dourin

First off, I hope it's ok that I post this as a new thread instead of in what has become the megathread for the news. This turned out longer than I had originally anticipated, so I felt this was more... appropriate? If not, feel free to let me know, mods. Anyway...

Obviously, like many here, I'm absolutely gutted by today's triple threat announcement of vacancies. Seeing the majority of the old guard ride off into the sunset was not something I was mentally prepared for.

I've followed these chuckleheads since the early Gamespot days, probably somewhere around 2002-2003 if memory serves me right. I remember Jeff and Ryan's QVC shenanigans. I remember Alex's now infamous Big Rigs review. I remember Brad's early meek, awkward-in-front-of-a-camera video reviews. I remember when Rich Gallup left Gamespot. I remember Kane & Lynch. I remember Arrow Pointing Down. I watched Jeff and Ryan build a bomb.

When Jeff started Giant Bomb, I was 23 years old, living with 4 roommates, working a seasonal job, and playing an unhealthy amount of World of Warcraft. Watching what Jeff and Ryan built inspired me. In late 2008, I even tried to do the same, throwing together my own editorial game site using a free, painfully limiting website creation tool. I remember I even tried to create a database of landing pages for any game that got mentioned in an article. Over the short life of the site, that last part still turned out to be an incredible undertaking. In 2009, I did a redesign to better accomodate for E3, and live blogged (that was a thing back then, I swear) all of the press conferences and vomited an obscene amount of articles and trailers up on the site to cover as much of E3 as I could manage by myself, and then some. I remember even going to Gamespot and counting how many articles and trailers they were posting to make sure I was at least matching it. It was insane. I was insane for trying it. That E3 broke me, and I abandoned the site shortly after E3 2009 exhausted, but with a massive appreciation for what the guys at Giant Bomb were doing and had accomplished. Years later, I had the opportunity to join a Giant Bomb community podcast that, 11 years later, a couple of us still occasionally record. We had (have?) fans from both inside Giant Bomb and outside. I met at least one in real life. Giant Bomb has been inspiring me for years, and been a catalyst for me to at least attempt to get out there with my own creativity, even if it didn't all succeed.

These guys have been, at the very least, in the periphery of my life for a significant chunk of it. I'm not going to say they're like family. Even typing that feels weird to me, and I imagine feels super weird for them to hear or read. But Vinny was right on the podcast. I can track so much of his life through the years of content they've produced. I listened to A Bunch of Dads because just a year prior to Vinny's son being born, my own son was born. I enjoyed listening to the guys go through all the things I had just experienced mere months before them. My daughter also coincidentally arrived a year before his, so I, again, related to his stories of being a father to a daughter for the first time when they came up on videos or podcasts.

I'm now a 35 year old father of two with an outstanding wife of 11 years. I've watched this site change and evolve. I've watched it grow and shrink. I'll be honest and say I've not always vibed with every new hire that's come on over the years. I do also have my own concerns about bringing too many new faces in, and what that could mean for the site that I've felt has become a sort of safe haven for the aging gamer on the web. But after all these years, I guess I can view Giant Bomb as a sort of living, breathing thing. So for now, I'm just waiting for the exhale.

Thank you to @vinny, @alex, and @brad for all the years of laughs and memories, and good luck in whatever you do next. Hopefully whatever it is, it still allows time for you to occasionally talk into microphones about video games if you want to. Later, duders.

@npfeifersaid:

I think we're absolutely running into the limits of human perception here. I know we can interpret input up to 1/235ths of a second or something like that, but obviously there are diminishing returns. _I_ can see the difference between 60fps and 30fps, but I'm also at the point where I'd rather play at a higher resolution (4K) than 60fps because reducing aliasing means more than framerate. Eventually games will do both and it won't be a big deal. And then there's, as we've been talking about through this thread, the matter of consistency and as a small-time game developer, I don't hold it against developers who can't always keep it together when pushing the envelope in terms of assets because it is a complex resource-managing task. I'm not saying that games should chop up to 3fps during intense moments, but having it sway between 25-30fps as action picks up isn't really a big deal.

So I think you sort of contradicted your own argument in this response. You say you can see the difference between 30 and 60 fps, but you'd rather play a game in at 4K 30fps than at 1080p 60fps because "reducing aliasing means more than framerate."

You're saying that your opinion is that aliasing and resolution matter more to you than framerate. I can tell you that for me, framerate always matters more than resolution, and sometimes matters more than aliasing. It's all personal preference based on your own perception. What seems to bother you is that Jeff and others don't share your personal preference. That's just life, though. Jeff doesn't share my preference in games, so when it comes to game reviews, I generally take his with a grain of salt. It doesn't mean I can't enjoy the content he puts out, just means I probably won't read any of his reviews, or put too much weight into his critical opinions on games in the podcasts and videos. And that's fine. I'm not going to put him on blast on a public forum because he is negative toward pretty much every MMO he plays, which is a genre I particularly enjoy. I'll get annoyed to myself when he talks about it on a podcast in a way that tells me he maybe didn't take the time to understand a system or something like that, but that's as far as it goes because I understand that not everyone shares my taste in games. Same should apply to how you feel about technical opinions. If you know someone really favors a high framerate for their games, and complains (even in a professional sense), you know that particular opinion doesn't match up with your own, so you probably shouldn't put too much weight in deciding whether a game is worth checking out based on that person's opinion alone.

Edit: To be clear, in that last part, I'm not trying to tell you how you should feel. No one should do that. I'm simply trying to get across why I think many in this thread are so strongly opposed to your critique of Jeff and others for their technical preferences.

@npfeifer As others here have pointed out, I think the underlying issue here is a matter of personal perception. Framerates matter differently to different people based on their own perceptions of those framerates. This reminds me of friends of mine who would get (I felt) unreasonably upset at people who claimed PC superiority because everything could run at 60 fps. "You can't even see the difference," would be a popular argument. The same debate would crop up when displays started pushing refresh rates into the 120Hz+ range. I had a friend who would argue with me to the point of actual anger that you cannot perceive the difference between 30 fps and 60 fps, and those who championed 60 fps gaming were objectively wrong and just trying to lord over players with what they perceived to be lesser equipment.

The reality is, some people absolutely don't see that difference. To some people there is no perceivable difference between 30 fps and 60 fps. My friend was one of those people. However, on the flip side, there are people to whom there is a stark difference between 30 fps and 60 fps. Once I moved from mainly console gaming to mainly PC gaming, and I was exposed to more 60 fps gaming, I absolutely noticed the difference. My console 30 fps games would often feel sluggish by comparison. 60 fps felt smooth as butter, and became the standard for my play experience going forward. Fast forward to a couple years ago, when I needed to upgrade my main monitor on my PC, and opted to go for a 144Hz display. I'd been playing a ton of Overwatch, and had heard that 144Hz could actually make your aim more accurate, so I decided what better time to test out that claim and went the higher refresh rate route. Visually, at first I couldn't say I noticed a difference between 60 fps and 144 fps. However, I absolutely felt it. Games felt smoother, my aim felt more accurate. As time went on, and ~144 fps has become the norm for how I play most games, I have found that when I play a game that drops into the ~60 fps range (not locked at 60 fps), that sluggish feeling I remember from 30 fps games before has emerged. It's not some elitist point of view, or me trying to say that if you're not playing games at 144Hz you're getting a subpar experience. I'm only saying that from my perspective, based on my own perception of refresh rates, higher, more stable refresh rates make for a better gaming experience.

On a side note, locked 60fps doesn't give me that same sluggish effect. Those games look and feel absolutely fine. It's more so games that will jump around from 55-75 that feel bad to play.

For...for meeeee?!

Call of Duty seems pretty good this year! But for some reason, hype around these parts seems to have died out since the beta. Let's change that! Enter the Giant Bomb Unofficial BLOPS 4 Discord Server (hereby referred to has "the server").

As of now, the server is a multiplatform server, so no matter where or what mode you're playing, hop on in and say hello! If traffic really starts to pick up on the server, we'll look at breaking out each platform to their own servers, but at least as of yet, I don't anticipate that being a problem. If you see a channel missing that you would like added, just dm me on discord and I'll get it added.

Last note: The server is open to all, but please note when forming groups that, as with other games on Battle.net, it appears each region is separate. So if you want to play cross-region, you all need to connect to the same regional servers from the Battle.net Launcher before launching the game. However, doing so does not carry any of your progress, friends, or apparently, current patches to the other regions.

And sorry for this posts formatting. I know it's poop.

@syndrom Sounds good. Server link is https://discord.gg/a8YczGr

I created a quick and dirty Discord server for Blops 4. I'll add more channels later as needed, just wanted to get something up and running for people looking for fellow duders to play with.

That said, I'm new to creating discord servers... is it safe to just post an invite link on here, or would we be better suited having people message for an invite?

As I said in another thread, it's especially a bummer they went on sale during normal, 9-5 work hours. Some of us don't have free access to internet at work, much less the ability to make personal purchases while on the clock. As a coin enthusiast, I was really hoping to be able to grab one of these. Here's hoping they come back again at a reasonable time of day.

Yeah, having them go back on sale during normal work hours was a bummer. Some of us don't have free access to internet at work, much less the ability to make personal purchases while on the clock. As a coin enthusiast, I was really hoping to be able to grab one of these. Here's hoping they come back again at a reasonable time of day.

Oookay, here we go...

• Mirror's Edge is a bad game, especially with a controller. There's a reason we stopped doing first person platforming.
• Bethesda (Bethesda proper, not including their acquired studios like id) can't make good games. They compensate by making the most game with each release, and people gobble it up.
• I forget who posted it earlier, but I will throw my hat in with the opinion that all 2D Zelda games are bad. Link Between Worlds was decent, at best.
• That said, Majora's Mask is actual literal trash, not that this is really that hot a take, but it needed to be said nonetheless.
• Final Fantasy X was the beginning of the slow, agonizing death of the Final Fantasy series. FFXIV is pretty good, though.
• Yoko Taro is superior to Hideo Kojima. It amazes me that people still continue to give Kojima money.
• No Man's Sky was a great game at launch and was exactly what I thought it would be.
• Assassin's Creed Revelations was the best game in the Ezio trilogy.
• Borderlands has never been good.
• On that note, with the possible exception of Brothers in Arms (I never played it), Gearbox has never made a good game.
• Prey on Xbox 360 was easily one of the best early 360 games released.
• DmC Devil May Cry is the only good Devil May Cry game.
• The only Tom Clancy series that's been worth a damn has been the Splinter Cell series.
• Modern Telltale games have always been bad. They just rode the Walking Dead hype into accidental success.

I could do a few more, but it's late, so I'll just end with the one I'll probably catch the most shit for.

• Mario 64 is the worst official Mario game. It was never a good game. It played like trash, even back when it released. I understand that they were still learning 3D platforming at the time, but that still doesn't excuse it for controlling the way it does. 3D Mario games didn't really get good until Super Mario 3D Land for the 3DS (though they cheated by having a 3D screen), or Super Mario 3D world for the Wii U. By that point, they figured out how to use shadows to help convey depth to the player and allow for more precise platforming in a 3D space. For the record, the Galaxy games weren't bad, I just don't consider them true 3D platformers since, if my memory serves me right, the majority of the levels took place on the planetoids with weird gravity that allowed Nintendo to bypass the fact that 3D platforming was still imprecise.