@@CynicalGamingBlogTerry309 You also talk about the character action crowd, but didn't address how places like Reddit are full of two things: 1. over-the-top montage videos of some insanely done combos that genuinely sometimes makes a beginner feel inferior. I tried to do those combos in dmc 3, and the amount of hours you have to sink into learning how to hold the controller in a way is ridiculous 2. Character action fandoms don't care about obscure beat'em ups/hns games. Unless..... if a big CZcamsr talks about them, suddenly YOU have to play that game.
I did address that. I said part way through the video that games like bujingai, genji and onimusha aren't worth mentioning because they barely even have a community. Character Action Game community is only for popular beat em ups or DMC like games, basically any form of action game that they consider profound. So the lesser known ones aren't considered character action games. There isn't a 3D Beat em up fandom, because the genre isn't popular enough to generate one... save for the few most popular ones... which are split between musou and character action. The rest are just in a void, forgotten by most.
An interesting topic, I tend to do own my thing when it comes to gaming, my own set of rules, my reasons for enjoying it and like most…. sometimes I agree with the community while other times I don’t. For example, I really enjoyed the combat of Valkyrie Elysium but hated pretty much everything else. Same with Forspoken …and many others…. So, I really enjoy listening to opinions but at end of the day, I make my own reasons for loving or hating a game, regardless of what the community thinks.
I've seen a lot of this in the gaming community over the years. I'll talk about all 4. 1. The mastery people are pretty annoying, in fact very annoying but is a a sterotype with video games in general. I have had two doctors in my life tell me something about me "mastering" a game when in reality, not everyone plays games to "master" them, a lot of people play different games for different reasons rather than mastery. The git gooders are very annoying, I remember tweeting about my issues with Resistance Retribution and two people told me I suck at the game when this is coming from the guy who actively defends Fall of Man's difficulty, that game felt fair, Retribution expects you to defeat lots of enemies and also super powerful tanky enemies without the ability to sprint, no ability to evade attacks and a contextual melee attack. You can say it's a "skill issue" or "git good" but I think the game towards the end and especially at Chapter 5 to be too unfairly designed with the limited controls. You can excuse all kinds of bad design by saying "git good", and it won't make me change my mind and is going to make me hate the game more. 2. I'm not really an easy mode, normal or hard mode player. I just randomly pick what I'm going to play. If a game has a lot of bad design that I have a feeling I won't like, I play on easy to mitigate potentially frustration I might have. Stuff like Knights' Contract and modern military games like Battlefied 4, Medal of Honor Warfighter and Ace Comabt Assault Horizon are bad even on easy. But I did enjoy 3rd Birthday and Yakuza Dead Souls on easy with that said. I tend to play on normal most of the time but some games have bad normal modes like you said. I only play on hard if the game let's me switch difficulties at any time, or if the hard mode is balanced around getting the maxium mechanically depth out of a game. I did enjoy Spider-Man 2(2023) and mostly Trepang2's hard modes. Difficulty is a super hard balancing act to get right, but it varies for me. The better made the game, the higher chance of me playing on higher difficulties. 3. I don't 100% games period. That sounds like it could piss me off and potentially make me hate a game with a strong passion even though it's a game I liked initally. Whole thing seems like a waste of time, the bragging rights themselves don't even seem worth it. Rather just move on to another game. 4. I've seen this A LOT all though to be fair, you are one of the few I have seen who play JRPGs for the gameplay, most play it for story, but a game needs to have good gameplay first. If the gameplays sucks, I might as well watch an anime lmao. Least I can just enjoy the show with that. But yeah, I've also seen people compare sequels fairly to their predessors and while it might be sound, it's also narrow minded. Viewing a game on it's merits is more important than living up to past games, if a game sucks on it's own then it's a bad game period. What if someone never played the games you worshipped? Saying they don't compare to previous entries doesn't really tell you anything. It's nice you like the older games, but unfavorbly comparing the "old" to the "new" is how bad movies like the Star Wars Sequels get made and revisionist history happens to begin with. All in all interesting vid.
"The better made the game, the higher chance of me playing on higher difficulties" You just hit the nail on the head. Difficulty in games is merely a measurement of the developer's confidence in their game's mechanics. If you make a game hard by default, the game better be good or it just shows that the developers are arrogant. This is why I hate how people glorify the souls games for being hard games, that's not something you should be celebrating/advocating for because not all games should be hard like those games, also it's not the difficulty that makes the games good, Eternal Quest is a hard game, possibly harder than Dark Souls but the game sucks ass. Having higher difficulty options is always important but games need to make sure normal difficulty is reasonable and not too difficult. Hard mode on the other hand, go nuts. Achievements I was never a fan of, I miss it when games let you unlock stuff for doing all the extra stuff, now you just get a meaningless trophy and the unlocks are now paid DLC... so lame. I agree with the whole "viewing a game on its own merits" though I had a tough time doing that with Valkyrie Elysium simply because I knew that it was clearly trying to pander to Valkyrie Profile fans while also alienating us. Like I said in my review, the combat is playable and it's not a terrible game, it's just a forgettable one because of how devoid of soul it is and that's mainly due to it being a successor to Valkyrie Profile, if it was its own thing, it could have turned out better and more fleshed out. I really had to hold myself back in my review of the game for that reason, I wanted to do a huge rant about the game and how much it pissed me off. I notice in particular that PS1 games tend to get a lot of praise but their PS2 follow ups tend to get ignored/trashed on/compared to their predecessor negatively. PS1 really is one of the most overrated consoles in retrospect, I mean sure the consoles of today are far, far worse than PS1 but as far as retro systems are concerned, while PS1 is still a good system people glorify it way too much, it's overrated as hell. People worship games like Brave Fencer Musashi yet demonize its sequal without giving it a chance, even if its sequal is a flawed game, it still has some things to like about it. Xenogears gets massive praise, Xenosaga... not so much. Valkyrie Profile is considered a legendary game by most, Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria is considered a disappointment and not as good, Grandia 2 is considered inferior to Grandia 1 for some reason (which is ludicrous to me), Star Ocean The Second Story, I get why people like that game, heck it used to be my favorite in the series... until Divine Force but even then, my god people put that game on a pedastal all the time and constantly trash all other entries, like what the hell!? Sure Star Ocean 3 deserves it but 4, 5 and 6 don't. Legend Of Legaia is worshipped like a diety, Legaia 2? Nobody talks about it, granted I wasn't a fan of what I played of it because it has old school style turn based combat but so does Legaia 1. I seriously think JRPG fans are heavily biased towards PS1... and that's before we even start talking about Survival Horror fans....
@@CynicalGamingBlogTerry309 Yup, hard for the sake of hard isn't good design. It's only going to make a game more offputting to play. I respect From Soft for staying true to their intregrity but I doubt many games even pull off a, "hard but fair" like their games apparently do. I agree with that, normal mode should ease you and give you a challenge of, "am I going to die" and then give you a sigh of relief when you avoid death, it shouldn't be brainless but not super hard either. A lot of games don't even have well designed hard modes either, most of them just lowers the amount of HP and make enemies hit super hard. I don't mind trophies, I kind of feel good for saying I beat a game and got the achievement for it, maybe it's stockholm syndrome, I don't know, I do like to look at achievements for nostalgia as weird as it sounds, but I still don't care that much. Admittedly, I can sort of feel that way with some games like you did with Valkyrie Elisium, Thief 2014 did that for me. They ruined one of my favorite protagonists ever and the gameplay at least mechanically isn't bad but the levels are linear and way too small compared to the sprawling and wide open maps of past games. But stuff like Thief 2014 tend to be the exception, I don't think there are many games that piss me off as much as that. I like the PS1 but that it's not a system I would actively seek to play games on. When PS1 games are good, they are great, but when they are not so good, they are really not that good. I'm not sure how many mediocre PS1 games I'm willing to play. But as for the JRPGs, there seems to be a huge bias for the PS1, almost everyone in their 30s and 40s and have nostalgia for 90s games seem to love them and from what I can tell, they seem to have super heavy bias towards them. I'm not even sure if any PS1 JRPG is even worth playing outside of maybe Final Fantasy and that seems to be pushing it. Whenever a PS1 JRPG gets discussed their is usually a lot of nostalgia heavy bias surronding them and of course they will nostalgia plays no part at all since well denial is apart of human nature. And speaking of survival horror fans, it just seems Resident Evil and Silent Hill get talked about the most, and everyone else has a cult following. Honestly? I think Silent Hill fans are crazy people. They worship a series that has pissed them since probably 2004 or 2007 if you want to be kind and they treat stuff like Silent Hill 2 like some kind of holy scripture. RE fans are also crazy, but Silent Hill fans are like an abused housewife who like to rant to their friends about how much they hate their husband they refuse to divorce.
@@CynicalGamingBlogTerry309 I wrote a lengthy response to you but it seems CZcams has censored me yet again since my comment isn't actively popping up so I'm going to write a shorter response. The thing is, not all games do hard difficulty that well. Some games are just hard for the wrong reasons. Souls games might do difficulty well but many other games don't. Hard for the sake of hard is never good. Arguably not all video game hard modes are good. Most just lower HP of your character and make enemies hit harder and that's it. I don't mind trophies since it provides proof that I beat a game and I like to look at the dates of when I beat or dropped a game, they are pointless but I find some charm in them even though its stockholm syndrome. The way you feel about Valkrie Elisium I felt about Thief 2014, that game ruined one of my favorite protagonists, and while it had good mechanics, it had really awful level design and so many contextual mechanics. Thief 2014 tends to be an outlier though. PS1 JRPG fans seem to be weird people. I like the PS1 but mainly just certain titles, it's not a system you will see me playing random games on. The JRPG fans in particular sound like nostalgic 30-40 year olds who probably haven't played their favorite game in over a decade. A lot of them sound dated and poorly made too. Survival horror fans are weird in that it's mainly Resident Evil and Silent Hill. RE fans seem to at least enjoy their newer games while Silent Hill fans probably haven't enjoyed a game in their series since maybe Silent Hill 3 or Silent Hill 4 if you want to push it. Where do they get so much devotion for a series they only like 4 games if not only one(SH2) for? They seem like an abused housewife who complain to their friends about their abused husband rather than getting a divorce.
Thing about trophies being proof of beating a game is they are stored on a server so if anything happens to the server, you can't back it up... whereas save data you can. I mean there are perks to that though but I see trophies as a replacement of unlockable content which is now paid DLC.
Star Ocean The Second Story is the only other one worth playing if you ask me, perhaps Legend Of Dragoon too but that's it, the rest can just be skipped over.
Interesting video, I can't comment of the difficulty aspect of games as I always pick easy unless it's a genre I'm confident in. I've never been good at games and people could say it's a skill issue but I play games for various reasons, it's not always about the gameplay and it's not always about the story. Each game is different and I approach each game differently. I may play something that I don't like, but may try it again later on to see if that was just how I felt in the moment and if my opinion has changed. Recently I tried Painkiller Black and didn't like it, it doesn't mean I should just shelve the entire franchise because of that one experience. It tells me that I should try other games in the series and if I by chance like them then I might appriciate the one I didn't like more. I don't care about achievements, never have done. If I think it's easy to get the ones I missed while on my first playthrough, I'd do a second playthrough only if I knew I would enjoy it, which it is very rare for me to do a second playthrough. So generally speaking achievements to me are just meh. When it comes to gaming communities, I generally don't participate unless I have something to get off my chest. 90% of the time my opinion is a disliked one, so I don't bother wasting it on people who either don't understand my opinion or refuse to acknowledge it (talking about reddit mainly here). So I don't really participate in them anymore, I just have a few outlets now and I barely speak on those. That's why you'll very rarely see me speak on the discord for example.
Honestly if you don't like Painkiller Black, you are better off shelving the rest of the franchise because the rest of the franchise is very much the same... but has problems. A lot of that is due to the fact that the later entries were made by modders and not actual game developers but the publisher repackaged them into games with no quality control and the result of it is a mess that will make you wish you were playing Painkiller Black. If you think Painkiller Black's level design is bad, wait till you play Painkiller Ressurection, that might actually be the worst level design of all time. The only Painkiller game I'd go out of my way to recommend is Painkiller Black, the other Painkiller games are for die hard fans only. If you ask me, it's probably better to just give Painkiller Black another go than play any of its sequals. The original game is the most refined experience of them all, they all get less and less refined as the series goes on.
Where are you getting to interact with a lot of these communities? I avoid Twitter and the old forums that I used to use, like GameFAQs. If I detect any sense of ego from someone who is otherwise anonymous - maybe they have a persona tied into their name and their avatar - then I just ignore them. These people LARP for make-belief internet points and attention. (Maybe that was a tangent and unrelated to what you were talking about. Oops.)
All over the place, be it CZcams, Discord, Reddit, Twitter, Twitch, they're all over the internet, you can't avoid them. Given the fact that I make content connected to these 3 genres of games I attract people in my circles who are into the same stuff but those same people have people in their own circles who somehow find out about me and my stuff and those people are the ones that bring about problems.
12:36 XD
I remember when Sekiro came out, and many acted like the game was too easy and some claimed never dying at all. Not even once. Yeah, lies.
Yeah those people are very annoying and diminish the value of actually conquering these games. Mastery is a journey after all.
@@CynicalGamingBlogTerry309 You also talk about the character action crowd, but didn't address how places like Reddit are full of two things:
1. over-the-top montage videos of some insanely done combos that genuinely sometimes makes a beginner feel inferior. I tried to do those combos in dmc 3, and the amount of hours you have to sink into learning how to hold the controller in a way is ridiculous
2. Character action fandoms don't care about obscure beat'em ups/hns games. Unless..... if a big CZcamsr talks about them, suddenly YOU have to play that game.
I did address that.
I said part way through the video that games like bujingai, genji and onimusha aren't worth mentioning because they barely even have a community.
Character Action Game community is only for popular beat em ups or DMC like games, basically any form of action game that they consider profound. So the lesser known ones aren't considered character action games.
There isn't a 3D Beat em up fandom, because the genre isn't popular enough to generate one... save for the few most popular ones... which are split between musou and character action. The rest are just in a void, forgotten by most.
An interesting topic, I tend to do own my thing when it comes to gaming, my own set of rules, my reasons for enjoying it and like most…. sometimes I agree with the community while other times I don’t.
For example, I really enjoyed the combat of Valkyrie Elysium but hated pretty much everything else. Same with Forspoken …and many others….
So, I really enjoy listening to opinions but at end of the day, I make my own reasons for loving or hating a game, regardless of what the community thinks.
Yeah I just try to avoid it all but it's kinda hard to do so at times.
I've seen a lot of this in the gaming community over the years. I'll talk about all 4.
1. The mastery people are pretty annoying, in fact very annoying but is a a sterotype with video games in general. I have had two doctors in my life tell me something about me "mastering" a game when in reality, not everyone plays games to "master" them, a lot of people play different games for different reasons rather than mastery. The git gooders are very annoying, I remember tweeting about my issues with Resistance Retribution and two people told me I suck at the game when this is coming from the guy who actively defends Fall of Man's difficulty, that game felt fair, Retribution expects you to defeat lots of enemies and also super powerful tanky enemies without the ability to sprint, no ability to evade attacks and a contextual melee attack. You can say it's a "skill issue" or "git good" but I think the game towards the end and especially at Chapter 5 to be too unfairly designed with the limited controls. You can excuse all kinds of bad design by saying "git good", and it won't make me change my mind and is going to make me hate the game more.
2. I'm not really an easy mode, normal or hard mode player. I just randomly pick what I'm going to play. If a game has a lot of bad design that I have a feeling I won't like, I play on easy to mitigate potentially frustration I might have. Stuff like Knights' Contract and modern military games like Battlefied 4, Medal of Honor Warfighter and Ace Comabt Assault Horizon are bad even on easy. But I did enjoy 3rd Birthday and Yakuza Dead Souls on easy with that said. I tend to play on normal most of the time but some games have bad normal modes like you said. I only play on hard if the game let's me switch difficulties at any time, or if the hard mode is balanced around getting the maxium mechanically depth out of a game. I did enjoy Spider-Man 2(2023) and mostly Trepang2's hard modes. Difficulty is a super hard balancing act to get right, but it varies for me. The better made the game, the higher chance of me playing on higher difficulties.
3. I don't 100% games period. That sounds like it could piss me off and potentially make me hate a game with a strong passion even though it's a game I liked initally. Whole thing seems like a waste of time, the bragging rights themselves don't even seem worth it. Rather just move on to another game.
4. I've seen this A LOT all though to be fair, you are one of the few I have seen who play JRPGs for the gameplay, most play it for story, but a game needs to have good gameplay first. If the gameplays sucks, I might as well watch an anime lmao. Least I can just enjoy the show with that. But yeah, I've also seen people compare sequels fairly to their predessors and while it might be sound, it's also narrow minded. Viewing a game on it's merits is more important than living up to past games, if a game sucks on it's own then it's a bad game period. What if someone never played the games you worshipped? Saying they don't compare to previous entries doesn't really tell you anything. It's nice you like the older games, but unfavorbly comparing the "old" to the "new" is how bad movies like the Star Wars Sequels get made and revisionist history happens to begin with.
All in all interesting vid.
"The better made the game, the higher chance of me playing on higher difficulties"
You just hit the nail on the head. Difficulty in games is merely a measurement of the developer's confidence in their game's mechanics. If you make a game hard by default, the game better be good or it just shows that the developers are arrogant. This is why I hate how people glorify the souls games for being hard games, that's not something you should be celebrating/advocating for because not all games should be hard like those games, also it's not the difficulty that makes the games good, Eternal Quest is a hard game, possibly harder than Dark Souls but the game sucks ass.
Having higher difficulty options is always important but games need to make sure normal difficulty is reasonable and not too difficult. Hard mode on the other hand, go nuts.
Achievements I was never a fan of, I miss it when games let you unlock stuff for doing all the extra stuff, now you just get a meaningless trophy and the unlocks are now paid DLC... so lame.
I agree with the whole "viewing a game on its own merits" though I had a tough time doing that with Valkyrie Elysium simply because I knew that it was clearly trying to pander to Valkyrie Profile fans while also alienating us. Like I said in my review, the combat is playable and it's not a terrible game, it's just a forgettable one because of how devoid of soul it is and that's mainly due to it being a successor to Valkyrie Profile, if it was its own thing, it could have turned out better and more fleshed out. I really had to hold myself back in my review of the game for that reason, I wanted to do a huge rant about the game and how much it pissed me off.
I notice in particular that PS1 games tend to get a lot of praise but their PS2 follow ups tend to get ignored/trashed on/compared to their predecessor negatively. PS1 really is one of the most overrated consoles in retrospect, I mean sure the consoles of today are far, far worse than PS1 but as far as retro systems are concerned, while PS1 is still a good system people glorify it way too much, it's overrated as hell. People worship games like Brave Fencer Musashi yet demonize its sequal without giving it a chance, even if its sequal is a flawed game, it still has some things to like about it. Xenogears gets massive praise, Xenosaga... not so much. Valkyrie Profile is considered a legendary game by most, Valkyrie Profile 2: Silmeria is considered a disappointment and not as good, Grandia 2 is considered inferior to Grandia 1 for some reason (which is ludicrous to me), Star Ocean The Second Story, I get why people like that game, heck it used to be my favorite in the series... until Divine Force but even then, my god people put that game on a pedastal all the time and constantly trash all other entries, like what the hell!? Sure Star Ocean 3 deserves it but 4, 5 and 6 don't. Legend Of Legaia is worshipped like a diety, Legaia 2? Nobody talks about it, granted I wasn't a fan of what I played of it because it has old school style turn based combat but so does Legaia 1.
I seriously think JRPG fans are heavily biased towards PS1... and that's before we even start talking about Survival Horror fans....
@@CynicalGamingBlogTerry309
Yup, hard for the sake of hard isn't good design. It's only going to make a game more offputting to play. I respect From Soft for staying true to their intregrity but I doubt many games even pull off a, "hard but fair" like their games apparently do.
I agree with that, normal mode should ease you and give you a challenge of, "am I going to die" and then give you a sigh of relief when you avoid death, it shouldn't be brainless but not super hard either. A lot of games don't even have well designed hard modes either, most of them just lowers the amount of HP and make enemies hit super hard.
I don't mind trophies, I kind of feel good for saying I beat a game and got the achievement for it, maybe it's stockholm syndrome, I don't know, I do like to look at achievements for nostalgia as weird as it sounds, but I still don't care that much.
Admittedly, I can sort of feel that way with some games like you did with Valkyrie Elisium, Thief 2014 did that for me. They ruined one of my favorite protagonists ever and the gameplay at least mechanically isn't bad but the levels are linear and way too small compared to the sprawling and wide open maps of past games. But stuff like Thief 2014 tend to be the exception, I don't think there are many games that piss me off as much as that.
I like the PS1 but that it's not a system I would actively seek to play games on. When PS1 games are good, they are great, but when they are not so good, they are really not that good. I'm not sure how many mediocre PS1 games I'm willing to play. But as for the JRPGs, there seems to be a huge bias for the PS1, almost everyone in their 30s and 40s and have nostalgia for 90s games seem to love them and from what I can tell, they seem to have super heavy bias towards them. I'm not even sure if any PS1 JRPG is even worth playing outside of maybe Final Fantasy and that seems to be pushing it. Whenever a PS1 JRPG gets discussed their is usually a lot of nostalgia heavy bias surronding them and of course they will nostalgia plays no part at all since well denial is apart of human nature.
And speaking of survival horror fans, it just seems Resident Evil and Silent Hill get talked about the most, and everyone else has a cult following. Honestly? I think Silent Hill fans are crazy people. They worship a series that has pissed them since probably 2004 or 2007 if you want to be kind and they treat stuff like Silent Hill 2 like some kind of holy scripture. RE fans are also crazy, but Silent Hill fans are like an abused housewife who like to rant to their friends about how much they hate their husband they refuse to divorce.
@@CynicalGamingBlogTerry309
I wrote a lengthy response to you but it seems CZcams has censored me yet again since my comment isn't actively popping up so I'm going to write a shorter response.
The thing is, not all games do hard difficulty that well. Some games are just hard for the wrong reasons. Souls games might do difficulty well but many other games don't. Hard for the sake of hard is never good.
Arguably not all video game hard modes are good. Most just lower HP of your character and make enemies hit harder and that's it.
I don't mind trophies since it provides proof that I beat a game and I like to look at the dates of when I beat or dropped a game, they are pointless but I find some charm in them even though its stockholm syndrome.
The way you feel about Valkrie Elisium I felt about Thief 2014, that game ruined one of my favorite protagonists, and while it had good mechanics, it had really awful level design and so many contextual mechanics. Thief 2014 tends to be an outlier though.
PS1 JRPG fans seem to be weird people. I like the PS1 but mainly just certain titles, it's not a system you will see me playing random games on. The JRPG fans in particular sound like nostalgic 30-40 year olds who probably haven't played their favorite game in over a decade. A lot of them sound dated and poorly made too.
Survival horror fans are weird in that it's mainly Resident Evil and Silent Hill. RE fans seem to at least enjoy their newer games while Silent Hill fans probably haven't enjoyed a game in their series since maybe Silent Hill 3 or Silent Hill 4 if you want to push it. Where do they get so much devotion for a series they only like 4 games if not only one(SH2) for? They seem like an abused housewife who complain to their friends about their abused husband rather than getting a divorce.
Thing about trophies being proof of beating a game is they are stored on a server so if anything happens to the server, you can't back it up... whereas save data you can. I mean there are perks to that though but I see trophies as a replacement of unlockable content which is now paid DLC.
Star Ocean The Second Story is the only other one worth playing if you ask me, perhaps Legend Of Dragoon too but that's it, the rest can just be skipped over.
Interesting video, I can't comment of the difficulty aspect of games as I always pick easy unless it's a genre I'm confident in. I've never been good at games and people could say it's a skill issue but I play games for various reasons, it's not always about the gameplay and it's not always about the story. Each game is different and I approach each game differently. I may play something that I don't like, but may try it again later on to see if that was just how I felt in the moment and if my opinion has changed. Recently I tried Painkiller Black and didn't like it, it doesn't mean I should just shelve the entire franchise because of that one experience. It tells me that I should try other games in the series and if I by chance like them then I might appriciate the one I didn't like more.
I don't care about achievements, never have done. If I think it's easy to get the ones I missed while on my first playthrough, I'd do a second playthrough only if I knew I would enjoy it, which it is very rare for me to do a second playthrough. So generally speaking achievements to me are just meh.
When it comes to gaming communities, I generally don't participate unless I have something to get off my chest. 90% of the time my opinion is a disliked one, so I don't bother wasting it on people who either don't understand my opinion or refuse to acknowledge it (talking about reddit mainly here). So I don't really participate in them anymore, I just have a few outlets now and I barely speak on those. That's why you'll very rarely see me speak on the discord for example.
Honestly if you don't like Painkiller Black, you are better off shelving the rest of the franchise because the rest of the franchise is very much the same... but has problems.
A lot of that is due to the fact that the later entries were made by modders and not actual game developers but the publisher repackaged them into games with no quality control and the result of it is a mess that will make you wish you were playing Painkiller Black.
If you think Painkiller Black's level design is bad, wait till you play Painkiller Ressurection, that might actually be the worst level design of all time.
The only Painkiller game I'd go out of my way to recommend is Painkiller Black, the other Painkiller games are for die hard fans only.
If you ask me, it's probably better to just give Painkiller Black another go than play any of its sequals. The original game is the most refined experience of them all, they all get less and less refined as the series goes on.
Where are you getting to interact with a lot of these communities? I avoid Twitter and the old forums that I used to use, like GameFAQs. If I detect any sense of ego from someone who is otherwise anonymous - maybe they have a persona tied into their name and their avatar - then I just ignore them. These people LARP for make-belief internet points and attention. (Maybe that was a tangent and unrelated to what you were talking about. Oops.)
All over the place, be it CZcams, Discord, Reddit, Twitter, Twitch, they're all over the internet, you can't avoid them. Given the fact that I make content connected to these 3 genres of games I attract people in my circles who are into the same stuff but those same people have people in their own circles who somehow find out about me and my stuff and those people are the ones that bring about problems.