Comments on: Editorial: The Atypical Experience

By: Java

Java — Tue, 09 Dec 2014 16:02:19 +0000

They still haven’t fixed the broken fuss and already announced art DLC. I don’t know what to think anymore, so I just buy.

By: Lusipurr

Lusipurr — Sun, 07 Dec 2014 01:28:23 +0000

I bought the article, but it brought me no enjoyment.

By: Dancing Matt

Dancing Matt — Sat, 06 Dec 2014 09:17:21 +0000

Unlike Ethos or Dancing Matt, I just fuss about cover art based on what Mel is all about. Buy the great article anyway Lusipurr!

By: Lusipurr

Lusipurr — Fri, 05 Dec 2014 17:06:08 +0000

Unlike Ethos or Dancing Matt, I don’t buy anything, I just fuss. I don’t understand… is there something to buy?

By: Ethos

Ethos — Fri, 05 Dec 2014 06:23:50 +0000

I’ve long felt that music albums can’t be properly reviewed until at least a year after their release. Not only do games take longer to get through, but there are more elements to reflect on and less of an academic foundation to draw from. I haven’t read any Dragon Age reviews but it seems to me that people had to get through it so quickly to review it that they were too busy being dazzled by how much content there was to take a hard look at if the game was any good as a whole. It’s not, really, I don’t think. The gaming equivalent of a popcorn flick, so I don’t regret my purchase. And they do some things like environment design and a few characters well, but like with any art, a good element is just a good element. What makes it good is much harder to discern. Dragon Age is – from my current impressions – a game that is less than the sum of its parts, but I still haven’t even completed it yet.

Anyway, I agree with Matt. I just buy covers based on the fuss. I don’t understand what all the art is about!

By: Dancing Matt

Dancing Matt — Fri, 05 Dec 2014 02:49:25 +0000

I just buy games based on the cover art, so I don’t understand all this fuss about review scores, but great article anyway Mel!

By: Mel

Mel — Thu, 04 Dec 2014 21:05:45 +0000

I know for certain many circles of the development world could stand to slow down for the sake of quality, but as you say this is all a part of a business. And while we can declare “The Market wants this”, we have to remember people (aka the market) don’t always buy (want) things with enough criticality to call that act an endorsement.

It’s more like a habit (a bad one) that substitutes the need to find out about new games with new names. I guess the resultant games are equivalent, they’re lazy products bought by lazy purchasers.

If you were to single out people and show them a new Ass Creed (but with a different name and without online opinion to color their own) I’m betting you’d find people saying worse things about these products.

aaaanyway, that was getting a bit off the trail. I think a missing component to slowing down any of these processes is an incentive. “The Other Guy” will always be willing to do it the faster way, and he’ll probably be rewarded for it. The incentive should be caring about the industry or thing in question enough, as a participant, to not want to see it cheapened by cutting corners.

But since businesses are treated like innocent and unbridled forces of nature rather than the small intelligent groups of people they actually are, and because they’re often helmed by people with no interest in the product, we’ll likely continue to see people controlling industries who only care about the money those industries produce and not the products they produce.

What a rant, jeez. That was like taking a dump.

By: Java

Java — Thu, 04 Dec 2014 20:26:51 +0000

It is hard for me to comment on something like this without the bias of a patient gamer. An idealistic side of me thinks the whole industry, from development to reviewing, needs to slow down a bit. Take the time to make a properly solid game, and take the time to write about that game properly. Yet, that idealist is countered by another side that sees the competitive nature in the business for what it is; a race for relevance. It moves fast, and a writer will typically want to keep a large audience interested. That may mean seeking a balance between speedy information, while imparting fairness, objectivity, and transparency into a review.