The New Giant Bomb Goes Live February 12

The beta still has some bugs that are driving me crazy, but the beta no longer has a central thread for posting them. :(

Being that I could never get into the beta (it hated that I logged in through Facebook for some reason), I'm excited for this.

I will miss the achivements. Everything else looks fab.

@Alphazero said:

I will miss the achivements. Everything else looks fab.

The achievement system is being taken out completely? Man, I actually missed that part. :(

Thanks for the heads up Dave! Can't wait to see the new Live site.

Noooooo! The OPTM only has a week left to live! You will be missed. :'(

Noooooo! The OPTM only has a week left to live! You will be missed. :'(

So what does this mean for the dicks and butts currently in place?

Sweet. My birthday is the 12th. I hope you guys have a smooth relaunch!

@Sweetz: I disabled the streaming option because our current video host does streaming really badly, when we switch video hosts soon (before the launch) I will re-enable the option as it should work find again.

@Video_Game_King: Psychic premonition: This totally wont work.

@LtSquigs:

And yet we both know I'm dumb enough to try it, even if it does result in a simple "Error posting" message.

@Video_Game_King: Based off what I have seen you do on the beta site... I dont put this past you

@LtSquigs said:

@Video_Game_King: Based off what I have seen you do on the beta site... I dont put this past you

I choose to be proud of this.

@GaspoweR said:

@Alphazero said:

I will miss the achivements. Everything else looks fab.

The achievement system is being taken out completely? Man, I actually missed that part. :(

I'll miss them too... :(

Is there no way to see the desktop version of the site on a mobile phone? I've been looking for a "see desktop site" link.

I know how hard it is to push a new website out. Good luck to all your team of top mens!

@LordAndrew: PM me a list... we'll be resetting the db soon anyways

they spent the time, so im hoping its a good site. the only thing i didnt like when i went on was the white background. reminds me of ign too much, (i dont like ign) lol. i prefer the black background that giantbomb has now

@ptc said:

Is achievement tracking officially going away?

I think so?

I'm not all that into achievements but it was a very cool feature. Especially having Steam, Xbox, and Sony all in one place.

@lucianotassis said:

@GaspoweR said:

@Alphazero said:

I will miss the achivements. Everything else looks fab.

The achievement system is being taken out completely? Man, I actually missed that part. :(

I'll miss them too... :(

We should start a kickstarter to get them back..

Yay!

Meh. I like the way the site is now, I don't think you should change it.

@Deltan said:

@lucianotassis: @lucianotassis said:

@GaspoweR said:

@Alphazero said:

I will miss the achivements. Everything else looks fab.

The achievement system is being taken out completely? Man, I actually missed that part. :(

I'll miss them too... :(

I too will miss achievements. Sorry I'm late to the news on this, what was the reasoning given?

The achievement system implemented on Giant Bomb, imo was very much ahead of its time. If that awful term "gamification" had a true definition, the achievement system coined here at GB would fit nicely into it.

Achievements are one of the best ways to get people to traverse different types of content on your site. It is not just another channel for traffic diversification, it's a way of creating more interaction points with the site and its content creators. Members are forced to see parts of the site they perhaps did not know about, interact with the tools offered (posting, commenting, blogging etc..) and compete with other members. The way achievements were done here must have benefited the GB community as a whole, I have no doubt. I am a huge fan of the implementation.

It's not new, but there's now an entire industry being built around "badges" for web activity and I think it has great potential to yet improve the web again. Check out Samsung's dive into this: http://www.samsung.com/us/samsungnation/ (I have no affiliation with that site whatsoever other than being a member).

@snide have you ever needed to or tried to prove the ROI on your achievement system? I have a certain expertise in the area, I'd be happy to help. I really hope the removal of achievements on this site is reconsidered!

It was explained on the beta video where Dave and Jeff talked about the new site and its functions. It's been a while so can't exactly quote it but it had something to do with the way the new website is built and not being compatible with different API's. Achievement and Trophy API's is still a bit wonky to implant on to websites and with the new consoles coming out soon they decided to leave it out for now.

I think the addition I'm most grateful for is article comments and quick look comments counting as forum posts. Not because of the number, but because I can now easily go back to stuff I've commented on and re-explore.

@Sweep: But think of all the nifty mod tools you will get. THINK OF THE POWER.

just saw the new site for the first time today and........its mostly the same as it is now, everything looks a bit bigger and slightly different...i thought this was a redesign, and not a lets paint this red wall with some more red paint kinda thing.

o well, gota say it does look better tho ^^

@Ravelle: As I understand it's not that the APIs are wonky, it's that they don't exist. Achievement tracking currently is the programmatic equivalent of hitting view source in your browser and picking out the relevant text. Scraping pages like that is the worst possible way of collecting data. The most innocuous looking change on the source site can completely break scraping scripts.

With a complete site rewrite I'm sure the engineering time is better spent squashing real bugs instead of maintaining achievement tracking. Hopefully the manufacturers will make actual achievement APIs to go along with their new consoles but I'm not holding my breath.

@Luca717: you can change it

Cool, a birthday gift from Giant Bomb.

@SexyToad said:

Is there no way to see the desktop version of the site on a mobile phone? I've been looking for a "see desktop site" link.

The site automatically changes the layout depending on how big the window size is, thus removing the need to develop a mobile site, similar to the Polygon design.

Also, yay new site! Can't wait to see the new layout in action!

looking forward to it, the new stuff looks cool.

@snide Congrats to you and the team! Been a long time coming. I believe a celebratory drink (or multiple) is in order at this coming Pax East. Perhaps a Car Bomb?

Hoo ray.

I am excited.

The one "bad" thing is the fact that my username is now billythekid as opposed to BillyTheKid. But that is not a HUGE deal.

Excellent, I can't wait to see what comes next.

So not only is the new Giant Bomb coming to us on my Birthday, but on Abe Lincoln's Birthday. This makes some kind of sense...

People fretting over the achievement feature being removed should realize it'll most certainly come back again in some form once the new consoles are out and the gb guys have had time to figure out how to once again grab that sweet sweet data. mmm

You duders are awesome. Thanks for the hard work. I'm excited for the launch!

I'm sure gonna miss the old GiantBomb site but like anything, there's always need of a change. I kinda like the new design though, especially the profile page. The banner section is always welcomed.

If I can suggest one thing is that to improve the List page a bit more so that it's in alphabetical order and the tabs are not too big.

Wow. The true face of giant bomb, revealed. Those programmers were moving so fast they could be barely be captured in a photographed. Reminds me of my database master, Mr Ly.

@MHBroly said:

So not only is the new Giant Bomb coming to us on my Birthday, but on Abe Lincoln's Birthday. This makes some kind of sense...

Are you Abe Lincoln? Were you really a vampire hunter?

Pretty excited, the beta looked great.

As a free member, I cannot wait to see what radical changes have taken place, and give my thanks to all involved.

Hell yes!

huzzah!

The look & feel of the new site is all a bit IGN/Kotaku/ for me. I will miss GB classic :( still though progress and if it helps with mobile rendering so be it.

February 11th should be official "write whatever you want in the wiki" day. 24 hours of pure unmoderated madness. I have volumes of Roberta Williams / Tim Schafer fiction I've been writing that needs to see the light of day and I think that place should be GB wiki.

Hey dave what's going to happen to YouTube videos on the new site, still available for us?

@snide: Hi Dave. Who's the Killroy in the picture?