The Press and Fallout 3

[Morbus]

The Alley of Infinite Angles has a third editorial on Fallout 3. Since the first two were well received, we're posting this one too. It's a bit out there, but makes a few good points:<blockquote>So, what about the press? This one's a pretty well-beaten track, too, in a way. Many gamers say that game journalism isn't 'real journalism', in that it's not as professional, as objective or as useful. Heck, you even get people in suits (ooh) saying that "game reviewers are lazy". And of course, there's that series of ex-journo Dan "Shoe" Hsu's insights into journos and developers sitting in a tree, popping out one mutated baby after another. (...) All good stuff. Basically, accusations include:

* Simple incompetence; no idea how to write or do journalism.
* Unprofessional: from personal bias/spite to downright corruption.
* Doomed from the start: reviews are just opinion anyway. If I disagree with you, your review's just worthless.

But for all that, we've got massive amounts of traffic on top of which game sites like IGN, 1up, Eurogamer, etc., thrive. (I swear, back in 1998 it used to be just Gamespy and Gamespot.) You've even got anecdotal evidence all over the place, with long-timer gamers saying they enjoy reading reviews or hands-ons, or find them useful (to varying degrees). So they're certainly doing enough to stick around (and a bit more), and there is at least a perceived usefulness. So what function does the press serve when it comes to what we think, know and talk about in terms of, say, Fallout 3? That's the topic of the day/week/however long I stick to this. </blockquote>Link: Fallout 3: The Press @ Alley of Infinite Angles

 

[Morbus]

An excellent bit of reading. The Alley is a very nice place, but places like that require lots of effort and time to keep running. I know that from experience. Without a team, making editorial content like that is crazy hard to endure.

 

[Brother None]

I think GameSpot is still one of the biggest, actually. GameSpy isn't, AFAIK.

If you read the forum comments, in fact, you'd think 90% of the article was about these two facts. It struck me how, when I read the full preview, there were other things people could have seized on that might have been controversial or newsworthy. The fact that Rivet City is buildt in/around a crashed aircraft carrier: the fact that a character less than six hours old was able to march into the "extremely difficult" heart of Washington D.C. and kill super mutants.

I think most people are tired of reading all these previews in entirety by this point. Even I skim them sometimes and I'm paid to read 'em.

That said, Rivet City was one of the earliest-known locations, and widely praised for its solid concept (though I'm not sure Hong here got the concept, referring to a ship as "crashed" is not really the traditional way to do things).

Why the once again proven broken nature of level scaling wasn't discussed I dunno. Kind of what we expect, I guess, and we've talked about some previewers being able to gun down supermutants with a 10mm pistol before. Most of the time we all assumed it was due to hacked preview builds, but it's starting to look like level scaling is broken. Again.

 

[DexterMorgan]

but it's starting to look like level scaling is broken. Again.

Surprise surprise.

 

[Bernard Bumner]

If you read the forum comments, in fact, you'd think 90% of the article was about these two facts.

Fine, but that does miss the point that many of the other issues have already been discussed in minutiae elsewhere on these forums.

It also fails somewhat to recognize the organic nature of forum discussions, insofar as they tend to drift away from discussion of the original sources and become focussed on a single issue raised in an early - controversial - contribution to the thread.

 

[EnglishMuffin]

The main problem with game journalism is that it isn't objective. It should just be a series of facts on the good and bad. All I ever see are lists and lists of how much the game reviewers enjoyed playing it and failed to see anything wrong even when media is released by the company of that project which show blatantly simple glaring issues.

Journalism is not supposed to be about personal feelings, it is supposed to be about straight facts, good and bad.

When I read something that says, "Buy fallout 3, this game is super special awesome. If there is something wrong you can count on us to tell you about it after you purchase it! LOL," there is something wrong.

 

[Texas Renegade]

ok now that I actually went and read the article rather then just replying to things on this thread...


I think that he himself is falling victim to the same thing he is discussing about message boards.

He talks about us seizing on the fat man and the invisible walls, yet he misinterpreted the preview. The IGN guy didn't kill mutants in downtown, I pretty much got the impression he ran from and avoided them all.

 

[Morbus]

You had...

 

[whirlingdervish]

edit: this was referring to a post above that was editted before I hit submit, which stated that perhaps the previewer who "killed a super mutant with a 10mm pistol" was using some sort of strategy of disarming and hiding to take it out as opposed to lucking out because level scaling is broken.
--


there was an option to hide behind things in both Fallout and Fallout 2. It required you to use some of the AP that could have been used for shooting/attacking, but it was there.

That's actually how I destroy the raiders in Fallout at a very low level (with only leather armor and a submachinegun) and how I wiped out the slavers in the Den in FO2 in almost every playthrough.

Just shoot one of them, and go running off to use a nearby tent/building as cover from the rest of the group. then you bottleneck them one or two at a time in the doorway and lay waste to whoever steps through..

If you grab up a shotgun and a few shells in either encounter it makes the process even more efficient.

at this point, it's hard to tell if these previewers are actually using a strategy like that to defeat the AI or if they just have buffed up stats for the preview and are more capable than they should be at that point in the game.

killing the SM with a 10mm pistol seems like it could be caused by a (hacked) high guns skill "adding damage" to the weakest of pistols in the game to make it deadly enough to do the deed.

even the weakest of super mutants in FO could be killed with the 10mm pistol, but he'd better be the unarmed kind, and you'd still have to shoot them about 8-10 times and hope for a critical hit.

 

[Autoduel76]

The main problem with game journalism is that it isn't objective. It should just be a series of facts on the good and bad.

Well there's the trap that even you are guilty of falling into right there though, isn't it?

How can it be objective and talk about "good" and "bad" which are subjective things?

Game reviews are, and should be, subjective. They shouldn't be a lot different than movie reviews, or any other form of entertainment review.

A list of "objective facts" about a game wouldn't tell you anything about its quality.

 

[EnglishMuffin]

Well there's the trap that even you are guilty of falling into right there though, isn't it?

How can it be objective and talk about "good" and "bad" which are subjective things?

Game reviews are, and should be, subjective. They shouldn't be a lot different than movie reviews, or any other form of entertainment review.

A list of "objective facts" about a game wouldn't tell you anything about its quality.

No, telling us if they like the things in the game or not is subjective, telling us what is broken and what works would be objective facts. The reviewer could always point out that they personally like it but others might not. I don't have a problem with a combination of both objective and subjective point of views in reviews, I think it should be a nice flowing transition between both, but currently it seems that they are mostly subjectively positive and fail to criticize anything based on facts. This is the same thing with calling turn based gameplay 'old and outdated' when it is equally old as first person.

 

[pkt-zer0]

How can it be objective and talk about "good" and "bad" which are subjective things?

"[An aspect of the game] is awesome, because it's awesome"

versus

"[An aspect of the game] is awesome, because [stuff that's in the game]"

That's how. I've seen a fair amount of reviews where I haven't managed to find out anything new about the game, other than "it's awesome". That's not very helpful, now is it?

 

[UncannyGarlic]

Maybe it's just me but I didn't think that this article was as well written as the past two and I don't really get why he went off on a tangent about the forums partway through either. I guess it just seemed to lack focus.

 

[fedaykin]

How can it be objective and talk about "good" and "bad" which are subjective things?

Now you're going ahead and reducing everything to relativism, which also isn't very constructive.

 

[Autoduel76]

No, telling us if they like the things in the game or not is subjective, telling us what is broken and what works would be objective facts. The reviewer could always point out that they personally like it but others might not. I don't have a problem with a combination of both objective and subjective point of views in reviews, I think it should be a nice flowing transition between both, but currently it seems that they are mostly subjectively positive and fail to criticize anything based on facts. This is the same thing with calling turn based gameplay 'old and outdated' when it is equally old as first person.

Without them having a complete design document of the game, they can not say what is broken and what is not, other than to just point out "bugs". Again, this doesn't tell you anything about the quality of the game, other than its relative level of bugginess.

If you are saying that the design decisions are inherrently good or bad, well that's just not true. Its always going to be subjective. Its an entertainment review and, as such, should be a subjective piece.

If you want a factual list of design decisions & features, along with a list of bugs, well really those aren't all that hard to come by shortly after a game is released. You can glean all of the factual information off of them, but they are not reviews.

Now, its often the case that with those bits of information, I can tell you if I'm going to like a game or not. In fact, that is basically how I personally decide on most games myself. I don't know of any reviewer out there, with tastes similar enough to mine that I trust to listen to. I've never needed a review to decide if I'm going to like a game or not, nor have I ever with movies or books for that matter. I know my own tastes pretty well.

In fact, as somebody with a major aversion to spoilers, I avoid reviews, and previews, of games I know I want to play like the plague. I haven't read any of the Fallout 3 previews since before E3, when they started to get detailed. I read reviews after I've played games, not before, out of curiosity about others' opinions.

 

[EnglishMuffin]

Without them having a complete design document of the game, they can not say what is broken and what is not, other than to just point out "bugs". Again, this doesn't tell you anything about the quality of the game, other than its relative level of bugginess.

If you are saying that the design decisions are inherrently good or bad, well that's just not true. Its always going to be subjective. Its an entertainment review and, as such, should be a subjective piece.

If you want a factual list of design decisions & features, along with a list of bugs, well really those aren't all that hard to come by shortly after a game is released. You can glean all of the factual information off of them, but they are not reviews.

Now, its often the case that with those bits of information, I can tell you if I'm going to like a game or not. In fact, that is basically how I personally decide on most games myself. I don't know of any reviewer out there, with tastes similar enough to mine that I trust to listen to. I've never needed a review to decide if I'm going to like a game or not, nor have I ever with movies or books for that matter. I know my own tastes pretty well.

Well since you don't read these preview you don't really know what we are talking about but there should be some clarity on why and aspect can be both good and bad instead of just what the writer thinks is good. Most of these game writers just seem to make up their own subjective realities on the spot and then pass them off as facts.

When a writer talks about running into an invisible wall that is the end of the map they should write why this could be thought of as a good thing and a bad thing. What we get, generally, are reviews that simply gloss over everything that could be interpreted as bad.

A review needs to have both subjective and objective qualities to be good and is quite easy to do. Right now I could make up a game called ..."Let's have a silly day 4" and I can tell you that I think the AI is terrible(subjective) because whenever I land my helicopter on the roof of a building, my teammates simply walk off the edge and plummet to their death(objective).

It is quite simple to do really. Now a good review could go into detail about why it is a bad concept to have your teammates fall to their death and why it is a good thing to have your teammates fall to their grisly demise. This is the subjective part of the review. This tell us what the reviewer thinks about the game mechanics.

Telling us that our teammates simply walk off the edge of the building as if they can't determine that there is a ledge is objective.

 

[Per]

Fine, but that does miss the point that many of the other issues have already been discussed in minutiae elsewhere on these forums.

It also fails somewhat to recognize the organic nature of forum discussions, insofar as they tend to drift away from discussion of the original sources and become focussed on a single issue raised in an early - controversial - contribution to the thread.

I'm also wondering why he/she would have missed those things, especially the first, and also especially the second.

Plus, as all here are aware, it was originally "Morrowind with guns and a nuclear feel" and was intended by the poster to have positive connotations. There were other descriptions like "Morrowind with post-apoc skins". Gavin Carter picked it up and responded that "We're not making Morrowind with guns", which is why it stuck. He also said "People who think we will never progress beyond Morrowind are going to be in for one hell of a wake-up call", then went on to publish Oblivion.

It's funny to go back and read what was said just after Bethesda purchased the rights:

Your an idiot if you think they will use tb, special, or isometric.

Well, they're using a heavily modified SPECIAL, so WHO'S THE IDIOT NOW?

Too soon to tell.

YOU SLAVERING NMA FREAK

 

[POOPERSCOOPER]

Your an idiot if you think they will use tb, special, or isometric.

Well, they're using a heavily modified SPECIAL, so WHO'S THE IDIOT NOW?

2/3 is pretty good okay. Also, I don't know why I said they wouldn't use special maybe I meant something else or you misquoted me because I have no weakness.

 

[Tigranes]

Thanks for the newslink guys, you've been a great PR department for the Alley

Morbus

An excellent bit of reading. The Alley is a very nice place, but places like that require lots of effort and time to keep running. I know that from experience. Without a team, making editorial content like that is crazy hard to endure.

It takes a long time to write each post, yes, and if I write too much I'll bleed dry and boring. I'm starting to entertain branching out slightly in terms of content. Perhaps something like Codexian-LPs (but not so Codexian that I'd be arrested), and so forth. Hrm.

BN

That said, Rivet City was one of the earliest-known locations, and widely praised for its solid concept (though I'm not sure Hong here got the concept, referring to a ship as "crashed" is not really the traditional way to do things).

I knew I'd get something wrong one of these days - I must have forgotten about it. I'll fix it up.

Why the once again proven broken nature of level scaling wasn't discussed I dunno. Kind of what we expect, I guess, and we've talked about some previewers being able to gun down supermutants with a 10mm pistol before. Most of the time we all assumed it was due to hacked preview builds, but it's starting to look like level scaling is broken. Again.

Yep. In fact, I was quite surprised, because NMA and others are often happy to talk about level scaling being broken again, and again. (Personally, I think it's important to keep talking if an issue is as catastrophically broken as this one is, of course.) But perhaps this one time, people generally felt there were better things to focus on? It's interesting.

Bernard:

Fine, but that does miss the point that many of the other issues have already been discussed in minutiae elsewhere on these forums.

Yep, you're right. If I was focusing on the issues that have to do with Fallout 3, I would have mentioned this (i.e. the thousand yard tall backlog of BOS/level scaling/etc discussions). The point here, tho, is not that nobody talks about those things anymore, but that the press coverage makes us and our thoughts gravitate towards several points.

Texas:

He talks about us seizing on the fat man and the invisible walls, yet he misinterpreted the preview. The IGN guy didn't kill mutants in downtown, I pretty much got the impression he ran from and avoided them all.

Not at all. I should have clarified that point. The IGN guy says that he had to eventually run away, but careful use of VATS/etc allowed him to kill a few mutants, if at the cost of large chunks of health. Now, I'm playing Fallout 1 at the moment. About three or four hours in, I was level 5/6 with Ian, Dogmeat and pretty good gear. Yet if I tried to take on a group of deathclaws or, say, the military base mutants, it would take a lot of reloads to just kill one while avoiding death. And I've played the game a few times and know what's up. The IGN guy, it's his first/second/blah time. Furthermore, I was already 'mid-game' in Fallout; FO3, probably being bigger in scale, means there is even more of a jump.

Garlic:

Maybe it's just me but I didn't think that this article was as well written as the past two and I don't really get why he went off on a tangent about the forums partway through either. I guess it just seemed to lack focus.

I agree that it was a bit more forced. (And as always, comments are welcome.) The intent of the post was not just look at what the preview was doing, but what impact the preview had on the readers. I originally wanted to talk about the common accusations made on journalism (which I bullet-pointed), but I'm writing a sort of response post to the Sore Thumbs series unveiling industry corruption, and felt it would overlap.

Per:

Plus, as all here are aware, it was originally "Morrowind with guns and a nuclear feel" and was intended by the poster to have positive connotations. There were other descriptions like "Morrowind with post-apoc skins". Gavin Carter picked it up and responded that "We're not making Morrowind with guns", which is why it stuck. He also said "People who think we will never progress beyond Morrowind are going to be in for one hell of a wake-up call", then went on to publish Oblivion.

Ah, that's interesting. Was that around '05-06? I was hardly here during those years. I think I came back, saw it get 'updated' as Oblivion with Guns, and thought it started there. My bad.

Anyway, it's always good to see intelligent feedback on what you write, and to be able to talk about it (oh i so lonely, etc). Now, back to Fallout.

 

[UncannyGarlic]

Garlic:

Maybe it's just me but I didn't think that this article was as well written as the past two and I don't really get why he went off on a tangent about the forums partway through either. I guess it just seemed to lack focus.

I agree that it was a bit more forced. (And as always, comments are welcome.) The intent of the post was not just look at what the preview was doing, but what impact the preview had on the readers. I originally wanted to talk about the common accusations made on journalism (which I bullet-pointed), but I'm writing a sort of response post to the Sore Thumbs series unveiling industry corruption, and felt it would overlap.

I'm rereading it and I think the problem is that the following quote makes the focus of the article sound like something that I don't think it turned out to be (there's a name for it but it's been too long since I took a writing class so I've forgotten what it's called).

Today I wanted to look at the actual press treatment of the games. Or probably, start looking, then finish later, because I'm a long-winded nut.

You then list the bullet points and the articles but abandon that so I guess it misled me. You then switch the focus to reader reaction with the following (a second (purpose?) statement).

So what function does the press serve when it comes to what we think, know and talk about in terms of, say, Fallout 3? That's the topic of the day/week/however long I stick to this

This is where the article really takes off and I think that you may have been better omitting the stuff above that paragraph.

I also think that your use of a casual/nonprofessional language ('tho, journo's, heh, ect.) also struck a sour note with me. I guess it just seemed too much like a blog/forum post and not enough like an article so it just might be personal preference but I think having a more professional tone throughout would improve it as a piece of writing and add more... authority/legitimacy/seriousness/???? (searching for a word here but I'm not hitting it).