Let it all out.
When England goes down to one of the worst defeats in ODI history, SiliconNoob, Imitanis, and Mel rush to console Lusipurr with pictures from Wal*Mart. Traumatised, the Dear Leader takes to his bed. But worse, Scottish defeats loom just around the corner.
LusipurrENGLAND WON! ENGLAND HAVE WON A GAME OF CRICKET!
EthosDon’t believe Ondore’s lies.
Lusipurr
KisakiProjectThat Final Fantasy XV demo sounds truly awful….I wonder if this will be the death nail in Final Fantasy on consoles?
LegendaryApplePeople of Walmart is a brilliant website. Gross, but brilliant.
SiliconN00B@KisakiProject – It could be very popular.
SiliconN00BHonestly, my biggest worry for XV isn’t that the combat will suck, but rather that it will be a Ubisoft style collectathon, a la Dragon Age Inquisition.
KisakiProjectThe thing with FFXV that kills me is that its some bros diving around on a bro trip. It’s the epitome of the focus tested garbage that is modern gaming.
The Legendary ZoltanI hadn’t thought about them making it a collectathon. Thanks for adding another fear to my growing list. I’m fine with the bro trip, fine with the car, with the open world, and even with Nomura’s zipper-loving host club pretty boys. The concern for me is the challenge. I was watching that video and every time they used a potion on someone with 0 HP, the amount recovered was different. When listening to the podcast, I thought that if they only get like 10 percent HP when coming back from 0, it wouldn’t be a big deal. It would be like a Phoenix Down (the shop prices would be messed up though). But in the video they sometimes got back like 70%! Also, I thought that everyone reaching 0 HP would mean game over but instead they ran away with Noctis and when they were out of battle range, everyone instantly revived with like 50% HP! NOOOOOOOO!
SiliconN00BXenoblade Chronicles would have been a crazy collectathon if it wasn’t for the fact that all of the sidequests are so pointless.
SiliconN00BAlso, I’m with Zoltan, the brotrip motif is the least of my worries, and I imagine that it is an undertaking that was incredibly close to Nomura’s heart.
EthosI’ve never played WATCH_DOGS, but I wouldn’t really compare any Ubisoft game I’ve played to DA: I. They’re bad in different ways. I have my own predictions about FFXV, and it’s fun to confidently swap our ideas about what the game is going to look like, but we all know by now that games have to be played – usually at length – to have any real sense of them. To understate it, 45 minutes of video footage is not nearly the same thing as 40 hours of playing. In fact, I would say that the more experience with games I get, the less confident I get about predictions based on comparisons, video footage, hopes, and fears.
LusipurrLet us not confuse sanctimony with sense. There is an understandable reticence to rush to judgement when details are thin on the ground, but then there is an ostrich-like refusal to accept the consistent implications of what one is and has been witnessing. There is nothing intellectually laudable about being so moderate that one will not call a spade a spade. Neither is there anything laudable about being intellectually fearful of inductively extrapolating reasonable conclusions from known variables on the grounds of a ‘lack of deductive certainty’. There is no deductive certainty that the sun will come up tomorrow, but no one is holding a praiseworthy position by steadfastly refusing to accept that it will.
Watching someone else play a demo for forty-five minutes may not be the same thing as oneself playing a demo for forty-five minutes (although it is far closer than is often smarmily claimed) or as playing a game for forty hours, but it is patently absurd to argue that forty-five minutes of a demo does not convey reasonable details about which one might adjudge the game, given that much of the core gameplay will remain essentially unchanged throughout the the game. In fact, that is the very purpose of a demo, and if it fails in that regard, that is also a perfectly right judgement upon the developers.
One does not need to read through a one thousand page novel before one’s negative judgement is justified if the first one hundred pages are complete rubbish, or if it is apparent in the first ten pages that the author cannot write. It is the duty of the novel to engage the reader all the way. Some sort of creative redemption on the part of the author in the final pages of the novel does not save the rest of the novel. It is still an awful work, because if it alienates its audience to the point that they are unwilling to finish it or engage with it, then it is a wasted enterprise. Mere creativity alone is not some sort of unfettered good.
Certainly it butters a lot of scones to reassure oneself that being hesitant to pass judgement is the same thing as the exercise of reason, but these are in no way equivalent things. To wit, we have had nothing but bad news about FFXV for months, and the more we see the worse it appears. I struggle to think of even a single glimmer of hope that we have heard which has been proved to be true. So, it is not unreasonable to have real, concrete fears for the FFXV enterprise at this point, or to express those fears as condemnations of what one has seen thus far should it manifest in the full title, in the hope that outcry will result in a changed direction. In fact, the unreasonable position is to refuse to accept what one has seen on the basis that development has not yet reached the point where it is too late to change it.
Finally, if the development team are only releasing overwhelmingly negative material which reflects poorly upon their game, but which is somehow (magically, perhaps?) not a true representation of the as-yet unseen ‘goodness’ of the game itself, then:
– The developer is doing an awful job at communication, for which they rightly deserve a great deal of negative critique; and,
– The material they are showing is unappealing to their audience, for which negative critique is absolutely needful; and,
– We cannot know how ‘good’ their work is if they only show us crap, and so we cannot praise it.
So, are we supposed dyslogistically to praise games and not critique any obvious problems we see in advance, because of the possibility that–because of developer incomptence–what we see might not be an accurate reflection of the ‘whole’? No. This is an obviously indefensible position. If the developer is that incompetent, and if the evidence is consistent, then the negative judgements are reasonable, and it is instead unreasonable to refuse to accept the implications drawn, quod erat demonstrandum.
EthosA perfect response to how I presented my argument. Certainly I was being a little sanctimonious and arrogant and needed to be told so, although there is also plenty that you responded to that required a few assumptions that I’m not sure were fair (something I did in my own original comment, I’m aware). I’ll come at my argument with better communication some other time in some other conversation. For now, I’ll clarify that my comment was not necessarily meant to implicate optimism or that people should not extrapolate information from what is currently presented, although I do not think your book analogy is all that applicable in any case despite being a truth on its own.
LusipurrThe book analogy is more correct than you think, especially given that the media’s advance feedback performs by and large the same function as editorial oversight on a manuscript (with just as inconsistent the effects when it comes up against authorial hubris/success).
SiliconNooB“I wouldn’t really compare any Ubisoft game I’ve played to DA: I.”
I would. DAI felt incredibly derivative of Far Cry and Assassin’s Creed; both games that pad their length with endless lists of things that need to be killed and collected for upgrades. DAI is positively gravid with such insipid busy work.
Is TSM still on iTunes? I accidentally killed my computer and can’t find it.
Lusipurr@EP: Yes. Search for Lusipurr. Make certain you are searching the iTunes store, not your library.
I found it. Thank you!
Dancing MattI’m just looking forward to seeing Flappy Final Fantasy one day.
Lusipurr@DancingMatt: SHHHHHHHHHHHH before you give them ideas!
DiceAdmiralI was incredibly busy last week. I’ll try and drop an Info Past in here soon.
