Review Hordes steams up RPGDot's glasses

[Diogo Ribeiro]

Exactly. Human Shield summed it up nicely.


[BTW, HS, nice avatar :wink: ]

Love your Rorschach avatar on NMA (if the two Role-Players are the same)

Yeah, i'm the same user :D :wink:

 

[Spazmo]

Certainly RPGDot isn't biased. They just occasionally have opinions that are wrong. :wink:

However, sites like GameSpy or IGN are clearly on the take. Beyond the complete whoring out to advertisers (GSA is loaded with spyware and IGN will never live down the McDonald's thing), they're just so full of shit that it can only be explained by extreme and dismaying stupidity or bribes. Not just a wad of cash, mind you. It's rather in the form of exclusive content and loot. IGN doesn't care how good Doom 3 (for instance) really is as long as id software gives them the exclusive interview that gets them thousands of unique hits.

 

[EverythingXen]

The mark breakdown worked like this for my review. The first percentage is how much of the total mark it's worth, the second is my rating. Copy and pasted from the review page:

Graphics (15%) 92%

The graphics are crisp and clear, the character/monster models are attractive, and the background textures are nice to look at. The graphics are improved over NWN, so I scaled up. The game engine is old, so I scaled down. I like them better than I like Morrowinds so I scaled back up a bit. It's still the second best looking CRPG I've ever played so it is still nearing the top of my scale of 1 to 10.

Sound (15%) 90%

Again similar to the other two NWN games. The sound has not gotten noticeably better or worse and so it remains similar, if not identical, in mark to the core game's review score (which I still stand by).

Control (25%) 95%

I love NWN's control scheme. If I could pick a scheme for any top down turn based or staggered time game in the future to use it would be NWNs. 36 hotkeys (I filled them all with my cleric), easy to navigate radial menus, easy to follow level advancement stages, and the ability to pause with a space. It doesn't get 100 because nothing gets 100. 100 is reserved for the super game that makes me drop to my knees and weep in despair knowing that there will never be a game better than this and my hobby is over... doomed to play only this perfect game for all time because to do otherwise would mean it was not perfect.

Fun (45%) 95%

Note that fun is worth nearly half the final score. It's why TOEE scored so high... despite the numerous technical glitches I encountered I still loved blasting through TOEE. Despite the weak dialogue and simple story and inability to zoom in on character models that I love so much. Crashes only affect this score if they make me want to take up smoking or throw my monitor out the window... in other words if they seriously detract from the fun I'm having with the game. Crashing to desktop three times in 60 hours of play does not detract from my fun. Crashing to desktop every thirty seconds does.

The puzzles of chapter three were lame but again... they didn't detract from the fun I was having. Fun is incredibly subjective and always will be. Would I mind seeing it broken up into a few more subcategories, such as stability, difficulty, etc as well as retaining a "FUN" factor to account for personal preference? Not really. Would a few of the games I reviewed be dropped a good 5% to 10% as a result? Most probably.

As an aside my Shifter used ranger 5, druid 5, shifter 10 to get things rolling in chapter 1. I ended up having to be in 'normal' form to defeat many of the creatures (none of the forms I had access to had an AC above 30 and so the drow commandos and duergar fighters were having a field day critically hitting them). I could have perservered and pressed on trying to get the insane requisites for the better shifting forms in Epic but I wasn't having Fun trying to do so. No Fun = character a write off, get hammered in review. I played through the game three times and did chapter one with 9 additional characters... I didn't have time to nursemaid a weak class through to completion (although later on with my monk I did see that forms like earth elemental get to use the monk unarmed bonuses, which was just plain nasty and did give me an idea to try again with a lawful neutral druid /monk/shifter that I didn't get around to before writing the review.).

 

[Sol Invictus]

Your criterion system is flawed.

Comparing HOTU's scores with NWN and giving the expansion pack's graphics and sound the same scores (+/-) based on the original release 2 years ago is as flawed as giving Commander Keen 5 (assuming it were released today, based on the original's graphics engine) a 90 in graphics just because the original was back in 1994.

What I'm trying to point out is that you have to compare HOTU with the games most recently released (e.g. TOEE and Gothic 2) rather than a game released 2 years ago. What you basically did was statistically refer to HOTU as a better looking game than the two aforementioned titles because you (in your great failure) compared the graphics to that of NWN's.

It's the same with your sound critereon - because NWN, as you should realize, does not include any of the new bells and whistles of today's latest releases such as EAX3, Dolby Surround 5.1 and Occlusion. Giving it the score that you did basically amounts to telling a lie, especially if one were to compare HOTU's score with Gothic 2, which has precisely all those features I mentioned.

In any case, Bioware doesn't have to bribe anyone as most of these reviewers are under the hypnotic effect of hype. Giving Bioware's games a high score is akin to giving Blizzard's games a high score - it's just something you expect yourself to fulfill, as a duty to the hype, as well as to the readers who expect to see those high scores. I tend to think of it as a form of mass hysteria.

I'll give the sheep a break for now.

 

[EverythingXen]

Which is why I don't like a numeric system of grading. There are too many variables. In this particular case the following things would apply:

1) I don't have a sound card capable of any of the high end features and so I can only judge based on what my hardware can support. That's why the 'reviewer's system' is included, as far as I can tell... so you can say "Hmm... he really liked the sound. Holy crap! His sound card can't handle any of the new features I find lacking in this game so he'd never know." Based on what my hardware can handle I think the sound in HoTU is better than the sound in Gothic 2 (for example). Should all reviewers need to run top end systems? What would that do to the poor low end system users who hear about all these fantastic features and then get to experience none of them?

2) I do stand by the graphics. Of the CRPGs I've seen reviews on and played this year I still believe NWN to compare nicely. It's not the lush and beautiful scenery of Gothic 2 (for example) but I found the graphics to be on par with Knights of the Old Republic (based on screenshots I've seen) and superior to other releases, such as Temple of Elemental Evil (which had a few nice touches, like the clothing layer) or Lionheart.

That said I've played perhaps 5 CRPG releases this year... Gothic 2, Shadows of Undrentide, Temple of Elemental Evil, Hoardes of the Underdark, and Star Wars Galaxies. I *prefer* NWN's style of graphics over the other three titles, but I'll grant that Gothic's graphics are *better*. Probably SWGs as well though there are a few things there that I really don't like.

If Bioware had released the piece of flaming dung that is known as Pools of Radiance 2 it wouldn't have changed my opinion on it at all. I didn't get a chance to review it for RPGDot and that might be a good thing as by our fun scale heavy system the thing would have lost 40% flat out... and the other features certainly aren't good enough to pull it to a 'flawless' 60. I paid 39.99 for Hoardes of the Underdark just like everyone else... if I believed for an instant that I didn't get my money's worth the score would reflect this dramatically.

 

[DemonKing]

In any case, Bioware doesn't have to bribe anyone as most of these reviewers are under the hypnotic effect of hype. Giving Bioware's games a high score is akin to giving Blizzard's games a high score - it's just something you expect yourself to fulfill, as a duty to the hype, as well as to the readers who expect to see those high scores. I tend to think of it as a form of mass hysteria.

I tend to agree - it seems for BIO games the rose-coloured glasses come on for a lot of reviewers. HOTU isn't terrible but it is not a 9+/10 game (please check out my critique in general gaming to see why), yet it seems to score this high pretty consistently with on-line reviewers. KOTOR was a better game, IMO, but again, more of an 8.5/10 than the 9-10/10 every on-line/magazine reviewer on the planet seems to give it.

It seems BIO games get so hyped in the previews that reviewers are hesitant to mark them lower in their reviews, for fear of looking a little silly. It's a bit like a straight "A" student that hands in an essay worth realistically a "C+" but still gets an "A" because the teacher looks at his name and his past scores and marks him based on that rather than his current effort.

 

[Rosh]

I'm just curious if HotU even bothered to address any of the old problems and gross inefficiencies of how NWN was made.

 

[Volourn]

No. It sucks like the same shit; just different pile.

 

[atoga]

Atoga, if you think that FOBOS has gotten high marks you should look at it from the slanted Internet Geek Review Scores. Its marks, overall, tend to be very low in comparision to most other games. It is, relatively speaking, getting bad reviews AND bad scores across the boards (with some good ones but nothing compared to most games).

I realize that, but a lot of places have given it mediocre or good marks while dishing out on the game. A good example of that is Gamespot's review; good marks, yet half of the points made in the article were complaints about the linear story, bad graphics, and worse gameplay. The situation was similar for a few other FOBOS reviews as well.

 

[Sammael]

I'm just curious if HotU even bothered to address any of the old problems and gross inefficiencies of how NWN was made.

Well, if you list your gripes, I'll tell you if anything was done about them. It's still pausable real-time combat, for one.

EDIT: I found HotU to be a large improvement over the OC or SoU, mostly in terms of story and gameplay balance. I'd probably give it around 80/100 (the OC ranks around 70, SoU around 75).

 

[Volourn]

Sammael rates NWN OC 70 = hates it with a passion

Volourn rates NWN OC 75 = raving lunatic fanboy


I love the 'Net. :twisted:

 

[Sammael]

Isn't your scale 01-80, though?

 

[Volourn]

Good point. :D

 

[Sol Invictus]

I'd rate it a 0/100. The fucker doesn't deserve any points for being a shitty spinoff of an even shittier, older game that I never liked.

 

[Rosh]

Well, if you list your gripes, I'll tell you if anything was done about them. It's still pausable real-time combat, for one.

EDIT: I found HotU to be a large improvement over the OC or SoU, mostly in terms of story and gameplay balance. I'd probably give it around 80/100 (the OC ranks around 70, SoU around 75).

To put it simply, if you've not even bothered to develop heavily with the "SDK" (or try to work around all the bugs and inefficiencies), then I doubt you'd understand what I'm talking about. Most of the inefficiencies and bugs are on the server side or are the result of the server programmers trying to program around other bugs and problems.

It still kills me that some of BioWare's kid programmers managed to fuck up a subroutine to the point where it loops a spell effect or five repeatedly and like a DOT when they aren't supposed to.