Humanity

I Was actually extremely dissapointed by the very one sided discussion on the Kotaku piece. Vinny was the only one willing to play ball and look at the issue from both sides of the fence but it was 3 against 1. I'm not sure why Alex was so insistent that it's childish to sever business relations and initiate radio silence, but it's not childish to report on abilities you will have access to in the game way before the game was even officially announced. Was it their duty to let players know about the grappling hook? How did that relate in any way to Unity's technical shortcomings or shelter the public from potentially harmful purchasing decisions? How was revealing key plot points of Fallout 4 looking out for the publics best interests? Is that not equally childish as making a business decision to not affiliate with an outlet that is releasing every little bit of info on your game they can get their hands on before you've had time to even put a trailer together?

If they have the right to run these leaks then whats the difference between leaking game information and straight up breaking embargo and releasing your review a week early? Wouldn't breaking embargos be actually way more beneficial to the gaming public if the game is bad?

You can tell Black Ops 3 is a hot topic game when they devote 3 minutes of Bakalar time to it.

Although I hear 3 minutes in Bakalar Time is like 3 hours in the real world..

I like everything about this except for the levels which seem to be completely at odds with the character design. Like it doesn't mesh well at all.

You "gaming freedom" people make me sick.

It's funny when they cringe so much whenever the game is trying to simply explain something new to them.

EDIT: OH MAN, Drew did the "Hey kid, I'm a computer.." reference. Good on you Drew! GI JOEEE!

The whole review discussion is a moot point anyway since scoring games these days has really become such an incredibly subjective idea. Those that played it all had very glowing things to say about the new Tomb Raider but at the same time it's somehow weighed down by the existence of the previous game - even though they say it literally improves on every single aspect of it. Fallout 4 improves on almost nothing and in fact retains a large amount of the big minuses that we've seen pop up time and time again in past Bethesda entries, but it's apparently still a solid 4/5 (on PC).

Now don't get me wrong, I don't care what the Bomb Crew score games. I'm not trying to start some unholy review war of "he's TOTALLY WRONG about this!" - honest, c'est la vie, they can score it however they want and I'll make up my own mind when I actually play those games. That being said, for the sake of a purely academic discussion: whats the point of even using the same granular scale for every game when every single game gets it's own special considerations? Especially when the review itself doesn't always appear to reflect the score and it only becomes clear when you get Brad or Jeff to frame that review into a broader context. The more time goes by the more I'm starting to think that a simple "Recommended/Not Recommended" system is probably the way to go instead of arbitrary numbers that mean something different to every person. Jeff says that he hopes that people would know how this works by now, but I don't think it's that simple. I get how reviews work, and I get how they score games. I've been following games all my life and I'm 31 now. Even so I still get confused why something gets a 3/5 and another thing gets a 4/5 or a 5/5 when the reviews all point to similar pros and cons. At the end of the day I just chalk it up to reviewer tilt, making the score fairly meaningless.

Once again to reiterate - this isn't written as a slight towards Jeff and crew. It's just musing out loud, please don't write to me saying I'm an idiot and that I should stop being a Tomb Raider fanboy. Please.

Either way they should all just switch to the Jeff Bakalar scale that scores games out of 77 Tophats.

From watching this Quick Look I think a steady framerate is a make-or-break sort of situation here. They NEED to hit at least a steady 30 on consoles or else it's just not going to work.

That empty, soulless world design Brad talked about has been present in all Bethesda games. Even when you get to Diamond City it's just this space with a bunch of robots standing in their designated spots - although I guess now there is a story justification for why all NPCs look and act like marionettes.

Weird to see them invite random YouTubers to this thing!

It will only be a waste of time if they spend 30-60 minutes talking about how broken it is and then begrudgingly agree to make it GOTY because no one can agree on anything.