It is definitely a societal problem, but that doesn't change the fact that it should be spoken about. Bringing awareness to an issue is what will most likely lead to a change. Calling out certain individuals and making them know how terrible they will hurt their reputation if anyone finds out about what they do, will also help with change.
You're not wrong, but putting a societal issue into a context of a subset of that society does have some value.
While what you say is certainly true, there does seem to be something going on that is a little more involved than what you are getting at. While we will probably never know the truth, and really don't need to, the fact remains that there is a problem in the industry. Just because this is not exclusive to gaming, which it most certainly isn't, doesn't mean it shouldn't be discussed and pointed out.
Particularly all of the peculiar censoring that was going on a...
While there have been quite a few remasters and remakes lately, I think that this year is at most only marginally more than the past few years. Even if there were a lot, there are still a lot of new games coming out soon, as listed in the article. Those were only touching on big name games too, not even indie games like Hyper Light Drifter (probably next year though). Plenty of stuff to go around this year.
It definitely would have been a very bad idea to launch another game in a similar fashion as Battlefield 4. Even worse considering it was another Battlefield...
I completely agree. I wrote the article and after rereading it a few times I felt like there was another point I was missing, but I couldn't remember it or find it in any of my notes I keep around. I also think that one of Metacritic's biggest issues is the way that it "modifies" other sites scores to conform with theirs to then give a average. Like you said, that manipulates results to a huge degree.
For some reason I can't reply to your comment below, but I think that you are welcome to that opinion about allowing people to make poor decisions.
While I recognize that companies like Valve and others that sell games on Steam are a business that make profit, why does it have to be through morally gray at best practices?
As you said before, those games won't ever reach high on the sell list for Steam, so its not as if Valve has a significant stake ...
I think that it can be really easy to blame the consumer in this. That is especially the case when you take a look at yourself and the group that you converse with. Most of us that use sites like this/read gaming news and opinions don't have an issue of doing personal research - at least I would think that is generally the case. Take Ride to Hell: Retribution for example. If you just look at the way it is represented as a product, it honestly doesn't look terrible. But if you look int...
I completely agree, but I still think that while it is much better than many other platforms out there, some higher standard than what is currently used on Steam should be put in place.
I never claimed the game was "unfairly hard." I said that the artificial difficulty it creates in scenarios similar to jump scares is not really difficulty. The game would have been much better served if I could approach enemies and learn their AI, then utilize the excellent combat system they have in place to defeat them. Not to have something jump out of nowhere to kill me, just because they can.
I agree with a lot of what you say and I know a lot of people really do love the game. But I think that it became needlessly frustrating for me, if that makes sense. I really did want to enjoy it.
Those two points you brought up, the lack of checkpoints and how you can lose a lot of progress, are probably the two least important things in the article. At most those are just very annoying.
If you read later in the article, about the underutilized combat and unintuitiveness of the game,that is where I have the most criticism.
It was more of a look at what I saw the flaws of the game were an a hope that those flaws would be improved or changed in the sequel.
I think at its core Dark Souls could be a wonderful game, but this mentality of making everything "difficult" doesn't help it.
Hey, I'm the author of the article and I just wanted to say that I completely agree with you. It is a very difficult thing to do and would require a reasonable amount of money to pull off correctly, especially if it is a AAA title. Publishers don't want to here about cases where content may be restricted to consumers, which I completely understand.
I just think, and I may not have expressed that all the way in the article, that we shouldn't be applauding games wit...
I actually allude to that in the article, saying that the issue here is no different from something like that. I didn't say it expressly, but it is definitely there.
And that is definitely something that needs to change.