ExEverest said:
A 'game' is a completed product. If you want to assess a completed product, I think one has to complete it. You can approximate what the rest of the game will be like...but one can't know for sure. At least I don't think so. Enemy groupings can change later on in the game, types of enemies, the story will come to a crescendo, new gameplay mechanics might be introduced, at the very least one would have to adjust their strategy-within the last 2/3 and 1/3 of the game a lot can happen that might change your mind about the game on the whole.
...which doesn't make any functional difference if the basic gameplay is flawed. I understand what you're trying to say here. I don't agree that you have to have played a game in full to judge it, but it is true that demos and advertising campaigns can be misleading - though usually in the opposite direction, they make the game seem better than it is, not worse. And therefore I agree that you cannot make a truly complete judgment until the game is out and you possess knowledge of how it differs from the product that was advertised. (I would still say that such a judgment doesn't necessarily require that you experience those differences firsthand, however, depending on how strongly you value certain features over others.) But it's simply incorrect to say that because you can't know for sure, you can't make a fair assessment, because a truly complete judgment is not always necessary. You're capable, as a human, of drawing reasonable conclusions from the data before you, including taking into account that it's been filtered through an advertising campaign. And if you have 95% of the necessary information to draw a comprehensive conclusion and it all points one way, then that last 5% isn't going to make much of a difference.
I don't feel like I'm expressing my point very well, so let's put it like this: I don't like NWN. Something about the camera and the way that combat feels when I'm playing it just isn't my cup of tea. A generic fantasy setting, the poor story of the OC, etc. don't help, but the main thing is I just don't like how the game handles. So I can download 500 modules, each with a different philosophy towards combat design, and I still won't enjoy playing the game. Now, there may be a module every once in a while where there's a design philosophy in place of letting the player use non-combat skills to bypass combat, and that I might enjoy. But this is about the point where this analogy falls apart. DA2, if it's anything like its predecessor or its demo, will be full of filler combat - hordes of enemies thrown at the player to artificially extend the length of the game, against whom you can use the same strategies over and over without fail. Who knows, though, they might go all out and hand-design every encounter, taking care to ensure that none is the same and you must vary your strategies. If so, that woud be a major incline on Bioware's part, and there would be a chance I might enjoy the game. But let's just say for the sake of argument that I feel the same way about combat in DA2 as I do about combat in NWN, so that even these tactical encounters make only a negligible difference for me. Now, if I buy the game, I'm essentially betting on the fact that there will be very little mandatory combat. And given Bioware's track record, statements in interviews, and the apparent design philosophy within the demo, this would be a downright stupid bet to make.
I can't "know for sure", that's true. Just as I can't know for sure that it won't turn into a platformer halfway through the game or that skyway will bitch about how horrible DA2 is, Volourn will bitch about how great DA2 is, and the Codex will bitch about anything that can possibly be bitched about. Hell, I can't be sure that the sun will rise tomorrow. Maybe some catastrophic event will cause the earth's rotation to cease. But it'd be pretty silly of me to withhold from making any assessments for which these probable outcomes are relevant altogether simply because I can't be completely, 100% sure.
kris said:
For a review or to judge something as unimportant as the story you need to play through the whole game. To judge if it is good or bad you just need to play it enough to see most of the mechanics. That was what I tried to say. And before you say that the story is important... Well if the story really is important in a game, then it is a bad game by default.
Well, that's assuming that the game in question displays most of it's mechanics in the segment played. Entirely possible, but I'm not sure how prevalent that situation is. We'd have to define what mechanics are first. Story is important, in my opinion (granted, I define most of current video games as a mixture of gameplay and film), but I understood what you meant. Just not sure if I agree. I'll have to consider this point.
I've addressed the first point above. And I would add that even if the gameplay changes later on, one has to weigh whether it's worth dozing through, say, 20 hours of poor gameplay so that you can finally get to the good stuff.
As for considering story (nearly) as important as gameplay, I can see where you're coming from. I used to feel that way, and I've known many people who enjoy JRPGs that feel the same way; they'll suffer through hours of repetitive random battles that consist of attack + attack + attack + heal so that they can experience the story, the real reason they play the games. (Personally, I've since decided that many JRPGs that are revered for their stories have rather lacking plots and characters and are simply better than western games at disguising the lack of plot and personality depth through elaborate backstories, "meaningful" pauses in dialogue, exaggerated, caricaturish character traits, faux-symbolic imagery, and incoherent bits of dialogue thrown in for the purpose of seeming deep, but that's another argument.) And it makes sense if you value story as highly as gameplay that you'd think playing through the game is necessary to assess it's quality, because otherwise you might miss a major plot moment that makes everything before it, however slow or seemingly disconnected, worthwhile. But I'm sure you recognize, too, that there are some people who play games for their gameplay, who consider a good story a nice bonus but unnecessary for a game to be enjoyable. Is it necessary for them to play through the entire game to make a fair assessment of whether they'll enjoy it?
(For purposes of simplification, I'm ignoring other aspects of gameplay such as choices and consequences, character creation, and skill usage; if you find this objectionable, just replace "gameplay" with "combat mechanics".)
Secondly, the people who make the big bucks can afford higher development budgets, higher development budgets=better people + more time + better managment=better quality. It's natural to expect most of the AAA titles to be quite good.
There should be a fallacy for this. Is there a fallacy for this? I'm not sure.
(A) Higher budgets doesn't mean better people or management. They might mean
more people, but it's not like a developer says "Hey, we just got the budget approved. Look at these numbers! We can finally afford to fire the idiots who decided to level-scale everything in Oblivion and hire some of those high-demand game designers who work for our competitors." They may pick up new workers and people from studios that have gone out of business, as Bethesda did with Emil Pagliarulo, but that does not necessarily translate into an influx of developers with more talent.
(B) Higher budgets don't mean more time. You can, in theory, afford to pay your workers for a longer time if you don't spend all the extra money on other things, but you also have a publisher who's invested a lot of money into this game and wants to see a return on that investment as soon as possible without sacrificing potential profit. Sometimes even sooner, depending on its financial situation and the knowledge (or lack thereof) the publisher posesses about the game-making process.
(C) Higher budgets don't mean better quality. If they did, the games on
this list would consist of the best games in existence. (I'll admit that they're all very polished, and most of the ones I've played are good games, but the best of their respective genres? I don't think so.) Money helps, but it's the people who choose how to spend it that matters. The passion, dedication, and talent of the team, that's what really matters. It sounds trite and cheesy to say, but their hearts have got to be in it. You can always tell when devs really enjoyed making a game, and it makes a big difference in the quality. And a high budget can be anathema to this, because instead of freely pursuing their own creative vision, the devs need, first and foremost, to ensure that the game sells.
Additionally, a game with a high budget has to have mass appeal because otherwise it won't be able to turn a profit. So a lot of that extra money is spent on the sorts of things that are most likely to aid in that goal: PR/advertising, focus groups, and graphics. Sometimes QA. A side effect of this is that a certain amount of pandering to the lowest common denominator is frequently required. And while some may consider Twilight, Britney Spears, and McDonald's to be high quality, the lowest common denominator is generally called the lowest common denominator for a reason. In any case, even if you don't agree that they need to appeal to the LCD, surely you recognize that more money invested into a game means that the investors will want more control over how it develops, thus limiting the ability of the devs to make the game that the game that they want.
