For me, the largest appeal of roleplaying games has always been the feeling of assuming another identity. I enjoyed theatre for the same reason. I was never serious about the craft, I just liked pretending to be another person. So when I approach these games, it's not from a perspective of trying to see myself in a fantasy setting, it's more about creating a cool character concept and putting it into the game world. Sometimes the characters are male, sometimes they're female.
But they're never me. Only I am me.
I'm probably in the minority on this, but it's really the biggest reason I enjoy RPGs of any variety.
Gat is pretty fly and all, but a large part of the fun of Saints Row was creating your own player character. I'll still pick it up, because it's still Saints Row.
@joejoe1639 After looking at it again, I agree I may have mis-characterized your response by saying you were claiming to know the entirety of Kevin's experience. The only thing I would maintain is that reviews should never really be considered objective. There's a difference between criticism and journalism. There are objective reviewers out there, but I find far more interest and value in a critic who is not necessarily objective but still brings a great deal of experience and expertise to his or her criticism. Whether or not I agree with the critic's assessment based on my own experience and expertise is irrelevant, because at the very least it provides a basis for some high level discourse on the subject.
On that note, thank you for your responses. Even though we apparently don't agree, I respect the way you've presented your case without resorting to personal attacks. It's boosted my faith in the possibility for rational discussion between disagreeing parties in Gamespot forums. Cheers.
@dmblum1799 I'm assuming because it was his job to do so. Critics don't have the option to ignore something they dislike if they're reviewing it. He stated the reason for multiple play-throughs in the review--a desperate search for any redeeming value. I'm also sure that it's short length didn't hurt.
@joejoe1639 How is that any different from you seeing that the reviewer stating a distaste for shallow and lazy writing in the form of profanity devoid of any value other than shock and immediately assuming you know the entirety of the experience the reviewer had with the game? Personal taste isn't clouding a reviewer's judgement, it's adding value to the review. But really personal taste is poorly chosen wording for it, rather it is more accurately professional criticism, which always carries some aspects of the individual critic's experience and worldview.
If that's not what you're looking for, there are a multitude of sites and publications were you can read procedural reviews recounting nothing more than a games mechanics and execution with a limited vocabulary. Gamespot is valuable because it has many reviewers who treat reviews as critique, which is far more important to the evolution of games as a relevant media format than any sort of rote cataloging of features and execution combined with a numerical score on a scale of 7-10. But regardless of any of that, it's fairly clear the game was given a terribly low score and a predominantly negative review because it was thoroughly broken technically, and the poor writing was mentioned because it failed to serve in any redeeming capacity for the poor mechanical state of the game.
@oldtobie You're getting hung up on a very small part of clarifying semantics. As you say, all randomly generated games can be considered procedurally generated, but more specifically, any game that is described as randomly generated is not described accurately. Random generation and procedural generation are distinctly different things and he was just pointing that out. I don't know how ten minutes of a high level discussion of their algorithms constitutes a rant?
I did find it lacking in some regard though, as they implied that the same seed would automatically be used for multiple players in a single world but didn't describe whether or not persistent change would be a factor.
@JRD1912 @g0nz0j03 I can understand that. I haven't played the expansion at all yet, but I did log in to try out the loot 2.0 a couple weeks ago and was amazed at how quickly I was able to upgrade my wizard's gear (gear that took a couple hundred hours and several million gold on the AH to get), but I wasn't as big of a fan of how the loot system was before.
I played hundreds of hours, saw only two legendaries, none of which were for higher than level 30, and both rolled crappy stats. There's got to be a middle ground between a loot system that makes things totally insignificant and one that just constantly throat punches you with RNG. I feel this is it.
@JRD1912 @g0nz0j03 I understand what you're saying. My point is that getting more frequent and better itemized gear is great for casuals because it keeps them interested and great for the higher skilled players because it enables them to push the difficulty curve and play a more interesting (in my opinion) version of the game.
So yes, while there were a lot of whiners (when isn't there with a Blizzard game, or anything on the internet for that matter) there was good reason to change the loot system, and I feel it's a great improvement.
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