Avowed | Review Thread

Comments

• ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  From Jeff Grubb:

  And also, to be kind of a shit, I think the complaints about being underleveled and not having the right gear, mostly come from games like these being streamlined to the point where they usually have no friction. The obstacles in this game aren’t just tolerable, they’re the main reason I love it.

  I definitely read a review where the reviewer was frustrated that he was underleveled and annoyed that his companions kept yelling at him to upgrade his gear, lol. But seriously, this sanding down of any sort of friction is something that has gotten to me with plenty of games in the past decade, so I appreciate someone laying it out plainly.

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  • NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    The thing to understand is that reviews are inherently subjective. Decade(…s?) ago, Kieron Gillen wrote a pretty famous manifesto where he basically compared game reviewing to travel writing.

    When you are booking a holiday, you don’t care how many grains of sand are on the beach. You probably don’t care too much about the average flow rate of cars on the highway during rush hour. What you care about is whether you will enjoy it.

    For some? That means there being plenty of museums. For others it is beaches with accessible parking so that you can leave your crap in a rental car. For others still it is nightlife.

    And that applies to “friction” as well. Because let’s take a different example. Many people (myself included) criticized Elden Ring for having a grace outside of basically every single boss room. We half joke that people would lose their god damned minds if they had to play Dark Souls 2 where one of the hardest bosses in the game involves fighting your way through a solid wall of Black Knight level enemies every single time. Others think we are fucking stupid for liking Dark Souls 2 (… they are probably right) and that this lets you focus solely on the boss and not memorizing what a weeb in armor is going to do… before you fight the other weeb in armor. And others still will point out that having to run past those enemies or fight one or two helps to “reset” the mind between attempts and avoids being on tilt against a boss.

    Just like some people want a beach where everyone is in a bikini and dehydrated like Hugh Jackman on a film set. And others still want somewhere they can relax and maybe surf for a bit.

    Which… mostly speaks to Grubb’s problems as a reviewer. As a “game leaks” guy, he is amazing. I think he lacks the drive to be a full on game journo but that is also a function of him working for the company that steals the work of the rest of games media on the regular (Fandom). But he has a VERY long history of giving “spicy takes” where he has a rudimentary understanding of a topic but still feels the need to shit on others unnecessarily. He isn’t the only one but I am increasingly at the point where I can’t tell if that is engagement farming or “Just Jeff Grubb”.

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    • ampersandrew@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      I understand that reviews are subjective. I just found it funny that the characters in the game were shouting the solution to the reviewer’s problems at him for so long that he found it frustrating.

      Jeff Grubb’s not-a-review was speaking to exactly the kind of thing that’s important to me in games and why he likes this one so much, which did me a great service, so I’m not sure why you’re shitting on him for spicy takes here, lol.

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    • mohab@piefed.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Hmm… sure, but I feel like "reviews are subjective" gets used as an excuse to give low-effort reviews a pass too often.

      Like, I understand if a Steam reviewer writes whatever because they're just a user, but I cannot justify using the same scale to judge a professional reviewer.

      I understand a game may not be a reviewer's cup of tea, but if this stops them from engaging with the game's systems and attempting to provide insight through their review then I think it's fair to judge they haven't done their job well.

      Like, if someone hires me to do a job, and I accept, I cannot go "Oh, I'm gonna do half of it because the rest isn't my cup of tea. Sorry." No, I'll do the job and maybe complain about it afterwards, which IMO, is exactly what reviewers should do—example: "I beat the boss, but the fight sucked because X, Y, and Z."

      I think there should be standards, otherwise you get reviewers unfairly judging games they barely played like in the infamous God Hand review.

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• vasus@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Glowing praise from journalists and middling scores from youtube reviewers… Same exact situation as Veilguard even down to Mortisimal glazing it.

  It’s gonna be awful isnt it

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  • anakin78z@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

    Ooo, I loved Veilguard, so maybe I’ll love this, too.

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    • Gerudo@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

      Same, I really enjoyed Veilgaurd and actually finished the damn thing, which is rare for me these days. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a good, breezy arpg.

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• NuXCOM_90Percent@lemmy.zip ⁨1⁩ ⁨week⁩ ago

  Shame to not have Mortismal’s “review” since they are probably one of the biggest PoE fanboys on the internet and CRPGs are their wheelhouse www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMCS_1ortZk

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