I don’t understand the people who spend a hundred hours on a game to then give it a bad rating, calling it boring. Why don’t they just quit much earlier and play Chrono Trigger or something?
I have about 30 hours in it now. I wouldn't say it gets any better over that time, if you didn't like it at the beginning you won't like it after 30 hours.
With some games after 20+ hours the honeymoon phase is over. But I want to finish it so that all this time doesn’t feel wasted. And there’s hope that the game will get better. I mean everybody else loves it so it must be a great game right?
However, often it just feels like work and it makes the flaws of the game even more obvious. And I just end up despising it.
This is the best answer, players are invested after a certain point, but the realization that they don’t like the game comes later in the process. The more you play the game you don’t like the more you’re frustrated with it and the more likely you are to give it a poor rating, especially when the things that are your biggest complaints feel like obvious bug fixes that should have already happened, but continue to exist.
That is a great question! I’ve certainly asked myself the same thing and the only answer I can come up with in 2 parts.
1: The game is compulsive. While you are playing you want to keep playing. And while the moment to moment interactions are dull (imo) but not so dull as to drive me away. There may be plenty of Oblivion nostalgia keeping me playing.
2: Many of the games problems appear in retrospect. The dumbing down of the subsystems, for example. Much like Outer Worlds; it feels fine while you’re in there but once you stop and step back you realise how crappy they are.
Yes, this was exactly how I felt when playing Fire Emblem Engage. God. I hated how the hub world basically sucked an equal amount of time for each map I cleared. Sure, the mini-games are optional,But so is brushing your teeth.
I may be getting older but it feels like a lot of games are just padding their runtime with gameplay that doesn’t mesh well at all.
To be fair, the game is so massive, any review (positive or negative) done on less than 60 hours probably won’t do the game justice. It’s entirely possible to hold hope for redeeming qualities only to be a bit disappointed in the end.
Customers aren’t professional reviewers. Paying customers are entitled to have their opinion at any time. Tiny Tina’s Wonderland immediately put me off with that lame overworld. I think I clocked around 3 hours and then uninstalled it. Never ever would I spend dozens of hours in a game where a significant portion massively annoys me.
IDK, I think 10 hours is plenty for any game, and 2 hours is enough for most. By two hours, you’ve likely discovered the core gameplay loop and seen how it handles progression, and by 10 hours you’ve seen whether that core gameplay loop changes throughout the game.
I don’t like negative reviews for games when they’ve spent double the time HLTB gives for a playthrough. I don’t expect to play much more than “main + extras” on any game, so any review that’s expecting content beyond that just isn’t useful for me.
But it doesn’t excel at any of those play styles. It’s the classic case of “Jack of all trades, master of none.”
I guess it’s fine if it’s the only game you play, but if you have choice, I don’t see why you’d pick Starfield over other games you could get. It’s kind of like the cult around Minecraft, you can play pretty much any style you want with mods (e.g. soccer, Pokemon, roller coaster, etc), but every style is done much better in a standalone game.
So I give Starfield an 8/10 or a B, it’s pretty good, but it doesn’t really stand out in any particular way.
Honestly, the games that take the most time I often have more negative opinions about. The Assassin’s Creed games, for example, purposefully waste your time. They shove a bunch of junk in and try to make you interact with it when I could be doing something enjoying with my time. Enjoyment per hour should be the measure of a good game, not hours alone. If the game takes me 300h to complete and I only enjoyed 10h of that, it’s a bad game.
Games are meant to entertain. If they aren’t fun or force you to do unfun things, then why waste your time on them?
I got the same with collectibles in games. Chasing collectibles is boring to me, and you will never see me going for one that isn’t directly on my path. It is meaningless fluff.
Chrono Trigger was the first example of a game that came to my head that’s just great. I replayed it a few weeks ago as well. It’s time better spent than playing a shitty game for 100 hours.
IDK, I bailed around halfway through. I got to the Magus fight, and it felt really RNG dependent. If he attacked in a certain order, I would lose a team member and eventually lose because I couldn’t keep up with healing.
Maybe I was too low level, or maybe I didn’t have the right items equipped, IDK, but I completely lost interest when I failed several times without knowing what to do differently except hope that he attacked in a different order. So I bailed.
Maybe I’ll try it again sometime. I originally played on my phone, but maybe I’ll have more patience on my Steam Deck. I really enjoyed the game up to that point, but I just couldn’t bear the RNG. I have no problem failing over and over (I love the early Ys games and some bosses took a dozen tries), but I need to see some sort of progress.
If a narrative-heavy game takes 60 hours and then fucks it up on the third act, it deserves the hate. Games having a bad payoff 200% warrants bad reviews.
Wait you think danganronpa fucks up it’s third act? I was absolutely hooked from start to finish for danganronpa 1 and 2. Not yet had the time to play 3 properly yet though but I’ve looked what I’ve played so far.
If a narrative-heavy game takes 60 hours and then fucks it up on the third act, it deserves the hate. Games having a bad payoff 200% warrants bad reviews.
2 hours doesn't let you experience even 10% of what a game like this usually offer, less alone giving you time to tinker with the systems and see if they actually work, and furthermore if they are actually fun once you're good at them.
Of course I agree. But it’s still not that great game design, if you are bored for hours. It’s like people telling me about tv show that gets good after first season. What should I do until then… :)
How else do you explain to someone what dwarf fortress is, for example? You need dozens of hours just to get the grasp of mechanics and UI, less alone to figure out whether you even like the game. Same goes for many bigger games, for example mount and blade (bannerlord) starts off strong with a promise of you establishing and leading a kingdom but once you actually reach that part through tedious grind, you realize it was all for nothing and the game's a badly designed, shallow, unfinished sandbox with absolutely no vision or execution in that regard. Good luck getting to that conclusion without already investing at least 50 mediocre hours in it though.
You need dozens of hours just to get the grasp of mechanics and UI, less alone to figure out whether you even like the game
The problem with this thinking is that you split the game in 2 parts: first a tedious learning process of dozens of hours, and then an enjoyable experience once you know how to play, and imply that you need to get over the first part before being able (or allowed) to rate the game. But the learning part is the game, even more so if you need to invest dozens of hours.
Many players will simply enjoy the grind of Mount and Blade, because they don’t care about the endgame. Many players (maybe the same) will uninstall Dwarf Fortress after half an hour, because they will estimate that the learning curve isn’t worth their time, even if it was the greatest game ever.
I understand your point. But, if I take your example of mount and blade. If it’s starts off strong with 50 hours of fun, that’s a win in my book. But yes, in this regard steam ratings fail, because of binary recommend or not recommend voting. On the other hand, you can see how many hours did the user that posted a review played, so you can kinda make your own decision.
Also, I would like to add that games like dwarf fortress, rimworld, factorio and similar, all start of fun, if you’re into this genre….at least for me, they did. Thinking back, I think I never experienced playing a game for X hours having a horrible time, and somewhere in the middle changing my mind. At least from the gameplay standpoint. Maybe sometimes story had some unexpected bump in quality (thank god), but not really core gameplay.
Overall, I agree with you, 2 hours is too little for a complete review of a video game. But these are user reviews that can be helpful as well. For an example, for someone who hasn’t that much time to invest in a game to get to the good part. Professional reviewers (or people who have themselves as professional) should play the game for a suitable amount of time, before making an informed review.
If I game can't keep you engaged while doing that for the first 2 hours it's not a good game, at least for that person. You don't need to know everything the game has to offer if it's bored you for 2 hours.
I think there are too many exceptions to this that the best way to truly know is to play it for yourself. I hated Death Stranding, Control, Days Gone, Final Fantasy 7 Remake, Fallout 3 and many other games in their initial few hours, but as they opened up they quickly became my one of my favourites. I’ve started my first playthrough of Witcher 3 and in the first 3 hours I’m not yet impressed, but I’ll give it a good chance before dropping it. Not sure if Starfield is any good but given its systems, it’ll probably need some buildup time I guess.
It’s such a bizarre, but real issue. I’ve always been boggled by the idea that you can’t offer your opinion on some games without first giving them a full work week. “I know you just sat there for the length of 5 movies and didn’t like it, but it doesn’t really get good until you sit through another 10.”
If you give it 2 hours, a game should have made it worth your time.
I robbed my self of that ability accidentally, because I preferred cs 1.3/4/5 and it was won only, so I actively avoided 1.6 like the plague and with it steam. Then halflife 2 came out and I bit the bullet.
If you ever used the server browser in Steam itself and not from the game, that’s basically what they were. An external app that you could get a list of servers for pretty much anything you added to it.
"I'm old, stubborn, don't know how to manage remote teams, and have no interesting in learning." - Todd Howard
Every time this guy opens his mouth, it sheds so much light on Bethesda's decades-old problems.
Edit: I'm looking forward to seeing what Ted Peterson, Vijay Lakshman, and Julian Lefay do with The Wayward Realms. These three are the actual fathers of The Elder Scrolls. Todd has been shitting on their legacy since Redguard.
AAA studios were used to having local build farms, in-person build-review sessions, and testers being in the same physical space so engineers could see what’s going on. They have collections of unreleased hardware that need to be distributed and secured.
It’s not simple to completely overhaul a setup like that and go full remote. You’re moving 100s of GB a day to each dev and trying to change every one of your processes.
Every AAA engineer I know complained about how how slow everything was remote. Studios are figuring that shit out now, but I don’t think “hurr durr Todd Howard old” is really accurate or adding anything to the conversation here
My current management has no idea as well and it has made it impossible to get anything done. We have 3 status meetings per day, with 3 different audiences, led my 3 different people, for 1 project. And we have multiple projects going on being managed like that. We have more managers and PMs than developers working on stuff. They have left 0 time to do any real deep work. If they’d leave everyone alone for even a couple days per week productivity would soar.
I have slowly faded away from those daily meetings and my rate to address issues increased. Working and supporting 2 different projects while doing extra research topics to future proof our tech or migration path. I do still have those weekly meeting though but my work pace have been better without the daily ones.
Even my manager ask me today if I want to do the biweekly checkup or skip, “well, we did the weekly this morning so I see no point of doing the biweekly.” “Sure, let’s skip.”
Now if I can have my own status board and progress bar on a internal page and tag it with my slack profile, maybe I can skip all the meeting?
There is some truth to remote being worse for engineers especially less experienced programmers that can’t talk to more senior programmers face to face.
This is where tools like Slack Huddles or Zoom come in handy. Need some face time? You are a click away. Need to collaborate on one screen? That’s one more click. Need to pair program? That’s a click.
There is nothing that is done face to face that can’t be done faster, better, and more efficiently using readily available digital collaboration tools.
Sure, the technology is available and it works well (mostly). But people are not machines, and in my experience quite a lot of them are not as comfortable communicating through chat and webcams as they are in person. Older people in particular don’t really get that they can be used for quick, informal conversations, and only use them for preplanned meetings.
So am I :) The “older people” in my comment refer to my former boss and colleagues, and their reluctance to adapt to a remote working environment was a major reason for my departure towards more remote-friendly pastures.
For sure, there were other issues, which were amplified by the distance and the lack of communication. Point is you can come up with the best technical solution to a problem, but at the end of the day if the people aren’t able or willing to adapt, there’s not much you can do except fire them (which I couldn’t) or move on (which I did).
I strongly disagree, I am a software engineer, have worked on the field for over a decade, while I understand that’s not enough to be one of the extremely senior developers but nevertheless I’m a senior software engineer that can answer any and all questions posed from a beginner or even a mid leven engineer. The company I work for pairs developers when they first join so you have someone who’s expected to be there to answer anything, this creates a positive climate and makes new joiners feel safe to come and ask questions, which in the long run makes them feel comfortable with doing the same.
When you send a message to someone on slack he can finish what he’s doing then respond, on an office setting the question will cut your thought line and cause you to lose track of what you were doing. Back when I worked at the office there were days I couldn’t get any work done because after 30min of investigation someone asked me something, then I had to redo the full backtrack of what I was doing only to be interrupted again for something stupid like shown a meme or be asked if I wanted to go out for lunch. The company I worked before my current one got so efficient during COVID that there wasn’t any work left to do, the managers had planned a year worth of projects and we finished them in a few months and they had to rush to try to find things for us to do. However working from home makes micromanaging harder, so managers who want to micromanage make everyone’s life harder (including their own), and then complain that the engineers are producing less.
100% is way too subjective to claim, if I ask someone something and I can review the semantics of how they worded it as many times as I need, I’ll definitely understand it better than if told me it in person and my ADHD brain just missed it
My ideal Star Trek game would be a first-person immersive sim where I can just be a random citizen in the galaxy and just… Live there. Maybe I join Star Fleet. Maybe I join the Marquis. Or I could be a Klingon or a Borg, or one of the Dominion’s warrior slave dudes addicted to drugs.
Having no idea what the ventilation is in other areas, I don’t know how it compares.
Also all those markets probably overlap a fair bit.
I used to think that the share was roughly ½ console and ½ PC, but not only does it probably vary wildly from place to place, I have nothing to base that feeling on anyway. It’s just that I never played on a console (until the deck, which only semi-counts) and never met anybody who did until quite late (which admittedly doesn’t really mean anything). Also I never really thought of phones as a gaming medium even though they clearly are.
And finally, now that a lot of titles are released on multiple platforms, does it matter all that much?
In America, probably not. It’s 21 for all states due to a federal law. If a state has it lower than 21, they get way less funding for Federal high ways, as the bill was aimed to lower drunk driving.
Hmm I’ve definitely changed the email that was associated with the account name, but the account name I think originally required an email domain in the field? That is something that you cannot change. It’s fine though, because the user name can be changed.
Yeah I dunno, maybe I was dumb back then but I’ve seen others posting similar questions/observations on Reddit and elsewhere before. Thankfully Steam lets you change the display profile name.
Ubisoft is a big company. I can see it as the devs saying “it’s not ready” and some exec, high on his if you believe hard enough it’s true bullshit and said either submit it or find another job.
Maybe they thought their checks cleared?
Or, it’s a security violation. Maybe the game accidentally opens a door to allow unsigned software to run.
Best comment here. Either exec (with overconfidence or deadlines), or security violation seem most likely. Surprising that it’s for both platforms though…
I've never played Cyberpunk, but watched my husband play for a lot of hours. I played Xdefiant's beta for a day in June. I'm puzzled by why it didn't pass. Beta was not buggy, had maybe one minor issue with it. My guess is security violation.
Or neither. Platform cert doesn’t directly correlate to how many bugs a game has, it’s a set of very specific test cases that software has to pass to be approved for release: show the correct button prompts for the platform, have correctly-implemented achievements/trophies, show correct error messages, etc.
Some of the tests do include things like ‘don’t crash during normal operation’, but the failures could be almost anything. (Source: am a developer)
I mean if you don’t understand that they’ve ported or remade their PS exclusives to PC because they also wanted a new untapped player base that didn’t own playstations, I don’t know what to tell you, brah.
Honestly, I'd completely forgotten that Embracer had bought out Gearbox. Curious to see who ends up acquiring them, if anyone actually does. Also have to wonder just how many studios Embracer is going to end up selling off or shutting down by the end of this.
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