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Cerebralbore101 on 22 October 2019
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Azzanation said:
Cerebralbore101 said:

I'd say those 5 points are a large gap considering that most reviewers don't want to issue a score below 70/100. Every point below 70/100 is like two points. But I guess I said that already. 

Sure SoD2 could be a good game now. Could be worse. But on release it was bad. 

Eh, just because the rest of the Zombie market is bad is no excuse. A bad game is a bad game regardless of how the rest of the genre is bad. 

its an open world Sandbox game that does require a big budget and team to get right.

That just backs up my original point that MS doesn't care enough, because their games are meant to be filler for Gamepass, and then put on as many platforms as they can get them on. If they cared why didn't they put a bigger team or more money into it? 

We agree that SoT lacked content at launch, and that SOD2 was extremely buggy at launch. Then why didn't MS give those games more time to reach a completed state at launch? Real question here. Not wholly hypothetical. Please answer. 


SOTs lacked content at launch like most big ambishest titles this gen. Thats how service games work. If you base your review on someone else's than you are only assuming its bad because you might actually like it. Iv played games that didnt score well and actually enjoyed them. Everyone has different tastes. As they say, One mans trash is another mans treasure.

I see a common theme here of trying to say that its okay for MS to do these bad things with their games because other games do them. That just doesn't work. Just because some bad players in the industry are doing things a certain way, is no excuse for another company to copy them. 

Should I just personally verify everything for myself? Do I need to whip out a telescope and do some math before I take Nasa's word for it on the orbital path of Jupiter? If I read a review by somebody that shares similar tastes to my own, then that is good enough for me. And if there's an overall consensus of reviewers saying that game X is bad, then that is good enough for me. 

Adding MP in games is not easy. If you tack it on than expect critics to criticize the games. Metroid Prime 2 copped criticism for its tacked on MP and lost overall points in its total review score. So if companies tack it on with little to no effort they lose points, so Sony removing it,  avoids that extra critisizm. Thats playing it safe. MP requires alot of balancing, modes and they need to be good just like the SP mode. 

By that logic avoiding extra single player levels in games is playing it safe. And since extra single player levels require vastly more work than extra multiplayer levels it is not Sony that is playing it safe overall. Single player games require balancing too. So that point is moot. Single player has way more levels than multiplayer has modes. Another moot point. 

You couldn't be any more wrong with your post. 

1) You need to stop comparing AA to AAA games. SOD2 is a AA game that cost half the price of a game like Days Gone. It was also produced with a much smaller budget and Team. There is no excuse for buggy launches and the game got criticised for it. Days Gone got criticised for other reasons. Also I don't disagree with you in saying MS could have funded more money into Undead Labs however Undead Labs was not owned by MS at that time. Now that Undead Labs is under MS, lets see how there next title turns out. From what we know, MS has been allowing extra time and funds for there new studios so lets judge them on there next release.

2) I don't understand how you think a game like SOD2 is considered a bad game because it sits on a 66 Meta. For starters Meta clearly showcases in colour what is a Poor, Average and Good game via Red, Yellow and Green. SOD2 sits in the Yellow so for you to come out calling it bad is hilarious and its even more funny since you haven't even played it to cast that judgement. SOD2 has a lot of mixed reviews from 4s to 9s and a lot in between. If every review gave the game a 66 than you might have a point however it shows some people like it and many think its average and some think its poor. Which one are you? You haven't played it so instead, you base it off its lowest review score.. do you do this with every game? Also the PC version of SOD2 sits on a 69, only 2 points off Days Gone, a game made with a AAA focus and a major inhouse dev team.

How would you feel if a reviewer gave a game a similar score based on another reviewers score without even playing the game? That is exactly how you sound. 

3) So are you saying games like Forza Horizon 4, Gears 5 and Halo Infinite are AA budget titles only to fill the gaps in GamePass? You think Obsidian, Ninja Theory, The Initiative, Playground Games, Rare etc are only there to create AA standard games? That's a very interesting foresight you have.

4) You clearly know nothing about Multiplayer games. no one said SP games are easy to make however building scripted events and having full control on a player and what they see compared to basically a warzone where balancing between players can be extremely difficult to implement. Iv been playing WoW since 2005, I can tell you 15 years afterwards they still haven't been able to balance the MP in that game, the SP content isn't exactly rocket science to create however the MP is on another level of difficult. Its a lot easier taking MP out of games so the devs don't get criticised for tacking on MP than it is trying to implement a fun and balanced experience on top of offering a good SP. 

SP games requiring Balancing? No where near as much as MP games require them. There is a reason why companies outsource to make RTS games or games that have heavy MP modes. Because its actually a specialty to create something with good game modes, good maps and locations, respawning and MP rules. Not every company can do it or do it right.

1. Games with smaller budget and scope actually have a better chance of being good games. Once a game's scope and/or funding gets closer to AAA status quality drops like a rock. Until funding reaches a point where the team and budget are big enough to handle the game again. Bend Studio went from making PSP/Vita games directly into HD development. That is a very hard move. The fact that Days Gone got the scores it did is a testament to their herculean effort. On the flip side SoD2 was a sequel, and not Undead Lab's first foray into making a game of this scope. Yet it dropped a full 10 points from the original game. 

2. Meta showcases lies in color. You haven't doublechecked Jupiter's orbit. Why believe Nasa? I'm not using it's lowest review score. I'm using the average of all the XB1 reviews. PC version may be a little better, but that hardly excuses MS from allowing the XB1 version to release in such a sad state. And as I said above, it's much easier to make a sequel than it is to make an all new game after developing on handhelds for years. Also, a good PC CPU can hide sub-20 framerate crashing bugs, because a gaming PC usually has a much better CPU than a console. 

3. Strawman argument. 

4. Modern game engines have sliders that can access the code. Nerfing a certain gun takes all of 20 seconds in modern game design. You may have experience in multiplayer, but you have zero game development experience. Multiplayer games use a fraction of the assets that single player games use. And it's those 3D modeling, sound/music, animations, etc. that take up the vast majority of development time/effort. Balancing is a drop in the bucket in comparison. 

Outsourcing teams are the bench-warmers of the game development world.