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Starfield review controversy traces game journalism's orbital decay
(www.gamesindustry.biz)
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this post was submitted on 01 Sep 2023
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It's been probably 10 years or so since I was writing reviews, and I have to say, I never felt pressure to skew a review one way or another.
The biggest heat I got was from fanboys when I had a sneak peek at PAX of Duke Nukem Forever and had to report how shitty it was. "YOU DON'T KNOW!!! YOU DIDN'T PLAY THE WHOLE GAME!!! YOU HACK!!!"
And I was like "Yeah, you're right, I didn't play the whole game, I played what their marketing team WANTED me to play and it sucked, you think the parts they DIDN'T want me to play are going to be better?"
Surprise... the game stunk up the joint.
But when it came to reviewing games, I approached every review as if the game were a 10/10, and then as I played I looked for reasons to subtract or add points. The plusses and minuses would balance out and I'd have a final score.
As a former teacher, I used school grades, which is why I think most sites are on a 7-10 scale.
A - 90%+
B - 80%+
C - 70%+
D - 60%+
F - 59% and down.
A game can be bad because it's a bad game or it can be bad because it's functionally broken. D is generally the Ralph Wiggum of games, possible to like, but you have to admit it's pretty bad.
I had to give a failing review to Assassin's Creed Liberty on the Playstation Vita even though I really liked how it looked and it played, because it had a game breaking bug that made your save file unloadable. Ubi took 2 months to fix it, rendering it unplayable for the first two months after launch.
Once it was fixed, I amended the review, but it was plainly unacceptable to release it in a broken state like that.
What was the worst game that comes to mind from your time writing? I used to write album reviews for a metal site years ago and one of our writers got HIM’s latest album at the time. They really just didn’t like the album and I shit you not, the review garnered 1,000+ comments from pissed off fans. It got so out of hand, we had to close comments.
Had to be Duke Nukem Forever. I was talking with one of the devs and I was legit curious as to how their process worked because it had been in hell for so long...
"Were you able to use any of the original assets?"
"Oh, all of them!" He seemed super excited.
To use 14 year old assets and be incredibly proud of that? Eesh.
Oh, and Brink! Brink was so incredibly disappointing. They had this well developed world and a fantastic movement system, solid class based shooter... but then it all fell apart in the actual implementation of it.
I really, really, wanted to like Brink, but it was unplayable.
Say you have a level where the enemy is escorting a VIP and your goal is to eliminate the VIP before they get to the destination.
You roll in, wipe the team, wipe the VIP, then someone respawns, revives the VIP, and you keep going back and forth until the clock runs out.
It didn't matter how many times you killed the VIP, all that mattered was if they were alive or dead when the clock ran out. Win/lose. Just crap design.
Brink... Sigh. I remember that trailer coming out and I watched it like every day for years waiting for it to come. I watched every dev vlog, read every update. For years I was hyped on that. At time of release my buddy and I took the week off of work. We played it for like 3 hours one night and finished it. I remember thinking "there must be a mistake. This can't be it. This isn't the game I've been dreaming about." I never booted it up again after that first night.
Brink was my CP2077.
It's a shame, because if someone licensed the IP for, just spitballin' here... A Fallout/Outer Worlds style game, the bones are there for a REALLY good game.
The assets, art, backstory, it's all done, it just deserved a better developer. :(
Just in case you don't know, CP2077 is great now, and set to get better when the dlc drops soon.
I really should go back to playing CP, I already enjoyed my time with the release Version.
But I also had a great PC and managed to not hit many Bugs during my playthrough, so I understand that my experience was not a common one.
I had a similar experience. Loved it then, like it even more now.
That happened for me too. Great 2077 experience through and through on good hardware with RT+DLSS. Had a couple bugs but nothing unsolvable like a puzzle with some saving involved, and they were things like scanning one thing early stops a scan later. Which is an unintended pretty cool mechanic lol, if only we'd been told it was a mechanic at the time.
Game got even crazier looking in recent updates and with better hardware, but I 100%ed it early and I haven't done another playthrough since so I've been at the endgame through all the updates lol
I actually played through it last month and it blew me away. I cannot wait to do a second play through when phantom liberty comes out! It was so so good.
I think Brink was game that killed my naive trust in the hype machine. So much anticipation, so much desperation to enjoy it, so much disappointment. From there on I only believed the hyperbole from proven developers but eventually Destiny killed even that. Now I’m a bitter shell of a gamer who lives by the creed, “never pre-order!”
I actually enjoyed the hell out of Destiny, then Destiny 2 fucked everything up, got patched, got better, and then Bungie turned around and went "LOL - story missions? What's that?" and cut 1/2 the content out of the game. Content I paid for.
No more money for Bungie after that, I'm surprised it's somehow still going.
I was damn near 1k hours in D1. I think I'm still under 100 in 2, because somehow they managed to make every single map in the entire game a heaping pile of dogshit.
Then they also took them away constantly.
The first Brink patch made it quasi-playable, but the damage had already been done.
And even after they fixed it, the AI still stank. They'd just ran back in the exact same path sometimes; to the point that you could just aim at a point and headshot all of them.
Man, DN4E sat in limbo forever. I remember waiting patiently for it knowing full well it would be a mess, but I didn’t care because I was such a massive Duke Nukem fan. Definitely on my list of bad games but I managed to complete it. It was so dated and clunky.
I vaguely remember Brink and all of the hype absolutely vanishing when it came out. I think I ended up skipping it because of the feedback people had.
Thanks for sharing!
duke nukem forever isnt good but i liked it, wish the online multiplayer didnt die so fast i had fun playing capture the babe with my cousin