Interesting idea, trying to create an objective measure through numbers and design, and I do agree games such as Halo get credit for things they did not do and heights they did not reach. But I feel like arguing about objectivity in art is a fool's errand no matter how you package it. Outside of the "hard" sciences, there really can be no pure objectivity about anything - even statistics require interpretation - so trying to apply some objective measure to something as fuzzy as art is a non-starter. Let's try music. Can we judge a work by its composition? How? This was actually by attempted modernists in the 20th century by measuring tonality, it never went anywhere and even its adherents would abandon it. Under this idea all music peaked 300 years ago with Western classical, but I doubt you listen to Chopin or Beethoven. If we seriously tried to go down that path, we'd struggle once we got to different cultures with different concepts of how music works and what scales are considered musical, or cultures where percussion and ritual dances are where music is centred. Maybe we can try fidelity? For the last few centuries there has been a race for the quality of sound, from the craftsmanship of instruments to concert halls with increasingly intricate acoustics. This exploded with the recorded media and later digital audio; away we moved from ornate auditoriums toward sophisticated recording studios with armies of engineers tinkering at optimizing waveforms. Maybe this is a frontier which we can judge music from some scientific angle? Attached is the album art and a brief clip of the 2008 album Deathconsciousness. It is mixed like utter shit. Tracks drenched in post processing reverb so poor you can hear the digital artifacts, vocals so quiet and drowned out as to be indecipherable, songs are distorted so heavily it can be difficult to judge what instruments are even present on a track, the entire album is so compressed its waveform can resemble like a brick. Deathconsciousness is considered one of the greatest shoegaze albums ever written. It is a work of art so intense the medium of sound can barely contain its emotion, it needs to be loud and extreme and sonically oppressive to convey its intensity. Were you to develop your idea further, you would run into this problem -- immediately finding limits to the attempt of turning games into an equation of content and complexity. Far Cry Blood Dragon has less "stuff" than every entry after, yet is regarded as one of the best games in the series. Most Assassin's Creed games are bigger and more feature rich than any of the early entries but are near-universally considered inferior. This could be a useful way to model why one game might be inferior to another, Deus Ex to Invisible War or Morrowind to Oblivion, but it could only ever model. Art is something fundamentally human, what we look for and enjoy is something unique to us, and it must be treated in the fuzzy and personal manner. There is no physical law for art and its value. We must write essays and record reviews and go on unread rants to explain our understanding of a game's worth, we can never defer to some mythical idea of objectivity.

>>1929235 A game has to be bad on its own, not when compared to something else.

CE is a much better game than Skyrim can ever be with any mods on top of it.

>>1929235 >>1929323 Objectively a game can only be bad if it's broken. Though I do think you can make some good discussion comparing a game to what it could have been compared to what it ended up being.

How does that one saying go, "comparison is the enemy of satisfaction"? Comparing subjectively different things created with different themes, goals, surrounding contexts, audiences, etc; is absolutely a fool's errand. If good quality was objective and easily obtainable it'd be trivial to produce and you'd end up with an ocean of "perfect" products, and at that point humanity might start losing its creative edge and capabilities for uniqueness or self expression (Even Touhou's dipped into a little commentary on this). Halo 1 I know has the context of being one of (if not) the first BIG console FPS games where every other game you mentioned was on PC with console ports being an afterthought. This allowed Halo to justify its weaknesses (except the movement bit) and target a more casual audience who unironically played it as their first FPS and carried that brand loyalty through the other 343 games at least. Skyrim I know less about but it most likely has a similar context, hitting a newer more casual audience by dickriding the success of Morrowind and Oblivion, being more widely available on every console not just PC and Xbox, making itself "more approachable" etc. Even the attempted DmC reboot, closer to an objectively bad game than either one you mentioned, even matching a few of your descriptors for Halo and Skyrim >DmC is just less.mp4 Is really just some shitty hipster-emo hack n slash that got the DMC IP stapled onto it, causing most debate to just being unfavorable comparison to the other DMC games. It couldn't stand on its own legs if it wanted to, might've even had a fanbase of people who liked hot topic and Vocaloid Screamo if it wasn't antagonistic to its predecessors and touted as DMC5. Everything I've seen of it is shit independent of those debates IMO, but we're getting to the point where someone twenty something trendsetter grew up with this as his first game and can define the "gold" he found in the shit pile. Art, Nostalgia, Time, all three easily fuck up something that can be so simple. I'm just autistically rambling and raving about the human experience for over 20 minutes at this point, TLDR I hate art debates, subjectivity, and things being different in ways I don't like (so do you, probably), and objectively bad "should" exist and does for Jekyll and Hyde etc, but seemingly can't for anything that gets a big enough audience, has a certain context, "unique" selling point, etc.

>>1929235 >Can a video game be 'bad' objectively? If you play some low effort indie games or maybe atari games I think you'll find some that are objectively bad. >bad in the sense that these two games are degenerative from what came before >Can this really be considered a good game if it ended up being a less mechanically-complex game than titles that came well before it? That's not what 'bad' means. Quality is not a measure of complexity. <but popular games get undeserved praise irrelevant If you want to convince people that halo or skyrim are bad you should evaluate them on their own merits and explain why they fail to entertain the player. Especially because you put the word 'objectively' in the title of this thread, not 'relatively'.

>>1929235 Objective good and bad exists as an inherent concept for anything that can exist, because subjectivity can be studied objectively. There may come a day when the finite human condition is cracked like the genome, and a machine could coldly and calculatingly create a mind-virus in art form to irresistibly control your thoughts and feelings. I think you need to gauge a game's quality by the scale of what it accomplishes as well as how well tuned the systems are to complement each other, and maybe also for sheer originality. Halo CE is a perfect example of tuning -you may not be able to sprint or slide or dash and clamber but you can dodge predictive plasma bolts with subtle motions, synch up your movements to a plasma rifle's rate of fire and step between bullets, and because the elites actually have advanced movement you're forced to stand and fight, keep track them when they try to break line of sight and play the angles to buzz their shoulder, flush them out with a nade and finish them. Many games have grenades but they're often unwieldy and impractical or just unfun to use even if they're strong, especially in older games, whereas in halo ce your restrictions lead to a profound sense of freedom when you nade jump, get out of bounds, break scripting, and create the high-skill situation of nade-weapon-retrievals. In Half Life you get the world's lamest pistol. in CE you get gaming's greatest pistol. If you pick up a rocket launcher, it's not gimped or balanced and you're not obligated to let it rot until "it's time" while using your boring rapid-fire weapon of which you might have two or three versions of to deal with fodder. In CE you pick up rockets and they're crazy strong, you get tons of ammo, and you're free -nay, obligated- to use them against whatever you fucking want. Every health kit is a supercharge. The AR in particular, is a garbage gun on paper, but you can sweep it back and forth to stunlock to death a hallway full of fodder without taking damage, and it happens to counter the most dangerous enemy -invisible elites. The guns could never be that individually interesting if you carried all of them unless the game sabotaged your ammo so you're stuck trying to go rock against paper until you memorize spawns. I think Armored Core 1 is one of the best in the series of like a bajillion games exactly because it's so simple and brutal compared to their later attempts to tune and balance it, and that simplicity leads to absurdly fast dev times, so the first three games which came out within a year-and-a-half have more content than most of the rest of the series. Objectively bad is actually hard to achieve and I think that serves my point -because if systems don't work well together you just get bland gruel no matter how much you add. In BlazBlue Calamity Trigger the final boss, Nu, has one attack where she throws out swords in rapid succession. Because each sword is a distinct attack, if you jump over her head she'll spin around and hit you anyways. So you're trying to rush down her ranged attacks but getting in close accomplishes nothing. There's a lot of cool stuff in CT but none of it matters when you fight Nu, you just need to wait and bait. It actively and completely ruins almost everything you can do in the game, so it's objectively bad. There's certainly bad games, but one popular enough to be discussed will probably have redeeming qualities to someone. I think Halo 4 is the best example I can think of that's profoundly bad in all aspects , but there are people who will stumble through on easy and not notice anything different from every other shooter which they also enjoy only as partial participant and say they successfully killed a few hours of their limited lifespan so it's alright i guess.

>>1929235 >OP encounters someone with a different opinion >can't immediately dismiss the conflict throught the one thought-terminating trick he knows >can't ignore the conflict, even though it's about hyper-popular games that have already been discussed to death decades ago >goes to the interwebz in search of validation >the best he can come up with to defend his position is a comically unwieldy definition of "objective quality" and unoriginal cherry picking arguments Please stop posting, and go play more games to broaden your horizons/challenge your assumptions: the naive "more mechanical complexity = better" position usually doesn't survive an encounter with Dwarf Fortress or even just QWOP.

>>1929235 >Morrowind good >Oblivion and Skyrim bad because streamlined Morrowind itself was a step down from Daggerfall. So stop pretending as if Morrowind is some purer form of Elder Scrolls as the seeds of what would become modern Elder Scrolls stem directly from Morrowind.

>>1929235 That's the longest bait post I've seen in a while, I'm impressed. Still, you're both a negro and a homosexual OP, and should better spend you time thinking about how you want to take your own life.

>>1929235 Conplexity means nothing. More complex doesn't mean better. Vic 3 is by everyone seen as more complex then vic 2 yet vic 2 is still a better product because how it's executed. And that's the point execution. How you execute anything in a video game determines everything. How you execute the story, the gameplay,the visuals and so on so forth. The only time where this works when something is overcomplicated or oversimplified

>>1930152 Who can play daggerfall with straight face and say it has more features than morrowind? It doesn't even has stackable items that you can put on shelves.

>>1929235 Yes. Every you like = bad. Every game I like = good. Simple as.

>>1929235 >>1929506 >Objectively a game can only be bad if it's broken Pretty much this. Though you could argue a game has objectively bad features that conflict or don't serve the game well.

>>1930745 Simple as what?

>>1929235 >The only metric that one can say the series has improved on is graphical fidelity ummm no. skyrim is butt-ugly compared to the previous games

>>1929235 I think a game is objectively bad when it fails to be what it set out to be, and mostly importantly, fail at being entertaining. Both Skyrim and Halo succeeded in being what they were and most important of all they are entertaining games, if they weren't they wouldn't be popular On an semi-unrelated, stop worshipping complexity, Morrowind's RPG systems were full of flaws and I'm not even only talking about the hit rate system. You should admire a hammer for its ability to hit a nail comfortably and effectively, not over its derangedly designed handle that you have to study to then finally hit a nail

>first pic You can always spot midwits because they praise Morrowind's infamous RNG miss mechanic to be le ebin contrarians, but neglect to mention its undisputably superior (if still flawed) damage mitigation formula as they didn't actually play the game. Malus points for misunderstanding how level scaling works in Skyrim on the most basic level, aka zone scaling and individual enemy scaling, let alone the finer details such as NPC classes.

The issue with games in a series, like Skyrim, is that the overwhelming majority of people are going to judge it based on other games in the series, which is perfectly reasonable. However, just because a game is worse than other games in a series, that doesn't necessarily make it a BAD game by itself - it just makes it worse than its other entries. Is Skyrim a bad game by itself? No, I would say it's a perfectly serviceable hack n slash adventure game to screw around in. It's just that a bunch of people will say that Daggerfall/Morrowind/Oblivion/whatever are better, and that's perfectly fine. Also, while being able to fuck up the casting of spells while you're fatigued makes a bit more sense, attacks being able to miss when the actual swing of the weapon makes full physical contact with an opponent is a fucking retarded mechanic and you cannot convince me otherwise. I'm glad they got rid of that shit.

Gacha p2w microtransaction filled slop yeah, absolutely bad both for the direct players via it being itself and other games players as a result of poisoning the industry.

>>1929235 To measure whether a game is bad or good you must ask what a game is supposed to do A shovel that burns well is Good kindling but does not make it a good shovel. This is obvious because a shovel has a clear and defined purpose If we were artic explorers who could carry very little in our packs a shovel that burns well may well be the exact thing we need, and therefore a good shovel, in that it is the shovel that is good for the journey To ask if a game is good or not is a folly because people want different games to do different things. Even the individual wants multiple different games Halo and skyrim likely served the purposes of your friend and so were good to him

>>1929235 More or less. You can argue the validity of standards but it is possible to create quality standards that can be evaluated objectively.

>>1934127 friendly reminder that you do not bully gachaniggers enough

>>1933866 >>1929508 >>1929323 Isn't comparison merited here? In the case of Skyrim, being developed by such a high-end game developing company, why should the sequels in a series be worse than what preceded it? They have the money, the resources, and the experience to make another good entry. So why didn't they? They should absolutely be at fault, even if Skyrim is a good game in a vacuum. But we don't live in a vacuum. You can compare this to saying "Mexicans aren't as good members of society compared to White people, but they are just fine on their own", right? Why settle for less when it's perfectly reasonable to attain the best, or as close to the best as one can get? Sure, this argument doesn't really fit if the subject is the flagship game of a new developer, or if that same developer never really released a good game to begin with, but like I had made mention of in an earlier post, if some dev company is making an RTS for instance, isn't it kind of their duty to look at and play other popular or well-made RTS games and take elements from that to incorporate into their new product? If they're limited by money, fair enough, but we know Microsoft has deep enough pockets to fund whatever ventures are technologically possible for a simple game development company.

>>1935722 >post shitty OP with retarded question >a few anons give you a chance and offer polite, thought out replies >reply to them with an even shittier post full of retarded non-sequiturs and smuggled in assumptions We get it, you really hate Skyrim, now fuck off and stop with this pathetic attention-seeking behaviour.

>>1935774 >somebody tries to actually have a conversation >reply by calling all his posts shitty while not actually contributing to the conversation being had. We get it. You have bad taste. Now fuck off and stop with this pathetic attention-seeking behavior.

>>1932996 >I think a game is objectively bad when it fails to be what it set out to be, and mostly importantly, fail at being entertaining. I agree, I was thinking the same thing. If a game sets out to be something, or convey a certain idea and fails to do so, it is not a good game, plain and simple. This goes for any kind of entertainment or craft. If someone orders a pizza and it fails to excel in any aspects of being a pizza, then it is a bad pizza. If a musician makes a rock and roll album that doesn't have any characteristics of rock, or he fails in every way to make rock music, then it is a bad rock and roll album. So if a development team sets out to make an RPG but fails to make any of the mechanics work, then it is, objectively, a bad video game and bad RPG. Entertainment does matter, though. Again, if someone orders a pizza and it comes out not looking like a pizza, but tastes great, it might not be a good pizza but its good food. So if someone makes a horrible survival crafting game where you tame animals, it may be an objectively terrible game in the survival crafting genre, but it could be entertaining as an animal racing game, and thus good in that respect.

>>1935944 >fail at being entertaining >an objectively terrible survival crafting game could be an entertaining animal racing game Is there a limit to that logic? If a game is a terrible adventure game, for example, but within it has a card game that's pretty good but requires stomaching the adventure part, would that spoil the good thing due to its proximity to the rest of the garden of garbage?

You shit on Skyrim for things it removed, but you can't ride dragons in Oblivion or Morrowind. In the end, a game is more than the sum of its parts, and Skyrim, as a whole, is an enjoyable experience. Yeah there's shit in Oblivion that should've come back, including the monster diversity and such, but Skyrim itself is a pretty nice adventure. Plus, it feels smoother when you actually play it. We can judge it by the mechanics available, but more mechanics is more points of failure to give you tedious, annoying gameplay over something actually fun. I like both Oblivion and Skyrim, but just saying

>>1936438 I mean, this is why Reddit often goes >It's a good game, just not a good X game when 'different' sequels come out. see: Breath of the Wild

>>1936438 Actually you just reminded me that the entirety of Timesplitters 2 could be found in Homefront: The Revolution. There were mods that went so far as to carve out the base game and leave only Timesplitters.

>>1935825 >getting mad at people not taking bait off a tall building with you

taste is definitely subjective but you can also condition taste simply because human subjectivity is partial to other reactions. I see it that no matter how much of an impartial, unreactionary man you consider yourself, you're bound to be subjective to any reaction that will alter what you will do next. Your 'taste' is just some building blocks you've created to set yourself apart from other people in your social sphere (tribe), it has no objective quality.

>>1938498 Saying, and actually explaining and discussing, common opinions that shitty games are shitty isn't bait, even if you are some halfchan refugee newfag.

>>1941559 you call them common, but who holds these opinions? if you ask both the critics and the general population, a lot of them will agree Skyrim and Halo are good. If you think it shitty cuz you don't like it, that's fair; we're all entitled to our own opinions. What you're doing is coming in here holding your opinion as gospel and fact, then calling those who disagree with you shit tasted. You come arguing objectivity and yes, you can have shit games, like Big Rigs, as you mentioned. Game is broken, barely functional and just not very fun. A long shot from games like Skyrim and Halo. as many Anons said, just because Y isn't as good as X, doesn't mean that Y is bad.

>>1942207 They are common here, even if somewhat drowned out by newfags with that recent 4chan downtime. But I'm not even the guy who said it originally. I think all the Elder Scrolls games are bad, largely for reasons others have already said here. Morrowind is an objectively bad game because I can see my sword go through an enemy and still be told I missed.

I feel like the people who talk about games being objectively good or bad also have the absolute worst taste in games.

>>1929235 I have my own subjective rating system for games. >Good The game has succeeded in its objective, which is to entertain me and managed to create a lasting impression in my mind. <Example EYE Divine Cybermancy >Mediocre The game entertained me in some form but lacks something that makes it unique for me. <Example Hollow Knight >Bad The game utterly failed to entertain me on all levels, and left me angry or bored. <Example Bioshock Infinite Outlast Fallout 4 >How much streamlining can a game suffer before one can finally have the right to call a spade a spade - or in this case, a shitty game a shitty game? Honestly, it depends on your subjective interpretation of what is a shit game, is streamlining bad ? Probably, see Fallout 4, Fallout 3 and Bioshock Infinite, but I don't think is inherently bad if it fits in the game, for example, I think the ammo crafting in New Vegas could be simpler, not because its complicated system, but because it fits the simplified mechanics of F3. Is a new game with streamlined mechanics bad ? no, it's a new game, with different characters, different setting and different story, disconnected from its roots beyond its original inspiration. >Can this really be considered a good game if it ended up being a less mechanically-complex game than titles that came well before it? I never played halo, but I've played many shooters and I don't think Halo is a bad game because it has fewer features or mechanics than Quake or UT, its existence does not erase or overwrite Quake or UT, we may not get new arena shooters like them anymore, for obvious reasons, you can still play them at any time. For me Halo looks and plays like a mediocre game, and the fact that the series is basically in shambles is enough proof that I'm right about the quality of the game, the only reason why Halo got big was because it was a big fish in a small pound, so M$ milked that cow in the xbox and 360 days, now in the year of our lord 2025 the gaming landscape has changed, competition increased and everyone have their favorite genres, there is no reason to waste time, energy nor money in these AAA exclusives anymore. As for Skyrim, same thing, mediocre game. >these two games are degenerative from what came before I would have agreed with you 15 years ago, but now we are completely spoiled for choice in games, there is no reason for me to care about the state of Skyrim, its effects in the industry, or the upcoming Todd's magnum opus Skyrim 2 WE WUZ KANGS and SHIET.

>>1929235 You're talking about replay value or replayability.

>>1929235 Morrowind > Skyrim > Oblivion I play Elder Scrolls for the environments and worldbuilding, not for the gameplay mechanics. Morrowind wins due to logistics of text vs voice acting. You can fit a lot more lore and story into text than audio. Morrowind had the most diverse biomes. Oblivion was too much green hills, trees, gray boulders. Skyrim was in the middle

>>1929235 CE is an objectively well designed and good game you tremendous gabe gobbling faggot

>>1942952 Interesting graph.

>>1951046 Still mad we never got to see a Cyrodiil and Imperial City the way they were talked about in lore.

>>1942952 I replayed OoT about 4 times right after beating it 100% the first time. It did the same with Skyrim but only twice and Xenoblade 2 twice

>>1929235 All these arguments sound like the decade's old PC gamer's lament of consolization (see Deus Ex: Invisible War, Crysis 2, Supreme Commander 2). I used to hate this too until I stopped looking for what I wanted out of the AAA industry and looked instead at niche titles and developers and supported them instead. https://yewtu.be/watch?v=24Y58q4YCeo

>>1952281 It started with consolization and then with dumbing down no matter the platform for mass market appeal. Funnily enough the most dumbed down ones were previously PC exclusive staple games like Call of Duty, Battlefield, Minecraft and CIV.

>>1952457 Forgot Fallout and TES

>>1935774 Skyrim is shit because I can see all it's design flaws face front and what could have been a great game is instead a fetch quest simulator with useless loot and weak enemies tailor made for your level on the same looking dungeons.

>>1952466 >a fetch quest simulator Most of the fundamentally bad Skyrim quests are the non-fetch ones, such as the Thieves' Guild main line, and most of the quests so bugged they're borderline unplayable are also non-fetch ones. The real problems are the abysmal writing and the shitty engine, the quest design just had to adapt to those conditions. >useless loot and weak enemies tailor made for your level Both problems that were worse in Oblivion, at least Skyrim's scaling picks between somewhat hand-tuned fixed level entries instead of forcing everything to the same exact level and relying on the comically bad and inflexible stat auto-calc system. Arguably Skyrim has the opposite problem of enemies getting way too strong at high levels, in part because of health bloat in part because of a bug that gets you one-shot by kill moves when you shouldn't.

>>1951779 How exactly were they depicted in the lore, then?

>>1957925 Originally Cyrodiil had a far more tropical climate with most of the region being dense jungles full of beast-men, cults, tigers and endless dangers. The Imperial City was originally envisioned to be far larger than its final incarnation, a massive holdout of civilized power in the center of pure wilderness with each district practically being its own smaller city surround White-Gold Tower and full of numerous cults and subcultures. The entire region and its people were far more exotic and unique compared to generic medieval knights in armor, and ranged from more Hellenic-looking soldiers conquering and taming the wild lands to sometimes nearly shamanistic battlemages, many of the people in between incorporating materials like chitin and newt hide into their armor to reflect their adaptation to the region over centuries of conquest. It all has far more in common with Morrowind than other RPGs of the time, but we ended up getting one of the most generic looking bloom-filled fantasy worlds ever because that's what sold games in 2006. Mind you I love Oblivion and grew up with it but knowing what it could have been hurts.

>>1957925 >How exactly were they depicted in the lore, then? Pic rel. The context behind it is that when The Elder Scrolls Adventures: Redguard released in '98 one of the extras was a little booklet presented as an in-universe travel guide with sections covering almost every part of Tamriel. With Morrowind they sort of side-stepped the issue of having to include everything by setting it in an established sub-section with little discrete lore but even what was there they got right - about Vvardenfell, the PGE 1E basically says "it's a big island in the middle of a flooded crater with a huge volcano in it" and as a sub-region you can feasibly fudge or ignore a lot of what's there in the lore. The Morrowind section doesn't mention anything about the Telvaani being murder-happy ancap wizards but it does mention that they're clannish xenophobes even by Dunmer standards. In that case you can say "well, maybe only the Vvardenfell Telvaani are crazy about magic" or "maybe the writer didn't interact with them enough to get an accurate idea of them" or something. There's some plausible deniability there for the lore in the book not matching up precisely 1:1 with the lore in the game. Those arguments cease to hold water when the inaccuracies and mis-matches go beyond any possibility reconciliation with established lore, which is what they did in Cyrodil and why their explanation is basically "a wizard did it".