That reviews exist does not excuse a product for being badly made. No customer should have to just... suck it up when a product they bought is badly made - oh, sure, they could have avoided the disappointment had they taken the time to read reviews, but reviews are not a magical loophole to allow the biggest,…

“...Vs Bioware, a company that is KNOWN to lack technical expertise. They build worlds well... They’re almost always buggy though.”

Um, what are you even talking about? Could we please refrain from trying to rewrite history?

I mean, you do realise that the first Witcher game was built on the Aurora engine... right?

Well, people read such numbers as an indication of quality because... it *should* be.

Oh, on the subjective front, sure, money cannot necessarily make a game good in terms of gameplay design, art direction...

But when it comes to not being full of glitches? Money *absolutely* equals quality. The more money a project…

Why are you tolerating a big budget EA game being “buggy as shit”?

You do realise that this very attitude is *why* EA now have a track record of releasing “buggy as shit” games, right?

People tolerate shoddy releases, and keep throwing their money at the company, so EA continues to think “Well, we didn’t do proper QA on…

They’re so mad because it’s a massive budget game from the biggest publisher, and has absolutely no excuse for being “rough”. If this were the product of a smaller company, or the price tag were much, much lower? Sure, people could accept its “rough” state. But that’s not the case.

You can disagree all you like... but this really isn’t a subjective issue - the the game is full of outright glitches that never should have made it into the release. And while crappy animations may not be “game-breaking”, falling through the world repeatedly certainly is.

Not that I’m saying there’s anything wrong with companies pulling ads (ultimately, I think youtubers need to just wake up to the fact that they make money out of sponsorship essentially, and that just like with TV, sponsors have the right to stop sponsoring you for whatever reason).

BUT. I think we could do with…

Even PVE would be an issue - have you ever seen clips of Left 4 Dead on PC, versus Left 4 Dead on console? On PC, the zombie count is way higher, and everyone reacts much more quickly - the entire nature of the difficulty is shifted dramatically.

So you’d end up with say, a team of console players... and one PC player.…

Yes, but it’s a pretty common reference. In Freespace 2 there was a class of Shivan corvette called a “Moloch”.

If they could maybe keep the first area, and then dump Egypt, that’d be great. I played the hell out of Secret World, but I know a lot of people (myself included) burned out pretty fast on reaching Egypt.

I think the central problem was - the opening chapter, with all its creepy Lovecraft stuff and its tight narrative,…

Speaking as a straight guy, I had such a bromance with Garrus mainly because he was the only person in Mass Effect 2 (in particular) who wasn’t whiny. Everyone else... they were either constantly whining about whatever past trauma totally did *not* trump the world-ending threat they were currently facing, or they’d be…

“...and were blazing new trails for a genre that had largely begun to find itself in increasingly well-worn ruts.”

What ruts? Really. Well-worn ruts? Just one year before Mass Effect, we had Oblivion. Just two years before Oblivion, we had Vampire: Bloodlines. Just four years before Vampire: Bloodlines, we had Deus…

You wash your mouth out. Baldur’s Gate 2 + Throne of Bhaal remains right up there with Planescape: Torment for the best writing in RPG history.

Especially since Baldur’s Gate 2 managed to achieve such greatness without relying upon any flashy visuals or a protagonist who looks like he’s doing one of those stupid…

For me at least, a big part of it is the art direction. The original UT was like a precursor to Overwatch - in spite of its violence and, on some levels, gothic design... the actual aesthetic was really bright and colourful, slightly stylised. Coupled with the booming voice of a commentator declaring…

I don’t see any ceiling chairs though.

There were similar sentiments in the RPS write-up recently. And I have to agree - you traverse the vastness of inter-galactic space, only to find... more white plastic sci-fi technology, more generic bipedal aliens...

Also, the technology really doesn’t add up at all. Like, they’ve made it to another galaxy, but the…

That’s not entirely true. You can have a bunch of preset emotional states to be triggered by the dialogue file - a flag that says “this line is to be delivered with the happy face, this one with the sad face” etc.

That way, even if you have literally a thousand characters, you can feed all of those thousand characters…

It’s badly done, whatever they’re doing. I mean even if you’re using a direct text to animation lip-sync thing, you should still have some prebuilt emotion animations for general emotions, to be triggered by the dialogue file.

Let’s not forget, this is something Valve figured out back in 2004:

You loved having a full inventory in ME1?

Do you mean, a full inventory system, or a full inventory? Because what *I* remember of ME1 was that the inventory system was the worst I had ever encountered, EVER. Just a massive list. So much scrolling. So. Much. Scrolling.

I may have missed the general concept of inventory…