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| ▲ | mjr00 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > I would say this is overstating it a bit. Hollow Knight was critically lauded, grew an intense fan-base, and often considered one of the best in it's genre (the awkwardly named group of "metrovanias"), but it's a bit much to say that it has the reputation of "one of the best of all time". It's not, like, Tetris or Super Mario World. You are welcome to your opinion, but it is literally on a Wikipedia page called "List of video games considered the best."[0] There's no definitive list, of course, but broad consensus is it is one of the best of all time. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_games_considered... | | |
| ▲ | rimunroe 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | > You are welcome to your opinion, but it is literally on a Wikipedia page called "List of video games considered the best."[0] There's no definitive list, of course, but broad consensus is it is one of the best of all time. To the degree that such a concept is even measurable in the first place, I don't think pointing at a Wikipedia list of what looks like around a hundred games over forty-ish years as definitive proof that something is widely considered to be among the best games of all time. My guess is that most people think of categories of "best" media in much much smaller terms, and the only people allowing so many things in their categories are people like the American Film Institute and other people who like making lists. It's hard to judge games which came out relatively recently against all the games which came before. I also think there's an abnormal level of hype around Hollow Knight. It's an excellent game which was received well, but I think on the grand scale of games I would be quite surprised if it cracked the top fifteen of most critics' choices of best games of the past decade. Within the Metroidvania genre I'd expect it to be a very different story. | | |
| ▲ | mjr00 3 days ago | parent [-] | | You are welcome to your opinion. If you don't like Hollow Knight, that's fine. I was just pointing to proof that it is widely regarded, by most (but not all) people, as one of the best video games of all time, hence why the sequel got so much hype. | | |
| ▲ | rimunroe 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > I was just pointing to proof that it is widely regarded, by most (but not all) people, as one of the best video games of all time, hence why the sequel got so much hype. My point is exactly that I don't think most people think of things being "the best" in terms of lists that large, even most people who review things for a living. I'd be fine if you used that list as support for most people considering it to be one of the best games the year it was released though. > You are welcome to your opinion. For what it's worth I quite liked Hollow Knight. I put a bit over 30 hours into it, and plan on revisiting it soon. It's a very good game, maybe even excellent, but there are a lot of excellent games out there. | | |
| ▲ | mjr00 3 days ago | parent [-] | | 100 games over 40 years is not a lot. There's 23 games over the past decade on that list, Hollow Knight being one of them. If being one of the top 23 over the span of 10 years of something doesn't make it "one of the best"[0] in your book, you are entitled to think that. I'm just pointing out that most people believe it was one of the best. You can argue that you are right and the 500,000 concurrent Silksong players on Steam, plus the millions more on Switch/PS/XBox, are wrong, but frankly you're unlikely to convince me. [0] By comparison, the Pro Football Hall of Fame had 28 inductees since 2022 -- are you willing to argue that being in the HoF doesn't make you one of the best? | | |
| ▲ | rimunroe 3 days ago | parent [-] | | > 100 games over 40 years is not a lot. You continue to miss my point, as your comment about concurrent player count indicates. I think when you ask people to come up with a list of what they'd consider the best of something, most would max out somewhere between five and ten. Most people don't think of things along the lines of the AFI 100 Best Films list. They think in much smaller categories. > If being one of the top 23 over the span of 10 years of something doesn't make it "one of the best" in your book, you are entitled to think that. That article doesn't include any ranking as far as I could see, and your use of that article is specifically the thing I'm taking issue with in this thread. Are you referring to a different source? > By comparison, the Pro Football Hall of Fame had 28 inductees since 2022 -- are you willing to argue that being in the HoF doesn't make you one of the best? I'm willing to argue that judging something as being "one of the best" because it's in a list of a hundred things isn't very different from saying something is one of the best because it's in a list of a thousand things. I think most people--critics included--don't rank things in such large numbers, and as the numbers get larger then what little meaning the term had to start with diminishes even further. | | |
| ▲ | mjr00 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > That article doesn't include any ranking as far as I could see, and your use of that article is specifically the thing I'm taking issue with in this thread. Are you referring to a different source? There are 23 entries since 2015 on that page, Hollow Knight included. By definition, it's one of the best 23 games during that period, according to that specific list. > I think when you ask people to come up with a list of what they'd consider the best of something, most would max out somewhere between five and ten. Most people don't think of things along the lines of the AFI 100 Best Films list. They think in much smaller categories. I don't agree at all. It sounds like you're making up bizarre exclusionary criteria to discount the fact that Hollow Knight is widely regarded by many people as one of the best games of all time, which explains the hype behind Silksong. This doesn't mean you have to like it, personally. I can acknowledge that Red Dead Redemption 2 and The Last Of Us are both widely regarded as two of the best games of all time, even though I personally found them both boring. | | |
| ▲ | rimunroe 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > There are 23 entries since 2015 on that page, Hollow Knight included. By definition, it's one of the best 23 games during that period, according to that specific list. Okay, but that's an argument that it's considered one of the best games of the last decade. Hopefully you can understand my confusion. > It sounds like you're making up bizarre exclusionary criteria to discount the fact that Hollow Knight is widely regarded by many people as one of the best games of all time, which explains the hype behind Silksong. *shrug* I don't think it's that weird. This certainly isn't something I'm coming up with on the fly. I've felt like this for a long time, as have the authors of the many articles complaining about the meaninglessness of the even larger number of "best of" lists. > This doesn't mean you have to like it You've made several comments which make it sound like I'm arguing this because I don't like the game. I'd appreciate you not doing that both because I did quite like it and because it implies that my feelings about the game are biasing my argument. I'd make this same argument if you'd used that Wikipedia article to support your feelings about Red Dead Redemption 2. I'd probably personally consider that one of the best games I've ever played[0] but would object to using its presence in that article as proof that it was widely considered to be one of the best of all time. [0] Honestly I'm still not sure if I should compare it to other games I've played or put it in its own category of interactive movie. It was incredibly good, but the parts I think of as being the best are the performances and the technical achievement and clever landscaping of the game world. | | |
| ▲ | mjr00 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I feel like you're being pedantic here and transforming the statement "X is one of the best of all time" into "X is one of the top N of all time", where N is a number you've arbitrarily picked to exclude X. To go back to sports analogies, this entire comment thread has been analogous to: Person: "Who was Kobe Bryant, why does anyone care that he died?" Me: "He was one of the best basketball players of all time." You: "No he wasn't. Michael Jordan, Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, Larry Bird, Oscar Robertson, and LeBron James are better." Like, yeah your statement may be true. I, too, can pick N such that Hollow Knight is not in my top N games, because it's not my #1 all-time favorite game[0]. However, in the context of "why does anyone care about the sequel to Hollow Knight?" it's fair to say that many people consider it one of the best games of all time. It doesn't really matter that you, personally, may rank it behind 10, 15, or even 50 games. [0] That title belongs to Doom 2. | | |
| ▲ | rimunroe 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > I feel like you're being pedantic here and transforming the statement "X is one of the best of all time" into "X is one of the top N of all time", where N is a number you've arbitrarily picked to exclude X. > Like, yeah your statement may be true. I, too, can pick N such that Hollow Knight is not in my top N games A) I haven't chosen a specific number. I've even been deliberately hazy about the range because that's how I hear most people discuss their "best ofs" and favorites. B) As per my previous message I wish you'd stop acting like I'm fabricating this argument just to exclude Hollow Knight. My objection is with your reasoning. I've tried to be as clear as possible about this. C) You have to bound your category of what qualifies as "the best" somehow, even roughly, because otherwise the term loses what little meaning it had in the first place. I tried to make this point earlier, though maybe I didn't do it well enough: >> I'm willing to argue that judging something as being "one of the best" because it's in a list of a hundred things isn't very different from saying something is one of the best because it's in a list of a thousand things. I think most people--critics included--don't rank things in such large numbers, and as the numbers get larger then what little meaning the term had to start with diminishes even further. If you want to say it's widely considered one of the best of all time, that implies some very large percentage of the general public or critics would say "I think X[0] is one of the best games of all time". If you asked a random person to list which games they personally believed to be the best games, they'd probably only come up with a handful. I think that list is probably a decent predictor of what people would respond with if you asked them for the best game in a specific year, but that it would do a much worse job of predicting agreement across all time. [0] you can take this to mean either an arbitrary game or the Egosoft one :p | | |
| ▲ | mjr00 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > I think that list is probably a decent predictor of what people would respond with if you asked them for the best game in a specific year, but that it would do a much worse job of predicting agreement across all time. You must have missed the criteria for inclusion that list, which states that games are only eligible if they appear on "all time" best lists, e.g. not just "Best Game of 2017" or "Best PC Games". > The games are included on at least six separate best-of lists from different publications (inclusive of all time periods, platforms and genres), as chosen by their editorial staff. i.e. there already is agreement across all time. | | |
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| ▲ | rimunroe 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | > You must have missed the criteria for inclusion that list, which states that games are only eligible if they appear on "all time" best lists, e.g. not just "Best Game of 2017" or "Best PC Games". I, in fact, did not miss that. If you look at that article, it references over 90 lists. By my count, a bit under half of the lists were written after the release of Hollow Knight. Of those lists, Hollow Knight appears in only seven of them, which is tied for the lowest number of appearances of any game in that list released in 2017 onward other than Baldur's Gate 3, which was released in the last year the list has entries for. > i.e. there already is agreement across all time. Eh, fewer than a fifth of lists with what appear to usually be 30-100 games each doesn't seem like good evidence of agreement to me. There are degrees of agreement, and I think "widely" implies a pretty high one. I think GamingBolt having Hollow Knight on their 2022 list at #14, but then it being completely absent from their 2023 and 2024 lists is testimony of how silly these lists are in the first place. | | |
| ▲ | pharrington 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Again, you don't have to believe the people who are sharing their sincere opinion, but A LOT of people regard Hollow Knight as one of the best games ever made. I'm one of the people. I grew up in the SNES era, and I think Hollow Knight is an all around better game than every SNES platformer I've played, including Super Metroid which it's directly comparable to. | | |
| ▲ | rimunroe 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > Again, you don't have to believe the people who are sharing their sincere opinion, but A LOT of people regard Hollow Knight as one of the best games ever made. Why do you think I don't believe that? It's undeniably popular and was critically acclaimed. I never said it wasn't. What I did say was that that Wikipedia article didn't support your assertion that it was widely regarded as one of the best of all time. Just because there are many people who think it's one of the best doesn't mean that most people (or even a large percentage of them) think it is. | | |
| ▲ | pharrington 2 days ago | parent [-] | | You're right. I guess I just think you're being really pedantic, and that pedantry is what I was reacting to. | | |
| ▲ | rimunroe 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I appreciate the response! I have no defense against the charge of pedantry. I do stand by my points, but I definitely didn’t need to argue it for so long |
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| ▲ | corimaith 3 days ago | parent | prev | next [-] | | Hollow Knight was released when a greater portion of the mainstream was going into gaming so that was one of their first encounters of a "great game" hence the rave reviews. It's recency bias clouded by initial unfamiliarity of a genre's appeal that is misconstrued as a sole game's features. If you ask people who more acquainted with metroidvanias it's not going to be topping their lists. | | |
| ▲ | mjr00 3 days ago | parent [-] | | What Metroidvanias do you think are better? I've played a ton of Metroidvanias and I completely disagree. Hollow Knight has excellent combat and arguably the best map layout in any Metroidvania. The only Metroidvanias I consider its peers are Super Metroid and Rabi-Ribi. | | |
| ▲ | rimunroe 3 days ago | parent | next [-] | | Not the person you're replying to, but I personally preferred Ori and the Blind Forest a lot, both in terms of movement and story, but also in terms of the satisfaction of the backtracking and world as a whole. I felt like Hollow Knight did a poor job of nudging players in the right direction, and found the combat to be a bit more finicky than I care for from the genre. I'm not a huge fan of the art style either, at least as far as the environments are concerned. The satisfaction of feeling your set of abilities and options for gameplay increase and grant the ability to overcome previous obstacles is the main thing I expect and want from a Metroidvania. I felt like this was Hollow Knight's biggest weak point. It just didn't feel like you gained new abilities at as steady a pace or as though they opened up enough of the world each time compared to other games in the genre, including Ori and the Blind Forest. I think Super Metroid still has the best progression among Metroidvanias, but it's possible that's colored by my having first played it at a young age. | | |
| ▲ | vunderba 2 days ago | parent [-] | | I was just gonna say this was one of the most annoying parts to the original hollow night - the environments kind of blurred together after a little while, and I found myself backtracking more than I would've liked. | | |
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| ▲ | vunderba 2 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | While I wouldn't necessarily consider it better, the sequel to "Ori and the Blind Forest", "Ori and the Will of the Wisps" is easily on the same level as Hollow Knight. | | |
| ▲ | mjr00 2 days ago | parent [-] | | Ori + its sequel are not on the same level as HK, in my opinion. The combat in the original is really bad/way too easy, and the exploration is just okay. The sequel drastically improved the combat, but the map is significantly worse; it's essentially just a "hub and spoke" where you go to one of 4 (IIRC) separate disconnected areas, grab the powerup which does more or less nothing in the other areas, use it to finish the area and beat the boss, rinse and repeat until the finale. That being said, they are still very good games; excellent atmosphere, artwork and presentation, some genuinely haunting, creepy, and awe-inspiring areas. But I think Hollow Knight is a tier above them. | | |
| ▲ | rimunroe 2 days ago | parent [-] | | > The combat in the original is really bad/way too easy, and the exploration is just okay Personally I find combat to be one of the less important aspects of Metroidvanias. I prefer the main source of difficulty coming from platforming around environmental hazards. I felt like exploration in Hollow Knight was a bit too broad, and lead to too much unnecessary backtracking. Backtracking is a balance. It's a staple of Metroidvanias, but if the backtracking search space is large enough and places aren't distinctive enough then the search for a previously insurmountable obstacle can start feeling like looking for a needle in a haystack. That was my experience in Hollow Knight, and something I felt like the first Ori game did better. |
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| ▲ | OskarS 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | I mean, fair enough I guess, but there's a lot of games on that list. I don't think you would go around saying "LittleBigPlanet is widely regarded as one of the best of all time" just because it appears in that article. A lot of publications has done click-baity "top 100 games of all time". |
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| ▲ | michaelsbradley 3 days ago | parent | prev [-] | | “metroidvania”, not “metro” | | |
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