[MUD-Dev2] [OFF-TOPIC] A rant against Vanguard reviews and rants

[Sean Howard]

"Mike Rozak" <Mike at mxac.com.au> wrote:
> Before I bought it, I didn't expect to like Vanguard. It's designed for
> a different sort of player than I am.

I was in a similar boat, except that I came out of Vanguard actually
liking it quite a bit. I'm still not that type of player - I never was,
and actually sort of hate that type of player - but Vanguard sort of
peripherally supports the kind of player I am in the same way that SWG
did. It's not about me, but I fit in comfortably between cracks. I just
wish the dev team wasn't so deluded into focusing on that one type of
player because I know that sooner or later, like every MMORPG, I'm going
to run out of cracks.

> 1) My vanguard experience has been mostly bug-free... other than setup,
> although reviewers didn't seem to have any problems with setup.

Same here, though in beta it was a completely different story. While I'd
like to attribute it to writing about the beta, the truth is, reviews
generally have more trouble with games than I do. I don't know if they
just use nothing but non-standard drivers, run the games using trainers or
cracks, or live in a virus infested cesspool of porn and pirated software
(my experience in the industry points to the latter), but I find that most
professional reviewers greatly exaggerate the frequency and severity of
bugs.

> 2) It runs really well on my 2-year old computer.

Same here. It could run better, but it runs better than EQ2 on my machine.

> 3) I haven't encountered the grind yet, but I don't expect to hang
> around long enough to verify this as being true.

I hear the grind begins in the teens, though I'm not speaking from
experience.

> What's really interesting with the Vanguard reviewers/ranters, as well
> as other game reviews/rants that I've read recently, is that there are
> huge flaws in Vanguard (from my perspective), but none of the
> reviewers/ranters mention them. I won't bother going into the flaws now,
> though.

What I find amazing is that nearly every review reads identically. The
same pros and cons are listed, the same experiences shared. It's like
every reviewer played the exact same character, met the exact same people
online, and tried the exact same activities for exactly the same amount of
time.

There are two options here. One is that they are just making up crap based
on 15 minute impressions and a year of press releases and interviews they
read. The second is that game reviewers are cut so perfectly from the same
cloth that one has to wonder whether it's worth having more than one of
them.

There are exceptions, of course, but they tend to come from smaller fan
run sites than the big guys.

> 1) The fundamental game isn't right for me, causing me to nitpick at
> "flaws" that people targeted by the game won't see? Could be, but WoW
> and EQ2 are essentially the same game, and I didn't cringe at them
> nearly as much as I do at Vanguard. (WoW and EQ2 are both less hard-core
> than Vanguard though.)

Vanguard has advertised that it isn't the right game for people since the
very beginning. In fact, I was extremely surprised that I liked it because
I was told over and over and over and over again that I was stupid and
Vanguard hated me with the passion of a thousand suns imploding. It is
really hard to write that sort of attitude off. It's frankly disgusting,
though I'm sure it does feed a certain xenophobic elitism typical of most
online gamers.

Anyway, it's possible that going in, thinking the game isn't for you, you
are going to be more critical. You are going to be looking for everything
that's not for you. Every design decision you don't agree with is going to
leap out and say, you can't hate me because I wasn't made for you. Which,
of course, makes you hate it more. I certainly do.

> 2) I'm designing and programming my own game, which has made me more
> aware of Vanguard's flaws in ways that reviewers/ranters wouldn't be?
> But why the Vanguard team didn't do anything about the flaws is another
> discussion... "Frog in gradually-boiling water" design, and/or, one
> person's flaw is another person's feature.

No, I don't think this matters. Please don't take this as an insult, but
in my experience, most game designers are no more qualified to talk about
game design than the average person. Partly this is due to the fact that
game design is hardly a quantified process (and when it is, it is usually
too simple or too complex or just completely wrong). But mostly it is due
to the fact that the average person, when they think about it, is just as
adept at noticing design flaws as anyone else. They can recognize them
even if they might not neccessarily know the best way to correct them.

Reading through messageboards instead of proffesional reviews has yielded
a lot of different opinions about Vanguard that differ wildly - from
people that like it but, to people that hate it except. I'm sure you'll
find many of your flaws listed in greater detail than even you've probably
considered.

Why are reviewers different? Because they aren't focused on explaining
flaws. Most reviews are about five paragraphs long and require a short
summary of the game followed up by a summary of the reviewer's opinions.
It's not uncommon to find that four of those paragraphs are talking about
something completely unrelated and personal. For instance, a review of
Virtua Fighter 5 may start with someone describing their childhood
experiences of playing the original game in the arcades for a quarter.
There's not a lot of room to go into precise detail. I mean, you'd need a
full review just of Vanguard's diplomacy system to do it any justice, but
there's no room. The best you'll get is a tiny paragraph, if you're lucky.

Then you've got the fact that many reviewers do not actually play the
games they review. I was talking with someone that did the DS version of a
particular game and was extremely upset because the poor review one site
gave them was a cut and paste job from the GBA version, which was
completely different. He was a producer and also mentioned that calling up
the reviewers personally could change the score four or five points in his
favor, so part of his job was literally biasing the reviewers in his
favor. Many reviews read like glorified press releases - some even
plagiarized from them. Lots of reviews are factually incorrect in very
simple and obvious ways. Most are based on pre-release copies or betas. I
believe there was a scandal back in the GameFan days when a reviewer of
Lunar (gave it a bad score) was found in usenet groups asking for help on
like the second boss months later. And let's not forget the number of poor
Goldeneye reviews for a game that became a classic much later (in fact,
the GameFan review spent most of the review complaining about how Nintendo
wouldn't let them have a review copy early).

When it comes to in depth discussion about gaming, I turn to messageboards
(like the ones at GameFAQs). Yeah, there's a lot of noise, but these a
guys who paid the same $40-$60 per game that you did. Not all of them are
literate or educated or able to put their opinions into sentences, but if
you read between the lines, there's a lot more information going on
between the players than you will ever get from a magazine review.

> 3) Reviewers/ranters perceive the same flaws as I do, but on a
> subconscious level. Since they can't verbalize the problems, they
> complain about other issues, much the same as someone will say, "I don't
> like him because he laughs like a hyena," when the laugh really has
> nothing to do with their like/dislike, but is merely an obvious problem
> to point to.

Yes, this happens. A lot, actually. The classic "purple shadows" episode
of GameFan. Many reviewers don't know how to properly quantify their
opinions of game, so when trying to summarize, it becomes a checklist of
tangible things (most often graphics for the pros and bugs for the cons).
However, I don't think this is your problem. This happens in messageboards
as well, but typically, you can see these things for what they are. We
humans are pretty good at non-verbal communications and we can pick up
attitudes from the ether between each item in a checklist. Even when game
reviewers are completely stupid about why they didn't like a game and why
they say they didn't (ie they hate turn based RPGs but said that the
loading times were too long when they weren't), you can usually guage some
sort of connection between these things.

No, what you seem to be having issues with is that there are flaws in the
game that they didn't even pick up on. Like they spend all this time
complaining about something shallow and unimportant when there is this
game breaking flaw sitting there and staring them in the face. If they
were really trying to justify their unknown feelings, surely they would've
taking the actual flaw rather than commenting so significantly on
something unimportant!

It's like saying, turn at the small dirt road with the bumpy rocks, when a
much better set of directions would be, turn before you fall off the
cliff. That they don't see the cliff or feel it important to comment on it
is one of the great mysteries of game reviewing, but I think it's very
likely that they just never drove that road before and are repeating
instructions off the press release.

> 4) Am I merely delusional?

Perhaps, but not about this. Game reviews and game reviewers live in some
sort of weird la-la land which is completely out of touch with their job
responsibilities, or even just plain integrity. Go spend some time in the
Vanguard forums (like silky venom or vgtact) for some real opinions by
others who have actually played the game for more than ten minutes.

Man, this was a long response. And you thought you had a rant against
Vanguard reviews? :)

-- 
Sean Howard