BladeOfCreation

When people ask, "how rich do you want to be?" my answer is always: rich enough to completely fucking ruin the lives of hundreds of people while suffering no ill effects myself. Fuck a yacht, give me that can-only-fail-upwards money, baby!

I wonder how much of the Middle-Earth Enterprises was due to the best and most profitable Lord of the Rings game released this year: Lord of the Rings: Heroes of Middle-Earth, a mobile gacha game.

As the resident Redfall defender on this forum...I agree 100%. This shit is obnoxious and it's just a bad user experience. The game that really used to piss me off with this was Diablo 3 after they added the adventure mode. Basically 5 random quests would pop up on a map, with escalating rewards. So if you completed all 5, you got the best reward possible. But Diablo 3 was 100% online. And if you got to the 4th quest and lost you internet connection for a few seconds, tough luck! But here's the part that never made any fucking sense to me. I know for a fact that the game is saving my progress in between quest completion milestones. How do I know? If I pick up an item that an enemy drops, then lose my connection, that item is still in my inventory when I log back in. So the game is saving in real time, but somehow is not saving some things. Absolutely nonsensical user experience.

I admit that I do enjoy reading a good dismantling of something that has received generally high praise even if I never engage with it. Sometimes I'll come across a book--one that's getting all the accolades, a real "book of the month" type, and think that it sounds dumb as hell, so I'll look for bad reviews just for fun. This is certainly petty and silly on my part, but sometimes a well-written bad review can just be really entertaining to read.

As for actually finding use in a bad review for a game, I'd say not really? To use a recent example: Redfall got abysmal reviews. But I played through the story of that game twice: by myself and with other people. The reviews were of no use whatsoever to me. It wasn't perfect, but I enjoyed it and I found those reviews to be fall on a spectrum between having a few valid points and being utterly absurd.

A bad review isn't going to keep me from playing a game (or reading a book, or watching a movie) for a simple reason: I know what I like. If you look at my Goodreads reviews, you'll see that the majority of books get either 4 or 5 stars from me. That's not because I have impeccable tastes. It's because I'm pretty good at picking things that I know I'll like. Sometimes I get it wrong, but most of the time I'm more right than wrong. I know what I'm likely to enjoy more than any professional reviewer ever could.

There are entire college courses dedicated to media critique. As you say, engaging with other people's views on these things can help refine our own beliefs. Now, sometimes media critique is bad. Sometimes it is literally, objectively wrong. That's not to say that what someone thought or felt when engaging with media is wrong--our experiences inform our interpretations. But every now and then someone will write an essay about what a work is trying to say, and they get it wrong because they never bothered to find out what the creator of that work thinks. That's always interesting (at least to me).

The truth is that at any given time, at least half of Giant Bomb's staff just isn't full of the type of person who wants to engage critically with media. Patrick and Austin were unique voices in part because of their willingness to engage with themes. The only other person who really did this was (and he wasn't always actively part of GB) was Alex. I actually think that Vinny has gotten more willing to engage in this sort of discussion over the years, in large part because of working with Austin, Alex, and Abby.

The ancient Greeks wrote and talked about and dissected Homer's epic poems for centuries after they were written. Talking about the art (or "media," or "content") that our culture produces is inherently human. The waters get somewhat muddied here when we're talking about projects that cost many millions of dollars to make, and corporations own the rights to characters. I try to look past that stuff and engage with the art of it; you know, the stuff that is actually written by human beings to connect with other human beings. Sure, Spider-Man is worth hundreds of millions of dollars to Marvel/Sony/Disney, and it's easy to get cynical about that. But that doesn't really change the fact that some writers wrote a really compelling and emotionally captivating story for the 2018 Spider-Man game.

I find this stuff incredibly interesting. Earlier this year, I had my capstone history course to get my degree. The course was on 9/11, and we were given the broadest possible leeway in choosing the topic of our papers. I served two tours in Iraq, but I wasn't interested in writing about the wars that came after 9/11. That's just history, after all. Instead, I wrote about the culture. The tonal shift in media--movies, TV, and video games--that occurred post-9/11. Because when it comes down to it, what inspires people to go the next war won't be the history books. It will be the stories we tell. Do you know what the quintessential post-9/11 movie is? It's Zack Snyder's 300.That is, of course, a ridiculous thing to argue. But it's also true. To most people, it's just a fun--if stupid--action movie. I guess what I'm getting at is this: whether or not one agrees with my personal takes on media doesn't really matter to me. What matters is someone at least having the ability to look at something and see that there's themes that go deeper than "pretty visuals" or "satisfying gameplay." And, as others have said, that's part of the reason GB doesn't have the most interesting discussions about games.

Wow. Great review for what seems like a great game, and a great reflection on the nature of art and entertainment and how it affects our lives. I have Blades of the Shogun but have never gotten around to it. I saw a demo for this game and thought it looked neat--I played through the lengthy demo in a single late-night session that lasted five and a half hours. I love the art design, voice acting, and gameplay. When I have the time and money, I'll be getting this game. I told my brother about it, and he tried the demo and loved it enough to get the game. So take it from two new fans: Mimmi is definitely going out on top, and in style. I wish the devs all the best. Thanks for writing this great review!

Never forget that time that Ryan Davis absolutely fucking bodied the writer of Borderlands 2.

When it comes to story, Borderlands 3 is a product of its time in the same way that Borderlands 2 was. The humor is different thematically, but it is still extremely "online." My favorite parts were some of the more serious revelations about returning characters. Borderlands 3 is the fourth game in the series; if you enjoyed the different classes and wild and crazy gun randomization from the previous games, there's plenty more of that. Play it with friends and turn the dialogue down.

I have a hardcover book about 25 years of BioWare on my bookshelf. Knights of the Old Republic was the series that got me into roleplaying games--although notably I prefer the second game. If a decade ago you had told me that BioWare would be in this state and Obsidian would be putting out two hits within a couple months of each other, I would've been hopeful but I wouldn't have believed you.

That statement was a helluva thing to read. It's "unlikely" that everyone will find a job at EA Frankly, it seems pretty fucking optimistic that they'll even WANT a job at EA. The line about allowing them to "unlock more creativity" is insane. You unlock more creativity by...firing creators? What?

Congrats to BioWare management on finding a way to fuck over unionized workers while not meeting the strict legal definition of union-busting. Seems pretty creative.

@sethmode: Signed and seconded, the entire community.

Or at the very least, make a single lootable corpse the starting point of a "loot all" command.