Totally Not Corrupt Professional Objective Gaming Journalism DRAMA

[thesoup]

There's a place for games of all lengths. Ideally the length of a game is tied to its play mechanics and its story. I cannot really fathom an RPG with interesting character compression, quests combat, etc. that makes full potential of its gameplay that lasts just 3 hours, or even 10 hours.

3 hours is just character creation, 10 hours is finishing the first dungeon / village that serves as a tutorial / leaving the mortuary.

 

[Jaedar]

honestly, the first thing i do when i find myself interested in a game is i look for a total biscuit WTF is video.

why? because i want to know what it is like playing the fucking game.

And you'd better believe the folks at Polygon and Kotaku and print gaming journalism are well aware of this. You're not alone. They've even tried to create their own WTF-style videos, but they're just not pulling in TB numbers. Many of them can't stand the guy. You saw some of that in the GameJournos mailing list leak. Total Biscuit saw that too and it's at least partly why he's so pro-gamergate now I think.

It's similar to what's happened to music journalists. When the internet got fast enough that people could listen to music on it, I think it must have been a huge blow to music critics. Why read 1000 words of what some pretentious rock critic thinks when you can decide for yourself by simply listening to 30 seconds of a band's music? Why read some long rambling piece of criticism from Leigh Alexander when you can simply watch a couple minutes of someone's Let's Play on YouTube and decide for yourself if it's a game you'd enjoy?

What gamejourno mailing list leak?

 

[Murk]

Jaedar http://yiannopoulos.net/2014/09/22/new-gamejourno-pro-leak-the-email-summaries/

And more like it

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

Reviewers hate spending time playing games. Remember the Rome 2 stats which showed only 30% of reviewers played the game for more than an hour? And that even less managed to fight a single real time battle?

source?

 

[Average Manatee]

Reviewers hate spending time playing games. Remember the Rome 2 stats which showed only 30% of reviewers played the game for more than an hour? And that even less managed to fight a single real time battle?

source?

 

[markec]

Reviewers hate spending time playing games. Remember the Rome 2 stats which showed only 30% of reviewers played the game for more than an hour? And that even less managed to fight a single real time battle?

Which is the best thing that could happened to Rome 2 since they still gave decent reviews to a shitty game.

 

[MadMaxHellfire]

Reviewers hate spending time playing games. Remember the Rome 2 stats which showed only 30% of reviewers played the game for more than an hour? And that even less managed to fight a single real time battle?

source?

ouch.

 

[Infinitron]

http://allmannerofnerdery.tumblr.com/post/100526443850/im-leaving-destructoid

Dale North
Editor-In-Chief
I am Destructoid's Editor-In-Chief. I love corgis. I make music.

I’m leaving Destructoid

Without going into details, I feel certain actions taken and statements made by Destructoid management have not accurately reflected my feelings or taken my input as Editor-in-chief into account. I’m no longer comfortable having my name attached to the continued engagement with former staff.

I love Destructoid. It has been at the center of my life for just short of a decade. It was one hell of a ride, and I’ll miss it and its people dearly.

Ooh, drama.

 

[dnf]

Good fucking riddance

 

[Perkel]

maybe this means Destructoid is going to bust ?
yay one fucker less.

 

[Spectacle]

This only means something if you assume that everyone who got a review copy reviewed the game. I suspect the majority of those are just guys playing around with their "free game" for a bit.

 

[Perkel]

That is taken 14,5 hours before release. Most of sites release their reviews on day of game release. Connect dots. It isn't that hard.

Only 30% of reviewers finished one hour of gameplay.
Only 4,5 % fought 10 battles with autoresolve

If it looks like a duck, if it quacks like a duck...

 

[Average Manatee]

This only means something if you assume that everyone who got a review copy reviewed the game. I suspect the majority of those are just guys playing around with their "free game" for a bit.

Who exactly is getting a free preview copy to review that isn't a reviewer and aren't reviewing the game?

 

[Spectacle]

This only means something if you assume that everyone who got a review copy reviewed the game. I suspect the majority of those are just guys playing around with their "free game" for a bit.

Who exactly is getting a free preview copy to review that isn't a reviewer and aren't reviewing the game?

My impression is that game publishers hand out review keys pretty freely to the media, bloggers etc. It's not just one key per major site.

 

[Average Manatee]

This only means something if you assume that everyone who got a review copy reviewed the game. I suspect the majority of those are just guys playing around with their "free game" for a bit.

Who exactly is getting a free preview copy to review that isn't a reviewer and aren't reviewing the game?

My impression is that game publishers hand out review keys pretty freely to the media, bloggers etc. It's not just one key per major site.

With all the stuff they go through to keep real previews from leaking out and therefor "manage" the publicity? Not a chance. Certainly not for Rome 2. Anyone who took more than a casual interest in the game could see it was broken.

Not to mention pre-release games on Steam have dozens of developers, streamers, QA teams, old press from previews, etc. etc. registered. Depending on when achievements were added during development, that percentage can be very misleading.

I'd highly doubt that anyone beyond the few people responsible for steam integration and QA (Note: Creative Assembly doesn't have QA) are actually playing on steam. And if anything I'd expect this to artificially inflate the figures. Surely devs and such have played their own game for more than an hour, if they have played it at all as part of their job?

 

[Average Manatee]

Of course, I'm not insisting that exactly 31.9% played an hour our more. The point is that ideally none of the press should be playing less than an hour, and the previews of the game coincidentally forgetting to mention everything wrong about the game (many of which should be obvious within one hour) sure paint things the other way around. Let's be straight, the only light the press needs to painted with is their horrifically inaccurate reviews. Anything beyond that to suggest they are shit at their jobs is just the cherry ontop of the shit sundae.

As a coder myself I highly, highly doubt that anyone beyond the steam integration team would be using Steam internally. Certainly the idea of Steam as version control is preposterous, steam is basically the antithesis of version control.

 

[Archibald]

Are people who never launched the game counted towards these statistics?

 

[Hobo Elf]

No.

 

[Multi-headed Cow]

Yes.

 

[CSM]

Half-Life: 13 Hours
Call of Doody Black Ops: 7 Hours
Call of Doody Ghosts: 5 1/2 Hours

Neverwinter nights: 54 1/2 Hours
Mass Effect: 17 1/2 Hours

Yeah, definitely not getting shorter.

R00fles!

Only last year's Ghosts was slightly shorter:

2007 Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare 8h 05m
2008 Call of Duty: World at War 9h 33m
2009 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 9h 13m
2010 Call of Duty: Black Ops 9h 30m
2011 Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3 8h 06m
2012 Call of Duty: Black Ops II 8h 35m
2013 Call of Duty: Ghosts 6h 02m

Not seeing much of a trend with other major single-player developers:

2002 Neverwinter Nights 66h 43m
2003 Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic 35h 08m
2005 Jade Empire 23h 18m
2007 Mass Effect 28h 29m
2008 Dragon Age: Origins 61h 04m
2010 Mass Effect 2 36h 17m
2011 Dragon Age 2 37h 59m
2012 Mass Effect 3 35h 43m

2007 Assassin's Creed 18h 35m
2009 Assassin's Creed II 27h 19m
2010 Assassin's Creed: Brotherhood 24h 50m
2011 Assassin's Creed: Revelations 19h 41m
2012 Assassin's Creed III 27h 12m
2013 Assassin's Creed IV: Black Flag 35h 42m
2014 Watch Dogs 28h 26m

2001 Grand Theft Auto III 24h 04m
2002 Grand Theft Auto: Vice City 32h 36m
2004 Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas 57h 48m
2008 Grand Theft Auto IV 38h 27m
2013 Grand Theft Auto V 42h 46m

 

[CSM]

Game length is a terrible metric, especially on its own and doubly so when it comes to game reviews, because the two main interested parties have differing opinions:

• gamers want to get the most value for money, and so will generally prefer "longer" games, whereas
  
• reviewers earn more money if they write more reviews, and so will generally prefer "shorter" games.

The better metric to go for would be gameplay density, or how much time you spend with a game you're spending on play "versus" other factors (walking from A to B when there's nothing gained/lost by doing so except time, waiting for loading screens, cutscenes, etc.) You'd probably want to normalize the value by genre, but it'd help identify story-heavy games from story-light games at the very least.

Or, some games benefit from being longer, whilst other benefit from being shorter.

NUANCE IN MY CODEX?????

 

[pippin]

Are you guys counting the expansions when talking about NWN? Also I completed DAO in 50 1/2 hours, sidequests and everything. And those aren't really open world games, where you can wander aimlessly for hours.

 

[Blaine]

 

[Infinitron]

This RPS post about the new WoW expansion got some amusing comments: http://www.rockpapershotgun.com/2014/11/13/world-of-warcraft-warlords-of-draenor-released/

 

[Alienman]

RPS is too cool for school, but yes, interesting comments. RPS is usually the ultimate circle jerk.