[PA Comic] Friday, September 21, 2012 - Iconoclast
Geth
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
LegionPerseus VeilRegistered User, Moderator, Penny Arcade Staff, Vanilla Staff vanilla
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Second reaction: Oh, that nutty Gabe. sigh~
kingworkscreative.com
kingworkscreative.blogspot.com
I also love the satire in Tycho's comment. Yes. Reviews are the light!
Yes, this. When I first looked at it I knew something was different and couldn't figure out what, only that the art looked amazing.
Huh? I'm barely past level 10 and I would often be on one quest, kill a monster that I had to kill for another quest, and not only would it track the progress in the background, but the quest notification area temporarily changes, displaying the progress for the inactive quest, to let you know that it's been ticked, before going back to the active quest.
Now, I haven't tried progressing one of the story quests without it being tracked, because I try to do all the sidequests I can find before doing the next story quest, so I don't know if the longer, scripted quests act differently than the more mundane collection quests re: tracking, but I thought the inactive quest progress notification they were doing was really nice actually.
However: Good on you guys. I know PA is at the top of the heap in the gaming world, but it still takes a lot of courage to say you don't like a game that is likely to be a hugely popular title. It shows a lot of integrity to be able to say, "Hey, I don't like this AAA title". I think you'll find most people love the game, but we still need honesty if anyone wants to point out faults in these games and move forward as a community.
Also really enjoying the texture of this comic. I love it when Mike experiments!
I had heard about the first Borderlands offhand from a guild mate a few days before it dropped. They talked about a game that had 6-shooters that were actually flame throwers and lightening guns, bazookas that were the BIO guns from unreal tournament, sniper rifles whose bullets melted people or blew up body parts that you aimed at, and rocket launchers that fired like 10 mini-rockets at once.
I ended up picturing this really awesome, goofy, over-the-top shooter in my head that promised near endless fun.
What I got (for 60 dollars) was a mild questing game that just had guns with special ammo, a broken multiplayer, and boring, repetitive enemies.
I ended up beating single player and getting a few legendary guns, but I regretted the hell out of buying that game at release.
I've never gotten the hype around the story or its characters. It's all so bland for a wasteland-type game.
Since then I've started a couple new characters and played them for a little while, but the game has never been able to hold my interest again. I've played online a little now that I actually can, sometimes with PA people, and I've been underwhelmed with the experience. Seems like everybody just sort of runs ahead and does their own thing. Games like Left 4 Dead give me much more of a feeling of being on a team, even with random pubbies.
your = belonging to you
their = belonging to them
there = not here
they're = they are
You're right, the faces are solid, no weird noses or anything, and everything is framed well. (Which has to be tough to do since we're looking at them through the windows of the car.)
Tycho certainly brings some good points about there being "too much" loot, but really, that's kind of the hook of the game. You're either going to like or hate that aspect of it. I enjoyed BL1 enough, but definitely had some issues with the design choices, most specifically non changing camps that would indefinitely respawn, so that back tracking through certain areas required cleaning out the same low level trash every. single. time.
I didn't enjoy it enough to spend $60 on BL2 though, so I'll too be waiting until a steam sale down the road.
Folks at work are playing B2, but I don't know if I want to get sucked in when there's a ton of SWTOR I haven't played
http://www.zeldawiki.org/Groose
The last time Gabriel adapted his style (when everything became a bit more loose and fluid - perhaps around the end of 2011, but I could be way off base on this) resulted in pretty much the ideal Penny Arcade look, I think. Kinda wish he'd not mess with a good thing.
Ah well, whatever.
Like how people tried to say MGS4 isn't a game because of cutscenes.
All female pole dancer species.
On the other hand, if everything else had stayed the same, in Borderlands 1 it would only have exacerbated the problem of questionable weapon balance: SMGs were pretty much better than everything else, and even though I picked Mordecai for my one completed playthrough because I wanted to use revolvers and sniper rifles, I still found myself with SMGs more often than not in the endgame just because they were drastically more effective.
The packrat curse is part and parcel of any game descended from ye ancient roguelikes, especially Diablo. The same goes double for skill point allocation - you're putting tens of hours of your life into a single playthrough, and those skill-point choices are permanent. I've got at least three current Diablo 2 games that've ground to a halt with 10+ unspent skill points and inventories crammed full of awesome equipment I can't decide between. I have the same disease Gabe has, no doubt.
And yet I had no problem with Borderlands 2. I picked up guns as I found them, switched to them to see what they were like, and was soon dropping them without a thought to make room for the expensive-looking ones for later sale. Diablo II has about ten trillion possible stats and differences to weigh; it's made for the slow, analytical player willing to browse character-optimization forums. They encourage OCD. Contrast Borderlands, where you're just shooting people. I'm an FPS aficionado, I know what I want in a gun, I found it, and dumped the rest without second thought. The "RPG elements" aren't RPG in the sense that you can't hit a flock of barns from inside the middle barn at level 1 (original Deus Ex, I'm looking at you,) rather, 90% of the game rides on your skill, with the RPG systems ability increases providing that thin margin for victory. Much like Mount&Blade, the effects aren't noticeable until you increase your own native skill with the game. It's a shooter with RPG tint, not the other way around.
I favor "tactical" games where taking cover is important and you Operate Like an Operator Operating Operationally; which means I really frown on games without "corner-lean" keys (or in lieu of this, a cover system.) Borderlands 2 has neither, and I hardly felt the lack because the game implementation obviated the need - weapons "spread" for the enemy just like they do for you, players hitbox is properly sized, collision detection/terrain mesh placing is excellent, etc. Corner-lean buttons and cover systems were always solutions for those problems (with cover-systems serving dual-use for PC/console dual-release games, but I digress.)
The point Gabe (inadvertently) makes in this comic is anything sounds bad if you just list "features." Gabe is acting similarly to this, but without the negative motivation. When he lists the essential parts of the game as why he doesn't like the game, he really means he just doesn't like this kind of game. Which opinion is increasingly viewed as illegitimate betwixt those that discuss games; (as the comic casts it, "It's like you haven't even read the reviews.") As Neuroskeptic points out, this is Gabe's strength, he's direct and unsophisticated and has a habit of cutting through the analytical woolgathering to the flamin point, viz. how much fun he had.
This is hard for game journalists to do; journalism vies to provide objective, informative coverage, but games are inherently subjective experiences. So we've got a discourse increasingly focused on reeling off lists of features (insofar as I've seen,) which, as enumerated above, don't convey the experience of the game at all. Borderlands 2 is short on "features," but as a game and an experience it's fantastic because it was well made and polished, and that's why it works. No random abundances of waist-high walls; the maps are well-designed, organic and don't scream "X wall placed here for Your Convenience." No sprint gauge, but paired with enemies that give you lots of reason to move around. The first two "boss battles" featured attackers chasing you down while you take suppressive fire from the "main" boss on an emplacement weapon, resulting in you sprinting from cover-to-cover in a pretty "tactical" fashion. The point here; the gameplay is reminiscent of "tacticool" playstyle - especially when using the 'class' designed to give you that kind of playstyle, and it achieves it through good, coherent design, esp. level design, and not mechanics and lots of waist-high walls.
Too much ink is wasted on "features," instead of how a game actually comes together in practice - how well it achieves what it set out to do. FEAR, for example, tried to combine action-movie style cinematic gunfights and J-Horror, which just don't go together at all, but it accomplished #1 so fantastically well nobody holds the resulting failure of #2 against them. (The first time I saw Alma I emptied my SMG into her face and drop-kicked her, then reloaded the game still feeling awesome.) Half-Life 2's physics system - and the weapon that let you play with them - was fantastic, but the enduring enhancement of gameplay (watching headcrabs be kicked down the hall by the kinetic impact of your SMG's bullets, for example), while impressive, was far less then the feature of PHYSICS!!1! had been played up as. Implementation was good, atmosphere was fantastic, but it didn't come together to move it past a (decent) mediocre shooter. Grenades as a separate weapon, instead of having their own hotkey, for example. And most disappointing, you really couldn't use the Gravity Gun to pick up objects and use them as bullet shields, because of collision detection, objects/players hitboxes and, most essentially, the kind, size, variety and frequency of suitable objects simply didn't support it. The pushable cart on an early level you can use as a shield to approach an MG nest may well have been a set-piece, and so in the end the greatest, most groundbreaking "feature" introduced to FPS games in a long while boiled down to lots of loathsome see-saw puzzles (HEY GUYS DID WE MENTION THE PHYSICS ENGINE YET!?!?)
I think it's important we start considering this, and I really hope it hasn't already been considered to death and I just wasted 40 minutes of typing to make myself look like a prat.
--E.L. Doctorow
The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right.
--Mark Twain
Exactly. Those are the "same complaints" detractors use, but the message is entirely different; and you have to read between the lines for that. You already explained the difference between Gabe's message and the detractors; a difference between simple honest statements and arguments made in bad faith.
- and the lesson is, that's a perfectly valid point.
-And this is the kind of statement gamer discourse must murder and dump in an alleyway somewhere. Just listing features, resulting in something that sounds bad? That statement, right there, exhibit A. Having played many shooters and far too much Diablo, I can attest "gun Diablo" is a gross, inaccurate oversimplification. For reasons elucidated prior, the shooting does not suck. The point is that Borderlands 2 can be a fantastic game and still not be everyone's bag, baby. We badly need to move past the "if I/That Guy Whose Opinions I Respect doesn't like it, it must suck universally." Game journalism should focus more on describing the game's atmosphere, interplay and how well it's implemented, not deciding if a game's good or bad, but equipping readers to decide if its good or bad for them. Me, I'm experienced with shooters and know how I like to play, so I take one look at a gun's stats and easily ballpark if it suits me or not (inaccurate close-range bullethose, nope, not for me.) Maybe Gabe can't do that, or even if he can, he's simply (even more) prone to optimization obsession then I, so anything even remotely involving colored arrows is a gigantic flashing neon NOPE sign. The game can be absolutely excellent at delivering the kind of experience it seeks to deliver and Gabe can hate it, most justifiably, because that's not the experience he wants.
But he doesn't say this. He speaks from his own subjective viewpoint, quite bluntly and honestly, and if you don't think to read between the lines - or haven't played the game yourself and thus acquired an appreciation for the dissonance between your subjective experiences - you may well conclude gee it sure sounds sucky when you put it like that. The only problem here is the communication problem. Gabe's character's Joe Sixpack, the honest, direct subjective opinion. Tycho's character is the extreme opposite end of the spectrum, so concerned with communication and discourse he's lost track of what he's supposed to be communicating or discoursing about (subjective game experiences.) The tension between those extremes is the real joke of the comic.
--E.L. Doctorow
The trouble ain't that there is too many fools, but that the lightning ain't distributed right.
--Mark Twain
I don't see why you keep bringing up games journalism because neither Gabe nor I are games journalists, we're just people talking about why we don't like Borderlands. I don't even see what your point is anymore, because you keep harping on the fact that it's only Gabe's opinion, which is true and I don't see why anyone would think otherwise. Is your post just a big long explanation of why Gabe is simultaneously right and wrong? What are we even talking about anymore?