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https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKF0I-JW63Q&t=53s Relevant bit is from 0:52 to 5:02, if timestamp doesn't work and the cited Polygon article is here. It's a decent read, though not much new information for anyone that's tuned into this stuff, other than perhaps the fact that Sony PR contacted the Vice reviewer after publication to tell them the review was "unfair". Final paragraph: Patricia Hernandez posted:But, based on my own conversations with fellow critics, many have assumed an air of wariness about The Last of Us Part 2 discourse. It feels as if there are all these larger forces working toward maintaining the status quo when it comes to big-budget games. It’s not enough that the game is selling well, and that most reviews are positive; you can’t fall out of line with that general consensus, even as a joke, without having to worry about whether or not a publisher will be looking over your shoulder, or if hundreds of fans will blow up your social media. It is not an environment that is conducive to encouraging honest reviews or critical discussion, which is ultimately a disservice to the game itself. The comments are great, the top upvoted comment is this: quote:TLoU2 is not "one of the biggest games this year", or "best game of the year". It is by far the best game made so far. That’s an objective fact. If you know a better made game, go ahead and tell me. I’m not talking about subjective opinion about a storybeat or whatever, I’m talking about how well made the game is.
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Jul 4, 2020 17:12
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Patricia Hernandez is good. We need more of her.
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Jul 4, 2020 17:21
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tlou2's defenders are finally giving me a taste of what the undertale fandom must have looked like from the outside though at least undertale was made by one guy killing himself with a spaghetti-only diet, instead of a monolithic company headed by a manbunned imbecile killing his employees with predatory business practices
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Jul 4, 2020 17:28
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Is it just me, or can you pretty much also read that quote as a critic complaining about the fact that they themselves are not immune to getting criticized?
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Jul 4, 2020 17:28
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Theres a lot of water between being criticized and being leaned on by giant companies/having gamer psychos going after you. In related news, it looks like Abby's VA is getting sent death threats by the gamer psychos upset about the games treatment of their proxy father Joel.
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Jul 4, 2020 17:36
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which sucks especially hard because laura bailey is my favorite VA in the biz and has really stepped back her roles lately, this fiasco isn't going to convince her any different
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Jul 4, 2020 17:37
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Cardiovorax posted:Is it just me, or can you pretty much also read that quote as a critic complaining about the fact that they themselves are not immune to getting criticized? They're not describing criticism, they're talking about Zelda 8.8 scenarios and things like the recently related intimidation over an FF12 remaster of all things.
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Jul 4, 2020 17:42
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Cardiovorax posted:Is it just me, or can you pretty much also read that quote as a critic complaining about the fact that they themselves are not immune to getting criticized? No that’s a pretty reasonable take. As much as people like to dismiss the game by saying how it beats you over the head with its messages and themes, tons of people reviewing it are overlooking or completely missing plot details in service of their point. There could maybe be a criticism made on how the game likes to hide some of its more subtle parts in journals and collectibles (like the Joel flashback in the ending fight being the first time Ellie sees his face not caved in since it happened, which you only know if you read the journal), but rather than refocus the critique on that people are just doubling down on their original point. “It’s too easy to miss parts of the plot” is a totally valid criticism, “I missed parts of the plot and therefore they don’t matter” really isn’t.
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Jul 4, 2020 17:45
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JustaDamnFool posted:Theres a lot of water between being criticized and being leaned on by giant companies/having gamer psychos going after you.
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Jul 4, 2020 17:46
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ErrEff posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKF0I-JW63Q&t=53s Talk about TLOU2 has just been phenomenally chilled by bigots on the internet, a big publisher being somewhat precious and overbearing, and the fact that the major reviewers just don't have a system that'll adequately review a game like this (which is understandable - you've got to have some way to review gameplay-intensive and story-intensive games in a way that's consistent). It's really interesting that the common thread from the various youtube pre-release reviews mentioned that a) the embargo essentially prevented them from usefully reviewing the game and b) the game was consistently trying to make you feel miserable. I'm not sure that b is particularly accurate but I can see how, if you wanted to code a warning that "this game tries to manipulate you in a way that you might find tiresome" without delving into specifics then you'd probably put it like that. In fact, I think the necessity of coding the pre-release reviews' message about the way in which some might find the structure and nature of the story unsatisfying coloured the post-release reviews as well - reviewers tended to expand on that message rather than modifying it.
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Jul 4, 2020 17:58
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This release is at the confluence of a lot of different dysfunctions in the dynamics between games media, audience, creators and critics, and it's all being conflated in a highly charged social media environment in a way that ignores nuance and leaves everyone looking worse. I think the relationship between creators and media goes back to the inception of industry, but games journalism seems to lack any collective memory that goes further back than 5 years or so. Probably because it's an increasingly narrowing field with few opportunities that chews through young kids who take on massive debt and move to the highest cost of living areas in the country in order to get a crack at writing anything for more than peanuts. There's a whole lot of crap to unpack and maybe it'll be examined in a meaningful way in the years to come, but it seems hopelessly full of noise and bad faith for the time being. And that's not even acknowledging the gamergate chuds! It's just pure cringe, and I'm glad I ignored it all until I beat the game.
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Jul 4, 2020 18:03
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This is a game with a 94 metacritic score and a lower bound of 6.5/10. It's not something that's been harshly treated by professional critics in any meaningful way.
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Jul 4, 2020 18:10
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The lack of really harsh and incisive reviews for anything except games too small and indie to have any meaningful publisher pushback result from it is historically a pretty persistent criticism of gaming journalism in general, isn't it? It's often considered rather less than honest for that reason.
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Jul 4, 2020 18:12
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https://twitter.com/youmeyou/status/1279413731189911552
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Jul 4, 2020 18:20
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Cardiovorax posted:The lack of really harsh and incisive reviews for anything except games too small and indie to have any meaningful publisher pushback result from it is historically a pretty persistent criticism of gaming journalism in general, isn't it? It's often considered rather less than honest for that reason. I think there's a genuine difficulty in that a crap AAA game tends to be crap for a AAA game. On any scale that encompasses all contemporary video games, you're going to have an absolute floor of 5 or 6 out of 10 for anything that's had resources lavished upon it, and in reality a 7/10 for a AAA title is a real bollocking from the critic. It is stupid as hell because it simply doesn't work effectively as a critical apparatus once you factor in all the necessary sycophancy required to obtain interviews, previews and so on as well. The medium of "games" is so broad that they should just drop ratings out of ten, but that's not going to happen because there's a demand for such things. e: I hate defending Druckmann, but this was completely fine. His view when he didn't understand the bigger picture was different to his view when he did. Perfectly Safe fucked around with this message at 18:31 on Jul 4, 2020 |
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Jul 4, 2020 18:25
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Yeah, I honestly agree with you there. A major problem with the modern gaming review scale of 1-10 or whatever is that they're all calibrated fpr starting at a hypothetical 1 out of 10 game that would so bad that it would never even see publication. No game that genuinely awful ever gets to the point of being sold, they largely die in production and any game that ever does get that bad is more a freak outlier than anything.
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Jul 4, 2020 18:28
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Scores feel like a relic from another time, when parents needed a way to quickly check if they were buying their kids a busted game. I don't know what relevance a metacritic score has to any meaningful discussion about a game when Mass Effect: Andromeda has a 72. It's also obvious that ad buys and tactic threats to access underlies many of these scores.
biceps crimes fucked around with this message at 18:45 on Jul 4, 2020 |
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Jul 4, 2020 18:41
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Its not like there's even a major demand for the incisive critique of AAA games during release window anyway. What the majority of people seem to want is just a weird mix of product review and a general thumbs up, and stepping outside that invites harrassment from various corners. Most of the best writing on games tends to come out in the months and years after release when the stakes are lower and there is less of a rush to churn out a review to hit release deadlines.
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Jul 4, 2020 18:42
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JustaDamnFool posted:Its not like there's even a major demand for the incisive critique of AAA games during release window anyway. What the majority of people seem to want is just a weird mix of product review and a general thumbs up, and stepping outside that invites harrassment from various corners. I remember the reactions when someone gave Death Stranding a less than amazing review for the first time.
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Jul 4, 2020 18:47
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I always end up thinking of No More Room in Hell when I think about reviews and stuff. It was a really rudimentary game that was developed on a complete shoestring and came out in around 2015 as part of Steam's Greenlight initiative. It used the same engine as Half Life 2, it was basically a cooperative zombie apocalypse game with specialised mechanics for getting bitten and so on. There were two game modes with several maps apiece, all the player models looked like they were constantly taking a poo poo and there were about eight zombie models being used by up to and over 100 zombies at a time. It was a magnificent accomplishment for what it was, a really effective, claustrophobic game that made the many behaviours of gamers a feature of the game ("gamers" and "people in a zombie apocalypse" are both examples of humanity pared to the bone, it seems - some people would panic and blow all the ammo in the first round, some were trying to help others while other people would consistently gently caress other players over in order to pinch their supplies, some would literally bunker in a cellar while others would be proactive etc.). In the grand scheme of things it was phenomenally crappy, but all the elements of a good, well-thought-out game were there and it was a lot of fun and quite thought-provoking in its own way.
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Jul 4, 2020 18:49
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Panzeh posted:I remember the reactions when someone gave Death Stranding a less than amazing review for the first time. even that was expected by most, because DS is so aggressively loving weird compared to its high-budget contemporaries (both in terms of general gameplay and kojima's bloviating scriptwriting) that it was bound to rub at least a few people the wrong way tlou2 is just the same action/adventure checklist as always with even more blood and cash laminating every surface
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Jul 4, 2020 18:49
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You can make a drinking game out of how often Death Stranding shows Kojima's name on the screen, but otherwise, I was surprised by how solid the 'fetchquest, but as an entire game' basic concept of it was. It's actually pretty fun.
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Jul 4, 2020 18:55
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Remember, folks - if you're making a deep, weird, thought-provoking game then it has to have an inexplicable sea water fist fight at the end.
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Jul 4, 2020 19:05
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I think “this game is trying to make you miserable” is a weird criticism because there’s a very real degree to which that is the reason so many fans want to play it. It’s the same reason people like to WATCH survivalist dramas. There are so few video games that approach adult themes and drama and the biggest ones are like GTA and the writing has never been this organic, imo. This game is catering to a more adult audience that really wants to immerse you in the misery so the moments of the game like holding your Potato looking at the sunset on the farm or any of the musical interludes hit you harder. Feature, not a bug, basically.
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Jul 4, 2020 19:13
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Bust Rodd posted:I think “this game is trying to make you miserable” is a weird criticism because there’s a very real degree to which that is the reason so many fans want to play it. It’s the same reason people like to WATCH survivalist dramas.
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Jul 4, 2020 19:19
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Oh for sure but at that point that’s not something the game is doing wrong, that’s just you consuming something that isn’t to your taste.
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Jul 4, 2020 19:27
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True. It's possible for something to be a very good game or story and still be something you personally just hate. You can criticize that without being unreasonable, it's just means your opinion is written from a very different position of expectation and point of view than the opinions of those who really like that experience.
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Jul 4, 2020 19:29
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I mean I think reviews of a game like TLOU2 have a difficulty in that gameplay wise it is at least solid if not innovative. And the horrible amount of work that went into the graphics obviously show. So it's placement on some sort of score is entirely based on the story, though if you ignore that and just look at gameplay/graphics/map design, it will score highly because of the insane level of work that produced the detail it did.
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Jul 4, 2020 19:45
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Every game in the post-Undertale world should have an accompanying Undertale index score, that would probably reduce a lot of the noise, especially when it comes to relitigating violence in video games on every AAA release
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Jul 4, 2020 19:55
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Bust Rodd posted:I think “this game is trying to make you miserable” is a weird criticism because there’s a very real degree to which that is the reason so many fans want to play it. It’s the same reason people like to WATCH survivalist dramas. There are so few video games that approach adult themes and drama and the biggest ones are like GTA and the writing has never been this organic, imo. This game is catering to a more adult audience that really wants to immerse you in the misery so the moments of the game like holding your Potato looking at the sunset on the farm or any of the musical interludes hit you harder. Feature, not a bug, basically.
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Jul 4, 2020 20:16
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ErrEff posted:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pKF0I-JW63Q&t=53s i think the best made game of all time doesn't have a 2 hour epilogue where the gameplay designer thought "gently caress it, you can have a silenced submachine gun to make the gameplay null and void" because it knows it's well overstayed its welcome but what do i know
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Jul 4, 2020 20:34
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stev posted:Patricia Hernandez is good. We need more of her. Patricia Hernandez sucks rear end as a critic but her online enemies suck rear end as human beings. Critical support for Patricia Hernandez.
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Jul 4, 2020 22:21
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Video gamer guys hate this game because there is a woman in it who has bigger muscles and smaller tits than they do
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Jul 5, 2020 03:54
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Josuke Higashikata posted:i think the best made game of all time doesn't have a 2 hour epilogue where the gameplay designer thought "gently caress it, you can have a silenced submachine gun to make the gameplay null and void" because it knows it's well overstayed its welcome but what do i know How does having a silenced SMG make the gameplay null and void? It's useful, the same way the crafted silencers are useful, sure, but it burns through ammo very quickly. It's a fun thing or bust out in NG+ for sure, but it's not a win button.
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Jul 5, 2020 08:11
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I was playing on Hard and my SMG ammo lasted against maybe 4 of the 50 dudes you have to kill at the resort.
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Jul 5, 2020 09:53
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JustaDamnFool posted:In related news, it looks like Abby's VA is getting sent death threats by the gamer psychos upset about the games treatment of their proxy father Joel. Maybe people are garbage?  Alright kids, I'm unbookmarking this thread as you've all been legitimately fantastic for quite some time now; thank you very much, I really do genuinely appreciate it. This is A Good Thread now. If someone is being a fuckwit please mash the report button, or send me a PM, and I'll come in and have a looksee for you. And remember Stux isn't allowed back in this thread unless he has bought and played the game.  So if you see him in here take him to task, and if he hasn't he'll be sent on another 2 week vacation.
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Jul 5, 2020 10:22
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I was going to post this earlier as well, because someone was talking about missile jumping, so now it'll just be some random little endcap to my posting ITT showing how much of a heckin nerdo I am  https://i.imgur.com/TKbN4Xg.mp4
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Jul 5, 2020 10:26
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I took the opportunity to post on Laura’s feed that she is awesome and amazing and Abby is so cool and I will enjoy hearing her performance for years to come! Lots and lots of fans showing love and support and really turning her experience around. We are outnumbering the trolls on twitter a lot, it’s not ALL bad!!
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Jul 5, 2020 10:30
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Are we currently experiencing the "game's actually good because it's being criticized by lovely people" counter-wave most games seems to get on SA? It's okay if we are but please let's not forget the monotone, one trick pony story with terrible pacing and high school fanfic plot devices. Or that the game spends half the time basking in its own misery because it's so edgy and dark and mature. Or that the gameplay is the same old poo poo now 7 years older. I was a huge fan of TLOU but to me this is an unfortunate game people won't like talking about in the future, not a masterpiece or even a great product. A technical masterpiece I suppose, if you really have to use that word. The Schindler's List of photorealistic graphics? I still find it hilarious that most videogame journalists gave it 10/10s or 100/100s right away then barricaded in their holes after being called out by the majority of the playerbase. My opinion on TLOU2 might as well be harsher than most but I'm sure we can all agree there's no conceivable universe where this game is a 10.
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Jul 5, 2020 12:44
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No, it was good while I was playing it and it's still good now. It's purely incidental that most of the people who didn't like it (or decided they didn't like it without playing it) are literal scum.
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Jul 5, 2020 12:48
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