Review RPG Codex Review: Dead State

[FUDU]

Zombra that little bit about inefficiency is exactly the sort of thing that you shouldn't leave out of a review. When I read "inefficient" with regards to the UI, the conclusion I'm forced to jump to is that the UI wastes screen space--apparently not what you intended.

That's funny, because when I read "inefficient" in his review, I assumed it meant exactly what he described.

Zombra

Don't be to discouraged Zombra.

Was your first ever game review perfect?

No it wasn't.

Will your next one be much better?

I'm sure it will.

I look forward to reading it.

 

[worldsmith]

if the game runs fine for one person, then it is complete and functional. Everything else is down to getting your configuration straight.

No. That is flat out not right. By that logic if the game "runs fine" for the dev selling the game ("one person") but works not at all for any of their customers nor any reviewers, "it is complete and functional".

And a clue for Zombra: Not everyone has the same graphics card, or the same motherboard, or the same amount of memory in their system, or the same sound hardware, or the same CPU, or the same display resolution, or the same operating system. Any one of these things (and many others) can be the difference between a game working and a game failing. And not due to any problem with the customer's box but due to a game bug. I.e., a game can have multiple critical bugs that will remain latent when the game is run on one system because that system isn't multi-processor or doesn't have more than 4GB memory or isn't using an AMD such-and-such video card or isn't using a monitor with a certain native resolution, and such bugs will strike when run on a different system. "getting your configuration straight" should not mean tossing your box in the garbage and buying whatever Zombra's using because that apparently works (after applying some work-around).

A simple example: Warlords Battlecry III with last official patch. Run it on a box with 2GB and it "runs fine" (mostly). Run it on a box with 4GB -- oops, all of the units are invisible. Is the person running on a 2GB box justified in saying that all of those with 4+GB (who say the units are all invisible and that makes the game unplayable for them) are "full of shit"? No way.

 

[Burning Bridges]

if the game runs fine for one person, then it is complete and functional. Everything else is down to getting your configuration straight.

What kind of douchebaggery is that? Computer programs should be configured to run on systems, not the other way around.

 

[Zombra]

Yeah, that little quote didn't exactly come out like I meant it to. Dumb thing to say.

 

[Burning Bridges]

'k
Add to that a UI merely "doing its job" is such a basic requirement that it's not worth mentioning at all.

 

[Zombra]

Add to that a UI merely "doing its job" is such a basic requirement that it's not worth mentioning at all.

Disagree. When I read about a game I want to know whether the UI is good, bad, or mediocre. To me talking about the UI is as fundamental as graphics or gameplay - you wouldn't say "Don't bother mentioning the gameplay if it's not especially good or bad." If you don't care that much about UIs, that's OK and I'm sorry to have wasted your valuable time with those three words, but I do care.

 

[Burning Bridges]

Really? Describing a user interface, the function of which is to allow the player to communicate commands to the game system, as "inefficient" isn't descriptive to you at all? Let me clarify that for you: if it takes me 4 button presses to enter a command when it could just as easily take 1, that is inefficient. As for "does the job", that is a slightly more colorful way of saying "functional", meaning the buttons are all clearly marked and do what they are supposed to do. This is relevant in a game rumored to be buggy and broken.

You missed the point. I was referring to this statement, that buttons "do what they are supposed to do" is so incredibly banal and pointless.

 

[Zombra]

You missed the point. I was referring to this statement, that buttons "do what they are supposed to do" is so incredibly banal and pointless.

Shrug. I get it, and I'm sorry you don't see my point. It's even more pointless to argue about it any more. You haven't convinced me to avoid addressing the mediocre in my next review (if any) and it doesn't look like there's any chance you're going to. I hereby agree to disagree.

 

[Burning Bridges]

You have serious issues.

 

[Zombra]

 

[Absinthe]

I'm just dropping in to note that I am going to write up an extensive response (EDIT: fuck it, Zombra actually ignorelisted me). I just happen to agree that the argument could do with some reorganization and more thorough critique so I wasn't intending to post until I had that, plus I'm a lazy bastard. But now worldsmith has already made one of my points for me, so I figure I may as well step it up. Also, Zombra, you have a terrible way of going "Yeah, well, that's just your opinion, man." to criticism. Quit being a faggot.

And while I'm here I may as well:

tl;dr You saw a review that is apologetic towards a game you don't like, but also apologetic in a way that you didn't expect, which made you feel like you were being "tricked", so you're going ballistic. ("What do you mean, you're telling me not to buy the game?! NUH UH YOU'RE STILL AN APOLOGIST AND I'M GONNA SHOW EVERYBODY HOW!!!")

Calm your tits. If someone made an apologist review of Civilization V, which I actually happened to somewhat enjoy, the only difference would be that I would tear your ass a new one that much harder because I could needle you on all the gameplay aspects. Hell, if you were to review Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri, which I have consistently viewed as the greatest computer game ever, as a flawless masterpiece, I would still give you shit for not noting problems with supply crawler abuse among other things. It's simply not a proper review if you do that bullshit.

Okay, so you got tricked. You've been had. Come to terms with that, and get over it. Not every style of review is for everybody. See, you're acting shocked at something that most people here just aren't that shocked by. Most of us always realized that Zombra liked the game. We never felt like we were being tricked by a misleading "cancerous" review. We just soaked up the information contained in it and moved on.

The fuck? I barely give a shit about Dead State. I think I've already been clear on this. I only had a courtesy interest in it because of AoD. My problem with the review is that Zombra seems to be basically dicksucking in fucked up ways throughout his review. Like, he praises shit that doesn't make sense ("Well-designed. Too easy." - You let this through why?) and downplays other crap, like bugs. And that's the problem, not "style", not "praise," but "quality." The fact that the audience here can do their own analysis doesn't excuse Zombra for fucking up his. That's somewhat like saying PC Gamer's Dragon Age 2 review is alright because you can tell the writer is scraping the barrel of positives and coming short. Instead of trying to spin this shit on me, fucking own up that you guys dropped the ball on this letting this review through and need to tighten up on editorial standards.

The Codex values comprehensiveness. Rambling, out of focus, ambiguous - those things are secondary as long as it's a big-ass wall of text that covers all bases and analyzes all the issues. So yeah, I can't guarantee that the "trend" won't continue.

Comprehensiveness is a good standard. Analysis here was flawed, and you guys certainly didn't do enough about it.

 

[Morkar Left]

The funny thing is if he would have just bashed Deadstate Roxor-style nobody would have complaint.

 

[TwinkieGorilla]

That's not funny. That's banal, boring, shit.

 

[Darth Roxor]

The funny thing is if he would have just bashed Deadstate Roxor-style nobody would have complaint.

thats because nobody even reads my reviews to begin with

 

[Clockwork Knight]

People would read them if they weren't such poorly written tryhard turds to begin with.




j/k I've never read them so I can't judge

 

[EG]

if the game runs fine for one person, then it is complete and functional. Everything else is down to getting your configuration straight.

No. That is flat out not right. By that logic if the game "runs fine" for the dev selling the game ("one person") but works not at all for any of their customers nor any reviewers, "it is complete and functional".

And a clue for Zombra: Not everyone has the same graphics card, or the same motherboard, or the same amount of memory in their system, or the same sound hardware, or the same CPU, or the same display resolution, or the same operating system. Any one of these things (and many others) can be the difference between a game working and a game failing. And not due to any problem with the customer's box but due to a game bug. I.e., a game can have multiple critical bugs that will remain latent when the game is run on one system because that system isn't multi-processor or doesn't have more than 4GB memory or isn't using an AMD such-and-such video card or isn't using a monitor with a certain native resolution, and such bugs will strike when run on a different system..

That's more an issue of getting your hardware specifiication right, so that those with toasoters will have ample warning that they need shaders to have mobile 3D models, enough RAM to actually run the game .etc

A simple example: Warlords Battlecry III with last official patch. Run it on a box with 2GB and it "runs fine" (mostly). Run it on a box with 4GB -- oops, all of the units are invisible. Is the person running on a 2GB box justified in saying that all of those with 4+GB (who say the units are all invisible and that makes the game unplayable for them) are "full of shit"? No way.

Alright, maybe not entirely.

How the hell did they manage that?

 

[worldsmith]

That's more an issue of getting your hardware specifiication right

You seem to be talking about the "minimum requirements" -- that is not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about hardware that should be compatible with the game but is not due to bugs in the game. This is unfortunately very easy to have happen because there is a lot of variety out there. Read a modern "standards specification" and often you will find tons of optional features and behaviors. Even CPUs these days have registers the program reads to find out whether or not the particular CPU it is currently running on supports each of dozens of different features/instructions. (See all of the stuff returned by the CPUID instruction on x86/x64.) If you try to make the most of the hardware (which games often do), you end up writing multiple versions of performance-critical code with all kinds of 'if'/'switch' statements to adapt to these different configurations your code can run into. When doing QA most game devs probably do not test against all of the possible combinations, and probably instead focus testing on the most popular hardware. (They've got limited resources to spend on testing, so it's likely spent where they think their audience is.) That means there can be a non-trivial amount of code that goes out the door on release day that is inadequately tested or even completely untested.

Another case is games that try to adjust their UI to the machine's native resolution. They probably only properly test those at a few common resolutions, and if your machine has an unusual resolution the game UI can simply break (either CTD or just not work right).

This is kind of expanding the topic beyond just hardware, but... I've lost track of how many games break if you have DPI set to anything other than default. (Though for that case the problem is so common that Windows includes a compatibility setting you can use to fix a given application. But I've seen this breakage in games that came out over a decade after Windows introduced user settable DPI. Many devs are simply not bothering to test that their code works at anything other than default DPI.)

How the hell did they manage that?

My guess (and it's just a guess) is that their code was trying to examine some information about the amount of memory and they were using a 32 bit signed integer which overflows when that amount is >=2GB. (Since the game actually worked on systems with exactly 2GB, presumably whatever this number was was somewhat less than the total amount of physical memory, maybe due to some memory being reserved by the OS for other things and therefore not included in the returned value.) When you overflow a 32 bit signed integer with a value between 2GB and 4GB, it makes the integer appear negative, so any checks in the game trying to verify there was enough memory to do something would fail, and as a result units wouldn't get rendered. (WBC III came out in 2004, and I guess at that time machines with more than 2GB weren't so common. But WBC III is a great game with lots of replay value {ditto for the WBC II campaign} and there is no WBC IV to replace it, so people kept playing it long after 4+GB was common, and there was eventually an unofficial patch to fix it for >2GB. If you get it on GOG it's already got that patch. BTW, there is a new, currently free, standalone mod of the game here. Funnily enough it has it's own unit invisibility issue, but it can be fixed just by selecting XP compatibility mode - no need to downgrade your box to 2GB. Such progress!)

 

[likaq]

My problem with the review is that Zombra seems to be basically dicksucking in fucked up ways throughout his review. Like, he praises shit that doesn't make sense ("Well-designed. Too easy." - You let this through why?) and downplays other crap, like bugs. And that's the problem, not "style", not "praise," but "quality." The fact that the audience here can do their own analysis doesn't excuse Zombra for fucking up his. That's somewhat like saying PC Gamer's Dragon Age 2 review is alright because you can tell the writer is scraping the barrel of positives and coming short. Instead of trying to spin this shit on me, fucking own up that you guys dropped the ball on this letting this review through and need to tighten up on editorial standards.

Cool, but this begs the question: why you don't seem to have any problems with this review:

http://www.rpgcodex.net/content.php?id=9076 ?

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...-darth-roxor-reviews-shadowrun-returns.85172/

^ why there is not a single post made by you? Surely both shadowrun and roxor deserves some attention from you.

 

[Darth Roxor]

 

[Baron Dupek]

People forgot about this shit long time ago but you got urge to correct someone "u r wong" and necro old thread of shame.
gj

Spoiler

 

[Absinthe]

That would be because I agree with Darth Roxor when he says "thats because nobody even reads my reviews to begin with." To be honest, it's nothing personal against Darth Roxor. I just never paid any attention to Shadowrun in the first place. It had that whole "modern RPG" vibe to it where they streamline the shit out of it, populate it with underwhelming encounter and quest design, but call it oldschool anyway. I can still feel my eyes glazing over at that shit. I read his AoD review though, and I think it was reasonable on the whole.

I did agree with some of the criticism of the Might & Magic X review (Blaine's in particular). And I share the concern that giving friendly attention to the RPG Codex will result in people writing unnecessarily positive pieces on your work where they let shit slide that they would call out otherwise. I think both M&M X and Larian Studios are guilty of this.

 

[Zombra]

Ah, memories.

 

[Absinthe]

For the record, Zombra pussyfooted so hard on this thread that he decided to put me on ignore.

He and Awor (I still have no idea how I got on Awor's behemoth of an ignore list) are the only people who have me on ignore atm.

 

[EG]

Ah, memories.

Time for a re-review.

 

[Lurker King]

We have three types of reviews. Positive reviews, negative reviews, and positive reviews that are presented in an ambiguous way due to some conflict of conscience “I love this game, but I have to be honest and present the problems”. Of course, the ambiguous tone gave the wrong message: “the game sucks, but some day it can be good”. Zombra should have stuck to his guns and said that the game was good even with these glaring flaws. I doubt that he thought that the game was bad if he spent his time reviewing it.

Dead State is a broken game with poorly implemented concepts, but it’s entertaining, immersive and addicting. Like most cRPGs with sandbox aspects, it is more challenging at the beginning, but it goes downhill after 20 hours of gameplay. It’s still fun by them if you like to explore, kill things, know more NPCs, etc. Even if you played the game for 60 hours straight until you hit a game-breaking bug, it’s totally worthy it. I know that is not much, but even with all the bugs, it’s still better than W2 and PoE combined. The game has personality and do its own thing.

Some people on the Codex went batshit crazy against the developers because of censorship and SJW subjects, and the fact that you have little sop-operas and one-dimensional caricatured NPCs with moral problems, including SJW topics, didn’t help. I don’t care about the developers, and thought that these topics, and the way they were presented, was a breath of fresh air. I prefer NPCs talking about mundane things to goblins, skeletons and tiresome cRPG tropes any day.