lase

So, while I gave my $0.02 on the Giant Bomb Survey, I had a few more thoughts I wanted to add in case anyone from the Staff is ever in here.

I realized that the large majority of the content that I've really enjoyed have had some "stateful" element - during the video members of the crew will make decisions or otherwise influence the state of the game (or metagame, in the case of Steal My Sunshine or Burgle My Bananas) for the rest of the episodes. Some other examples include 13 Deadly Sims, Project BEAST, Astroneering, and Minecraft streams. Full game playthroughs, while nice and reliable (looking forward to more Run For The Hills), don't tend to hook me in the same way.

I know I'm sorta splitting hairs here, since all game playthroughs are technically stateful, but just wanted to give my explanation a shot.

I'm the same way. I usually download the first couple and give them a go, then either zoning out while they finish or just deleting them. The past couple of years I haven't even bothered with the final days because it's just SO much. I've wondered if the low amount of insight/analytics into podcasts has anything to do with this. If most people are subscribed and automatically download, I imagine on the backend that a full listen shows up identically to an instant delete.

I know that at least from my personal perspective, I listen to every Bombcast, Beastcast, and Aftermath, but will probably listen to less than half of the GOTY podcasts, and the only video I'll watch is Giant Bomb Feud (if nothing else pops up tomorrow).

I guess this is my hangup - they don't tend to like either type of game. Just seems a bit odd to hamstring Sekiro for it's lack of variation when they also don't care for the most varied games in the series either. I personally think Sekiro is brilliant in communicating its vision through gameplay in a way that very few games do, but it seems like everyone but Ben didn't even make it to the point where that "clicks".

This is still a huge amount of work & effort, and I'm strongly in favor of them staying sane & happy.

To me, even with a lighter load, 30+ hours of podcasts just aren't nearly as interesting as any of the group videos or features. They could shave off all deliberations except 1 day of the final top ten and have a bunch of time opened up for other content. Heck, even if it didn't kneecap the rest of the features, that'd be great too. Even if some people really love it, I have to assume that fewer people actually listen to the full duration of these podcasts.

ALSO: Metro Exodus wasn't my favorite, but hearing Alex rag on it after watching him play on the QL in such a hamfisted way is frustrating. On mouse & keyboard and a harder difficulty level, I think that game shows a lot better.

Regarding Sekiro, it's a bit annoying to hear derisions of its clear & well executed "offensive" combat vision with criticisms that they "couldn't play however they wanted", and then on the flip side mock the prevalence of RPG mechanics in the industry at large. I totally get not vibing with this game, but I was really thrown by some of the arguments.

This probably seems like a dumb question, but any advice is appreciated. I bought the PC beta in 2011, and haven't really touched it since then. However, after seeing all the cool path tracing shader stuff, I wanted to dive back in.

However, I don't really know which version the community is behind - the windows store has all kinds of different editions, but for many years the mod/shader/texture pack support was obviously all behind the Java version. I can't get back into my Mojang account, or I would just do the Java version without thinking too hard.

Any thoughts?

Have yet to listen to the Most Disappointing section yet, but if it's anything like Best Style, I can tell it's gonna piss me off. Really gets under my skin to watch a year of Brad playing different video games and having no idea how core features work, not noticing big flashing UI elements, etc., and then when people critique RDR2 he says things like "it's not that hard" in a snide manner. Ben had to teach Brad how to play Bane! After thousands of hours of Dota! Dude is consistently an airhead when it comes to formulating or ingesting actual critiques.

Also, I feel like there has been a lot of back and forth in this thread about the movement being "good" or "bad", and that is obviously subjective. The movement is demonstrably slow and unresponsive. The menus are labyrinthine. There tutorials popups are small and vanish quickly. I think they (& us) should focus more on descriptive language in discussion.

I'm with Dan on this one, unfortunately. I play just about every western game I can get my hands on, but to me, RDR2 just doesn't have any of what makes a game fun. That, and the story isn't that good either! The ending was so obviously telegraphed on that Strauss mission! Why don't my magic bullet time powers work right as my friends are getting shot to death? Why does the trolley throttle break for no reason? Why does Charles sign up to possibly die for no reason? Why are there so many missions where you can't catch the person/thing you're chasing until after the game decides you can? This stuff is ridiculous.

It's pretty obvious Rockstar just wants to make a movie, and they should. They are continuing to wring out what remains of the "game" portion with each of their releases.

While I'm not a big fan of the redesign myself, I feel like the comments are starting to get hyperbolic. Relax folks, it's all gonna work out.

My biggest hope is that the dev team has analytics already in place so data can point to genuine issues vs. personal preference issues.

Some thoughts:

• It seems like "Live" getting top billing by being the first menu item is counter intuitive. Live shows don't happen that often, and I imagine many users might just go to /chat out of habit.
• Swap the location of the "Search" icon and the "Live" notification. Could have a little pulsing "Live Now!" Red button on the right.
• Can I have a "Recently Watched" sub menu under Videos? I don't really want to add whole shows to a watchlist, I just want to easily be able to jump back into the last video I was watching. With GB specializing in long ass videos, I feel like this feature is sorely missing. Going back to continue watching UPF from last week, I've gone to Videos -> Latest -> Latest UPF Episode -> Play button. 4 clicks is way too many to resume watching the last thing I was watching.
• The entirety of the frontpage being the latest content is nice, but too large. Not to mention, it's audio content multiple days per week. I know folks like to watch the bombcast, but I have to imagine the viewer numbers on that are incredibly low in comparison with other site videos / audio listeners of the podcast.
• Individual show pages are incredibly unintuitive. I wanted to send a new subscriber a link to Steal My Sunshine. To get to episode 1, I had to change to Grid View (which should be the default), and change the year (???) to 2017. It is also labeled as having 2 seasons. I'm guessing these are the years? If I'm looking for a specific show, I just want a grid of all episodes, in order, with paging if there are too many. The current default that takes the user to the last episode, with comments on THAT episode (when you think you're visiting the show at large) and a small carousel view is just bad UX.

EDIT: Just learned from reading other posts that there is a Continue Watching carousel on the front page. I never realized because it's two full page widths down among 5 other carousels, under a huge image of Majin Bu that of course links to non-visual content.

This is of course speculation, but I think it's possible Rockstar doesn't realize their game is confusing. From a development perspective, I would wager that most of the actual mechanical systems in this game have been in a playable for years and years at this point. After those are in a semi-working state, it's time to flesh out this amazing world with the perfect terrains, textures, animations, voice acting - you name it.

If you've been interfacing with this game for such a very long time, it seems easy to forget that any individual mechanic might be difficult to grasp. Playtesting is the answer for this type of thing, but given the breadth of the game, I can't imagine there were a lot of "full playthrough" tests, but rather "okay, now play a demo of this duel, how does that feel to you?". In a vacuum like this, any individual component isn't that hard to understand. Everything starts to break down when you're trying to read the horse sprinting tooltip while steering your mount and getting shot in the back.

@merxworx01: Yeah, makes sense. I've just play hundreds of hours of Hunt: Showdown that manage to have slower paced combat with those type of weapons that don't throw in this oddity. Even WITH that feature, R2/RT for cocking just feels (like many of the controls) unnatural. If you don't cock after a shot, a pull of R2/RT both cocks and fires? The context switch with every button in the game drives me up a wall.