It's kinda hard to talk about objective fun in reviews, it's the most subjective thing about entertainment. Some people play brutally crushing, soul-destroying survival games for fun
It is fine that it is subjective, but this is why reviews from a major corporation don't make any sense. You want reviews from a large number of individuals so that you can get to know some of their taste to see if it is similar to your own. Then you can make a decent guess if you will also find the thing fun.
Not to mention these major review sites rate on a 7-10 scale which is kind of worthless. They are also effectively bribed by game studios so it is actually worse than worthless. It is actively harmful to finding out the truth.
You want reviews from a large number of individuals
This isn't that helpful either. I end up getting lost because of all the different opinions. For example Starfield as a recent example, professional reviews are mostly positive but individual opinions are all over the place. I am left confused.
Yeah, and e.g. I don't have much fun with racing game. Doesn't mean the games are bad and other people, who actually like the genre don't have fun. This is why you should know the reviewer and their tastes and biases to make a better judgement whether a game is for you or not from a review.
I like ACGs format for reviews along with the rating scale being a spectrum from Buy now, wait for a sale, never touch. He's the only one I really go to nowadays to see if the new hot thing is worth my money. It usually isn't haha
Yea the greater majority of the population wouldn’t like escape from tarkov or even something lighter like a souls game but some of us enjoy the pain.
For example, I love soul crushing difficult games with a million things to keep track of and grind. I like GregTech for creations sake! A mod that is infamous in the Minecraft modding community for a reason.
Then there is stuff like baba is you, games about programming and circuits (zachtronics games), the modded in levels of Celeste (and other hardcore platformers), very punishing XCOM games, or dark souls challenges, traditional rogue-likes, and so on, and so forth. (A lot of which I also like lol)
And a lot of people find these fun... And a lot of people hate their guts. A lot of people love casual mainstream (with often generic gameplay) linear story-centric games you can beat barely thinking. Which is perfectly fine, but their gameplay (not story) does tend to bore me. Even if they tend to get high ratings.
cough cough gregtech new horizons
Notice how Sound Design isnt even mentioned on the meme. That's how far down that is in everyone's minds.
But it should because we've been suffering for over a decade of flat non surround or abysmal volume mixing. Dialog that is just too quiet while everything else is loud. But I guess as long as we have separate volume sliders in game that'll fix it. If only every game came with em.
Also we've been pushing graphics all the time but Sound has basically tanked since the invention of the Sound Blaster AWE64 or something. What's a sound blaster? Well kids we used to buy sound Cards for our computers much like you do GPU cards. That's how much sound tech has stagnated. We had 5/7.1 setups in the late 90s had games with EAX support now everything is just whatever, play sound.wav. I guess Dolby Atmos is a thing but it's a thing with a subscription fee.
TLDR: what about sound
If the game requires you to use the volume sliders to have a decent sound design, then it's kind of a "mix it yourself" game.
Proper spatial / binaural audio in games is a game changer for me and it's wild that I have to buy something like DTS Sound Unbound (and before that, X-Fi sound card with CMSS3D) just to kind of "emulate" it in games. This is tech they figured out in the 90s.
5.1 and 7.1 systems aren't all that widespread, even in the music industry. Surround kinda sits in the same place vr does for me. It's immensely cool, but it'll never become standard due to hassle and lack of support.
Most of the recent innovation in sound has been trickled down from the music and film industries. Just a general increase in the capabilities of soft synths and a better understanding of foley, alongside dedicated in house recording studios have raised the bar of audio.
To be honest I agree with you that sound is overlooked, sound engineers truly are unsung heroes. I mean even when people point out the sound in a game, it's usually directed at the composer.
There was a point I used to turn down SFX because I wanted to listen to the music. At some pointed I started to turn down the music so SFX was more punchy like it used to be.
As a professional generalist/gameplay programmer, imo sound isn't far off from 3D graphics in terms of complexity, perfs issues and hardware fuckery. That is, if you want to do anything "fancy" with it, of course. As you said, the "play sound.wav" approach is way overused...
I do care about shipping the best SFX I can, and obviously so does our sound guy (who also deeply cares about mixing btw) but unfortunately, as opposed to graphics it doesn't translate into better reviews/more sales in the execs' mind so any substantial programming work in that area usually goes on the backlogged pile.
Ironically, I think that situation used to be better because there was a time where you basically had to have a dedicated sound programmer on the team since the software side was also a giant mess.
"It's a technical wonder, never seen before in the industry. Completely unique dialog trees and interactions with NPCs. Elaborate upgrade system. Crafting mechanics. Full open world sandbox experience. Planned DLC for the next 2 years. BattlePass"
Holy fuck I'm tired of this shit
I hate how every AAA game has to be an open world sandbox with loads of extra features. I just want a good story and strong core gameplay.
I want an open world sandbox with loads of extra features
Which part of that has never been seen before?
It's just schlock that every AAA developer pads their ad campaigns with. You see those accolade trailers with cherry picked reviews toting it's game of the year, claiming it "reimagines everything" or "sets a new standard" , when it's a game built on a 12 year old engine that is showing its age.
Fun is so extremely subjective that some people play DESTINY and CoD for fun, it's difficult to quantify in the time frame that reviewers are held to for each video game
I usually consider graphics to be a secondary to gameplay. I play a decent amount of ascii terminal games, so graphics doesn't matter much to me.
Graphics used to be the hallmark of a great game. Back in the early days, if your game didn't come with improved graphics, it was trash (like, '90s era games I'm talking about). These days, good graphics can be achieved pretty easily, so it's not nearly as important as it used to be when trying to stand out from the crowd. If I had to pick the tipping point for this trend, I would have to say Minecraft was the game that proved definitively that graphics < gameplay.
Same. Love playing a beautiful game, like Kingdom Come: Deliverance, but I also love Rimworld. Like more hours in RW than any other title, by a wide margin. And it's top down goofy 2D graphics and I wouldn't want it any other way.
Graphics are like, one of the last things I give a shit about as long as they're not hampering the game. I don't care if I'm playing Wolfenstein 3D or the latest triple-A graphics splurgefest so long as it's a fun game, but stuff like Cruelty Squad is an absolute no-go because of the dogshit HUD that serves only to distract the player and make it feel claustrophobic.
If you ask me, a game has to be tied or close when it comes to fun, story (if applicable), and music (if applicable) in order for me to even care about a game.
You could throw a text based terminal game using ASCII art at me and I'd love it just as much as a game such as Hitman Blood Money so long as it's fun enough.
Indeed.
Graphics will always be less important
The popularity of various "ugly" games is proof of that
undertale
Rimworld
Dwarf fortress
Minecraft
Diablo 2 (not resurrected)
Probably many many more
You'd think that everyone thinks that way, but the overwhelming majority of my "normie" friends won't touch a game if it doesn't have good photorealistic graphics and animations.
Totally. That's why Nintendo games always review poor- oh, wait
The reviews still have a strong focus on graphics, but based on the hardware limitations of the Switch.
Also, the aesthethic is not just about how photorealistic the game looks or what cutting edge technologies it uses. That's why some games age differently than their peers, simply because their art style is not or less diminished by technological advances.
I don't care very much about the cutting edge graphics, I rather have something with a round aesthethic than dry looks with ray tracing.
Games aren't meant to be fun, they are meant to make money.
Unless you're an Indie studio, then games aren't meant to make money until the bills start piling up.
Very true.
One of the reasons why I like Skill Up reviews is because he tends to focus on whether or not the game is a good time.
Personally I've stopped watching reviews for that reason. Too much of his review depend on whether he actually had fun with the game or not. If it's a game he didn't enjoy he's going to review it much harshly while finding whatever positives to justify recommending a game he enjoyed.
For instance he didn't enjoy the Outriders expansion and one of his big points of criticisms was that it's too hard to play solo. Which is a pretty dumb criticism to have when the game has a world tier system with the sole purpose of letting you set the difficulty. It climbs with XP but you can always set it to a lower difficulty if something is too hard. He could've easily set it to world tier one and just shred through the game, he simply stubbornly chose to be on the highest difficulty that was unlocked for him. And he was at the difficulty level where builds start to matter, except from the video it's pretty clear he doesn't have an actual build in mind. His criticism was the equivalent of playing master difficulty (or beyond) in Diablo 3 as a monk without any consistent spirit generation, and then saying Diablo 3 is too hard. Anyone who has played Diablo 3 knows statement like that is complete BS but anyone trying to understand whether they'd actually want to play Diablo would instantly be dissuaded from giving it a shot.
And the flipside is Destiny's Lightfall expansion review where he just decides to add everything "free" into the same expansion review pile because he loves Destiny. And of course then proceeds to downplay every glaring negative point about it such as "No new pvp maps. You shouldn't expect it because Bungie isn't focusing on PvP either" and "Nothing new about gambit, the players don't care about gambit either." or "One new strike and no real improvements to that core gameplay loop. Game development is hard you guys". To give the expansion context, it's the weakest expansion after Y1 (which was the lowest point of the entire series) and is complete filler in terms of the story. Yet Skillup still felt it was good enough to recommend it to people.
For me his reviews have become mostly worthless because I first have to intuit his experience with the game to understand which way his bias has swung, so that I could get context of his final verdict.
Swap music with Graphics or Story and I’m with you on most games.
IGN's review of Starfield has zero mention of the music, same with its Fallout 4 review.
Just checked The Verge - also not mentioning the music of Starfield at all.
In my opinion, music is what turns a good game into a great game.
Music has always been the part I've cared the least about. Out of the thousands of hours I've wasted on games, the only video game song I can think of out of the blue is the Mario theme song. (And Raphael's battle song in bg3 because I just fought him; that shit was pretty cool.) It always surprises me when I see OSTs included in deluxe editions because I think, who's going to listen to 2 hours of instrumentals from a game they played 5 years ago. To each their own I guess.
Eh, that's very subjective. A ton of people (me included) mute the music and have something else in the background (with exceptions, of course).
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