Slashdot Mirror
Too Human Meets Mediocre Reviews
Earlier this week, the long anticipated action-adventure game, Too Human, was finally released for the Xbox 360. After being in various stages of development for about a decade, the game made its US debut to overall lackluster marks. Gamespot weighed in with a 5.5/10, while IGN gave it a slightly more favorable 7.8. Developer Denis Dyack from Silicon Knights defended the game, saying players didn't yet "get it," and that it was "so innovative that we have put some people off." The game's reception in Japan has been similar.
Just because you have the skills to develop a game, does not mean you know how to develop a gaming experience.
There are developers that know how to develop entertaining gaming experience, and their are dev's that just know how to make games without a decent ability to judge whether or not what they are developing is exciting, interesting and entertaining and doesn't suck.
This is a big problem in the industry as far as I'm concerned, there is just too many clueless people (pub's and developers) about how to build entertainment. I think the biggest problem is still the technology. There is so much time and money consuming technical engineering that it overtakes the money and time needed to develop the entertainment aspect. Too much on art and engines, not enough on developing interesting things and connecting them with skill.
Striking a balance is hard, I agree, but that's the business you're really in: Entertainment. Game developers have to be good at knowing entertainment as well as engineering. It's hard, no doubt... and sometimes you just want to keep trying just doing your own thing (which is also valid) but if you want to do your own thing, you got to go back to small time games and understand what aspects of both the art, and the interaction of the objects, makes the game. Some indie game developers know this, they know what is wrong with the industry.
On the basis of 3 hours or so play, it's a pretty but generally uninspired 3d Diablo clone, at heart. Sure, it mixes Norse mythology with sci-fi, but that's hardly new. Just ask John Romero - I seem to remember him at least partly doing that in Daikatana (although if, like most people, you only played the demo, you won't have seen those bits). It's also really easy, the enemies seem to auto-scale (a la Oblivion), which is a feature that should be consigned to the dustbin of history, and the camera is annoying. Personally, I'd go for a 6 on 10. Maybe a 7 on the basis of the graphics.
Is this just another case of Derek Smart thinking his IQ is at least twice what it really is?
I downloaded the demo on XBox Live a few weeks back. It was okay, I guess, but judged purely on the demo I'd say the 5/10 score was fair. It was a fairly mediocre third-person shooter with Viking Space Marines and cinematics so melodramatic that I was embarrassed to have them play when someone else was in the room.
I heard so much buzz about this game in the months/years leading up to its publication. Can someone more knowledgeable about some of the history help me understand this? Was it simply based on Silicon Knights' good name? Did the game undergo a substantial change somewhere along the way that removed something everyone was excited about?
The title follows the conventions of use in English. It won't confuse any native speaker.
Just as films can get "good reviews" and "bad reviews", a video game can get "mediocre reviews".
One of the worst control schemes I've ever used, that's what I didn't get. I was semi interested in Norse mythology in space, and the visuals were good, but the control scheme was so bad I gave up on the demo in frustration- when my grenade launcher kept auto targeting objects flying towards me that I had no chance of hitting instead of the monster lobbing them at me.
www.GrenadeHop.com
Got the demo from Live, played it and found it unremarkable, but the setting was interesting. But then, the whole review thing is silly most places. If a game gets less than 9/10 then it's a bad game. 8.5 is a bad score it seems. A game scoring 6-7 is still in the upper half of the quality scale, and taking into account how good a game would have to be to score above a clean 9, if things were done properly instead of based on money and hype, then 7 wouldn't be a bad score at all... A local game magazine describes a 6 on it's 10 scale as a mediocre game that will appeal to fans of the genre.
Meet is slightly problematic, though. While native English speakers will no doubt understand the title without trouble, it can give the impression that the reviews themselves are mediocre. Receives would have been a better choice in my opinion.
It's quite common for humans to be horrible, arrogant, self-obsessed organisms that make you just want to wish they got ran over by a train. But.. "too human"?
*unzips fly* Let me know which game dev studio front door I should pee on.
Yes this was a worthless post, but from the first few posts in front of me along with the description of the article, peeing on their front door to their offices really isn't that bad of an idea after all. When Denis Dyack catches me and asks why I would do such a thing, I'll tell him that he "just doesn't get it." Boy am I in a rebellious mood today.
having "Too" in a title reminds me of having "Extreme" in the title, but not as horrendous.
Maybe now they'll make a another Eternal Darkness for Nintendo. Sanity's Requiem was one of most favourite games for the game cube.
If game players "just don't get it" then you have made a bad game.
I was really looking forward to this game until I played the demo. Thank god for demos.
Autoscaling is to games as loudness war is to music.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
There's a demo on Marketplace that allows you to play as every class (through an easter egg, intentionally left in by Silicon Knights). I think a lot of reviewers expected the world from this game. I expected a dungeon crawler/action RPG similar to Phantasy Star Online and Diablo. I'm very happy with the end product. Personally, I'd give te game an 8.2, or in letter grading terms, a B-. It has some problems - namely, the length, some camera issues, and a weak story - but the core gameplay is FUN. And that's what's important to me.
"It's a reverse vampire...they....they crave the sun!"
The titles imply that that the reviews itself are mediocre. English isn't my native tongue but this was easy to spot.
I wish I was so smart that I couldn't make sense of something like that until somebody corrected it.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
Didn't Eternal Darkness get pretty average reviews when it was released? It's pretty fondly looked at now, being the best example of Lovecraftian style horror on consoles (the gold factory and everything after in Call of C'thulhu stops that being the best)
8.2 on a scale from 0 to 10 would be a "B+" (1% away from an "A-"), not a "B-".
A "B-" would be something between 6.7 and 7.3.
Personally I give any (wannabe) RPG with auto-levelling an F ("Completely failed to understand the fundamental concept of the genre"). This game is a nice-looking shooter, but that's all it is; it shoots itself in the foot in every other aspect.
Meet is used all the time in English! Superbowl teams meet victory! I go to the grocery to meet food! Transplant patient meets new kidney!
It's a perfectly cromulent word in this situation.
It's a game that is not for gamers. Brilliant!!!! Game of the year!
This game has been in development for something like seven years, on an off; the last major bit of news we heard about it before its release is that they were suing the makers of the engine they were using. I said at the time that this was a desperation move by Silicon Knights to excuse their own failings and it looks like I was right, funny that. I like the concept of a viking setting in a futuristic world, but an interesting concept, badly executed, makes for a bad game.
If you're failing to get your clever ideas across to the audience in an enjoyable way, then that's a failure on your part. It's possible for games, or any other medium, to be daring and clever without turning audiences off (see House of Leaves for an example of something clever but enjoyable), and it's part of your job to do that if you want to be "smart".
No kidding!!! What do you say at this point?
How can this game have been in development for a decade, the Xbox 360 isn't even nearly that old (including the dev kits)?
English not being your native tongue would explain why you mistakenly assumed that the meaning-as-written of this sentence should follow logically from the meaning-as-written of other sentences written similarly.
English is oftentimes by its very nature ambiguous, but the problem is made worse by the fact that it's not always consistently ambiguous.
For example, to rephrase the title to mean what you thought it sounded like it meant, one would probably say 'Too Human Meets Reviews Which Are Mediocre'.
To phrase the title to mean what it actually means unambiguously, one could probably write 'Too Human Meets Indifferent Reviews' (as opposed to positive or negative reviews). Phrasing the title to refer to tone (a quality of the reviews) rather than quality (a quality of the review OR of the game) indicates better the intended meaning of the title.
English is frustrating, in that even when all the words are present in a grammatically correct sentence, the phrasing can be ambiguous; contrast this to Japanese, where you can exclude huge swaths of the sentence-as-intended as long as those parts removed can be inferred from context.
The key here, I think, is 'native speaker'. My ex-girlfriend, born in Russia, raised francophone in Quebec, speaks English well enough that you'd never know she wasn't anglophone. There's a slight accent if you listen for it, but it's subtle enough that you don't notice it after a day or two.
She frequently used to ask me how to say something, or why something means something, or ask me to check over her writing. Frequently, I'd find mistakes which I would consider 'elementary', in the sense that they are the basic mistakes which everyone makes. She would often get frustrated, because she'd want to know what the rule was in that situation, how one was supposed to know how to write or say something in particular.
The best I could usually tell her was 'Well... experience. You just have to know from experience how things are supposed to sound or be said or written, and eventually something will just feel right, or it won't.' I don't think she ever actually liked that answer, but I didn't feel like getting into a 'It's usually this but about half the time it's this except for two thirds of that half of the time when you're also saying this....'
It's pretty ugly.
Are reviewers on crack? Or is it just the readers?
Why the hell is a 40% increase in score (5.5 * 1.4 = 7.7) only "slightly more"? I think if I were given a 40% raise I'd consider it more than just "a slight raise". What would it take to be "more" favorable? 60%? "Much more" would be 80% and "they downright liked it" would be a 100% increase?
Whatever happened to the olden days of reviews when kids weren't on my lawn, 5.5 was above average, 7.8 was "buy if you even like the genre slightly" and 9+ was "go buy now!"?
I can't help but wonder what the actual mean (or median for that matter) is in game reviews these days. That'd be an interesting experiment, wouldn't it? I mean, if the mean score is 8.9 on a scale from 1 to 10, then aparently you need to adjust the scale for it to make sense.
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
I'd call that a failure.
If players don't get your game, maybe it's not them, maybe it's the game.
and to say it's "so innovative that we have put some people off." Yes, I think that's it. Too Human must be too good. Way to toot your own horn Dyack.
This thing stinks of robotic frogs all over. But I'm going to try the demo anyway. Maybe I'm wrong.
They're using their grammar skills there.
Sure, but if you developed them today, the problems that would prevent Halo kiddies from "getting it" would probably be gone (i.e. graphical/audio update, aesthetics update)
I'm not a native speaker either, but it actually took me a while to recognize what the OP was complaining about. While I'm not an expert on all the world's languages, in the few that I'm fluent in, one can say something like "bad marks", "poor evaluations", and even "mediocre reviews" and it will mean exactly what it means in this headline, and not that there's something wrong with the reviews.
The "Review" in this instance is refering to the rating not the justification (essay/article/review). I can receive "Good reviews" and "Bad Reviews". But very rarely will an english speaker pass judgement on the quality of a review. Only agreeability. Substitute the word Review with Opinion or Ratings and it will function in most cases.
I remember gameplayer doing an article called Is Too Human the X360's Haze? following hands-on preview of the game.
But they changed their view with the review stating that it wasn't as bad as first thought. Still not a stellar score, but not terrible.
I thought it was something called "Too Human Meets Mediocre" and it was reviewing something or being reviewed by someone. Actually, not really.
alias possession='chmod 666 satan && ls
The problem is it isn't finished.
The Good:
Most amazing armors I've ever seen.
Great new combat controls. Yes, they did get it right for the most part.
The levels are truly beautiful. The main city is ridiculously awesome.
Norse mythology translates pretty damn well to a futuristic world. Great backdrop.
The gameplays and levels are all very finished.
Every single asset in this game is awesome... but why is it getting sub-par reviews?
The Bad:
Only 4 types of enemies. Seriously?
Only 2 player co-op makes many class abilities lame.
All that great gear, and the gear interface is slow and cludgy.
Most of the classes play pretty much the same.
Co-op strategy isn't really necessary, although it makes the game much more fun.
Plays a lot like PSO. You walk into a room, the same bad guys spawn as the last room, repeat.
Death is a major problem. The death mechanic in the game take all of the sense of accomplishment out of boss fights. Wasting my time is a very bad game mechanic as a "death" punishment.
There isn't nearly enough story for an "epic trilogy". Seriously, I got that much story in one mission in Oblivion.
So here's the thing. All the assets are there, they just need to work on making them more accessible and more inviting. Also, they need split screen or shared screen co-op. That would make this a killer game.
Owning the game myself--despite the reviews; it just interested me--and having sunk some hours into it, I can say that, despite its flaws, it is really quite enjoyable. I can see some immediate problems reviewers might have, since it takes a while to get used to the way the unconventional controls and camera work. Now that I'm comfortable with it, though, it's really just a fun dungeon crawl. It has its challenges, and its fun little secret zones, and it really does the "loot whore" thing very well.
Honestly, I'm pretty comfortable saying that all of these horrendously bad reviews are just people who simply decided they weren't going to like it, and weren't going to try to learn to play it. I, for one, am hoping people look past the imbeciles who decided they'd give it a 55% review just because they didn't like the way it looked at them, because I, for one, would enjoy a second installment.
P.S. Protip: Switch the camera to "Strategic" mode IMMEDIATELY. The default camera mode is horrendous.
For the first time ever, I bothered to even write some comments about a negative game. That's how awful it was. Short version:
1) The camera *is* a deal breaker. It has no redeeming qualities. One interview mentioned people need to "stop fighting it". I don't need to "stop fighting it", I need "one that isn't actively counterproductive and vomit-inducing".
2) Co-op. Stop claiming it has "co-op", and start specifying it as "co-op only over xbox live". I bought the game to play with my SO, and I can't, because we sit in the same room to play games together. Too Human isn't the only guilty party here, but they're sure as hell a big contender.
3) Mediocre story. You have a whole universe of potential awesome there, and you churned out something seriously devoid of depth or breadth, that doesn't really hold much real reference to the actual mythology it's based on
4) Crappy combat. Look, I know they love to claim it's good, but it's not. It's massively limited. Your core attack is "hold the thumbstick in the direction of the enemy", and your character sits there and just does it. The "advanced attacks" screen contains six pieces of information. Even using all of them, the combat is still limited and dull.
There was a bunch of other stuff, but that was the core of my complaints - abysmal camera, dull story, crappy combat, and couldn't play co-op. Three of those were the reasons I bought the game, and the other was just something that made a crappy game worse.
Gary (-;
Blame Nietzsche. It's a reference to his book Human, All Too Human.
The details are trivial and useless; The reasons, as always, purely human ones.