Mise said:
| Sqrl said:
The thing I simply don't get is why if they find the game so boring do they feel the need to come trash it? There are plenty of games that I didn't like that I thought were overhyped that I didn't feel the need to trash. This kind of persistence on a topic the person claims to be disinterested in doesn't really make much sense to me. What benefit is gained from this? ***2)***
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Attention?
There are three easy ways for getting attention in regards to games on teh internets: Trolling, bashing a widely appreciated game, or defending a widely despised one. Only one of those is a bannable offense, and the former is much easier to do than the latter.
I can understand why people don't necessarily love it, though. First of all, the single-player component is practically non-existent (ie. a near-dealbreaker for someone like me), and second, the game essentially demands a team. And I'm pretty sure that players, being the persistent pests we are, can find all sorts of nifty ways to completely eviscerate the games balance in the coming weeks.
Also - it might be just me, but a game like this can potentially have a really steep learning curve. When you are required to work as a team, wide differences in skill can quickly disrupt a team and its performance, and weaker players will either be typecast in the weakest roles there are or ousted completely. I don't use Steam, so I don't know whether it has a skill-based matchmaking system or not, but this is something to consider IMO.
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Actually I think we agree on almost everything TBH.
The single player is not the strength of the game, and they openly admit that. So certainly as a single player I could see why someone would give it a 7, but I don't think a game designed around multiplayer should be reviewed as a single player experience. To me that is like reviewing a song based on the standards of a movie =P
And I definitely agree on the learning curve, that is a fairly succinct way of summing up what I was driving at in my last post. But I think in this case part of that steep curve is the result of a major shift in the genre from co-op optional to co-op required where teamwork isn't just helpful but essential.
While most games only build on existnig mechanics and have a fairly easy task in training their players. This game has to train players for a vastly different experience so its a much tougher job (that shouldn't be taken as an excuse on the dev's part, but rather a reason to give it a bit more of a chance). The dev's could have certainly done more to help train people but they've already done more than any other game I know of.
For instance, in the commentary they explain that their hint system tracks the situation and provides contextual hints. In a given situation there might be 3 or 4 hints but they have them prioritized to show the most important one. Where the system gets even better than that is that they actually track your actions and make notes of how many times you demonstrate competence in the action being hinted at and eventually they mark it as "learned" and stop showing you that hint in favor of the next hint on the priortized list. In this way they can train players and ensure that they learn the most essential skills needed to succeed ASAP. The downfall here is that it can still take a little while to train them and they never get trained if they only play 2 chapters of a movie. I don't blame the player, but I also don't really blame Valve as much as I would in other situations because not only is their task abnormally difficult, but they also devised a fairly clever solution to it.
