MiniPato

Gear progression in general seems a bit bunk. I agree with Jeff in last week's bombcast that the crafting system feels oddly paced. Also I think the whole seamless presentation with no cuts puts me off of even wanting to replay it again. If there were a way to fast forward through cutscene sequences, that would be great, but in general I've felt no desire to run through it again.

I was expecting that Atreus temporary heel-turn to be a result of him being possessed by an evil entity or something because he's constantly hearing voices in his head. But yeah, they don't really explore it that well. I suppose the growing pains of being a god includes turning you into a huge asshole with incredible hubris. Maybe it's natural for a child to have volatile mood swings, but I don't buy for a second that he would ever shit talk his dead mother like he did. There was something else at play there that I thought they would explain.

DeWitt is supposed to be a "bad" protagonist because he gave up his daughter and committed atrocities during wartime. We're not supposed to view him as a bad guy because of his trite "both sides" stance on the revolution. The game actually kinda props that up as the correct way to approach any kind of political strife and it especially doesn't hold up in 2018. Infinite preaches against violent extremism and offers nothing in its place except flaccid neutrality and submission. DeWitt is a bad character because he comes off like a smartass internet commenter going "but both sides!" while he pisses his life away downing bottles of whiskey in his private detective office. He's bad in a way that is unintentional. If it weren't for Burial At Sea retconning Fitroy's cartoonish child murdering extremism as a bluff, Infinite would be downright embarrassing today.

In general, I can play as a bad, unlikable character if the game is aware that the character is supposed to be unlikable. But the mistake that so many writers, gaming or otherwise, struggle with is that lack of self awareness. We see this in things like anime too where antagonists who committed heinous acts are easily pardoned so that they can join the good guy team. Same with comedies where the protagonist is supposed to be funny, but comes off as selfish and grating. I can handle playing characters who are intentionally bad. But if they are unintentionally bad and the writer is unaware of that fact and still expects us to like and identify with that character, then I really can't stomach that.

It took a lot of maturing for me to stop taking review scores so personally. Posting on gaming forums since my early teens, I definitely got caught up in the score comparisons and "taking reviewers to task" by comparing an old review of a completely different game to another irrelevant game and going "SO THIS REVIEWER IS SAYING THIS GAME IS WORSE/JUST AS GOOD AS THIS GAME?!" And other tired immature arguments like "there should be no 10/10 games because no game is perfect!" thinking I was being very clever and perceptive. I posted on gametrailers a lot and watched their reviews and basically thought reviewing should be a math where you assign a number to different aspects of the game like graphics, sound, story, gameplay, and then take the total average to get the score. At the time, I thought that was a good objective approach to reviewing/criticism. A lot of my forum activity during my youth was definitely spent arguing that some games weren't getting the right numbers that they deserved and how so-and-so publication sucks at games/ got paid/ isn't qualified, etc. if they didn't give a game the "right" score.

It wasn't until I joined Giantbomb that I started to drop that mentality and stopped trying to look at reviews as a defined math and started looking at reviews as more of a general feel. I started to see how unnecessarily stratified a 10/10.0 scale is for categorizing your opinions. What's the difference between a 2/10 and a 3/10? A five star scale makes more sense since most people consider anything below a 6/10 to be a failure anyways. I think the reason why people, including old me, cling to a 10 point scale is due to this need to rank every single game ever. Scores are seen as a tier list to validate people's opinions on what game is better than other games. That's what drives people to make arguments like "Oh sure Mario Odyssey and BotW are both 10/10 games, but I would say Mario is a 9.8 and Zelda is a 9.9 because I like Zelda better." It's essentially GB's top 10 GOTY debates happening on gaming forums on a constant basis. There's also the unfortunate habit of people equating good reviews to their favorite franchise surviving and getting a sequel. So they think there is some onus on reviewers to keep their favorite series alive by giving it a good score and as a result there's a lot of bitterness and digging into a reviewers past reviews and doing that ugly "how can you give this shitty game a good review and give my favorite franchise game a bad one?!"

I glance at rotten tomatoes to determine if a movie is worth driving out to a theater to see. I don't compare movie scores and wonder why some movies get better scores than other movies. Mostly because most movie reviewers don't do review scores. At most, rotten tomatoes does the "scoring" and even then they just determine if the reviewer liked it (fresh) or didn't (rotten). So scores are useful for me for a quick recommendations during a boring weekend or something. If I wanted to read an in depth criticism or review, then a score is irrelevant, it's the content of the review that matters in that case. The more I've gotten older, the more I realize that I enjoy talking about the actual content of the art rather than comparing scores. Throwing around numbers and scores is not valuable discourse.

Wondering this too. A lot of people seem to really hate the end-game content, but is Destiny 2 worth it if I have a group of friends ready to play through like a Borderlands type of game and don't really care to treat it as a Diablo/MMO-like?

Phone, wallet, leatherman multi-tool that has a knife, screwdriver, pliers, bottle opener etc.

@sweep said:@minipato said: @opusofthemagnum: Yeah I've seen chunks of discussion get deleted. Especially during Far Cry 5's release and all the political and artistic discussion around that. Sure, some of the discourse gets heated, but there should be some amount of trust in the community to be able to talk about subjects that are inherently intense. It's weird when a discussion happens on the podcasts and seems to get squashed on the forums because of a lack of trust in us to handle those same discussions. As other posters said, it seems like the forum is on preemptive strike mode because of the gamer gate era stuff.

The forum enters a bland medium of not being trusted enough to handle heavy topics and not being allowed to be too jokey and ends up with 10 threads about "terrible/bad/mediocre/good games you hated/loved." No shade to those threads, a gaming forum needs that type of thread every once in a while for people to vent about games people loved or praise games people hated, but a whole bunch of em cropped up at once recently.

The community spotlight features dozens of blogs and threads every week which demonstrates that's not the case. If people want to talk about social issues in america and the way they're represented in videogames then they should make a thread specifically for that purpose rather than trying to have that discussion beneath a quick look. We're not in preemptive strike mode, there are very few subjects we have a blanket ban on, unless you want to argue about ethics in games journalism or why feminism is actually a bad thing then you're able to discuss almost anything. The problem is many people aren't willing to make the effort to begin discussions in a way which will promote meaningful and thoughtful conversation, and if we feel that someone isn't treating an issue with the respect it deserves then yeah, we'll nip that shit in the bud. You can be cynical if you want, but some of us have been moderating this site for 10 years, we're getting pretty good at spotting when a thread is heading downhill.

Some joke threads get locked for lack of discussion value when the same subject would be the source of many jokes in an email section of the bombcast/beastcast. The criteria for what can exist as a goof and what can't seems vague.

This has always been a little weird, because there's plenty of things that get talked about on the podcasts that we wouldn't tolerate on the forums. For example there are numerous times where the staff tell one another to "fuck off" or jokingly insult one another in a way that we wouldn't tolerate here. That might seem like a double standard, but it's too easy to misinterpret the context or miss a reference. Playing it safe ultimately makes the forums a nicer place to be, and that's the decision of the staff, not the moderators.

The deleted posts I'm talking about weren't in a comment section of a video, but a blog post specifically pertaining to Far Cry 5 and how games can be more than toys and discussing why gamers are averse to games being a deeper medium. Of course discussion like that would get heated, but insults weren't being hurled about. It definitely feels preemptive because the posts got deleted before there was a chance to deescalate and find common ground. There was not even any notification or warning for why they were deleted. I get that mods don't know each and every single user personally and don't know their maturity levels, but ending a discussion before it has even turned into a fight feels preemptive and displays a lack of trust in the community. I don’t thInk I’m being cynical, I think operating on the assumption that all users are as bad as an immature minority is cynical.

Makes sense. MBMBAM and Adventure Zone have taken off and have become surprisingly popular. Plus with other podcasts they are starting up, it makes sense to double down on the McElroy brand instead of trying to split time between their most popular thing and Polygon.

@opusofthemagnum:Yeah I've seen chunks of discussion get deleted. Especially during Far Cry 5's release and all the political and artistic discussion around that. Sure, some of the discourse gets heated, but there should be some amount of trust in the community to be able to talk about subjects that are inherently intense. It's weird when a discussion happens on the podcasts and seems to get squashed on the forums because of a lack of trust in us to handle those same discussions. As other posters said, it seems like the forum is on preemptive strike mode because of the gamer gate era stuff.

Some joke threads get locked for lack of discussion value when the same subject would be the source of many jokes in an email section of the bombcast/beastcast. The criteria for what can exist as a goof and what can't seems vague.

The forum enters a bland medium of not being trusted enough to handle heavy topics and not being allowed to be too jokey and ends up with 10 threads about "terrible/bad/mediocre/good games you hated/loved." No shade to those threads, a gaming forum needs that type of thread every once in a while for people to vent about games people loved or praise games people hated, but a whole bunch of em cropped up at once recently.

@hassun:

I give props to Rorie for sometimes popping up in the forums to interact a bit. Staff mostly post in comments section, but generally on-site interaction in the forums is low. Twitter is where it's at and the easiest way to interact with staff and fans. Fobwashed and Jeremy Medina post all their stuff on twitter because it gets more play on that platform than GB's community spotlight/showcase and they can be retweeted by the staff. I honestly refresh GB just to see the staff's twitter updates since I do not want to make a twitter account.

@poobumbutt: Yeah, it's hard to say how much more I would have enjoyed it if I didn't know of those theories beforehand. But I only knew of the theory halfway through the season and even before then I felt very unsatisfied with how little crossover there is of the storylines and how none of the other characters even referenced William's adventure in the park. Not knowing of the twist, the constant editing shenanigans during Dolores' journey started to wear thin and feel like filler. Same with Robert Ford's constant philosophizing, other host flashbacks, and those two numbskull engineers who keep getting away with stuff they shouldn't. The Man in Black's journey was getting tiresome once he joined up with Teddy and for some reason seemed to treat the hosts like real threats when he was supposed to be a character who's above all the roleplay shenanigans of the park. William was the only one I could relate to who was having an interesting arc, but there was so little of him because they wanted to conceal the twist and they kind of fast tracked his story at the end. So I think I still wouldn't have enjoyed the twist even if it came as a complete surprise.

I hope Season 2 is better because I honestly believe the first season was seriously hampered by structuring itself entirely around the twist.