Koki on 17/4/2012 at 14:53
Quote Posted by Thirith
Then make up your own fucking example. Seriously, do you expect *anyone* to take you seriously, advocating a fabled sort of facts-only review that has never existed but is magically better than reviews that contain *opinions*? I gave you the benefit of the doubt that your point makes more sense than, "There should be reviews that are purely factual, and these reviews will be much better than
all the ones that have existed in the ~30 years that there've been game reviews!"
Yes, and there should be unicorns and flying pigs and cheese helmets. I pay my taxes, why can't I have one?
If you bothered to read the fucking OP you'd notice that there are reviews like that for movies, books, and everything else. Poetry even. Videogame reviews are the EXCEPTION, not the rule.
So here's your unicorn, citizen.
Inline Image:
http://pbfcomics.com/archive_b/PBF253-The_Last_Unicorns.jpgFlying pigs and cheese helmets were eaten by obamacare
Thirith on 17/4/2012 at 15:05
Facts-based reviews, opinion-free, for movies, books, poetry? Huh. Bull-friggin-shit. Or quite possibly unicorn shit.
Reviews that don't reduce what they're reviewing to a number? Intelligent, interesting thought pieces that go beyond "It's fun" or "It sucks"? If that's what you're looking for, then I'd say that those exist, although sadly they're a tiny minority. But I guess that's not what you mean, since you brought up that whole thing about facts vs. opinions. Which brings me back to my initial "Huh" in the first line.
Nice comic, though.
Koki on 17/4/2012 at 15:54
Quote Posted by Thirith
Reviews that don't reduce what they're reviewing to a number? Intelligent, interesting thought pieces that go beyond "It's fun" or "It sucks"? If that's what you're looking for, then I'd say that those exist, although sadly they're a tiny minority.
Wow, now it's my turn to ask you for links then.
IN THE MEANTIME, ENJOY THIS DYNAMIC RESPONSE TO RPS T:A REVIEW:
"There are games where you can just run around and spam bullets like a crazy-person and end up at the top of the leader board like some king or queen of awesomeness. Tribes: Ascend is not one of those games. Just look at its most famous weapon, the Spinfusor – a slow-moving projectile that doesn’t even hit particularly hard, and seems custom-built to be rubbish against fast moving enemies zooming round on every axis of movement."
Ironic then than all the competetive players pick the Thumper DX and Assault Rifle combo on the Soldier, and not the Spinfusor & Eagle. That's despite the fact that Thumper DX is THE worst explosive projectile in the game and Assault Rifle is second worst automatic in the game. Automatic weapons simply dominate T:A
that much. You can't afford to NOT have one and use it most of the time.
"This is a game of skill and precision, where teamwork is critical and points have to be earned."
Teamwork? Back to front at 300km/h or more at full health because of the regen, shoot the flag once to clear any mines/HoF, don't even touch the flag itself but grab it anyway because of Reach, you're at your stand in 10 seconds. Sometimes less. A good capper on Arx doing back to front
won't even touch the ground between the two stands.
If the stand is heavily defended, the capper just calls in a tac/orbital strike.
Turning the issue around, one good sniper completely shuts down any cap attempts, as does one good shriker.
Tribes: Ascend is the least team based game I've ever seen. One person can literally win the round while remaining 15 people on the team do nothing or next to nothing.
"With Tribes: Ascend, it’s fair to say that while earlier beta versions were decent, they weren’t quite there. Skill based weapons like the spinfusor sat next to much less involved kit like hitscan based pistols for instance."
Hitscan pistols are still in the game. No idea what he's on about.
"Throughout the process though, developers Hi-Rez Studios have outdone themselves with their responsiveness to community feedback, constantly tweaking and changing elements and creating something special regardless of whether you’re a Tribes newcomer or a more established fan."
HiRez listened to large community feedback pretty much only twice: When they made rifles bullet-based instead of hitscan and when they merged classes into 9 from original 18. All the other feedback, and believe me there is a LOT of it, remains completely ignored.
"While it offers several modes, like regular Team Deathmatch and Capture and Hold, Tribes lives and dies on the CTF battlefield. Two teams, two bases, two flags. Between them, a seemingly endless expanse of hills and mountains and scope for clever play."
Some of the maps are so small that snipers can shoot at each other
from their spawns.
"If you’re a flag-capturer, you’ll see it as a blur – your jetpack hurling you through the air, your feet ski-ing down slopes as you hold down the key that sticks two fingers up at the concept of friction."
Jetpack caps out at 72km/h, after that speed it provides only 1km/h/second speed increase. It's only good for going uphill, and if you want speed don't bother with slopes, just nitron yourself.
"If you’re a Juggernaut, those hills are where you deliver explosive packages from incredible distances."
Mortar range is a joke, Spinfusor MKD outranges it.
"Technicians busy themselves on the homefront, keeping the generators going that power your defences."
Defenses that can be destroyed even by a Pathfinder with a Light Spinfusor from outside of their attack range.
"Not all combat is at long range, but much of it is, and even most of the weapons with splash damage offer relatively little margin for error considering the aerial nature of the combat."
Fortunately that's where bullet weapons come in, allowing you to shred anyone flying high - in a Tribes game - with ease.
"It’s probably best to leap into Team Deathmatch mode first, just to get the feel of things, before stepping up to full-on Capture the Flag where turrets, vehicles, base defences and attacking power generators come into play."
In TDM, the team that first forms a Blob of Death wins. In CTF, the team that ignores both their own and enemy's generator wins.
"The only real catch is that managing all the complexity can be tricky, partly because of how much your team has to handle, but mostly for the lack of integrated voice chat. At least, so far. On the plus side, this means not being shouted at by the usual screaming waste of semen that infests most online shooters. It does however make instantly responding to an incoming flag-carrier zooming in at an appreciable fraction of the speed of light trickier than it might be, with your main communication method being a short-cut tree of barks like “Need! Covering fire!” and “Warning! Enemies!” that still soak up valuable split-seconds of your attention."
Voice chat will never be in the game, confirmed. VGS doesn't take "valuable split-seconds of your attention" and it's much easier to click VFF than actually say "I'm getting the enemy flag, don't llama plz" on chat yourself.
"You don’t have to top the leaderboard to make a solid contribution, and it’s tough to be a major drag on your team outside of the special 5v5 Arena mode (which is probably why you have to reach Level 8 to take part in it)."
One word: llama.
"In short, while the level of skill required to play well is much higher than most shooters, there’s no need to be scared off by the challenge."
There's nothing that makes T:A "much harder" than, say, Quake 3, Warsow, or even Counter-strike. Leading shots has been with the FPS genre since first Doom.
k bored now
Thirith on 17/4/2012 at 16:02
Can't do so from work (silly internet filter), but personally I consider a fair number of Eurogamer and RPS retrospectives and WITs pretty good in that respect (in fact, I think the general standard of Eurogamer reviews is pretty good, with some outstanding ones), or Kieron Gillen's article on The Cradle way back when, or some of the stuff in Kill Screen or The Escapist (haven't read the latter in years). (Based on your posting history I'd imagine that you'd find a lot of what I find interesting, intelligent and worthwhile pretentious, mind you.)
Papy on 17/4/2012 at 23:47
Quote Posted by Koki
Score or not you're still rating the game based on that purely subjective opinions of yours instead of facts.
Rating on facts? I'm sorry, but that's absurd. Giving 8/10 for graphics is opinion, not fact. Describing one specific bug bay be a fact (as long as it is not presented out of context), but subtracting 2 point out of 10 because of bugs is opinion, not fact. Even simply saying controls for a game are bad is opinion, not fact.
I also would like more facts with reviews, but a (meaningful) rating will always be only a matter of personal opinion.
CCCToad on 18/4/2012 at 02:17
Quote Posted by Thirith
Which is vastly different from saying that reviews should be all about facts and in no way about opinions. Koki seems to be talking about reviews that are innately different from reviews, whether by IGN or Eurogamer, and that would seem to be the exact opposite of e.g. RPS's "Wot I Think".
Which is kind of the point. If a review focuses simply on "fun" its going to miss those objective facts that will affect how much enjoyment other players may get out of the game. For example, the fact that one of said FPS games involves extensive backtracking through identical empty rooms fightining infinitely respawning enemies might not turn off the reviewer. For me it was bad enough that I couldn't make it very far into the game.
Papy on 18/4/2012 at 03:37
Quote Posted by CCCToad
the fact that one of said FPS games involves extensive backtracking through identical empty rooms fightining infinitely respawning enemies
How do you objectively define "extensive"?
I know what you mean, but what you ask for is not possible.
Thirith on 18/4/2012 at 05:17
Quote Posted by CCCToad
Which is kind of the point. If a review focuses simply on "fun" its going to miss those objective facts that will affect how much enjoyment other players may get out of the game. For example, the fact that one of said FPS games involves extensive backtracking through identical empty rooms fightining infinitely respawning enemies might not turn off the reviewer. For me it was bad enough that I couldn't make it very far into the game.
Thing is, this doesn't make any sense to me - because extensive backtracking and boring level design impair fun for a majority of players. If a review focuses on how fun a game is but ignores the things that make the game less fun - bad bugs, boring levels etc. - they're doing something wrong. The thing is, as Papy's written above, you can state facts (and any okay review will do that) but you will still have to have an opinion on how much these facts affect a player's enjoyment. Is a game a buggy mess or a diamond in the rough that lacks polish? Opinion, not facts.
And for me it returns to this: ratings, while I see why they may be necessary for the *industry*, are a bane in terms of what is worthwhile about reviews. They're utterly decontextualised and pretend a precision that is simply not there ("Game A is 23% better than game X!"). What quality there is in a review will be in the narrative part, not in the number at the end.
Koki on 18/4/2012 at 05:57
Quote Posted by Thirith
The thing is, as Papy's written above, you can state facts (and any okay review will do that) but you will still have to have an opinion on how much these facts affect a player's enjoyment. Is a game a buggy mess or a diamond in the rough that lacks polish? Opinion, not facts.
Jesus fuck, that's why you
don't say whether it's one or the other. You just say something like:
"The introducion of health regen to the Tribes franchise ended up causing problems like cappers explosively propelling themsleves to very high speeds and yet still being able to grab the flag at full health or enemies who can camp your generator room seemingly forever because they're able to completely regenerate between your attempts at killing them."
And that's
that.
heywood on 18/4/2012 at 08:06
I strongly suspect the professional critics turned in their reviews of ME3 before finishing the game. It's the only explanation that makes sense aside from a severe case of advertiser pressure. If they had finished it and found that three games worth of choices added up to precisely dick in a nonsensical ending, it would be hard to write stuff like:
...worthy conclusion to one of the finest stories ever told
...remarkably satisfying conclusion
...truly consequential decision making
...choices impact the game in wonderful ways
...how he treats those around him heavily affects the game's outcome
...impressively widening the paradigm in which choices you made in the original two games come to bear upon the trilogy's finaleIt's not just ME3. Game reviews today seem more "front loaded" than ever, capturing early parts of a game but often failing to mention endings or issues arising later in a game. Another example is Far Cry. The reviews seemed to focus almost entirely on the outdoor graphics and soldier AI in the first half of the game and neglected to talk about the mutants or how tedious, difficult, and uninspiring the game became in the latter parts. Other reviews are so thin on information that only a few aspects of the basic gameplay are discussed amongst all the review filler. The Tribes: Ascend review Koki highlighted is an example of that.
It makes me believe that many/most professional reviewers spend a handful of hours playing around with a preview copy just to get the basic feel and gather up some gameplay anecdotes to sprinkle through their review text, and never really play the games like a real player would. Then they write a fluff piece based heavily on the publisher's PR material, with just enough gameplay references of their own to make it look original. You can get away with that most of the time, but in the case of ME3 I think they were caught with their pants down.
Some of this is due to the always blurry line between editorial and advertising roles at the 'zines. Anybody who doesn't believe that plays a part should Google Jeff Gerstmann. But I also think the problem stems from time pressure. I doubt that reviewers at the major publications are given adequate time to play games through to the end at a normal pace and still get the review published in time for the game's release date.
Quote Posted by Papy
Rating on facts? I'm sorry, but that's absurd. Giving 8/10 for graphics is opinion, not fact. Describing one specific bug bay be a fact (as long as it is not presented out of context), but subtracting 2 point out of 10 because of bugs is opinion, not fact. Even simply saying controls for a game are bad is opinion, not fact.
I also would like more facts with reviews, but a (meaningful) rating will always be only a matter of personal opinion.
A numerical rating is a judgment call, but that doesn't mean it should be pure opinion. For ratings to mean anything at all, they need to be based on criteria which are clearly stated or understood and which are applied consistently from review to review.
8/10 for graphics should be given based on things like amount of detail & object counts in interior levels, terrain detail in outdoor levels, character movement & moonwalking, facial expressions and lip syncing, use of dynamic lighting and shadows, water effects, etc. and the criteria behind that rating should be applied the same to other games of the same generation. Not simply "this game looks great, 8/10".
Similarly, a stability rating implies certain expectations about the frequency of crashes & bugs, which is objective. If stability always counts for 20% of the overall score, it's not opinion. The problem is when one review concludes "outstanding game which could be game of the year except for crashes and silly gameplay bugs that interrupt the enjoyment, 80/100" while the review of another game by the same publication says "frequent crashes and some glaring bugs mar the experience, but it's easy to overlook them since the game is so much fun to play, 95/100". That's bullshit. The grading criteria should be applied equally.
