I'm not sure how Alex has had so many bad experiences in Apex. I have 400 hours in that game and I think I remember maybe one or two times where someone was toxic. Maybe a lot of people reported Alex and he got put into the shadow toxic queue or something.
@allkindsoftime: I felt the same. Jeff in particular was a bit toothless on the topic - citing the vocal minority of people who don't like Epic because of Tencent. Like really? This is in no way related to that and no one is going to lump you in with those people for taking the side of human rights and democracy.
I was disappointed by how matter-of-fact the crew(with the exception of Ben) was about the situation. They had no real commentary on it and didn't even do a good job of covering the topic.
And just in general lately, I feel like GB is a bit toothless towards publishers behaving badly. It's disappointing because I remember in the Hotspot days and early GB days how they would rightly lay into someone for shit like this. That GB just seems to be gone now.
I like how they get weird about people making comments about their neck on videos. But 5 minutes later proceed to comment on David Boreanaz's forehead. Ok guys.
They were so dismissive of the Epic games store exclusivity - John tends to be that way of things he doesn't understand, so I shouldn't be too surprised. But I just want to say that Steam has a huge value add for the customer.
Let's go over the list of value add services that Steam gives you:
A controller based, TV focused interface was released with Big Picture Mode.
A no question, automatic refund system.
A library sharing system.
A vendor agnostic VR API, which ensures games purchased on Steam aren't locked to the Vive HMD but also working with Oculus Rift and Windows Mixed Reality HMDs.
A free OS which led to Steam Proton, an automatic tool to play your Windows games on Linux.
A community based mod sharing system, which allows to share and install content with one click.
A streaming feature to stream your PC games to your TV, your mobile or your lower end laptop.
A cloud based save system.
A system wide, vendor agnostic controller API was made with Steam Input, which not only support Steam Controller, Xbox One controller, Dualshock 4 and Switch Pro Controller but also support all their different inputs such as touchpads and gyrosensor, to remap extensively (and I insist on that, there's no tools like it anywhere else in term of possibilities and functionalities) but also allowing to download community based controller mapping.
A market place to sell in game items
Valve hosts community forums
Aren't partly owned by Tencent
There's no question that buying on Steam is a better value for the consumer. If their store is good enough, they shouldn't need exclusive deals to pull me away from Steam. Gog has been able to pull me away from Steam because they have some pretty killer features. Epic just needs to be better. People don't want to buy on Epic because they want to keep their one launcher - it's because it's a bad user experience and doesn't provide anywhere near the level of support Steam does.
Reviews seeming 'useless' sounds a bit extreme. If you disagree, then sure that's fine. But if I want to know if a game is worth considering before I part with my money, they serve a useful purpose. Whether I agree or don't.
@doncabesa: I'm loving it too. The negativity around this game is weird. But game reviews are useless anyway, so I shouldn't even pay attention to it.
There are cases where I find it to be true. Watching some reviewers play games like Apex or really any game with a high skill ceiling and seeing them have no idea how to play or what to do makes me value their opinion far less on the subject. Useless is the rarity, but it's been close to that often for me lately.
The shooter example is a good example of how I feel with reviews. If there is a shooter I'm interested in, I'm not going to read about a game reviewer from a major publication fumbling through it. I'm gonna go watch someone that actually knows shooters, like Shroud on twitch or others.
Shroud can tell me more about a shooter being fun than a game reviewer without him needing to say anything about the quality of the game. Just watching him play is enough information most times to know if I'm going to like a game or not. Like, as much as I love GB, the first thing I thought of when hearing their initial discussion on Apex is, I'm gonna go watch people who are good at shooters on twitch play this and see if it looks fun.
Beyond that, for single player games, quicklooks and seeing a game on UPF have been far more valuable to my purchasing decisions than any review GB has ever put out.
Cool list. I like the concept of favorite 10 games from the past 10 years. I enjoyed reading what you had to say about each game too. Seeing you put Ghost Recon on here makes me wanna try some of the DLCs.
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