Xbox VP under fire for criticizing journalists about Anthem complaints
47 replies, posted
Proof?
https://www.tweaktown.com/image.php?image=imagescdn.tweaktown.com/news/6/4/64261_645_anthems-combos-primed-gear_full.jpg
https://puu.sh/CPoDe.jpg
Whether it's a primer or detonator is on the tool tip of every weapon drop in the game
Sure, but unless I missed something (and I don't think I have), the game never once bothers to explain the existence of primers and detonators unless you voluntarily start reading through the Cortex which I'd wager most people won't do (nor should they be expected to). Core gameplay elements should ALWAYS be introduced by the game itself, not by randomly happening upon it.
The game honestly fails to explain an awful lot of very basic information.
There's plenty already to ding anthem on in many many areas; gameplay mechanics isn't one of them.
This isn't discussing the mechanics, its letting the player they know they exist and how to do them. It is basic shit to teach players how to play your game without them having to search for this information themselves.
The game has an extended tutorial for super basic gameplay instead of regular mechanics, it’s so fucking weird. Like it repeatedly teaches flight controls but skips over other things.
then again, what do I really expect from them, the whole game reeks of repurposed content from another point in development, I really doubt that the game even started out as a looter shooter,
What kind of fucking game in this genre has only at most four almost identical models for each weapon type, let alone actually no unique models for the special ones?
when you have to go through articles and dev streams to learn about a core mechanic of the game, it's bad game design
Again it's listed on the weapon tooltips.
So, he criticizes a reviewer for not knowing how to do a combo. I grant you, not everyone knows about that mechanic of the game, but honestly, it's better than having it fucking shoved down our throats during some obnoxious, exhaustive list of techniques that assumes the mass populous of gaming are all dumb and incapable of figuring things out on our own.
It's not like combos are integral to the core gameplay loop; you're not going to face an inability to progress that early on in the game, and once you're at the point that you absolutely need them, you'll likely have learned through experience or by having another player tell you.
What a concept.
It's bad UI, bad tutorial, and/or bad game design, take your pick. I'm getting the feeling the VP never actually played the game and just reacted off of "combos" because it isn't an obvious mechanic.
Reminds me of Warframe - bullet jumping, a near mandatory component of the game for traversing quickly, is explained terribly. The area of the parkour tutorial that mentions it is a floating description and you can just double jump past it without even noticing it. It also never mentions you can do it in any direction in that parkour tutorial. It's also only explained there once; you need to dig into the codex (which they poorly explain what it is or why you should use it) and go to the tutorials there to see a better explanation. Later on various mods and some mastery tests require its use. As a new Warframe player the lack of good explanations for the shitloads of mechanics and content is frustrating so I bookmarked the Wikia in my steam browser home page since I need to refer to it so often.
Games that have complex mechanics or non-intuitive features need to sign post them and teach them better. Fighting games have come a long way with better training modes and explanations, but there's still plenty of games that make wikia or Google do the heavy lifting of teaching complex things like damage statistics, drop rates, status effects, advanced techniques etc.
Again, it doesn't matter if EA put a pamphlet with the explanation of the combo system on the reviewer desktop, if the game doesn't explain it then his point is valid: Is shitty game design.
If you don't gonna explain to the player how the mechanics of the game works, at least make it so the players needs to learn them in a natural way. This video shows how the original Super Mario Bros teach the player how 90% of the game works on the first level:
https://youtu.be/zRGRJRUWafY
Why does every game need to hold their players by the hand?
The game has an extensive tutorial and "How-To-Play" tab under your journal (J on PC), which explains all the game mechanics and combo's.
The player is directed to this journal several times in the first hour of the game, and shows hints about Combo's and this tab during loading screens.
With that in hand, if the player sees something in the menu they don't understand and decides "ehhh whatever", disregarding the provided tools, how is that the game's fault?
This shit is why every modern game slaps you with un-skippable and infuriating pop-ups explaining every teeny tiny detail of the game now.
"When an enemy hits zero HP, they die!"
People gush about Souls-like games leaving players to fend for themselves and learn the game, but when EA/Bioware does it's bad?
Don't get me wrong, the game has plenty of things to criticize, and for the head of a platform to make a statement like this is disingenuous.
But he has a fucking point; The game does explain what combo's are, the reviewers are literally ignoring the built-in-game explanation.
That's why I linked that video on my last reply, if a game is well designed, then you don't need any tutorial or holding the player hand.
You expect that the game at least tell you the vital stuff that you need to complete a game. Yeah, these screenshots shows that there is an explanation in some submenu of the game, but if you don't know that the combo system exists in the game 99% of the people don't gonna even touch the "How to Play" manual expecting some hidden mechanic. Is a shitty design choise that can be easily fixed if, for example, adding a mini-quest that makes the player use a combo to complete it.
This kind of news like the ones with Cuphead and others ( which each dev team recognized there were UI / gameplay problems btw ) are often overblown for the reasons others have already pointed:
A thing to take into account when being on game/mod developing is that it is so really easy falling into the thought that the controls/gameplay elements are "clear as crystal" to all the players, while in practice is that you will get newcomers to the genre, people which have trouble with controls or that they just don't fully understand it. This is why is so important QA, not only for bugs but also for this.
The "old games were better because you had to learn by just playing" isn't true as we used to have manual booklets with detailed instructions ( and the ones who isn't had terrible reputation back in the day ).
As for the "well game journalists should be already competent for doing this job", this notion starts getting dispelled when you learn that they have to do several reviews at the same time in a limited span ( which at the same time it opens the whole pandora box of working conditions ).
Why was Cuphead the hill a bunch of people died on? Of all the examples, why did people come out of the woodwork to defend the guy too stupid to look at the fucking screen?
https://files.facepunch.com/forum/upload/657/cb140ced-d388-411a-8ee4-f79080104339/image.png
What an absolute mess. I have to deal with this terrible UI and read all this shit just to progress? No thanks.
There were people defending that Polygon journalist who couldn't even shoot straight in DOOM 2016
To be honest I can't think of a time when a journalist was dumb about something or was bad at a game and the the rest of the community were quick to call them out about it.
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