Yeah, in a recent episode of Waypoint Radio, Austin talks about how he wants people to write about what they felt about a game at the time because so many games are being patched after release to a nearly unrecognizable state, that writing "this game looks great" won't mean anything in 10 years.
Kotaku now has their writers on "game beats", following a game and writing about it for several months/years after release, to keep up on their changes. Giant Bomb does their Unfinished series, where they theoretically are supposed to go back and check out more updated versions as time goes on. Polygon has had their provisional reviews and their changing review scores as games get changed and become better/worse.
It's certainly something that outlets are already preparing themselves for. Why write a review about a pre-release, pre-patched, often unfinished game when you can just cover it in a way that serves the audience and yourselves?
The Division was actually better than I expected. The plot was trash-garbage, but the shooting was fun and the missions were enjoyable, and I liked the setting and all that. I even spent some time in the dark zone against all expectations. Never grouped with anyone at any point.
I should go back to it and see what the DLC is about, since I do have the full package with everything.
I finally installed Titanfall 2, so I'm excited to knock that out before GotY.
Why is PSN so slow, I started the download in the early evening and on my 150 down connection it downloaded 3 gigs in 5 hours. Whyyyy.
That network seems to vary wildly. I started downloading Hitman last night and its early guess was 7-8 hours, but about 30 minutes in it updated to a much more reasonable time. Bout an hour and a half total. It's not blazing fast, but not unreasonable.
Other cases it stuck with that horrible first prediction and rode it to hell.
As a Hitman first note: My wife and I decided guns are off the table for our playthrough, but a fire extinguisher goes a long way. Even if you can't carry two at once the way we want to.
Yea, I use wired, I'm lucky to get 100kBps over wifi through PSN. I tried the rest mode thing, it didn't seem to help but I'm hoping it sped up overnight, I haven't checked on it since I went to bed.
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FencingsaxIt is difficult to get a man to understand, when his salary depends upon his not understandingGNU Terry PratchettRegistered Userregular
This is kind of long-winded and apropo of nothing, but I was re-listening to the excellent episode of the Beastcast that Gerstmann guested on and thinking about game reviews, or more accurately, the problem that a lot of people tend to conflate "reviews" and "criticism".
I agree with Jeff that the traditional review is dead, at least for the GB audience. Save for serving as some sort of bug report (which is the only reason I even open an eye towards them these days), something that's capturing a locked moment in time in an industry that has abandoned the concept of locked moments in time doesn't really stand on its own. I think that, contrary to popular opinion, the conversations around specific games is actually much longer than it used to be. Reviewers used to be able to take a game and put a stamp on it (good or bad) and then hold that up as some sort of definitive statement. Now, the typical support lifespan for a game seems to be around a year. The initial release, patches, free updates, DLC, multiplayer... these things keep a game alive for its audience. Lots of people, including myself, only get a few games a year, so this trend towards extended support is actually a positive for me. The great caveat of all this support is, of course, pricing - but that's something that's subjective to a lot of people so I don't have much to say about it.
I'm basically looking for continual coverage of games these days, and that's something that no "traditional" review sites are really willing or able to deliver (which has kind of naturally led to the propagation of YouTube channels that focus on a specific game/franchise). Criticism divorced from the need to have something out at a game's release is always welcome and I'd love to see more of it, but it's hard to come by on games that aren't the big watershed moments that everyone expects (OoT, FFVII, etc). I think Waypoint is doing some interesting things in this regard and I'm happy about their decision to abandon the concept of reviews wholesale (though Patrick was on Twitter earlier today griping about how FFXV is getting updated missions and dialogue in a patch, which is pretty much the exact locked-moment-in-time problem I just mentioned).
Mostly, I just want to see Giant Bomb revisit games more than they do. Check in with 20XX's releases three times a year to see what's changed, what's been added, stuff like that. I understand that it's a hard mentality to switch over, especially when you've been covering games in a "burn through them" kind of way for your entire career, but it'd be content I'd be interested in reading or watching. I know I'm in the minority though, because most people want to hear about the new thing all the time and that's the kind of thing that sells ads and all that frustrating business stuff.
Agreed. I was talking about this just recently with a friend but I'd love to see games journalism (or at least a corner of it) become a bit more narrative in nature and maybe take on stories more akin to Playboy, Rolling Stone (old RS), or even just long form journalism. Embed a reporter in with a studio for a year and let them write about it, get back to exhaustive non-technical post-mortems on games, etc.
I have high hopes for Waypoint but I haven't seen much of it materialize yet (though Patrick's story on glyphs and such was in the ballpark). With such a small writing staff @ both GB and WP it would be tough to execute on. And don't even get me started on NDAs, etc.
Too much of games journalism is just commercial in nature. It's all about what are the reviews, the latest releases, or what's rumored (or leaked) to be happening. It's honestly barely journalism oftentimes. Give me some creativity in writing once again.
Journalism and Enthusiast Press are not the same thing. Most videogames writing is the latter.
I'm guessing Steam's flood of bullshit games wins "Please Stop" this year.
I can't think of anything else as bad. Well, in the video game industry, at least.
What makes this year worse than the past like three years or something in that regard?
Like yeah, there's that bit about 40% of all games blah blah blah, but that's literally a trend that has been going every year, year on year
Except that the 40% number gets more obscene every year because you're compounding the number annually. That 40% number isn't a 40% over last years numbers; it's 40% over the entirety of Steam's lifetime, which includes last year. That's an exponential growth; not a linear one.
If anything it feels like less of a big deal because we're now resigned to that just being how Steam is
There was just a big rant one of the podcasts about how cluttered New Releases is, to the point where Drew has to spend like an hour a day trying to parse the new releases list to see if there's anything worth covering.
Doom, Hitman and Titanfall 2 in a three way match for GOTY.
Personally for the entertainment and the amount of fun, I would like hitman to win it.
Titanfall 2 will definitely be in the running for Moment of the Year, but I don't think enough people feel strongly enough about it as a whole to push it that high.
I would not be at all surprised at DOOM #1 Hitman #2 though.
Was going through my list of games I played at least a little bit this year to try and remember what came out. Think Salt & Sanctuary, Ratchet and Clank or Dark Souls 3, get any discussion?
Tokyo Mirage Sessions was definitely one of the biggest surprises of 2016 for me. Battleborn, I am Setsuna have to rank among biggest disappointments. XCOM 2 and Deus Ex are sort of...games that came and went?
new to hitman, an elusive target comes up, the angel of death. so I grind through paris for the suggested handgun, and grind through marakesh for the suggested throwable rubber duckie explosive.
anyways marakesh was annoying, and so was the challenges used for mastery. I got annoyed enough that shot through a whole building of army men just so I wouldn't have to sneak around to complete certain objectives
also also, I failed that elusive target later
PikaPuff on
0
MaddocI'm Bobbin Threadbare, are you my mother?Registered Userregular
Sure, but until someone threw out that number how would you even tell
Once you hit a certain amount of bullshit garbage flooding the front page every day, numbers become kind of indistinguishable
The Steam front page has been a disaster for years now, there could be a hundred games releasing every day or ten thousand and I wouldn't even notice a difference
Sure, but until someone threw out that number how would you even tell
Once you hit a certain amount of bullshit garbage flooding the front page every day, numbers become kind of indistinguishable
The Steam front page has been a disaster for years now, there could be a hundred games releasing every day or ten thousand and I wouldn't even notice a difference
I've definitely noticed it's been worse this year.
For one, the sheer number of risque images of anime graphic novels has skyrocketed.
Sure, but until someone threw out that number how would you even tell
Once you hit a certain amount of bullshit garbage flooding the front page every day, numbers become kind of indistinguishable
The Steam front page has been a disaster for years now, there could be a hundred games releasing every day or ten thousand and I wouldn't even notice a difference
I've definitely noticed it's been worse this year.
For one, the sheer number of risque images of anime graphic novels has skyrocketed.
I finally installed Titanfall 2, so I'm excited to knock that out before GotY.
Why is PSN so slow, I started the download in the early evening and on my 150 down connection it downloaded 3 gigs in 5 hours. Whyyyy.
@Knight_ PSN download speeds can be garbage, but one thing I've realized is that having a game or app suspended in the background cuts speeds to an absolute crawl - as does allowing multiple downloads at once (obviously). I always think this is too obvious and dumb to mention, but I'm telling you here in case you (like me) hadn't really realized that closing all open games/apps can really boost speeds.
I finally installed Titanfall 2, so I'm excited to knock that out before GotY.
Why is PSN so slow, I started the download in the early evening and on my 150 down connection it downloaded 3 gigs in 5 hours. Whyyyy.
@Knight_ PSN download speeds can be garbage, but one thing I've realized is that having a game or app suspended in the background cuts speeds to an absolute crawl - as does allowing multiple downloads at once (obviously). I always think this is too obvious and dumb to mention, but I'm telling you here in case you (like me) hadn't really realized that closing all open games/apps can really boost speeds.
that is fucking stupid. no reason it should work like that, the XBone and PCs certainly don't have that problem.
god sometimes you can really tell Sony is a hardware company and not a software company.
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fRAWRstThe Seas CallThe Mad AnswerRegistered Userregular
edited December 2016
I live in Toronto Canada (in theory close to a PSN data center?)
and the best way for me to download stuff is to put Ps4 in sleep mode. Shit downloads mad fast (1-2mbs)
I finally installed Titanfall 2, so I'm excited to knock that out before GotY.
Why is PSN so slow, I started the download in the early evening and on my 150 down connection it downloaded 3 gigs in 5 hours. Whyyyy.
@Knight_ PSN download speeds can be garbage, but one thing I've realized is that having a game or app suspended in the background cuts speeds to an absolute crawl - as does allowing multiple downloads at once (obviously). I always think this is too obvious and dumb to mention, but I'm telling you here in case you (like me) hadn't really realized that closing all open games/apps can really boost speeds.
I had actually just plugged it in for the first time in almost a year, so it def didn't have anything running, but that is good to know in the future since I to tend to suspend stuff.
I just did the rest mode thing and waited, made it faster. It still took over a day and a half to download the whole thing, it's almost offensive how bad PSN's speeds are when I could have probably downloaded the whole thing on steam in an hour at most.
A question posted about half way up was Hi Austin! What was the most valuable lesson you learned while working with Giant Bomb?
Good (and difficult) question, so let’s start with this one!
I learned a ton from my time at GB—I cannot begin to overstate the wisdom that was imparted on by everyone there. Really, really hard to push So here's a lesson I from everyone:
Vinny taught me the value of of a backup plan—and how to face the fact that sometimes, even your backup’s backup fails. I remember when Vinny told me that our quick look system had three redundancies. I laughed at how surreal that was. Less than a week later, the initial recording and two of those three backups totally failed. I was very grateful for that third one.
Alex taught me how to push forward on a shitty day. Alex and I both have a great deal in common in terms of our, uh, cloudy demeanors, let's say. But Alex was an incredible professional, and even on the days where things were rough as hell, he managed to put his nose to the stone
Jeff taught me that it’s less about perfection, and it’s more about cadence. Every swing you take will not be a home run—both as a creator and journalist and also as a person—but if you can consistently, reliably do solid work, people will follow you.
Rorie taught me the value of prioritization. Matt is just… super busy over there, and he constantly has to decide what challenges are things he needs to address immediately and which things need to be saved for tomorrow.
Drew showed me the courage (and the deftness) it takes to bring really, really esoteric interests to a wide audience. Things like the Crusader Kings 2 stream or the Twilight Struggle Quick Look (which I did with Drew) never
would’ve happened if he didn’t prove that if you bring a fun personality and a lot of patience, you can share your weirdest interests with people.
Jason is a living example of grit. Long nights of setup were worth it, because tomorrow it meant that things would be that much easier. And longer nights of breakdown were worth it because hey, you were done. If I’m every a tenth of the professional Jason is, I’ll be able to get a ton done even on the hardest nights
Dan and I bonded over our social anxiety. His ability to step out into a crowd—but also to know that it’s okay to step away when you need to was a very important lesson for me.
Brad taught me how to deal with criticism. That’s not a joke, either. There were weeks where I saw fans of ours pile onto him unfairly—unaware of whatever really difficult task he was hard at work at accomplishing—and he was just fucking head down on what had to get done. But he also listened when people had real, important, constructive critique. Super important lesson
While I was there, I also worked with a dude named Stan who you probably don’t know, but Stan absolutely taught me the value of working with people who understand the big picture. I’m a humanities dude, you know? I resist stats and charts and all that. Stan showed me how those things could inform my work without forcing it to change in a way I wasn’t happy with.
Patrick was obviously gone by the time I arrived, but watching his whole career (and now being lucky enough to work with him on a daily basis), he’s taught me a ton about the value of being curious. Dig deeper. The story isn’t the obvious thing, it’s the next level down. Always take that next step.
And while I was never lucky enough to know Ryan, as a fan, I was keenly aware of his amazing way of bringing a room of people together. In prepping for our huge 72 hour livestream, I thought a lot about how well Ryan was able to find common ground between people who had very little to do with each other. He was a master MC, and I aspire to bring even a fraction of the joy he brought others.
Posts
Kotaku now has their writers on "game beats", following a game and writing about it for several months/years after release, to keep up on their changes. Giant Bomb does their Unfinished series, where they theoretically are supposed to go back and check out more updated versions as time goes on. Polygon has had their provisional reviews and their changing review scores as games get changed and become better/worse.
It's certainly something that outlets are already preparing themselves for. Why write a review about a pre-release, pre-patched, often unfinished game when you can just cover it in a way that serves the audience and yourselves?
3DS Friend Code: 2165-6448-8348 www.Twitch.TV/cooljammer00
Battle.Net: JohnDarc#1203 Origin/UPlay: CoolJammer00
Why is PSN so slow, I started the download in the early evening and on my 150 down connection it downloaded 3 gigs in 5 hours. Whyyyy.
I should go back to it and see what the DLC is about, since I do have the full package with everything.
That network seems to vary wildly. I started downloading Hitman last night and its early guess was 7-8 hours, but about 30 minutes in it updated to a much more reasonable time. Bout an hour and a half total. It's not blazing fast, but not unreasonable.
Other cases it stuck with that horrible first prediction and rode it to hell.
Putting it in rest mode sometimes helps for some reason and definitely go wired if possible
I've found that using a wired Internet connection improves my PSN download speeds, and only my PSN download speeds. Happens with both my PS3 and PS4.
Journalism and Enthusiast Press are not the same thing. Most videogames writing is the latter.
I can't think of anything else as bad. Well, in the video game industry, at least.
What makes this year worse than the past like three years or something in that regard?
Like yeah, there's that bit about 40% of all games blah blah blah, but that's literally a trend that has been going every year, year on year
If anything it feels like less of a big deal because we're now resigned to that just being how Steam is
Personally for the entertainment and the amount of fun, I would like hitman to win it.
Except that the 40% number gets more obscene every year because you're compounding the number annually. That 40% number isn't a 40% over last years numbers; it's 40% over the entirety of Steam's lifetime, which includes last year. That's an exponential growth; not a linear one.
There was just a big rant one of the podcasts about how cluttered New Releases is, to the point where Drew has to spend like an hour a day trying to parse the new releases list to see if there's anything worth covering.
Titanfall 2 will definitely be in the running for Moment of the Year, but I don't think enough people feel strongly enough about it as a whole to push it that high.
I would not be at all surprised at DOOM #1 Hitman #2 though.
Tokyo Mirage Sessions was definitely one of the biggest surprises of 2016 for me. Battleborn, I am Setsuna have to rank among biggest disappointments. XCOM 2 and Deus Ex are sort of...games that came and went?
anyways marakesh was annoying, and so was the challenges used for mastery. I got annoyed enough that shot through a whole building of army men just so I wouldn't have to sneak around to complete certain objectives
also also, I failed that elusive target later
Once you hit a certain amount of bullshit garbage flooding the front page every day, numbers become kind of indistinguishable
The Steam front page has been a disaster for years now, there could be a hundred games releasing every day or ten thousand and I wouldn't even notice a difference
I've definitely noticed it's been worse this year.
For one, the sheer number of risque images of anime graphic novels has skyrocketed.
Hmm?
I guess I haven't visited Steam in a while...
twitch.tv/Taramoor
@TaramoorPlays
Taramoor on Youtube
Edit: Seems the answer is just now, and the solution is to turn off adblock. Thought I already had whitelisted them.
Wow Inside as number 1. But I thought brad was the only person who liked that game and was gonna shove it down our throats!!!!!
PSN/Steam/NNID: SyphonBlue | BNet: SyphonBlue#1126
But that number WAS thrown out there. They literally discussed it during a news segment.
It's in no particular order (he has no #1, etc) and it's a top 12
3DS Friend Code: 2165-6448-8348 www.Twitch.TV/cooljammer00
Battle.Net: JohnDarc#1203 Origin/UPlay: CoolJammer00
@Knight_ PSN download speeds can be garbage, but one thing I've realized is that having a game or app suspended in the background cuts speeds to an absolute crawl - as does allowing multiple downloads at once (obviously). I always think this is too obvious and dumb to mention, but I'm telling you here in case you (like me) hadn't really realized that closing all open games/apps can really boost speeds.
that is fucking stupid. no reason it should work like that, the XBone and PCs certainly don't have that problem.
god sometimes you can really tell Sony is a hardware company and not a software company.
and the best way for me to download stuff is to put Ps4 in sleep mode. Shit downloads mad fast (1-2mbs)
I had actually just plugged it in for the first time in almost a year, so it def didn't have anything running, but that is good to know in the future since I to tend to suspend stuff.
I just did the rest mode thing and waited, made it faster. It still took over a day and a half to download the whole thing, it's almost offensive how bad PSN's speeds are when I could have probably downloaded the whole thing on steam in an hour at most.
That didn't stop Jeff from recycling his list last year.
Edit: I mean, these lists are silly to begin with, but having two completely different top 10 lists would be a farce.
I learned a ton from my time at GB—I cannot begin to overstate the wisdom that was imparted on by everyone there. Really, really hard to push So here's a lesson I from everyone:
Vinny taught me the value of of a backup plan—and how to face the fact that sometimes, even your backup’s backup fails. I remember when Vinny told me that our quick look system had three redundancies. I laughed at how surreal that was. Less than a week later, the initial recording and two of those three backups totally failed. I was very grateful for that third one.
Alex taught me how to push forward on a shitty day. Alex and I both have a great deal in common in terms of our, uh, cloudy demeanors, let's say. But Alex was an incredible professional, and even on the days where things were rough as hell, he managed to put his nose to the stone
Jeff taught me that it’s less about perfection, and it’s more about cadence. Every swing you take will not be a home run—both as a creator and journalist and also as a person—but if you can consistently, reliably do solid work, people will follow you.
Rorie taught me the value of prioritization. Matt is just… super busy over there, and he constantly has to decide what challenges are things he needs to address immediately and which things need to be saved for tomorrow.
Drew showed me the courage (and the deftness) it takes to bring really, really esoteric interests to a wide audience. Things like the Crusader Kings 2 stream or the Twilight Struggle Quick Look (which I did with Drew) never
would’ve happened if he didn’t prove that if you bring a fun personality and a lot of patience, you can share your weirdest interests with people.
Jason is a living example of grit. Long nights of setup were worth it, because tomorrow it meant that things would be that much easier. And longer nights of breakdown were worth it because hey, you were done. If I’m every a tenth of the professional Jason is, I’ll be able to get a ton done even on the hardest nights
Dan and I bonded over our social anxiety. His ability to step out into a crowd—but also to know that it’s okay to step away when you need to was a very important lesson for me.
Brad taught me how to deal with criticism. That’s not a joke, either. There were weeks where I saw fans of ours pile onto him unfairly—unaware of whatever really difficult task he was hard at work at accomplishing—and he was just fucking head down on what had to get done. But he also listened when people had real, important, constructive critique. Super important lesson
While I was there, I also worked with a dude named Stan who you probably don’t know, but Stan absolutely taught me the value of working with people who understand the big picture. I’m a humanities dude, you know? I resist stats and charts and all that. Stan showed me how those things could inform my work without forcing it to change in a way I wasn’t happy with.
Patrick was obviously gone by the time I arrived, but watching his whole career (and now being lucky enough to work with him on a daily basis), he’s taught me a ton about the value of being curious. Dig deeper. The story isn’t the obvious thing, it’s the next level down. Always take that next step.
And while I was never lucky enough to know Ryan, as a fan, I was keenly aware of his amazing way of bringing a room of people together. In prepping for our huge 72 hour livestream, I thought a lot about how well Ryan was able to find common ground between people who had very little to do with each other. He was a master MC, and I aspire to bring even a fraction of the joy he brought others.
STEAM | XBL | PSN
IT IS DONE.
STEAM | XBL | PSN
Probably not a whole lot