Editorial RPG Codex Retrospective: Roguey smashes the patriarchy in Josh Sawyer's Icewind Dale

[Tommy Wiseau]

Oblivion is not a bad *game*

Heh.

 

[Excommunicator]

http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=129
I only skimmed this article but I don't see any mention of graphics, music, the opening and ending cinematics, nor does it discuss the ~awesomeness~ of the Dark Brotherhood questline that a bunch of people liked so much.

And you're probably right. I haven't read it but if that's the case then it's not acceptable as a real review to me, although it was written years before I came to the Codex.

Citing the mistakes of others doesn't absolve you of your own though. I think everyone understands where I'm coming from here and I'd be more than happy to see a line drawn in the sand for future content, but I have a feeling it won't happen. They're still very reasonable suggestions.

I just want to see the Codex representing something rather than complaining about the conduct of others without any real principles or standards to be an example of. So it isn't a paid institution. If anything that just means money is one less obstacle in the way of achieving a standard.

I get the feeling this is going to end up with me being told to "do a review if you care so much about it" and maybe I will do that at some point but I haven't been playing a lot of games lately and generally don't buy them when the hype is still going. We'll see.

 

[Infinitron]

I get the feeling this is going to end up with me being told to "do a review if you care so much about it"

Thanks for saving me the trouble

 

[Darth Roxor]

DUN LIKE THE GAME? HOW ABOUT YOU TRY MAKING YOUR OWN AND THEN TALK LOL!

 

[Excommunicator]

I get the feeling this is going to end up with me being told to "do a review if you care so much about it"

Thanks for saving me the trouble

u mad

 

[sea]

I like how Roguey's best examples of "Josh's brilliant design" are archers that shoot at you from across a room, a "moral choice" between killing or not killing a vain, evil dictator, and an annoying trap and waves of skeleton mobs in Kesselack's tomb. Meanwhile the much more interesting combat encounters, such as enemies that use various spells and status effects, are glossed over as "filler".

Methinks that Infinitron and Roguey are out to troll the entire Codex.

 

[Infinitron]

I like how Roguey's best examples of "Josh's brilliant design" are archers that shoot at you from across a room, and an annoying trap and waves of skeleton mobs in Kesselack's tomb. Meanwhile the much more interesting combat encounters, such as enemies that use various spells and status effects, are glossed over as "filler".

Methinks that Infinitron and Roguey are out to troll the entire Codex.

Hey, if you wrote stuff for the Codex I'd post it too. Instead I must copypaste from Gamasutra and GameBanshee

 

[fizzelopeguss]

Wait, Roguey is a male?

She self identifies as female, at least on the codex.

Which means she's pre-op and has a 9 incher swinging between "her" legs.

 

[Sranchammer]

she's pre-op and has a 9 incher swinging between "her" legs.

... Go on....

 

[Roguey]

A third developer (the a writer from Ultima V: Lazarus) retweeted my review. It's sliding from coincedence to pattern. I may be able to refer to myself as The Developer's Reviewer: The Preferred Reviewer of Games by Developers now.

I like how Roguey's best examples of "Josh's brilliant design" are archers that shoot at you from across a room,

Are you referring to the tower in chapter 6? Because I thought it was neat how they were attacking me from a fortified position where I couldn't attack them (until acquiring a key). How often does that happen in any IE game? Plus the battle inside required me to use spells because the room is so small and they like to target squishies (and it requires gathering your party before venturing forth so no leaving them outside).

a "moral choice" between killing or not killing a vain, evil dictator,

Oversimplification. The choice is whether or not to agree with the wishes of a victimized third party.

and an annoying trap and waves of skeleton mobs in Kesselack's tomb.

I don't know what's giving you the impression that I liked anything about Kresselack's Tomb. I mentioned that as an example of something that annoyed me.

Meanwhile the much more interesting combat encounters, such as enemies that use various spells and status effects, are glossed over as "filler".

Please list actual examples.

 

[Infinitron]

Roguey Lazarus had lots of writers, chief of whom was Michael Hilborn.

I regularly chat with another of Laz's writers on Facebook. I wonder how many of them went professional after the mod was released.

 

[tuluse]

Excommunicator I reject your ideas of what a review is or should be. What's next after making a reviewer talk about graphics and sound? Do they need to score them in a point system? Do they have to weight each category according to some rubric?

 

[Grunker]

Methinks that Infinitron and Roguey are out to troll the entire Codex.

If this is all it takes to troll them, they deserve it. The reaction to this is blown completely out of proportion, even if the review was bad, which it isn't. May I remind you that you helped father this piece of garbage and later defended it to death?

I like you bro, but you should be above choir of rage on this one.

Excommunicator I reject your ideas of what a review is or should be. What's next after making a reviewer talk about graphics and sound? Do they need to score them in a point system? Do they have to weight each category according to some rubric?

Shut up, tuluse. Excommunicator's criterion for writing reviews are more objective than yours. HE is basing his opinion on business-as-usual in the glorious games journo profession. What are YOU basing your cocky remark on, huh?

 

[Exar Kun]

I think its just that lots of people are jelly that not only Roguey's review got a news article but also is getting RT'ed by devs.

Easier to hate then create.

 

[Excommunicator]

I have nothing against Roguey. Good luck to her getting as much exposure as she can. This is just about my opinions on being clear according to principle.

Excommunicator I reject your ideas of what a review is or should be. What's next after making a reviewer talk about graphics and sound? Do they need to score them in a point system? Do they have to weight each category according to some rubric?

What's next? Well hopefully the rest of the content in the game. You need a broadness of experience to evaluate everything being offered. If a reviewer doesn't complete a "playthrough" in vaguely the way the designer intended a full playthrough to be, I'd also make them put how much of the game they completed right at the beginning. I understand how the more time spent playing the more expensive a review becomes, but people need to know. When there's an assumption the reviewer has completed the game, they need to be explicit.

As for scores, they're usually a distraction. People often look to scores before reading the content which is reason alone why they should be avoided. I like a simple "recommended" or "not recommended" but really the review is the reviewers attempt at giving their opinion.

Although for discussion's sake if a reviewer was going to put a score in, I'd say it should be something based not just on a standard within a given publication but it should be a format that's publicised on the internet where people can look up the scoring methodology and understand how it has been achieved. But again, they often act as nothing but a distraction from the review. I wouldn't recommend the Codex do scores. Well, unless you were really desperate to manipulate the Metacritic scores towards something more reasonable (maybe in an alternate reality).

 

[villain of the story]

I think the only sensible way to settle on something remotely resembling a scoring system is creating player archetypes based on real data. Eg:

Archetype #1 favours genres #1, #2, #4; the following games in those genres; the following elements in those games. Archetype #1 also favours the following games outside his favourite genre for the following reasons.

Archetype #2, Archetype #3 and so on. You look at the archetypes that resembles your preferences the most and then see what they say about The New Game On The Block.

Diversity and choice are key points of importance, not one authoritative elitist attitude monopolised by few. Because obviously, we here are all enough of authoritative elitists compared to the rest of the human scum elsewhere

This should be fairly easy to settle. We already have well known established bases. Maybe I'll get to it with a few polls sometime.

 

[SCO]

GRAREFAGAFASF

You know, this has a interesting 3d effect if i click on it. Probably a graphic card driver bug.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

I don't think so, it's just a blank-background picture being stretched.

 

[Black_Willow]

Didn't read the review but it sux lolz.

 

[Infinitron]

Again, it's a retrospective you morans. Read one of the retrospectives for old games they occasionally post on Eurogamer and tell me if it qualifies as a "proper review". They never do. They're always more of a personal editorial from the writer, telling us of his particular experience of the game.

The purpose of a proper review is to help gamers decide whether a new game is worth purchasing. Old games don't need that.

 

[Black_Willow]

Kosher butthurt detected.

 

[Surf Solar]

Again, it's a retrospective you morans. Read one of the retrospectives for old games they occasionally post on Eurogamer and tell me if it qualifies as a "proper review". They never do. They're always more of a personal editorial from the writer, telling us of his particular experience of the game.

The purpose of a proper review is to help gamers decide whether a new game is worth purchasing. Old games don't need that.

Do these editorials also contain massive amount of stupid "Josh Sawyer!11" dropping or have embarassing titles/tags as well?

 

[Roguey]

Do these editorials also contain massive amount of stupid "Josh Sawyer!11" dropping

Everything I said about his contributions was factual, including my opinions about them (i.e. fact: I think he made the best areas excluding Kresselack's Tomb which only had better writing than the rest of chapter 1).

You're not very likely going to see a Planescape Torment retrospective without the writer gushing over Avellone.

 

[commie]

Shit retrospective is shit.

 

[sea]

Are you referring to the tower in chapter 6? Because I thought it was neat how they were attacking me from a fortified position where I couldn't attack them (until acquiring a key). How often does that happen in any IE game? Plus the battle inside required me to use spells because the room is so small and they like to target squishies (and it requires gathering your party before venturing forth so no leaving them outside).

The idea of "archers that can hit you with impunity until you can reach them directly" is, while fun for that particular scenario, nothing particularly special either. Just run past/avoid them.

Oversimplification. The choice is whether or not to agree with the wishes of a victimized third party.

It was an interesting bright spot in an otherwise kind of bland story. I like Dorn's Deep, the whole thing. Really cool area design and lots of variety. But that moral dilemma really doesn't deserve singling out as anything particularly special either - I found it extremely black and white, myself. I mean, you're seriously expected to spare this asshole who lords over all those people and treats them like the lowest of slaves because his lady friend has Stockholm syndrome? Seriously? And then you can just give her a potion to break the wards on her and she'll leave him on her own anyway, so I guess even she doesn't care that much about him? So why would you ever spare him?

I don't know what's giving you the impression that I liked anything about Kresselack's Tomb. I mentioned that as an example of something that annoyed me.

That was a joke.

Please list actual examples.

Exhibit one: calling the majority of the game filler except for Josh's most divine, magnificent contributions:

Icewind Dale's gameplay largely consists of pressing the equals sign, left clicking on a target, pressing the space bar, waiting for the autopause to kick in after the target dies, and repeating the process until you finally run into an encounter that demands more of you. A bit like Diablo, only with a party and less emphasis on quick thinking (unless you choose to play without pausing for a self-induced challenge). Some of these mindless fights serve a purpose when it comes to introducing you to new creature types before throwing you into the deep end, and a few are made more interesting thanks to Heart of Winter adding call-for-help scripts in a few areas (mostly Josh's); however they're largely there to pad out time that would be spent in dialogues or exploration in other RPGs.

Exhibit two: insisting that Josh is responsible for all good encounter design in the game while also giving no evidence that the fights are poorly designed except for that they include "undead" even though in the previous paragraph, fights featuring undead were praised. Also: completely ignoring the Yuani-ti, cultists, lizardmen and more that make up the area as well as some decent quests.

Sound exhausting? Well don't worry, Josh Sawyer can't design everything, and as a result chapter 3 goes back to the doldrums. It has some beautiful levels, but they're filled with nothing but more standard undead, undead orcs, and undead pointy-eared white supremacists*. Some of them like spawning on top of you for extra annoyance.

Exhibit three: calling the Severed Hand uninteresting save for a single fight, despite it pulling lots of tricks with traps, stealthed enemies and archers. Also contains yet more praise for Sawyer and implying he would have done it better.

There's nothing noteworthy about chapter 4 except a nice battle where you have to deal with two Stoneskinned Drow spellswords, two Mirror Imaged mages, archers protected by a chokepoint, and two phase spiders who pop in from behind. It's a shame you can make the fight easier by exploiting the fog of war since Sawyer was the only developer who had the time and inclination to intelligently place call-for-help scripts in his base campaign areas. Sadly, the rest of the chapter has you facing even more undead and one of the easiest Liches on record (whose weakness is explained by a botched ritual). I'm guessing playtester experiences were involved in its nerfing.

Exhibit four: saying that the Ice Temple and surrounding locations are more boring than the previous ones even though they feature more varied enemies (vipers, frost giants, wyrms, etc.), more quest options, choice between combat and non-combat solutions with some moral choice component, and have much less linear, more open level design and optional areas than previous chapters.

Chapter 5 manages to be less interesting than the previous by offering nothing of value. The ice temple definitely could have benefited from call-for-help scripts, but placing them would be difficult because the mobs are grouped so close together that you could very well end up having to fight the entire floor at once (like certain Storm of Zehir single-digit-room dungeons). A particularly strange thing about this chapter is how most of this boring combat is completely optional: you can avoid everything in the temple's main floor just by not visiting it again after you free the slaves (if you choose to free them at all), and you can coerce the frost giant leader into handing over his badge without a fight. Of course since this is a combat game I had to kill them all for their loot and xp (plus they're evil and deserve killing).

P.S. I agree Josh's areas (namely Dorn's Deep) were the best in the game. But the other areas often had many combat and non-combat design elements that overlapped with his, and similarly Josh's areas weren't free from "filler" combat either (like all the endless mushroom-men and umber hulks in Dorn's Deep). Your showering praise on him and him alone for practically "saving" the game feels like it ignores the better parts of the game's other areas, while in turn ignoring Josh's weaker contributions (save for Kesselack's tomb).

 

[hiver]

Pretty good retrospective review. Precise, clean, informative, to the point.
No overblown drivel, no bullshit or faintly disguised personal subjective crap plastered all over.

Very good job.

You're not very likely going to see a Planescape Torment retrospective without the writer gushing over Avellone.

I dont give two shits about Avellone in that sense. Maybe i should do it.