NPfeifer

Before I start, I just wanna let you know this rant is available in video form.

Giant Bombers, I think more particularly on the west coast, are getting far more picky about not just what "good" graphics are, but what "acceptable" graphics are. Frankly, the graphics between all of the major platforms are getting so similar these days that there are very few games that are "unplayable" or "unacceptable" graphically outside of the demo scene and maybe some indie games (Soda Drinker Pro, I love you, but I'm looking at you).

But as Louis C.K. once said "Everything is amazing and nobody is happy."

For years, Giant Bomb, especially Jeff, has become particularly presumptive that everyone just has a good PC with a 1080Ti lying around to play games in their graphically optimal format when that couldn't be further from the truth. That's why we have fanboyism for the most part: people can afford one console, they have one, maybe the second, and they fight for what their first choice was. It's economic realism. Also: the vast majority of us aren't paid to play video games and/or have an expense account to get new hardware and games.

Watching Jeff play the Saints Row the Third Quick Look, which looks just as smooth and high-fidelity as it ever has been, even with all of the upgraded graphics, then go on the Bombcast to say that the framerate was "unacceptable" and "doesn't run super well" when it clearly is not either of those things is just ridiculous. This alone might be like "Oh, NPfeifer, what are you ranting about", but then you start digging into Digital Foundry videos where they nitpick every last thing and they essentially make a living clowning on graphical performance. And suckers like us keep giving them attention.

20 years ago, I played Deus Ex on my 533MHz Celeron Pavilion with integrated graphics. This was a game that launched exclusively on PCs and wouldn't run on a lot of them because the game was so technically intense with its vast open spaces, even though it didn't look great. Settling for 16-bit color where you had splotchy colors (that also, ironically, seemed to enhance the atmosphere of the game) but also gunshot decals on surfaces had faintly visible squares around them because the game couldn't render transparency quite right was one thing. But on my machine, once an enemy "activated", my frame rate fell through the floor, usually pulling a "full stop" for up to two or three seconds before I could respond where sometimes I would just die because I couldn't aim and fire back. And then there were the 45-60 second saves/loads/reloads that really killed the flow of the game. And yet I loved it. That was a new game for new hardware exclusively on the PC and it was literally unplayable for a lot of people. It still wound up being my favorite shooter of all time. These days I get angry if I'm running it at 4K and I *can't* replicate the splotchy look it originally shipped with.

Giant Bomb, all graphics are amazing and you're not happy and that makes no sense whatsoever.

I don't buy the excuse of "they've got mouths to feed", they still work the same number of hours a week.

But the thing is, even as the crew has been separated for nearly 5 years, that edited content has come down. Obviously it's better when everyone is in the same building and it takes a while to do that stuff, but it seems even since then, it just doesn't appear to be a priority anymore.

Forgive my lateness in bringing this up, I'm just now catching up. I've been on the site since 2009 and while I was a subscriber for years, I don't get much time with Giant Bomb these days (marriage does that!). Getting through this past year's GOTY deliberations took over two weeks as they get longer and longer and I have less and less time. That's not Giant Bomb's fault by any means, but as I peruse the rest of the content that I _didn't_ get time to look at as it was posted, it does seem like it was very, very light. I remember Space Egypt and Ryan's tiny hat and the staff's individual Top 10s in video format. I remember the sketches and the other scripted content. I even remember the scripted "at-home" anthology series of videos they did a few years back that were really funny (like when Austin was assembling that Gundam).

But as the site has gravitated away from scripted content to "recorded live" stuff, I feel that the deliberation podcast/videocasts have become the centerpiece of the site's content rather than the by-product of the deliberations that would've happened regardless of what content wound up on the site. When Jeff did finally post the list of GOTY winners, it seemed almost like an after-thought.

Now I'm not privvy to what Giant Bomb does when they stay together for two weeks in San Francisco in early December, but it seems that as the years roll on and the staff gets bigger and bigger, the amount of content they create seems to get less and less. Maybe I'm missing something big here.

EDIT: Also, that said, I did appreciate the shift in format from categories to giving the year a full review. Having a smorgasbord of categories meant that things got negative from the get-go as everyone started to dog every game that wasn't (and all the ones that were!) worthy of the top 3 spots in each category.

I definitely want to see more gaming docs out there, whether it's Danny's stuff, Area5 or even the Polygon long-forms that Russ Pitts was in charge of. That's the direction the gaming industry should be going instead of just consuming games and spitting out reviews as quickly after release day as possible. That said, it's time consuming to do this stuff. Not to self-promote, but I've been doing long-form game documentaries for two years, but since no one knows who I am, a Patreon or Kickstarter is basically impossible. Danny can thankfully take advantage of that.

Thanks!

This generation really weirds me out because Fallout 3 and Skyrim ran like relative garbage on Xbox 360 if you didn't install them and I don't remember anyone complaining, but Fallout 4 not only runs dramatically smoother than FO3 ever did, but when it hitches it becomes "man, the Xbox One really sucks, doesn't it?". It's soooo strange.

Let me know what you think! These usually take about three months to make, but I was thankfully able to whittle the time down to about a month. Had to record about 300GB of footage to make it work.

A "native" version of Minecraft was absolutely inevitable after the purchase. Java was so damn irritating and it lead to some of the worst performance losses on my machines. I remember the game losing its shit repeatedly as we built some of our larger projects on the Vergecraft server. Losing the mod support is going to suck so I know people will be sticking to the Java version for that specifically. That said, I might be okay with losing mod support if the game runs substantially better.

As for the appeal: playing Minecraft with a big group of friends on a server is a better and more fun experience than any MMO ever created.

I still don't understand this disparity, but it's ironic considering how many of my PS4-only friends are still waving the "I've got the console for games!" flag.