dillonator

@somedelicook: And that audio logs are infinitely better than cryptic item descriptions/poorly spoken NPC dialogue.

@lordxavierbritish: If by iterated and improved, mean that you used estus flasks rather than eat grass, if you mean that combat is slowed down, if you mean wide vistas that chug on all platforms, if you mean that until later patches that PVP and many covenants didn't work as designed, then yeah, it's the Souls formula done to absolute perfection.

Let's not even get into how Dark Magic from the DLC unbalanced PVP. And let's not get into the fact that the calling card of the game, the difficulty, really isn't all that difficult. Or the story told is done almost strictly through telling and implicating, not showing. Just because Dark Souls is a sacred cow for hardcores doesn't matter.

You go into multiple Infinite threads, like people who are doing the hate on deal before it becomes stylish, and then say people responding aren't thinkers. If this game being in the conversation as a completely arbitrary game of the year means gaming is dead to you and this is how you're going to go about talking about it, maybe you need to go someplace that's more suited for guys like you. Like /v/ or something.

@lordxavierbritish: Maybe because you're going out of your way, celebrating other non-casual games as central to your point? Or that you can accept that the hot new thing that's getting gushed over is not remotely worth any of said praise. Not every game released gets game of the year attention or call outs. That's ridiculous. Just as much as saying that Infinite is a 'product of the industry' when celebrating Dark Souls or other games like it as if they weren't sequels or iterations or whatever.

If it's to be assumed that Booker has some memory of the events of Bioshock Infinite in the post credits epilogue, what about Anna/Elizabeth?

As someone who has played over two hundred hours of Dark Souls, using it as a benchmark for environmental storytelling as if it deserves the rose tinted glasses treatment is asinine. The voice acting is terrible, and much of the richness of characters are linked to wholly arbitrary decisions. Siegmeyer and Sieglinde's arc is one of Dark Souls most emotionally powerful story arcs; it deals with the subject material a great deal. But pointing out all of Infinite's window dressing flaws when Dark Souls central storytelling is done wholly on you being told things, doesn't compute.

Again, if you manage to get all the way to Ash Lake and play out said arc, Sieglinde's killing her father is shown through us hearing her emotional as a result of her doing the deed, and all we see is her standing in a static position over a dead body. We don't even see her strike the final blow. Hell, we don't even see Siegmeyer turn hollow. All the environmental storytelling is told to you. You don't experience it. And that's the point. You're playing the aftermath of a world's embers. The great adventures are over, crumbled to dust.

Point being, many things can be said about many games, even the top ones, and if you and others wish to peel the thinnest layers of the onion as if they are central, you're missing the point, and making a post that's more about casual versus non-casual. On its own merits, from a subject standpoint, the most central issue games face isn't what new gameplay concepts they employ, or whatever. So many people use this wholly arbitrary measure to make fake salient points. Core to story is engaging characters and conflict resolution. It doesn't matter if Infinite doesn't reinvent the wheel; it's the job it does with what it has. Subjectively, Infinite succeeds at a level other games have not.

Which, again, rides on subjectivity.

This is what happens when consumer press and those attempting academia styled criticism (very poorly, too) grow more and more jaded with the industry they cover and the customers they depend on for clicks. They exist in a world where print mediums have all but dried up outside of Game Informer, where they live in an internet vacuum where entertainment and controversy are the methods behind keeping a job in the industry. The other thing is, as this site proves on a daily basis, there are a bunch of guys who want to live vicariously through the exploits of others. These guys are cool because...they get paid to play video games, and then they get drunk on the weekends, and they seem like they have fun in an office like it's an internet start up in the 90s so...cool!

There will always be a place for the press and for the reviews, but to be frank, places like this are growing ever more irrelevant the more publishers can directly market to and deal with their potential buyers.

Oh look, you undermine hundreds of words by using the cliched 'entitled' line.

If you honestly want to talk about vision, then why is the vision so malleable that it the punctuation mark was constructed right before the game went to gold? Or what about narrative shifting, where the game suddenly becomes a philosophical quandary to wrap a bow around something rather than character contextual decisions with philosophical differences? Or how a series that was, from the very start, not about grander scope of philosophical exploration suddenly turning into a quest to create false depth?

It's a space opera, and a three part story. As a one off game, then the ending is viable for experimentation purposes. It's clumsily executed, but whatever. To act as though the gaming public is entitled when the level of conversation for the colossal fuck up the ending to the series was has to do with examination of narrative shifts, in lore failings, and sudden change in stated purpose, is disingenuous and completely false. You might have enjoyed it, and for whatever that's worth, I'm glad you did. But don't insult the intelligence of people or take a shot at people who voice their displeasure to a company that has stated from the get go that this series is a joint creative venture between fans and Bioware. Nobody told them to extend those platitudes, they did it themselves. Nor does false equivalency to the artistic vision of directors for films when Hollywood executives, producers, and studios force shifts and changes on a whim and cut content based solely on what they feel sells, not by what a director or screen writer have as their 'vision'.

Lots of people here gay for sloven mediocrity. Good to know there's so many suckers out there. :)

@Otzlowe:Dumbasses complain about having to spend money.

Lots of people, thousands of people are willing to pay ten bucks. If they can get a Child's Play charity past $77,000 to state their message of changing endings, you really think they're going to have problems giving that money to EA and Bioware?