cold take: hero shooters are garbage. If there's different character appearance options in the game it should be a dressup game with limited impact on gameplay like splatoon. I don't want to have to be sgt. bumblefuck mcgee because he's the only person on earth who can use an assault rifle

@anemone HUGE AGREE

@anemone I am really thankful that Overwatch 2 and CONCORD killed the Hero Shooter, god please no more of these

@anemone
I guess if you could mix and match kits and costumes it'd be cool.
Reason it's this way now is everybody else is too busy using everyfuckingthing else.

@Paradox@raru.re Splatoon lets you design your character and then wear whatever clothes you want. They do have effects on your stats but you can customize them. (Not) coincidentally it is the only shooter I have bothered to play in years.

@anemone
As far as I can tell, there's maybe two different kinds of characters to use in Splatoon.
It's hardly a hero shooter because there's much less diversity in how you play the game from the perspective of the character you pick. I imagine it's more reliant on map design and game mode.

@Paradox@raru.re your chosen weapon determines your kit. But yes it's not a hero shooter which is kind of my point: Hero shooters are trash genre and companies should stop making them

As a corollary here's my related "hot" take:
Overwatch: shit game
Apex Legends: shit game
Team Fortress 2: shit game
Whatever other dumb hero shooter you like: also a shit game

@anemone This was also my findings

@ocean@raru.re its funny how so many battle royale games try to be hero shooters which the most successful one lets you pick any skin you want (provided you bought it during a limited time window for irl money, but that's a separate issue)

@ocean@raru.re theres still more coming out but they will probably all die an ignominious death while the only people who liked them (game journos) cry about it

@anemone Oh yeah there was one they were showing off that I've forgotten the name to, and I knew that was one just DOA lol

I feel sorry for the devs in the industry right now, everyone is jerking them around trying to push out live service slop

@dagda actually:

@anemone
Ok so I don't think you're wrong.
From my perspective, TF2 is a hero shooter, and I love that it exists.
I don't play it because I don't much like mp play, much less an fps. But it has good culture.
Overwatch is a fucking mess, Concord barely existed, and.... I dunno what else there is. Maybe this was something Valve could only pull off in their heyday, or maybe it's possible to make it work and most people just misunderstand why tf2 worked.

I daresay we would all live if AAAs stopped and left it to the indies to figure it out. I don't hate the genre, but I definitely know of more that were bad than those that were good.

@Paradox I disagree

@anemone
I've literally never played it. My only experience with tf2 is the promo videos and community shitposts (and effortposts).
It's entirely possible it's a mediocre game, but now my question is, is it worse than Overwatch? If you had to pick one, which?

Because for people that were interested in the concept of such a game, that was important. They flocked to it, even if it wasn't great. It was good enough, and the best available.

@Paradox@raru.re i would probably rather play overwatch tbh i remember trying tf2 and even back in it's heyday I did not enjoy it at all

@anemone
Interesting. Well, fair enough.

@Paradox@raru.re the only good parts of tf2 were the character intro videos that were not even part of the actual game

@why@shitposter.world its a stupid argument because games like quake or counterstrike don't have unique characters and literally started the competitive scene and still have dedicated fans

@why@shitposter.world not that games should even be designed around the "competitive scene" since it accounts for like 0.001% of the people who actually play it

@anemone team fortress 2 is ok because I want all of those men carnally. I can't say the same for other games in the genre