Original Sin - Inteview @ Rock, Paper, Shotgun

Hmm, now that Swen has mentioned he reads us to get feedback, I feel I should fire up the Divinity alpha and start posting impressions. I'll probably try to tackle this for a while, now that the release is getting closer. It may be too late to influence the game, but if it's as good as I'm hoping, I should be able to start playing now and still enjoy the game quite a bit come April 25th.

BTW, I'm one of those gamers Josh was talking about. I've played almost every crpg that has ever been released on a C64 or PC. I still don't consider myself an expert, especially at tactical combat. Why am I not a master? I could care less about the combat. To me, I play for exploration, magic systems, and loot Story is also a secondary concern as "story first" games typically don't get finished by me. (Planescape, DAO, etc.)

crpgnut said:

Hmm, now that Swen has mentioned he reads us to get feedback, I feel I should fire up the Divinity alpha and start posting impressions. I'll probably try to tackle this for a while, now that the release is getting closer. It may be too late to influence the game, but if it's as good as I'm hoping, I should be able to start playing now and still enjoy the game quite a bit come April 25th.

BTW, I'm one of those gamers Josh was talking about. I've played almost every crpg that has ever been released on a C64 or PC. I still don't consider myself an expert, especially at tactical combat. Why am I not a master? I could care less about the combat. To me, I play for exploration, magic systems, and loot Story is also a secondary concern as "story first" games typically don't get finished by me. (Planescape, DAO, etc.)

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I'm similar but different Replace 'combat' with 'exploration' and that's me. I play cRPGs for the tactical combat (reason why I don't care about games like Gothic or Witcher). Story and exploration are secondary in my case.

If Blackguards hasn't been consumed by you, wolfing, it should be. I don't keep track of who likes what, but that should be your game in Spades.

MMX Legacy should be fairly good for you too, though it isn't nearly as tactical in the long run. MMX Legacy is at its best right after the way to Seahaven opens. Once you've gotten to level 20 or so, the tactics don't change and then it's just a march through the rest of the content.

Blade of Destiny HD might be worth another shot too as the tactics were looking pretty nice in that game, but it was buggy and pretty empty. The devs have been working on both for quite a while.

Not that you asked my opinion

Alrik Fassbauer said:

In the other Larian thread there was this reply posted : http://www.twitlonger.com/show/n_1s0reu1

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Thanks for that link I read the article and it is interesting though while the author makes a case from a reviewers perspective, my short-story response is, 'not my problem.'

The article is well articulated and essentially describes intrinsic constraints the industry has created for itself. If review competition is so fierce to the point that such reviewers have to crank out reviews that are ignorant, what the heck am I supposed to do about that?

My response as a consumer has been to largely ignore the gaming press and consider them derelict and incompetent. Not all reviews are terrible, but more so than not. One of the most jaw dropping blatant examples in recent memory was when I came across a review of Oblivion where the reviewer complains that they cannot save their game whenever they wanted to. It was an egregious example of incompetent reporting that goes on all the time in the gaming press 'MTV' culture.

If I'm on the fence about a game, I gladly wade through bi-polar user reviews and comments, searching out trends in the comments, coming to places like RPGWatch to see what some of the more thoughtful and articulate players might have to say about a game. This requires a greater time investment compared to the time it would take if I could rely on 'professional' reviews, but in my experience I just can't because they've been dishonest and ignorant too many times.

Maybe I'm just a curmudgeon now, but for a long time I've felt that much of the gaming press is like the U.S. Congress, largely irrelevant… and made irrelevant by their own hand. Now, GET OFF MY LAWN

crpgnut said:

If Blackguards hasn't been consumed by you, wolfing, it should be. I don't keep track of who likes what, but that should be your game in Spades.

MMX Legacy should be fairly good for you too, though it isn't nearly as tactical in the long run. MMX Legacy is at its best right after the way to Seahaven opens. Once you've gotten to level 20 or so, the tactics don't change and then it's just a march through the rest of the content.

Blade of Destiny HD might be worth another shot too as the tactics were looking pretty nice in that game, but it was buggy and pretty empty. The devs have been working on both for quite a while.

Not that you asked my opinion

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Started Blade of Destiny but paused when I got MMX Legacy, which I paused when I got Stick of Truth

[Edited]

TheMadGamer said:

The article is well articulated and essentially describes intrinsic constraints the industry has created for itself.

My response as a consumer has been to largely ignore the gaming press and consider them derelict and incompetent.

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I suddenly get the impression as if this bad image "the press" has is an result of it's own, internal, actions & decisions ?
Or ... perhaps decisions of those who wanted "the press" to produce more profits ?
I'm a bit confused right now ...

Websites that write about games and have a paid staff or paid editor depend for their income on sold ads.
More profit from ads is gained when you have more page views. You get more page views when you have articles that generate and/or keep the interest of the visitors. And you need quite a few of those articles as well.
As the owners of these sites want the cost to be low and the profits high they either have a small staff that generate a lot of articles or pay per article (or a combination). In any case it benefits the journalists if they can create a lot of articles in a short time.
You simply do not generate a lot of articles if the games you are to write about are difficult to grasp for you and require and investment in time. So you either skip those games and move on to games that are easier to cover in a short time frame or have a go at it and probably miss out on a lot the game has to offer, but still create an article that is likely to suck big time.

It is easy to dismiss the effect these game journalists have, but the simple fact remains that these sites have a lot of visitors of which quite a number are potential candidates that could buy your game.
Having a good positive article of your game on IGN or Gamespot is worth a lot, so it would be good to cater to the needs of the journalists that needs to write an article of your game and if needed hold his/her hands while doing it to get the best out of it.

Fortunately our costs are low, we don't make a profit or much of a loss and our editors are paid in praises and complaints from our visitors, so we can spend loads of time on games

Here is a list of conundrums I see with the gaming press. These are in no particular order:

*Business model for reviewers generally evidences conflict of interest - reviewers get paid by review which promotes rushing. Rushing creates an abundance of reviews that are just plain awful. Nothing is more ironic than a reviewer who rushed his review, stating numerous inaccuracies while at the same time bashing the game. This problem may be intrinsic to the industry, but that just isn't my problem the industry needs to figure it out.

*Plenty of evidence over the course of my life of cronyism between devs/pubs and journalists.

*Reviewers routinely paired with genres they openly admit they loathe

*Reviewers reviewing genres they openly admit they loathe but are still unwilling to produce a professional fair assessment of the game

*Reviewers that routinely fail to critique a game based on the stated marketing goals of the game (for example, features listed on the website, advertisements, and/or box of a game) but rather inject their own expectations or hype that never came from the developer

*Reviewers who seem too inclined with showing off their writing prowess and vocabulary in an all-too-often sophomoric result. They seem to put in second place reviewing the actual game. They commit the offense of making themselves the story instead of the game. There are a few notable authors out there who the second I see their name as the author I look away because I know there are going to be at least 1000 words of nonsense before they begin getting to anything pertinent about the game. Some people out there may like this. I'm not one of them.

*This is a new one and has to do with 'early access' reviews that are now becoming commonplace. I'm on the fence whether there is any real value to these reviews as it's all so new. But the way some of these reviews are going I don't think I will appreciate them in the long run. I just don't think there's all that much value to them and they spend an inordinate amount of time mentioning problems and bugs which I think is a disservice when it's already known the game is NOT retail. This one is a wait and see for me - but it's looking like this is just another excuse for reviewers to crank out content that they get paid for but has very little, if any, actual value.

This list above, for me, is why I do not feel the end-product - the reviews by 'professional' reviewers, serves the regular gamer very well.

But that isn't to say that there aren't reviews out there that are great because there are. There are also some authors who I tend to trust because they've shown they can be trusted. But at the 50,000 foot level, the gaming review press has too many problems and I am largely uninfluenced by what they have to say, I am more interested in what gamers who have played a game have to say about it.

Nice summary of problems with the gaming press, that mirrors my thoughts.

Myrthos said:

It is easy to dismiss the effect these game journalists have, but the simple fact remains that these sites have a lot of visitors of which quite a number are potential candidates that could buy your game.

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I agree. GameSpot and IGN are examples of highly trafficked gaming sites that include reviews. I visit them myself though mostly for the news and not really for their reviews. I admit from time to time I do read their reviews, it just isn't often and even when I do, I take them with a grain of salt even if I want to agree with said review (in situations where I haven't played the game myself).

When it comes to their reviews I suspect a large number of their traffic doesn't really understand or is aware of the issues I pointed out in my earlier post. That they may not realize it doesn't negate that there is a measure of disservice going and self-serving going on.

BTW, I've let my PC Gamer subscription lapse. The content has become so thin that I don't get enjoyment anymore from reading it. Hopefully I wont miss out on some good new releases. What I do miss are the monthly columns that were in depth and interesting. Those were replaced by more shallow reviews a few years ago…