reason (of many) why FFXIV is experiencing a massive skyrocket in popularity. One of those being it's not like most mmos, in that it's 'best content' is scattered all throughout it's length. Alexander, for example, is one of the game's most popular/beloved raids and it's experienced at lvl 60.

When did you quit playing? They practically removed the leveling requirement unless a new expansion drops

Even with Master/Grandmaster, talking about bosses being bullet sponges is like talking about an MMO Raid Boss having too much health because you only have 1 DPS on it. I play Destiny 2 for a living, so I'm a bit biased, but Master/Grandmaster bosses can be melted in an instant, it's just a matter of coordination and buffs. If you have a Well of Radiance and use appropriate weapons it's quite easy, the only real prevention is immune phases and even those can be worked around. The Corrupted for example, you can break the boss' shield at the end, kill all of the adds, then get in position and do DPS. You can even hold an extra orb to break down the boss' shield again if you don't do enough burst damage, giving you nearly twice as much time to finish her before she moves to the second battlefield and summons more adds. Destiny doesn't expect or demand teamwork when you're playing alone, because you're meant to be capable of playing alone, just like enemies in most MMOs aren't insanely tanky outside of Dungeons/Raids, because they're meant to be taken on alone or in small groups. When you go into team content, you're asked to play as a team. Destiny has taken time to figure out how much teamwork should be expected in easy content, that's why early on bosses had "too much" health, because they expected the team to work together. Now, teams can be relaxed to clear most things and only require actual teamwork when doing endgame.

@@djempathicmind8317 I mean, that’s kind of true, but the problem with Master/GM content isn’t necessarily that you’re flat-out incapable of melting bosses, but rather that you’re incapable of doing it without both grind that can get time-gatey AND coordination/skill. Like, if you don’t have a “Bonk Titan” or any of the few other builds that one shot bosses, no amount of skill is going to let your team one-phase GM Sedia. Basically what I’m trying to illustrate here is that GM’s have one of the two problems that Vaush outlined here, and you can kind of pick your poison. Either the bosses are bullet sponges, or you’re going in with weapons and gear that it probably took you a month + of soft-timegated grinding to get.

@@yourewrong9028 "Like, if you don’t have a “Bonk Titan” or any of the few other builds that one shot bosses, no amount of skill is going to let your team one-phase GM Sedia." Sorry, but this is just incorrect. I was farming last week with nothing but random Linear Fusion Rifles and a Well of Radiance for boss DPS. Sometimes we used Sleeper, sometimes we just used Threaded Needles and Taras. For context, I do Recoveries, so I'm used to working with various weapons. That being said, while I understand your general point, I simply think it's wrong to say that even in GMs bosses are bullet sponges. Most teams who are experienced with GMs can take down their health rather quickly, to such an extent that Lake of Shadows, Warden of Nothing, and a few others have had a history of boss melts being the go-to method of handling the boss room of a GM. Also, given the nature of Destiny's design, I don't think anyone who's played less than a month should really be expecting to hop into the hardest content in the game either. That's not because of time gating, but because of all of the moving parts that you need to learn. Trying to play Destiny like Call of Duty or Halo would be a travesty, and you wouldn't expect a FFXIV or WoW player to understand how to do endgame raiding with limited knowledge of their abilities and only a short amount of time to explore and learn it. That's not to say people should have to dedicate great deals of time to it for them to participate, but rather that through your journey to reach endgame you'll get Legendary weapons that'll make endgame at least mildly accessible.

The whole WP was meant to show the reality of your war crimes. Where doing that in a CoD game would be portrayed as a hero moment for the player. So many people miss that,even though.the game constantly mocks you after that expecting a big hero moment.

Yeah I like to see the evil route being the easier one, since it mimics reality a lot better and provide that temptation. This War of Mine did a good job with that. As for Spec Ops, I don't know if it really had the intended effect on me. My reaction was similar to Vaush. By not giving the player an active choice (besides shutting off the game), it does take away your responsibility, because it separates you from the persona of Walker. Since the player couldn't choose for Walker, then Walker did those things, not the player. And therefore you don't bear any responsibility for what happened. You're just watching Walker's story play out.

@Cornelia It seems that way at first, but it’s standard shorthand for all normal raids so it becomes intuitive very quickly

I feel like his problem with most games is that he just likes action games. I’ve tended to notice that if there’s any shred of a story in a game he’s playing he just does not care or won’t engage with it.

Precisely. Also on a meta level, by complaining about the lack player agency and decision making, we the player are essentially doing the same thing as what Walker does in Spec Ops - shifting the blame and refusing to take responsibility. Both the players and Walker had a choice, but one which we never actually considered - not continuing with the game/mission. Walker could have easily at any point in the story just turned around and gtfo'ed out of Dubai. It was only his self-imposed mission creep that kept pushing him forward. His original mission was just to do recon after all, not to single-handedly solve whatever was going on. Likewise the player could have at any point just said enough is enough and just stopped playing. But we don't, because we as players have been conditioned to see games as tasks to be completed, objectives to be fulfilled.

Eh. Some of the bosses in Master and Grandmaster content edges up on that "bullet sponge" line, but yeah, in normal difficulty raids the bosses definitely aren't "bullet sponges" unless you're going in with less people than intended.

@@yourewrong9028 Yeah but even in GMs you can build to delete them. You cant call a game full of bullet sponges when sometimes one specific mode has like a few high health enemies

@@darkaura019 I agree, but they do exist. You can definitely grind out builds to make them way easier, and they’re rare, but they do exist.

Or if you think you have all the answers and pick Yes-Man

@@malte3756 Right. It's a really special experience I think

But you couldn't have stopped. Not within the context of the game. Sure you can get all meta and say you could stop playing the game, but that's dumb. Having the option to continue or stop watching are the equivalent choices you get when watching a movie. So if you have those two as your "choices", you're just watching a movie and have no actual agency, so you don't have any of the blame. At least unless you want to put the blame on the viewer for all the people Jason kills everytime they don't shut off a Friday the 13th movie.

@@taragnor Spec Ops The Line is an objectively *INCREDIBLY* meta game. Characters will literally just *talk* to the player. When the game says “If you think this is terrible then you should’ve stopped” they’re literally telling *you* that this is your fault for continuing The game *does* treat you stopping as a legitimate option. Players are the ones that don’t

Thanks, someone finally fucking said it. and I'm confirming this as a WoW vet.

He said that didn’t he? “It’s tiered so you have to do the raids before it to have the gear and no matter your skill you can’t do some content mathematically”

nothing beats sith inquisitor storyline, it is the most fun story and you are just such an unapologetic egotistical villain it is delicious