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ELEX's treatment by the mainstream gaming media

Urthor

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Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
Or, a game that was honestly less enjoyable than Risen 1 and released almost a decade later suffers from the fact that AAA studios have been churning out open world action RPG games hand over fist and have actually made some mildly okay ones that are exceptionally better than Elex at the action and open world parts of the equation?

Elex is the most circlejerked Codex game in a long time, most of it actually wasn't that good or particularly filled with C&C. People are attracted to the game for the punishing start and loot curve and the quest design, but a lot of the other bits are pretty shoddy.
 
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Haplo

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Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
Mainstream reviews are silly and no point of reference. Sadly they affect sales... which affect dev fates and future projects.

In case of Elex, perhaps the game was simply too difficult for the reviewers. Huge armor even on the very basic starter enemies leads to a situation where you really have to work hard and actively avoid most combat till Tier I equipment. Even if you are lucky and snatch some good weapon early, it will be stat restricted and you won't be able to use it till you gain a few levels and/or brew a few Elex pots (which also requires some levels invested and a lot of money). The levels do not come fast and effortlessly.
Stamina is also very restrictive early on.

Even worse if you fell into the arpeegee trap and invest in Cunning and personality+thief skills.

A real tough start, I feel even less fair then the Gothics (where player skill with some difficulty allowed you to overcome a few level-appropriate mobs).
Definitely Elex is not beginner friendly. And game journal reviewers aren't known for particular skill or patience/persistence.
 
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Metatron

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Not saying the bashing for ELEX is warranted but mainstream media did champion Divinity: OS2, a lengthy TB rpg with a lot of text. It's probably in the top 5 of best reviewed games this year, the aforementioned Gamespot and IGN gave it a 10/10 and 9.6/10. - higher scores than they gave to Fallout 4 actually. Remember when everyone on the codex was convinced a turn-based rpg would never ever get good scores?
Piranha Bytes needs to rethink their PR, there's no positive hype surrounding this release and in 2017 this matters more than ever for a smaller studio. I'm sure there were 5 people on the codex really looking forward to this but for a mainstream media journalist who suddenly has to review this game he wasn't paying any attention to pre-release this is met with a shrug.
 

Doktor Best

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Feb 2, 2015
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What i dont understand is that some of you guys still didnt get the message that mainstream gamejournalism is not worth your attention. They proved again and again and again that they are clueless corrupt hacks, yet you click on their reviews and watch their youtube reviews again and again as if you'd somehow expect they will have something worthwhile to say all of a sudden.

They earn money if you click on the shit they dump on their websites and on youtube. If you stop giving them revenue by doing so, if you stop steering attention towards them by talking about them and if you spread the word that nobody should pay any attention towards them, the problem will go away eventually.
 

1451

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In My Safe Space
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They have a quota to complete. Since they evaluate bad games as good, they have to give some negative reviews as well to appear impratial. So they find games like elex and do their worst.
 

Thane Solus

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What i dont understand is that some of you guys still didnt get the message that mainstream gamejournalism is not worth your attention. They proved again and again and again that they are clueless corrupt hacks, yet you click on their reviews and watch their youtube reviews again and again as if you'd somehow expect they will have something worthwhile to say all of a sudden.

They earn money if you click on the shit they dump on their websites and on youtube. If you stop giving them revenue by doing so, if you stop steering attention towards them by talking about them and if you spread the word that nobody should pay any attention towards them, the problem will go away eventually.

Yes, but half of the codex are as a clueless as these journo hacks, even if they pretend otherwise. Just look at the dumbest piece of shit games out there, you will see 300 pages thread on codex, "arguing" or "making fun" of it.
 

Goblino

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Jun 22, 2015
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Let's be honest, Elex isn't for everyone. You've got an incoherent anachronistic setting with, like, retard grimdark dialogue. Sure it's all good cheesy fun, but when you throw the mainstream audience a premise with fantasy/sci-fi/diesel-punk shenanigans, they expect to be wandering around murdering everything with tight combat and controls. Nothing less. When an open world game with this look starts slapping the average player over the back of the head by killing them with "critters", "runt mass rats" (???), and fucking dinosaurs, what do you expect? The Gothic style of progression is more consonant with the original gritty understated setting. Nobody, outside of Gothic fans, is going to go into Elex and expect to run around and play bitch-maid to a bunch of poorly characterized npc replicants. Look at a shit and piss game like Borderlands, full of overacted "funny" characters and instant gratification gameplay. That's what people want when you say things like open-world fantasy jetpack romp.
 

Urthor

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Pillars of Eternity 2: Deadfire
Yes, but half of the codex are as a clueless as these journo hacks, even if they pretend otherwise. Just look at the dumbest piece of shit games out there, you will see 300 pages thread on codex, "arguing" or "making fun" of it.

Username checks out
 

Theldaran

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Oct 10, 2015
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Why are you surprised? Those people are very far in taste from the Codex. I'd be surprised if the one who makes the review is actually an RPG specialist. I'm sure in some cases, the hack who sits in front of the game doesn't have a clue, and he concludes it's shit.
 

Sigourn

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Reminder it's these people who review videogames nowadays. I wouldn't put it past reviewers to try ELEX, die horribly, and claiming the difficulty is too much because of that.
 

Sigourn

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Moreover, this ties in with my now-recurrent thought that reviewers don't post facts, they just post opinions. So a review is less like "the game is this", and more of "this is what the game is to me", which has the effect of "if this reviewer said Skyrim is the best game ever, it must be!".

Look at this if you don't believe me:

"Most of the way this huge roleplaying-shooter game works is carried over from its excellent predecessors, Fallout 3 and Fallout: New Vegas. It is the Skyrim to Fallout 3’s Oblivion, if you will – it iterates on the previous game’s already amazing systems, and it’s similarly dense with locations to explore, genuinely creepy monsters to fight, and superbly engrossing post-nuclear atmosphere that blends unsettling gore and death with dark comedy. After more than 55 hours played I may have seen an ending, yet I feel like I’ve only begun to explore its extraordinary world; from the look of it, I’ll easily be able to spend another 100 happy hours here and still see new and exciting things."

What is he actually saying about the game? Nothing. He talks about "amazing systems", but he doesn't tell which systems and why are they "awesome". He says it is dense with locations to explore, but he doesn't talk about what "density" or "exploration" mean in this game. He talks about "genuinely creepy monsters", but he doesn't explain how do they behave, how they differ from each other, or what dangers do they pose to the player. He talks about the "atmosphere" but doesn't go into details. And so on. Most of these reviews are so full of opinion and so little on facts that, if you take them at face value, ANY game could be the greatest of all time, and ANY game could be the worst game ever made. Look at this sentence again:

"it iterates on the previous game’s already amazing systems, and it’s similarly dense with locations to explore, genuinely creepy monsters to fight, and superbly engrossing post-nuclear atmosphere that blends unsettling gore and death with dark comedy"

I mean, who wouldn't want to play a game like this? But that's just fluff. Once you know:

- That the "amazing systems" are fairly shit because of so many things I won't bother describing here.
- That the locations offer nothing of value thanks to leveled loot that makes exploration not worth it (not to mention most of them are shooting galleries or places with your standard skeleton/teddy bear set piece).
- That the "genuinely creepy monsters" are all crap and only LOOK creepy, because they offer no challenge otherwise (since they are leveled).
- And that the "superbly engrossing atmosphere" is all over the place. Fallout blended unsettling gore and death with dark comedy. Fallout 4 doesn't know what the hell it wants to be.

Then you realize this reviewer's opinion is completely worthless.
 

Sigourn

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And just to nail my point home, I bothered to read through the IGN review and narrow down all the facts of the review, just to prove my point:

Overview:

- It is a post-nuclear FPS RPG.
- There are many locations to explore, and many different looking areas.
- There are monsters to fight, with more unique behaviors.
- It is a long game with many sidequests.
- It is more color-saturated than Fallout 3.
- There are set pieces with skeletons.
- You are given a suit of Power Armor and a heavy weapon near the beginning of the game after the bombs drop, and you fight against a Deathclaw.

Character "building" and "roleplaying":

- There's a new character sculpting tool.
- Skill points and traits have been replaced by a Perk system, illustrated by an animated Vault Boy chart. You can buy Perks, increase their levels, or increase a S.P.E.C.I.A.L. attribute. Increasing your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. gives you access to new, previously inaccessible, Perks.
- Only Charisma opens up unique dialogue options.
- Each companion has their own skills, likes, and dislikes. They also have contextual flavor dialogue.
- You can choose between different factions.
- Some quest chains are opened up or closed off through dialogue decisions and actions (only one example listed).
- Fully voiced protagonist, male and female.

Gameplay:

- There's rain and radiation storms.
- The interface is handled through the wrist-mounted Pip-Boy. It changes when you are in Power Armor.
- There's a new loot menu that pops up in real time.
- Items in the world are made of material components.
- You can use these components to craft equipment upgrades of different kinds. These changes are reflect in stats and look of the weapons.
- The armor system lets you piece together six tyeps of gear. You can wear armor on top of your clothing now. You can also upgrade your armor with collected materials. These types of gear can be individually damaged and repaired.
- You now get into and out of Power Armor, like a vehicle. You must power your armor using fuel, which you find in the world.
- You can now name your pieces of gear.
- There are Legendary enemies which have a chance of dropping weapons and items with unique names and stats.
- There have been improvements to the shooting mechanics.
- There's V.A.T.S., which now happens in slowmotion.
- V.A.T.S. and sprinting (new feature) drain your action points.
- You can now manually activate critical hits.
- Hacking now happens in real-time.
- You can block and do a heavy strike (similar to Skyrim).
- You can now build shacks, crops, water pumps, power generators, and defenses to create settlements in predefined areas.
- There are visors.
- The end-cutscenes aren't as detailed as those of previous games.
- You can play after the game is over.

Performance:

- The performance is not very good.

These are all the facts in that review. "Facts", as in, "not opinions". Now you tell me what do these things actually tell you about the game.
 

Iznaliu

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Apr 28, 2016
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These are all the facts in that review. "Facts", as in, "not opinions". Now you tell me what do these things actually tell you about the game.

Do you even know what a "review" is supposed to be? This ridiculous obsession with objectivity in reviews is like expecting people to drive cars up walls.
 
Joined
Dec 17, 2013
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A lot of the criticisms of ELEX from the media (and unfortunately some Codexers) don't make any sense to me. For instance, while its combat is not that great, saying that it's broken or crappy is wrong. It has an internal logic to it, which is actually better than something like 60% of RPGs. You use defensive moves (roll, blocking), you manage your offensive moves, you manage the stamina pool, you've got special moves like the shield bash. It may not be Dark Souls, but it's a fairly sophisticated system that actually works. And the flaws they point out, like not having enough stamina, or doing enough damage, are actually what ties the whole thing to the RPG aspects. Level up and get more stamina, level up and get better weapons. To criticize this kind of system while literally 70% of melee RPG combat is spamming one button just seems insane.

Same with these criticisms about ELEX NPCs or dialogue. Sure, the same faces get recycled to death, and the voice acting is budget level, but the actual stories, dialogues, and quests are really good. They are interesting and unique, and connected to the world. Compare this to the flowery drivel in most high budget RPGs (like DA:O or Skyrim), which makes you want to stab your ears, and there is nothing wrong with them in ELEX.
 

Sigourn

uooh afficionado
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These are all the facts in that review. "Facts", as in, "not opinions". Now you tell me what do these things actually tell you about the game.

Do you even know what a "review" is supposed to be? This ridiculous obsession with objectivity in reviews is like expecting people to drive cars up walls.

I know what the point of reviews is, and current reviews are shit in that regard: instead of letting the customer know whether they will enjoy the game or not, the reviewer tells the customer whether he/she enjoyed the game or not. A review of Skyrim by someone who hates Skyrim isn't useful to me; a review of ELEX by someone who hates ELEX isn't useful to me. Both lead to the same conclusion: "don't buy the game just because I didn't like it".
 
Self-Ejected

IncendiaryDevice

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Intrigued by this thread, I checked out Metacritic to see what all the fuss was about. From 28 reviews only IGN and one other critic review gave it a negative rating, a lot more sites gave it positives than negatives and the final sum of all the critic scores pretty accurately matches the user-score:

PC

Critic: 67 from 28 reviews
User: 68 from 997 ratings

I can't help feeling this thread is itself fake news reporting on someone else's fake news. Maybe if the title was changed to
ELEX's treatment by IGN
Then it'd make for a more interesting thread, rather than the usual rehashing of generic MSM quotes we've all seen a billion times before, most of which have little conversational value with regards to talking about Elex as a game nor IGN and what version of gaming they promote.

I was initially motivated to start a deliberately contrary thread entitled
Avadon's treatment by the Codex's gaming media
But I seriously doubt many people would get the comparison, what with so many people round here simply not interested in that kind of RPG.

Am I comparing Piranha Bytes to Jeff Vogel?

Quite possibly. I can think of quite a few similarities, can you?
 

fantadomat

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Edgy Vatnik Wumao
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I do like both Spiders games and PB games and i don't want them to change much. You could always go and play some nuwave rpgs in search of innovation.
 
Joined
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Messages
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ELEX's treatment by IGN

What are you talking about? Gamespot gave ELEX an even lower 4/10 (for the PS4 version, apparently they couldn't even be bothered to play the PC one). PC Gamer gave it a 64, which while not quite as horrible as the other two, is still way lower than both what the game deserves and what its predecessors received. These are the big gaming sites, hence mainstream gaming media, the better scores generally came from some tiny niche publications barely anyone reads.
 
Unwanted
Joined
Dec 29, 2017
Messages
28
If they're actually getting money then I have no idea whose hands it ends up in considering how many mainstream journalists struggle financially. Game companies do hand out free items often to journalists but it's hard to eat a bunch of gaming headsets lemme tell ya.

All those fry cooks at mc donalds make jack, so therefore md donalds will go out of business soon.
 

Kitchen Utensil

Guest
ELEX's treatment by IGN

What are you talking about? Gamespot gave ELEX an even lower 4/10 (for the PS4 version, apparently they couldn't even be bothered to play the PC one). PC Gamer gave it a 64, which while not quite as horrible as the other two, is still way lower than both what the game deserves and what its predecessors received. These are the big gaming sites, hence mainstream gaming media, the better scores generally came from some tiny niche publications barely anyone reads.


And you also have to compare it to the inflated ratings AAA shit gets from these critics. 64 might be an accurate-ish score for ELEX in a world without inflated ratings where 50 essentially means unplayable, broken shit and even 80 is more like "worth a try if you like the genre".
 

Sjukob

Arcane
Joined
Jul 3, 2015
Messages
2,052
lot of the criticisms of ELEX from the media (and unfortunately some Codexers) don't make any sense to me. For instance, while its combat is not that great, saying that it's broken or crappy is wrong
Huehuehue

Stamina doesn't reward a mix of offense and defense, becuase by avoiding enemy attack you just limit your further offense and give them additional opportunity to attack and potentialy drain your combo meter
Single attack don't do anything you absolutely have to combo which completely destroys melee against crowds. The issue of fighting against groups is also escalated by the problem above.
Enemies can randomly pierce your block even if you have the best armor and high parry rating.
Enemies can randomly stop getting staggered after you hit them and smack you in the face.
Enemies can hit you with no stamina.
Stamina is a retarded concept which can be observed by fighting and animals. Beasts are more fierce because they can't be "shut down".
Knockdown is almost useless because enemies can still attack with no stamina and are stagger immune when getting up and they get up fast. Of course for the player knockdown in 90% cases is lethal.
Certain attack cannot be blocked at all for no reason like ratptor's double slash. Although troll attacks you can block just fine.
Enemies cannot be hit in melee if they are slightly below you of course they can hit you just fine. Can't remember if it applies to the position where they are standing above you.
Monsters spitting attack is retarded, the AOE and tracking is too good. Also because of some weird positioning they can spit at you even if you are close and hit you while you are getting up. Again see issue with player getting knocked down.
Balance of melee vs ranged/magic is completely retarded. Compared to ranged melee dude is basicaly a gimp. At least you get enough points to level both.
Heavy attack is almost useless just as shield's special. Jetpack attack is underwhelming.

I probably missed something but it's an impressive list already. Elex combat is bad bad bad. Gothic completely shits all over it.
 

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