I find them really valuable. Before buying a game, I’ll skim 10 or so reviews, both positive and negative, to find what it’s good and bad at. If the negative reviews are all stuff I don’t care about and the positive reviews excite me, I’ll probably get it. But if the negative reviews consistently mention something that’ll bother me, I’ll pass.
What? Just sort reviews by most helpful and set it to a timeframe that is relevant for you.
I make sure to rate helpful reviews or leave them myself, so there are definitely people out there trying to help make the actually relevant, non-loweffort-meme reviews that contain illuminating information rise to the top.
After this one we got the prison unlocked, but decided to save that for next time we play.
Some advice for when you do: If you get stuck in a cell block during a hunt, the ghost can’t see through cells for some reason so locking yourself in one isn’t a terrible idea. Good luck. Medium maps are a big step up in difficulty, and a lot of people hate prison, though I myself enjoy it a lot.
We played a match today a little bit and that was what I ended up doing (after I triggered a hunt with the Monkey’s Paw). I locked myself in and held the door.
Influencers (mostly vod and twitch based) have increasingly realized the way to move up to the next “tier” (or to maintain it) is to lead a “movement”. It is the logical extension of every new generation’s “All those people on X were corrupt and unethical and lying to you. Us here on Y are here to speak truth to you and will never let our opinions be bought. So make sure you like, comment, and subscribe and make sure to use my affiliate code in World of Tanks”
In a lot of ways? Concorde broke the gaming world. It was a game that drew a LOT of hate for having “non-sexy” female models and also suffered from being incredibly “meh” so nobody felt a real need to defend it. But it let the chuds actually “cancel” a game. Which aligned well with all of the various reasons Black Myth Wukong became The Most Important Video Game To Ever Exist.
So now all the influencers who want their own armies to harass and torment anyone they consider competition are trying to get in on that. Lots of verbiage shifts from “Wow, this game is horrible because those devs hate you. Unlike me who loves you” and more “Wow, this game is horrible and those devs don’t deserve to exist and people need to know not to waste their money on this” that translate to Call To Action style movements.
V Rising was fun, I played through on a public PvE server mostly solo. The progression felt really good and dialed in, strong loop. Would have loved to have a solid group for boss progression, but didn’t have friends interested.
Haven’t played or know much/anything about the others.
Haven’t really noticed any change personally. What game was it btw? Having a positive experience with a game that is being negatively reviewed doesn’t necessarily mean it was review bombed. Especially when it comes to bugs and technical issues, which often won’t affect every single player.
Oh ok 🙂 It was Seafarer: The Ship Sim. A day after they launched they got a load of negative reviews that took them down to a "Mostly Negative" rating. That's improved since then, presumably once more genuine reviews came in.
I haven’t noticed it getting worse, and I think Valve is doing the best thing they can to mitigate it by way of recent reviews and the review graph. When you can see when a review bomb started, you can cross reference that date against news for that game in your favorite search engine. If the review bomb is truly frivolous, it will pass in no time at all.
The graph will also give you a note that the review behavior is unusual and that there may be review bombing going on.
I think the biggest problem is that when people are just browsing games, all that’s shown is overall and mixed reviews. They should add a similar indicator to that view of the game.
They’ve also segregated reviews by language. So now when a single group starts review bombing (usually China, from the reports I’ve heard) the rest of us are unaffected.
But since the total sample size is much smaller due to language categorization, review bombing is much, much easier and impactful when it does hapoen for the speakers of the language the bombing is targeted at.
That clip of Jim Cummings talking to a fan and telling them “please remind Larian that I exist” still breaks my heart. I guess Matt Mercer is a cheap PR move or something to boost sales but I wish Jim got to come back to do Minsc.
EDIT: Also, I know they motion captured everyone for BG3, and when some of these guys are getting older, maybe it was less about PR and more about who they believed they could get into mocap gear.
Also who replaces ::: spoiler spoiler Viconia. Though the whole character assassination of Sarevok and Viconia in itself is a travesty. :::
Studios like Remedy and Sandfall have shown you can have mocap done by an actor other than the voice actor and still end up with a great product. Stuff like this is just one of the many little things that make me feel like Larian had very little regard for the original games, and only used the IP for brand recognition and marketing. Which makes me sad.
I never encountered her in my playthroughs of 1 and 2, so I couldn’t say. The guy I spoilered was fine, and I’d say Larian showed a ton of reverence for those original games throughout. The entire format of the game is one BioWare made famous via Baldur’s Gate II, after all.
I never really got the feeling of reverence for the originals personally, down to the references made feeling like lip service created by someone browsing a wiki who has never played them in the first place.
Choosing to set the game a 100 years later (so that they wouldn’t have to incorporate much of the original cast or story) but still shoehorning in two fan favourite characters never sat right with me either.
The other point to setting the game 100 years later is that they’re not beholden to the same exact geography, architecture, or, most importantly, the choices the player made in the previous game. And it allows people to step into this one without feeling like the previous two were mandatory. They did still choose a canon, and they can handwave others away as hearsay told in legends where multiple conflicting things are true, but the game was unmistakably made by enormous fans of Baldur’s Gate and Dungeons & Dragons. It is still a story that revolves around the city of Baldur’s Gate and Bhaal. It is the most authentic D&D game made since those old infinity engine games and arguably more so, given the ways their games are made to allow you to get more creative with systems, like the tabletop experience.
It’s set in the 1490s because that’s the current era in Forgotten Realms, just like the first games were set in the 1360s because that was the era that was current at the time. It’s not like they actively chose that specific time period for any of the three games.
V Rising is a very good game from the little time i played it. Caravan Sandwitch is really cool too, according to a friend of mine. The others i know nothing about, except that Atomic Hearts was really dividing about its quality and playability.
I would say interesting is the best way to describe it. Atomic Heart is charming for its ambition but not the best game IMO, although I never got all that far in it. Sandwitch is also a novel concept. V Rising was very very popular, and I can only assume that’s for a good reason.
Jeffrey Combs was also in DOTA: Dragon’s Blood, and that series’s cast was a fun synthesis of video game voice actor luminaries plus Star Trek alumni (Michael Dorn, John de Lancie, Anson Mount, Andrew Robinson and more).
But yeah, really that whole late 90’s/early 2000’s gaming era had some genuinely great performances from actors of different media. I still think about David Warner in Baldur’s Gate 2 from time to time.
There was some military strategy game which was voiced by Will Wheaton. I remember you had to control the characters with voice command, and that was a very new and novel idea and so when playing online people forgot that that meant that you could hear what orders they were giving their units.
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