Comment on Avowed | Review Thread
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 year agoThe thing to understand is that reviews are inherently subjective. Decade(…s?) ago, Kieron Gillen wrote a pretty famous manifesto where he basically compared game reviewing to travel writing.
When you are booking a holiday, you don’t care how many grains of sand are on the beach. You probably don’t care too much about the average flow rate of cars on the highway during rush hour. What you care about is whether you will enjoy it.
For some? That means there being plenty of museums. For others it is beaches with accessible parking so that you can leave your crap in a rental car. For others still it is nightlife.
And that applies to “friction” as well. Because let’s take a different example. Many people (myself included) criticized Elden Ring for having a grace outside of basically every single boss room. We half joke that people would lose their god damned minds if they had to play Dark Souls 2 where one of the hardest bosses in the game involves fighting your way through a solid wall of Black Knight level enemies every single time. Others think we are fucking stupid for liking Dark Souls 2 (… they are probably right) and that this lets you focus solely on the boss and not memorizing what a weeb in armor is going to do… before you fight the other weeb in armor. And others still will point out that having to run past those enemies or fight one or two helps to “reset” the mind between attempts and avoids being on tilt against a boss.
Just like some people want a beach where everyone is in a bikini and dehydrated like Hugh Jackman on a film set. And others still want somewhere they can relax and maybe surf for a bit.
Which… mostly speaks to Grubb’s problems as a reviewer. As a “game leaks” guy, he is amazing. I think he lacks the drive to be a full on game journo but that is also a function of him working for the company that steals the work of the rest of games media on the regular (Fandom). But he has a VERY long history of giving “spicy takes” where he has a rudimentary understanding of a topic but still feels the need to shit on others unnecessarily. He isn’t the only one but I am increasingly at the point where I can’t tell if that is engagement farming or “Just Jeff Grubb”.
I understand that reviews are subjective. I just found it funny that the characters in the game were shouting the solution to the reviewer’s problems at him for so long that he found it frustrating.
Jeff Grubb’s not-a-review was speaking to exactly the kind of thing that’s important to me in games and why he likes this one so much, which did me a great service, so I’m not sure why you’re shitting on him for spicy takes here, lol.
And good for you if that aligns with your wants (it sure aligns with mine).
But, at its core, it is “stupid games media” rhetoric. If you are in a mad dash to finish a review or even a game guide (Fandom’s gotta eat), you might not have time or even interest to go back track and do ten side quests in the starting area. At which point constantly hearing “you should get a better pistol” is gonna be REAL grating and is arguably bad encounter design. What is described as “no friction” is often designing encounters so that people can do both the critical path (just story quests) and all the side paths. And its why so many games either have continuous encounter scaling or just big levers you can flip (PoE1 and 2 did the latter).
So yeah. I do have a bit of an issue with someone in the games media space (especially at the company that steals the work of the rest of games media…) “be(ing) kind of a shit” to colleagues in a manner that just fuels the same kind of bullshit they constantly put up with on social media.
Whereas a “real” games reviewer learns to… not be a shit? I forget what game it was, but I remember Mortismal basically saying “The level scaling is kind of wonky. If you just do only the main story quests, you are going to have a bad time and you’ll need to really understand the combat systems to progress. But if you do too many side quests, you’ll be overpowered and just run right through everything” (… actually that sounds like PoE1 after the DLCs came out…). Rather than just making fun of other reviewers for not being able to handle “friction”.
Although I will say, in Grubb’s defense: That is also kind of the Giant Bomb style guide. It ignores that the OGs (Ryan, Jeff, Brad, Alex, etc) had fairly strong “games media” backgrounds by the time the site started and knew how to say something inflammatory to get a point across without angering the publishers to the point of losing ad revenue (… okay, Jeff wasn’t quite as good at the last part). But without those old hats to act as editors (and no, Dan doesn’t count), you get situations where “snark” is just shit stirring that feeds the people tormenting the rest of the industry.
Grubb has no ill will toward his colleagues. But there are plenty of them praising games that he and I found disappointing for that sanding down, so I understand frustration when there are reviews knocking down a game for delivering what we feel games “ought to be” doing. You get short snark because it fits better in a character limit. If you want more nuanced opinions of his, they come in podcast form, not written form.
I understand frustration when there are reviews knocking down a game for delivering what we feel games “ought to be” doing.
Yeah… that is a real shit perspective. You are actively “frustrated” that people like things you don’t. That is a very big side effect of the content bubble we all liv ein.
And I say this as someone who has loved squad based tactics since the JA2 and Silent Storm days. I am WELL used to “okay, add about 30% to the metacritic score for anything in that genre” and the like.
Grubb has no ill will toward his colleagues (…) You get short snark because it fits better in a character limit.
Which gets back to what is really “the problem”. It is about building his brand by “lightly ribbing” his colleagues. His colleagues who are perpetually days away from layoffs and who are constantly attacked by the asmongolds of the world who are using the exact same arguments and are glad to say “See, this person gets it. Why can’t they?”.
Its about worker solidarity even amongst competition. It is why so many of his colleagues will make it a point to preface even the skeets with “I get that this probably came from on high but” or would have just removed the “snark” entirely and said something like
I think the complaints about being underleveled and not having the right gear, mostly come from games like these being streamlined to the point where they usually have no friction. The obstacles in this game are the main reason I love it.
mohab@piefed.social 1 year ago
Hmm… sure, but I feel like "reviews are subjective" gets used as an excuse to give low-effort reviews a pass too often.
Like, I understand if a Steam reviewer writes whatever because they're just a user, but I cannot justify using the same scale to judge a professional reviewer.
I understand a game may not be a reviewer's cup of tea, but if this stops them from engaging with the game's systems and attempting to provide insight through their review then I think it's fair to judge they haven't done their job well.
Like, if someone hires me to do a job, and I accept, I cannot go "Oh, I'm gonna do half of it because the rest isn't my cup of tea. Sorry." No, I'll do the job and maybe complain about it afterwards, which IMO, is exactly what reviewers should do—example: "I beat the boss, but the fight sucked because X, Y, and Z."
I think there should be standards, otherwise you get reviewers unfairly judging games they barely played like in the infamous God Hand review.
NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip 1 year ago
How about we have ANY job security before we start playing the “I am paying you sub minimum wage to run that kroger. HOW FUCKING DARE YOU DO RESTOCKING AT EIGHT AM!!! YOU ARE PAID TO DO THIS OVERNIGHT!!” shittery? Hmm
Which is something a lot of old hat games media have actually talked about. It is a lot easier to run a 36 hour day to finish up that JRPG review when you know you’ll be able to rest next week. And when you know you’ll get something other than “Fucking woke reviewers don’t understand how to play a game” feedback from the “fans” who only ever see your review when their favorite hatemonger youtuber talks about it while making sure EVERYONE knows your social media accounts.
Define “standards”.
Is it “You must finish a game before reviewing it”? Because Jeff Gerstmann kind of infamously made it a point to finish Metal Gear Survive prior to reviewing it (I think it might have been his final print review at Giant Bomb?). EVERYONE, colleague and fan alike, told him he was stupid. And his consensus was basically that he felt the same way after 30 hours of misery that he did after 2.
Is it “You must be good at a game to review it?”. Because, funny enough, Remap Radio kind of talked about this last summer on one of their ridiculously long podcasts in the context of “games media suck and aren’t good enough to play Shadows of the Erdtree” in that short window before basically everyone said “So… this DLC is fucking hard, huh?”. And they pointed out that this is not at all a new experience for them. They are regularly playing much less polished and MUCH harder versions of these games under a strict time crunch where the only “guide” they have is what their buddy who is paid to write a game guide can experimentally figure out.
And how that translates to a review?
You mean the game which, throughout every re-release, the vast majority of players either nope out after they get their asses beat by random grunts in the first stage? And most of the rest leave when they get to the shop and realize they need to buy and build their own combos blind?
I have no idea what “infamous God Hand review” you are referring to. But the majority I read when I heard about this cool ass PS2 game? It was “Hey, this is a really freaking cool concept and I personally had a blast. But it is not for everyone and a lot of the fundamental gameplay concepts are outright bad. OPM or whatever the hell has a demo of it and we strongly encourage you to get that if it is still on news stands because you are either going to love or hate this”. And, because this was still the era of print (like the VERY tail end), there was money to have one main review and like two “impressions” reviews at most of the major outlets. And, like almost all games, they would make it a point to have at least one sicko persona give it a high score while the rest bounced off. Which kind of represented how players respond to it to this day.
Or is it just “you must agree with me?”. Because, speaking as someone who has loved flight sims and tactics games his entire life (I was the kid in elementary school who liked xcom. The old xcom…)… most gamers don’t have my tastes in gaming. So having someone who dreams of Silent Storm reviewing Fire Emblem isn’t a particularly useful metric for most people.
That said? I learned from an early age to actually look at the by line on a review. I learned which guys/personas at EGM or PC Gamer I vibed with and which I didn’t. And that continued on into the online age and to this day.
Sometimes it is really annoying. Like… I like WW2 RTSes a lot. I fully understand why I need to vet every single youtuber who likes the games I like…
But also? Sometimes it is a really awesome realization that the weirdo audiophile on a podcast is the same guy who wrote some of my favorite reviews over the past decade (Rob Zacny is a treasure). And that the reason I am vibing with his thoughts on Valkyria Chronicles is that I have been vibing with his thoughts on other games for a significant part of our adult lives.