Also Jeff has nothing to say about Crackdown 3 that he didn't say when Crackdown 1 came out. I don't really need him to tell me how it's generally considered a bad look to release a generic game that feels like it was plucked from over a decade ago. I get it.
Also if you had to rank all the new releases in order of "importance", Anthem probably takes that top spot easily and so it justifiably deserves to be spoken of for a long amount of time on the podcast.
Boy Jeff did a really good job steering me away from Anthem. I wasn't going to buy it now anyway, but damn. I basically blame EA, I'm sure they wanted this thing out the door as soon as possible, content be damned. And if they completely cannibalize BioWare as a result... well fuck them.
We've seen games like these make big turn arounds. The Division. Siege. It can be done with time and care, and BioWare has done it before with TOR. I think they can do it again, but EA doesn't seem to have that kind of patience anymore. I'd like Anthem to be good and successful, for the very simple reason that rooting for games to be bad is stupid, and the more good games, the better.
I am hoping we can say some really positive things about this game 6 months down the line.
People have been saying BioWare is on the way out ever since Dragon Age 2, I've mostly stopped assuming I know who EA's going to spare or kill
This happens every time BioWare releases what people consider a mediocre product
No it was a special side mission in COD4. You did have to play quickly and you had a limited amount of time to do it in on the hardest difficulty, but it wasn't a time trial because you either finished it or you died.
It was timed to get the achievement though. That's what it was about.
Also Jeff has nothing to say about Crackdown 3 that he didn't say when Crackdown 1 came out. I don't really need him to tell me how it's generally considered a bad look to release a generic game that feels like it was plucked from over a decade ago. I get it.
Also if you had to rank all the new releases in order of "importance", Anthem probably takes that top spot easily and so it justifiably deserves to be spoken of for a long amount of time on the podcast.
It's also similar to the "Most Disappointing" segment in GOTY 2018. Anthem came in with much higher expectations than Crackdown 3, which with its constant last minute delays was pretty much a known quantity.
I heard Jeff's anthem stuff this morning and agree with pretty much everything except that the suits all feel the same. I played Ranger and Storm and they played quite differently, one focusing more on shooty shoot mans and the other focusing on throwing around elemental damage like spells. But after a couple of hours of doing the same thing on each one, I haven't felt compelled to go back.
Also I have a sneaking suspicion that Jeff's semi-conspiracy theory about the tomb quest being a roadblock to stop you from burning through all the content with the 5 dollar ten hour free trial is accurate. (and I only paid a dollar for it so I could get apex currency, then got to play anthem for 6 hours as a nice bonus)
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GoodKingJayIIIThey wanna get mygold on the ceilingRegistered Userregular
Boy Jeff did a really good job steering me away from Anthem. I wasn't going to buy it now anyway, but damn. I basically blame EA, I'm sure they wanted this thing out the door as soon as possible, content be damned. And if they completely cannibalize BioWare as a result... well fuck them.
We've seen games like these make big turn arounds. The Division. Siege. It can be done with time and care, and BioWare has done it before with TOR. I think they can do it again, but EA doesn't seem to have that kind of patience anymore. I'd like Anthem to be good and successful, for the very simple reason that rooting for games to be bad is stupid, and the more good games, the better.
I am hoping we can say some really positive things about this game 6 months down the line.
People have been saying BioWare is on the way out ever since Dragon Age 2, I've mostly stopped assuming I know who EA's going to spare or kill
This happens every time BioWare releases what people consider a mediocre product
Maybe but I haven’t heard it for everything, plus EA has been a bit more aggressive terminating things lately.
I heard Jeff's anthem stuff this morning and agree with pretty much everything except that the suits all feel the same. I played Ranger and Storm and they played quite differently, one focusing more on shooty shoot mans and the other focusing on throwing around elemental damage like spells. But after a couple of hours of doing the same thing on each one, I haven't felt compelled to go back.
Also I have a sneaking suspicion that Jeff's semi-conspiracy theory about the tomb quest being a roadblock to stop you from burning through all the content with the 5 dollar ten hour free trial is accurate. (and I only paid a dollar for it so I could get apex currency, then got to play anthem for 6 hours as a nice bonus)
Posted this in anthem thread but the Tomb quest assuredly comes out of a design meeting where someone said "we should make sure everyone tries out freeplay and sees all the world events and try exploring before they finish the main story and think about putting it down". It's just not paced for users critical pathing the story and who knows how many testers they have grinding that out of final builds
I heard Jeff's anthem stuff this morning and agree with pretty much everything except that the suits all feel the same. I played Ranger and Storm and they played quite differently, one focusing more on shooty shoot mans and the other focusing on throwing around elemental damage like spells. But after a couple of hours of doing the same thing on each one, I haven't felt compelled to go back.
Also I have a sneaking suspicion that Jeff's semi-conspiracy theory about the tomb quest being a roadblock to stop you from burning through all the content with the 5 dollar ten hour free trial is accurate. (and I only paid a dollar for it so I could get apex currency, then got to play anthem for 6 hours as a nice bonus)
Posted this in anthem thread but the Tomb quest assuredly comes out of a design meeting where someone said "we should make sure everyone tries out freeplay and sees all the world events and try exploring before they finish the main story and think about putting it down". It's just not paced for users critical pathing the story and who knows how many testers they have grinding that out of final builds
I definitely wish I had done what Brad did, which was critical path until you hit the tomb quest, then go do the side missions. I was doing every mission as I got it and was nearly out of missions by the time the tomb stuff popped up and it made it way more intimidating.
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HonkHonk is this poster.Registered User, __BANNED USERSregular
The tomb thing is Bioware failing to account for YMMV
When I got to that point yesterday I had 80% of what it wanted me to do already completed, I hadn't been doing any freeplay before that point either.
I fucking hate the new website. It is worse in every way possible and I don't understand the design decisions behind it (even after listening to the dev casts) and am woefully underwhelmed with the technical implementation of it.
The tomb thing is Bioware failing to account for YMMV
When I got to that point yesterday I had 80% of what it wanted me to do already completed, I hadn't been doing any freeplay before that point either.
Isn’t it partially bugged too? Like I thought they said that some people were not getting their progress accurately tracked.
The only stuff I heard about personally was pickups like part of it is requiring you to open chests, and it only counts if you do it and not someone else in your team. That's one I had zero progress in despite seeing quite a few chests up to that point, I hope they plan to fix that.
Though just by doing the world events for another part of a challenge I got enough chests to almost fill that one up.
I really don't see what could possibly be making it into several hours of grinding as some have mentioned.
Edit: Unless it's literally just not checking things off properly.
Honk on
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HardtargetThere Are Four LightsVancouverRegistered Userregular
I fucking hate the new website. It is worse in every way possible and I don't understand the design decisions behind it (even after listening to the dev casts) and am woefully underwhelmed with the technical implementation of it.
agree! it's markedly worse for written content or just quickly finding all the latest videos, and it's also worse for watching videos since you can no longer embiggen so they are smaller!
great changes all around.
Hardtarget on
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SteevLWhat can I do for you?Registered Userregular
Yeah, I'm also not a big fan of the new website after using it for a few months. I still have a hard time finding stuff.
Not to mention they still have the bug where if you watch multiple videos in a row they just stop loading without you reloading the page. I really really hate it.
People keep hammering them on their forums in the thread about the changes. Took months for them to really respond to a lot of the feedback.
So, so much of the problems are things they should have seen coming, things that are obvious use-case things. I'm hoping that's what the open UX designer is being hired to fix - half of the stuff I hate about the update is one of their engineers thinking "hey, I think it's cool if a feature works this way" and then not thinking past their own use-case/interactions with the site.
This is exactly the sort of thing GB has dinged game devs for in the past. Suddenly up and replacing something older, but functional after an incredibly short beta/roll-out period where they solicited feedback that they then ignored, all while going effectively radio silent.
Doesn't matter what we all think though, viewer numbers are up on the new site design
I think my favorite comment anyone made about the redesign was about a month ago. It was basically "Hey, go find the QL for 'Below' (a late 2018 release), and tell me how many clicks it takes to get there without using the search"
It was something like 30-40. You had to go to Shows - QuickLooks - scroll 4-5 panes of the carousel to get the "see more" box to pop up, which loads the grid view, which is sorted into pages. There are like 11 pages per year, and you can only "jump to" a page 2-pages off (up/down) from your current page, click through one page at a time, or jump straight to the end.
All of the decks are still gone, along with the uploader tag (easy to see which coast did something).
Show sorting is done alphabetically except for the top two slots, so you end up with fun stuff like "Betting the Farmville" (from 2011) as the second show shown in the archives section while stuff like Mario Party Party or Metal Gear Scanlon is just down in the middle of nowhere.
if you just watch stuff as it comes out new or via the watchlists, its probably fine. But god help you if you want to check out old content
edit: Also fun, there is currently no way on their forums to tell a hyperlink from underlined text without a mouseover
I like how for a while (and it still might be true), certain shows that had many episodes were just listed as being a series with 1 episode in it, the current one. I wanna say Gotta God Hand episode 7 said it was the only episode that existed for a while.
People keep hammering them on their forums in the thread about the changes. Took months for them to really respond to a lot of the feedback.
So, so much of the problems are things they should have seen coming, things that are obvious use-case things. I'm hoping that's what the open UX designer is being hired to fix - half of the stuff I hate about the update is one of their engineers thinking "hey, I think it's cool if a feature works this way" and then not thinking past their own use-case/interactions with the site.
This is exactly the sort of thing GB has dinged game devs for in the past. Suddenly up and replacing something older, but functional after an incredibly short beta/roll-out period where they solicited feedback that they then ignored, all while going effectively radio silent.
Doesn't matter what we all think though, viewer numbers are up on the new site design
Are viewers actually up? Is this one of those things where the people complaining are just a minority, or is it just that the site is getting more popular and so it's more people visiting a janky website for the first time?
I mean, the engineers won't even do a light theme because it'd be more work than they want. At a certain point it just feels like we're shouting into the abyss and they're doing things just to do them.
Light themes >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Dark themes
People keep hammering them on their forums in the thread about the changes. Took months for them to really respond to a lot of the feedback.
So, so much of the problems are things they should have seen coming, things that are obvious use-case things. I'm hoping that's what the open UX designer is being hired to fix - half of the stuff I hate about the update is one of their engineers thinking "hey, I think it's cool if a feature works this way" and then not thinking past their own use-case/interactions with the site.
This is exactly the sort of thing GB has dinged game devs for in the past. Suddenly up and replacing something older, but functional after an incredibly short beta/roll-out period where they solicited feedback that they then ignored, all while going effectively radio silent.
Doesn't matter what we all think though, viewer numbers are up on the new site design
Are viewers actually up? Is this one of those things where the people complaining are just a minority, or is it just that the site is getting more popular and so it's more people visiting a janky website for the first time?
I mean, the engineers won't even do a light theme because it'd be more work than they want. At a certain point it just feels like we're shouting into the abyss and they're doing things just to do them.
On one hand I feel like multiple themes are kinda silly but looking at comicvine's css and giantbomb's... they are like 90% there at least. Also their css styling is way cleaner than my hamfisted stuff.
psn: PhasenWeeple
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HardtargetThere Are Four LightsVancouverRegistered Userregular
Light themes >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Dark themes
I download all their videos i'm going to watch so I can load them up later, and everything autoplaying makes that take even more steps.
Also after a couple of days pass it's hard to find what is recent, if I missed anything.
in your personal profile you can turn off autoplay next vid, which is a god send
Yeah but the link to the videos on the main page has the ?autoplay=1 at the end of it. So i'm not autoplaying the next video, i'm autoplaying this video. Which removes the download button. I have to then click the link to the same video again from this page, which doesn't have the autoplay on it so it just loads up the video page that includes all the download buttons.
This is only a problem for the most recent video that is at the top of the page, and only a problem for me because I want to download it instead. So yeah it's probably not a thing many people even worry about.
People keep hammering them on their forums in the thread about the changes. Took months for them to really respond to a lot of the feedback.
So, so much of the problems are things they should have seen coming, things that are obvious use-case things. I'm hoping that's what the open UX designer is being hired to fix - half of the stuff I hate about the update is one of their engineers thinking "hey, I think it's cool if a feature works this way" and then not thinking past their own use-case/interactions with the site.
This is exactly the sort of thing GB has dinged game devs for in the past. Suddenly up and replacing something older, but functional after an incredibly short beta/roll-out period where they solicited feedback that they then ignored, all while going effectively radio silent.
Doesn't matter what we all think though, viewer numbers are up on the new site design
Are viewers actually up? Is this one of those things where the people complaining are just a minority, or is it just that the site is getting more popular and so it's more people visiting a janky website for the first time?
I mean, the engineers won't even do a light theme because it'd be more work than they want. At a certain point it just feels like we're shouting into the abyss and they're doing things just to do them.
Quoting from "wemmick", who shows up as staff on the forums over there. This was about a week ago:
The decision to go live after a beta is roughly the same for any site: What does the majority of the feedback (from all channels) look like? If we go live, will people still be able to accomplish the core use cases? Are there any blocking bugs? What do the usage patterns look like?
Ultimately though, a lot of problems with a new site don't really come to light (or aren't fully understood) until people are using it 100% of the time, so extended beta periods with small sample sizes are often counterproductive in that they can lead to fine tuning where it isn't necessary and errors in prioritization due to sample bias.
It's a similar situation for the concept of "old.giantbomb." If we were to spend time making the old site compatible with the new data structures and fixing bugs people find there, we'd be taking time away from development on the new site, and that's clearly not a good situation.
Could we have made the beta period longer? Sure. That said, when looked at it as a whole, feedback was positive, and site usage patterns since the redesign have actually improved. The feedback within this forum also has a sample bias - one may not get a complete picture of how the site was received just by looking here.
That said, the folks in this forum are the most frequent users and are important to us, and we understand many of you are still looking for some features to be fixed, so we're working on those as I type this. Thanks again for your patience and understanding.
Old.GiantBomb would be rad, but I guess I understand why keeping track of two (or more, if the engineers are to be believed about why they won't do a light theme) versions of a site would be tough.
I download all their videos i'm going to watch so I can load them up later, and everything autoplaying makes that take even more steps.
Also after a couple of days pass it's hard to find what is recent, if I missed anything.
in your personal profile you can turn off autoplay next vid, which is a god send
Yeah but the link to the videos on the main page has the ?autoplay=1 at the end of it. So i'm not autoplaying the next video, i'm autoplaying this video. Which removes the download button. I have to then click the link to the same video again from this page, which doesn't have the autoplay on it so it just loads up the video page that includes all the download buttons.
This is only a problem for the most recent video that is at the top of the page, and only a problem for me because I want to download it instead. So yeah it's probably not a thing many people even worry about.
there must be some sort of thing in their API you could take advantage of to just script the videos downloading for you?
"@wemmick said:
Shows page really is just meant to be a way for people to find shows they know the name of and to see all the shows at a glance - it was not meant to be a primary navigation path, hence it being a sub-page under the Videos nav."
Umm what? Thankfully, there's a really good rebuttal of that point. Somebody else pointed out that if you're away from the site now for a few months that the new design makes it almost impossible to know what you missed and the response back is "That's not one of our use-cases." Again, umm what? They produce SO MUCH long form content, even if I'm away for a week for work I find it difficult to catch up with all the content. It should absolutely be a consideration for them.
Interesting this is happening so close to teh leadership changes at Sony, as well as being on the heels of the restructuring Microsoft recently did with it's Xbox division (Promoting Phil Spencer to a role where he reports direct to the CEO now)
If we didn't already know about them, I'd say new consoles a-comin'.
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Also if you had to rank all the new releases in order of "importance", Anthem probably takes that top spot easily and so it justifiably deserves to be spoken of for a long amount of time on the podcast.
3DS Friend Code: 2165-6448-8348 www.Twitch.TV/cooljammer00
Battle.Net: JohnDarc#1203 Origin/UPlay: CoolJammer00
People have been saying BioWare is on the way out ever since Dragon Age 2, I've mostly stopped assuming I know who EA's going to spare or kill
This happens every time BioWare releases what people consider a mediocre product
It was timed to get the achievement though. That's what it was about.
It's also similar to the "Most Disappointing" segment in GOTY 2018. Anthem came in with much higher expectations than Crackdown 3, which with its constant last minute delays was pretty much a known quantity.
Steam: CavilatRest
Also I have a sneaking suspicion that Jeff's semi-conspiracy theory about the tomb quest being a roadblock to stop you from burning through all the content with the 5 dollar ten hour free trial is accurate. (and I only paid a dollar for it so I could get apex currency, then got to play anthem for 6 hours as a nice bonus)
Maybe but I haven’t heard it for everything, plus EA has been a bit more aggressive terminating things lately.
Posted this in anthem thread but the Tomb quest assuredly comes out of a design meeting where someone said "we should make sure everyone tries out freeplay and sees all the world events and try exploring before they finish the main story and think about putting it down". It's just not paced for users critical pathing the story and who knows how many testers they have grinding that out of final builds
I definitely wish I had done what Brad did, which was critical path until you hit the tomb quest, then go do the side missions. I was doing every mission as I got it and was nearly out of missions by the time the tomb stuff popped up and it made it way more intimidating.
When I got to that point yesterday I had 80% of what it wanted me to do already completed, I hadn't been doing any freeplay before that point either.
I fucking hate the new website. It is worse in every way possible and I don't understand the design decisions behind it (even after listening to the dev casts) and am woefully underwhelmed with the technical implementation of it.
Isn’t it partially bugged too? Like I thought they said that some people were not getting their progress accurately tracked.
The only stuff I heard about personally was pickups like part of it is requiring you to open chests, and it only counts if you do it and not someone else in your team. That's one I had zero progress in despite seeing quite a few chests up to that point, I hope they plan to fix that.
Though just by doing the world events for another part of a challenge I got enough chests to almost fill that one up.
I really don't see what could possibly be making it into several hours of grinding as some have mentioned.
Edit: Unless it's literally just not checking things off properly.
agree! it's markedly worse for written content or just quickly finding all the latest videos, and it's also worse for watching videos since you can no longer embiggen so they are smaller!
great changes all around.
My Backloggery
So, so much of the problems are things they should have seen coming, things that are obvious use-case things. I'm hoping that's what the open UX designer is being hired to fix - half of the stuff I hate about the update is one of their engineers thinking "hey, I think it's cool if a feature works this way" and then not thinking past their own use-case/interactions with the site.
This is exactly the sort of thing GB has dinged game devs for in the past. Suddenly up and replacing something older, but functional after an incredibly short beta/roll-out period where they solicited feedback that they then ignored, all while going effectively radio silent.
Doesn't matter what we all think though, viewer numbers are up on the new site design
Also after a couple of days pass it's hard to find what is recent, if I missed anything.
I usually watch videos maximized to the size of the window, so embiggen being gone isn't something I even noticed.
I have no real issues with the site personally, the way I use it hasn't much changed. And I kind of like the auto play to the next video at the end.
in your personal profile you can turn off autoplay next vid, which is a god send
It was something like 30-40. You had to go to Shows - QuickLooks - scroll 4-5 panes of the carousel to get the "see more" box to pop up, which loads the grid view, which is sorted into pages. There are like 11 pages per year, and you can only "jump to" a page 2-pages off (up/down) from your current page, click through one page at a time, or jump straight to the end.
All of the decks are still gone, along with the uploader tag (easy to see which coast did something).
Show sorting is done alphabetically except for the top two slots, so you end up with fun stuff like "Betting the Farmville" (from 2011) as the second show shown in the archives section while stuff like Mario Party Party or Metal Gear Scanlon is just down in the middle of nowhere.
if you just watch stuff as it comes out new or via the watchlists, its probably fine. But god help you if you want to check out old content
edit: Also fun, there is currently no way on their forums to tell a hyperlink from underlined text without a mouseover
3DS Friend Code: 2165-6448-8348 www.Twitch.TV/cooljammer00
Battle.Net: JohnDarc#1203 Origin/UPlay: CoolJammer00
Are viewers actually up? Is this one of those things where the people complaining are just a minority, or is it just that the site is getting more popular and so it's more people visiting a janky website for the first time?
I mean, the engineers won't even do a light theme because it'd be more work than they want. At a certain point it just feels like we're shouting into the abyss and they're doing things just to do them.
3DS Friend Code: 2165-6448-8348 www.Twitch.TV/cooljammer00
Battle.Net: JohnDarc#1203 Origin/UPlay: CoolJammer00
Steam: CavilatRest
Light themes >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>> Dark themes
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
On one hand I feel like multiple themes are kinda silly but looking at comicvine's css and giantbomb's... they are like 90% there at least. Also their css styling is way cleaner than my hamfisted stuff.
can I agree more than once?
Like, I'm not colorblind either, but I wouldn't dismiss the concerns of an actual colorblind person if they told me my work was hard to actually use.
3DS Friend Code: 2165-6448-8348 www.Twitch.TV/cooljammer00
Battle.Net: JohnDarc#1203 Origin/UPlay: CoolJammer00
Yeah but the link to the videos on the main page has the ?autoplay=1 at the end of it. So i'm not autoplaying the next video, i'm autoplaying this video. Which removes the download button. I have to then click the link to the same video again from this page, which doesn't have the autoplay on it so it just loads up the video page that includes all the download buttons.
This is only a problem for the most recent video that is at the top of the page, and only a problem for me because I want to download it instead. So yeah it's probably not a thing many people even worry about.
Quoting from "wemmick", who shows up as staff on the forums over there. This was about a week ago:
"hey, what video or episode of a series am I watching again? Oh yeah, I have to pause the video and keep my cursor moused over to see the title"
because that's definitely user friendly and something the people want in a video player.
Old.GiantBomb would be rad, but I guess I understand why keeping track of two (or more, if the engineers are to be believed about why they won't do a light theme) versions of a site would be tough.
3DS Friend Code: 2165-6448-8348 www.Twitch.TV/cooljammer00
Battle.Net: JohnDarc#1203 Origin/UPlay: CoolJammer00
there must be some sort of thing in their API you could take advantage of to just script the videos downloading for you?
And getting replaced by Doug Bowser
"@wemmick said:
Shows page really is just meant to be a way for people to find shows they know the name of and to see all the shows at a glance - it was not meant to be a primary navigation path, hence it being a sub-page under the Videos nav."
Umm what? Thankfully, there's a really good rebuttal of that point. Somebody else pointed out that if you're away from the site now for a few months that the new design makes it almost impossible to know what you missed and the response back is "That's not one of our use-cases." Again, umm what? They produce SO MUCH long form content, even if I'm away for a week for work I find it difficult to catch up with all the content. It should absolutely be a consideration for them.
Seriously, just give me the old site back.
If we didn't already know about them, I'd say new consoles a-comin'.
I’d buy a PS5 this year if I could