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.