Doh! (looking at reviews) » Forum Post by Akitoscorpio

honestly, they should just tell people not to buy or review the game for a few months and then try and organise a media relaunch in a month or so with a big free patch/expansion and shiny new trailers (give it an impressive expansion sounding name too, like relic did with Dawn of War 2: The Last Stand), and pretend that that is the game launch and that this is just an pre-order beta stage.

the fewer reviews the game gets right now the better. though i for one am happy playing it and knowing that it will improve.

EDIT: btw, all the people claiming reviewers are slaves to industry etc... that really is sour grapes. being an indie game never hurt plenty of break out games like Braid. reviewers are just people with opinions. name me one truly legendary game that launched to uniformly mediocre reviews.

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BoydofZINJ said

The game does lack polish in that aspect. I just got the game last night. I was doing well on Extreme. Until I realized that this one enemy computer CPU had 3 cities that were 5 times my size and my two cities were still stuck at level 1. Then i realized how to gather the resources within my influence (the clay, the fertile land, the goldmine). The game sure did not help me much in realizing that I needed to do something to them. I just ASSUMED (and we all know what happens when you assume) I had to research a technology or item to gather resources from that specific item. So I was going thru the Civilization tech tree line looking for a farm to build to get to level 2 on my city. If the game was a bit more UI intuitive or tutorial friendly, I may not have made that mistake. Likewise, I was dominating an EXTREME NPC soverign that had 3 cities tat were level 5 and I only had 2 cities at level 1. I could never muster enough forces to capture a city, but I kept him from leaving his, though.

... the "Campaign" mode is, sort of, the "Tutorial" mode. It explained these things (at least my patch version did.)

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It's really quite simple. You have engineers and designers. Do not let engineers design a GUI.

I can partially agree with that. If your designers eat and breathe what works and what doesn't, works with users every day, reads past studies on HI design, that makes sense. The software engineers don't--they eat and breathe design patterns, libraries, revision control, debuggers, etc.. I can see software engineers getting cocky and thinking designers who don't do a lick of code don't know what they're talking about.

On the other hand, though, the designer doesn't really need an intuitive interface--he already knows how it works. He designed it. The software engineer doesn't need it either--he wrote it. In that regard, they're really both equally unqualified.

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Quoting VR_IronMana,

reply 48

Quoting cloglobster, reply 20
I own hundreds of PC games, some good, some great others poor. Some hasn't been well recieved by the reviewers but are still great games _for me_, others are bad like they say. The point with reviews are that they're subjective. It's what the reviewer thinks of the game and doesn't have to apply to your taste. .

Which makes me wonder - what's the point?

If a reviewer is looking at it with his/her taste - and I have my taste and if they don't match, how much value is in the review? If I don't know if I like the game or not - but the reviewer might not have my taste in games or look for what I look for, how much stock should I put in the review? There's no way of knowing the taste/what they are looking for? Is the reviewer praising it because he/she likes it or because it's actually that good that just about anyone would like it? Likewise for things that are bad.

Never mind the whole "condense the game to a single number in an arbitrary and not-even-standard number system". It's like trying to convert from metric to english units. 7 here is average, 7 there is good, 5 there is bad, etc. What's the practical difference between a 7.7 and 7.8? A 8.9 and 9.2? A 4.9 and a 5.0? Is there really any separation of quality there or just some way to try to split hairs to say which game is "better"?

And what are reviews geared to? Fans of the genre? Fans of the company's past offering? Fans of the sub-genre? "Casual" Gamers? "Hardcore" Gamers?

It just makes me wonder why it's such a review based thing when it seems like it should be a demo-based thing - i.e. demos for the gamers so gamers individually can make decisions based on actual experience with the game - especially if reviewers can't, by nature of their jobs and assignments - delve deep in to some games that might require a long investment of playtime to really get everything out of it.

The general idea is that you're meant to read the review and then use your judgment to see if your tastes are the same as the reviewer or not, in a well written review it doesn't just say "The game is good" or "The game is bad", it's meant to explain the features that the reviewer did and did not like.

It has happened that negative reviews have sold me on a game since all the cons the reviewer listed where things that I didn't think was much of a con and that's where the point system gets really useful, because if you go to a site like Metacritic and seek out the all the most negative reviews (based on points), read them and conclude "Those things they complain about aren't things that would bother me much" then you know that you'll like the game.

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Tridus

Join Date 03/2008

+110

Quoting Simsum,

reply 38

It's not just poor balance. The basic system Elemental uses to compute results is simply not right for the game. Balance-wise, the problem is that values have to be too low and too similar to produce a predictable result. Sadly, that problem is made worse by how simple the system is: it simply isn't enough to be interesting/compelling, and it's not just a major departure from the usual "to-hit + to-damage + to-avoid-damage" mechanics similar games have (and players expect), the simplicity makes special abilities, spells & whatnot feel boring and same-y.

Yep, agreed. I just lump that into balance for convince even though it's a systems issue. There's a good discussion about it going on in the ideas forum if you're interested.

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All the screenshots are official shots from Stardock

That's fairly standard. Even professional magazines will run review screenshots provided by the publisher. If you subscribe to several different mags, it's not uncommon to catch the same shot again and again. Heck, recently Edge and Game Pro ran the same cover. I personally prefer unique shots that match the review's text, illustrate their points, etc., but that's just the way it goes.

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Quoting Akitoscorpio,

reply 9

Quoting Bashemgud,
reply 8

Quoting ioticus, reply 7I'm shocked 1up gave it a C+. Deserves a D+ at most.

Harsh man, real harsh.

This game is easily a b+ atm, and heading for a nice A ^^

That's considering I never crashed once while playing the game. Happened twice while loading a saved game...

Send stardock your specs, hell send all of us them so we know what the computer that runs the game properly looks like.

I've never had it crash and i have an HP i bought a yr ago for $900 bucks

2.5 GHZ AMD quad core

8 gig ram

750meg Nvidia (its a 9600 series but made only for HP, not on Nvidia's website.

Not a bad system but not top of the line either. Pretty good for 900 bucks about a yr ago

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