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

[Adam Martin]

On 26/02/07, Sean Howard <squidi at squidi.net> wrote:
> "Jeffrey Kesselman" <jeffpk at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > You can certainly hold it against a game if it doesn't go beyond the
> > basics of the genre and explore interesting new ground.
> >
> > Anyway, I can.
>
> I can and do. But there's a difference between blaming the genre and
> blaming the product. For instance, if I write a review of Harry Potter,
> I'm not going to spend five pages talking about how books have too many
> words and you can get paper cuts if you turn the pages improperly! And
> bookmarks only save your page, not your paragraph and word. Oh, and
> reading in poor lighting can give you a headache.

That's not entirely fair - e.g. it may be valid to criticise the
decision to publish HP as a fat novel instead of as a series of
cartoons, or as machinima, or ... or ... or ... For a given market,
and a given conceptual product, cricitiquing the way the product has
been actualised is often valid.

There's also the issue that HP is an established property, whereas VG
is not, and so you're not doing a fair comparison. My understanding of
the thread is that this is at least partly about people coming to a
*new* property, and debating whether the way that property is being
presented in a really appropriate way (should it really dump people in
a boring, rat-killing valley in a world post-Oblivion?).

FWVLIW, I've found Oblivion has displaced a substantial chunk of my
online play, simply because it was *better* in so many qualitative
ways. Obviously, after a while, you get bored by the loneliness, but
when it comes to pure immersion, the experience is often exceptional
(and often not - the problems with O's design and presentation are
legion, everything from a poor outdoors 3D engine to iffy decisions
about the nature and effects of time).

Adam