Not necessarily the best active, playing community. I’ve noticed that the people you meet playing a game, and the people you meet on the forums, or out in the wild can be very different, though certainly the playing community can be part of the fanbase.
I think the worst fanbases I’ve encountered are Final Fantasy and Sonic the Hedgehog. They’re both a bunch of whiners that REFUSE to be pleased with anything the game gives them. Is it a good game? Too bad, they’ll complain ad nauseum about how they changed Sonic’s eye color, somehow ruining the game FOREVER. Try to make press releases making it clear that you listened to fans and are addressing their gameplay and story concerns? They’ll just start 100 threads complaining about the main character’s name. Some people complain about the Zelda fanbase and the infamous “Zelda cycle”, but in Zelda there’s a clear delineation between the fans and the trolls, in my experience. In Sonic and Final Fantasy, there’s no real way to tell who’s trolling and what’s a fan screaming in apoplectic range that the game isn’t enough like/is too much like [6, 7, or 8, your choice].
The best, on the other hand, is the Tales series. There’s a few whiners, and every once in a while there’s a minor flame war over localization of whatever title, but everybody is generally on good terms, very calm, and into reasonable discussion. They’re altogether pleasant to chat with.
It also depends where you go, too. Reddit has a crazy amount of love for everything Nintendo 64, other websites are console-specific, and what not. For me, it’s kind of hard to tell. Like here, for example, the Dope doesn’t like big releases. Call Of Duty doesn’t get much play here, which is shocking, because it’s only the most played game in the universe currently.
CoD is big, but I think recent statistics put League of Legends as the number one e-sport (in terms of average active log ons per day, money made, videos watched, etc) at the moment. Unless you were utilizing hyperbole, in which case carry on. Not that it changes you point much (we have, what, one LoL thread with like 4 posts, most by two people).
Edit to add: Also, Nintendo 64 FUCK YEAH, I love how 6 of its 15 games were so amazing. But seriously, it had some of what were arguably the best games of all time, but it had practically no library. The Playstation probably had just as many good games, thought a lower percentage over all due to shovelware.
For LoL, I heard that Starcraft II was the number one e-sport, and LoL surpassed it. If that’s wrong, I apologize, but I read it on EscapistMagazine.
For the N64 thing, I exaggerated a little, but it had a pathetic 3rd party library due to the cost of developing cartridges, and I say this as a person who only had an N64 and hated the Playstation for stupid console war reasons.
I intended a little bit of hyperbole, but I don’t know one way or another. All I know is that Call Of Duty sells stupid amounts of rehashed games every year. I know that because I buy them because there’s nothing out there better right now, unfortunately.
The Skyrim thread has 1500 posts, so it’s definitely not the case that Dopers don’t like big releases. Or more comparable, the Battlefield 3 thread has over 400 posts.
MW3 doesn’t get much discussion because it’s a piece of shit and there’s nothing to talk about. It’s exactly the exact same rehashed shit they’ve been shovelling out for 6 years.
Dopers skew away from lowest common denominator bullshit, which the big things often are, but not always. Compare discussions about HBO’s Game of Thrones to discussion about The Bachelorette Season 14.
On part one, that’s true. Skyrim does (Deservedly so) get a lot of love around here, but it was going to. It’s an RPG, made by Bethesda. I’m not sure where I’d rank the Battlefield love here, though. There’s clearly some, but it’s not like Skyrim. I suppose I’d put it at “moderate”.
Actually I was thinking of another Bethesda RPG as a candidate for “worst fanbase.” Back before Fallout 3 came out there was a HUGE outcry by seemingly everybody who’d ever played any previous Fallout title that BETHESDA WAS GOING TO RUIN FALLOUT FOREVER. Mind you, of course, this was about a game that had yet to hit the shelves, but from the second the first promo pictures came out–and we’re talking about artwork that wasn’t even going to play a place in the game–the crying started.
Here’s an example of some of it. Oh no, Fallout fans were “forcefully fed PR” leading up to a game’s release! Duh, that’s called MARKETING. Leaving aside any of the “console vs. PC” debate, the level of craziness about Fallout 3 just didn’t make sense to me. I played Fallout 1 and 2 and Wasteland, so it’s not as if Fallout 3 didn’t eventually appeal to PC lovers.
I know you’re going to hate me for saying this, SenorBeef, but in my mind the Fallout community was the genesis for the idiotic “console gaming ruined PC gaming” meme. The Fallout community was bound and determined to hate Fallout 3, and that would have happened whether or not it was designed for the console or not. Because that happened to be the main criticism of Fallout 3, the assumption soon became that every game that sacrificed even anything for console play was irrevocably ruined.
The Elder Scrolls Series IMHO has the best fanbase. Sure, they’ve got some haters mixed in, but the modding community, wow! How many other games have so many outside people putting so much work in making the game better, weirder, or just plain different?
I’m largely ambivalent towards mods. I have to be, as I do almost all of my gaming on the console, but, after poking around in a lot of them, Sturgeon’s Law definitely applies. The fact that you can do some of that stuff is kinda fun, though, it’s just that I don’t have much desire to get into it at all.
I was involved, slightly, in the Railroad Tycoon 3 mod community and those people drove me batty with their constant whining and complaining, saying things like “Unless you rework the entire economics engine of the game, you’ve lost me for life!” and worthless crap like that. Made me wonder what sort of person has nothing to do but bitch about video games? If you don’t like it, don’t play it. Say your piece and move on… don’t hang around the forum for months thread-shitting all the discussions.
The Pokemon fanbase is divided more-or-less equally between hyper-competitive battlers who will mock anyone who doesn’t take a ‘tier 1’ pokemon, and furries. The former are why I stopped playing as a teenager, the latter are why I didn’t return. Either way, it’s an orgy of the most depraved excesses of nerdity.
Is beyond good and evil the game in which you have a bouncy talking pig or something as a best friend? Because I tried that game and loathed it–never got more than about half an hour into it.
Portal, on the other hand, is the game of the gods.
