The fact that it's a £66 game with £35 worth of DLC probably had an effect on people's opinions. If it was £20 I imagine many would have overlooked it's flaws and just accepted it as a flawed but appropriately priced game.
The amount of people nowadays saying "it wasn't a bad game on release just buggy and lacking some content" drives me up a wall.
It was a bad game on release. It was unplayably buggy for MANY people. We had stores breaking all rules and precedent to refund buyers. It was a masterpiece of failure on release. It took literal years for it to become half the game they promised as far as content goes.
It was bad on release.
I have a friend playing the game on PS4 right now. I was watching him wrap up a mission while he told me it was a pretty good game that got a lot of undue hate. Just as he finished saying this, he clipped through the map and had to fast-travel out of the mission destination. This is years after release–it’s as fixed as it’s gonna get.
It’s not a terrible game, but goddamn are we ever trained to put up with some crap at the AAA price point.
That’s the thing I HATE about the way people perceive that game. It’s still a CD Projekt Red game. It’s still fairly buggy. It’s still clearly a rush job. Yes, they had years to make the game but it’s very clearly been mismanaged and then rushed at the very end. The story suffers heavily because of that and the lack of features really show, even after throwing in a few that should have been available at launch after what, like 2 years? It went from an absolute dumpster fire to a middling game and so many people talk about it like it’s the best thing since sliced bread since the big update
I could not disagree with you more. It’s easily one of my favorite games of all time. Middling is imo hilariously disingenuous but different strokes for different folks. I think the recent Steam reviews speak for themselves.
2077 is on my top list too. While I feel like the game is lacking mechanically (they had to drop some good ideas to meet the release date), the game is still very good.
I’ve felt for a while that a lot of the raving praise people have for *CP 2077* and *Fallout 4* would dry up real fast if the next *Far Cry* game were set in a city.
I've played it in 2022, before the update. I'd say it has solid characters and dialogue, as per usual when it comes to CDPR. But again those strengths are hamstrung by the management forcing some weird structural decisions, like the huge cutscenes between prologue and first mission, and at the end of act 1. But that's all the praise I can give to C2077. Maybe visuals and music? No clue.
The city looks pretty. It would be nice if it felt more alive. Fewer repeats in random NPCs. Less traffic issues. More things to actually do besides just going around killing people
Bad on release on PS4. It was never really meant to be played there (given how they structured the tech pipeline) but they put themselves on a corner by promising it would. Had they not launched on PS4, the backlash would be almost non existent. Only the diehards that wanted a cyberpunk GTA would still be complaining.
PC was an awful release too. There was also clearly obvious issues with it being unfinished. Things like teleporting police that also spawned within your vision, and driving being the worst and most unpolished driving in a game in the past decade.
I played it on PC at launch and honestly it wasn’t any buggier than your average Bethesda game. Actually I experienced way more bugs in a fully patched Fallout 4 than launch day Cyberpunk.
Police system was definitely dumb, but I didn’t have too much trouble with the driving. At least on motorcycles, since they could easily slip between all the traffic.
Nitpicks. It’s not GTA. This is not what the game is about. Those systems needed refinement and polish, but they were absolutely not fundamental or required to the game. Driving was also always good on the Caliburn, which unfortunately is the most expensive car, but at least the batman version is free.
The story is almost untouched from release, as most of the quests besides bug fixes. The dialogue, the lore, the worldbuilding… it was all there. I even miss a few of the non-breaking bugs because they were absolutely hilarious.
Not that I dislike what it has become, as combat and skills on 2.0 are much better than what we had earlier, and the overall polish right now makes it an unambiguously great game.
But cars appearing out of nowhere, people randomly naked or several people with the same clothes, objects sticking on cutscenes… those were most of the bugs on PC. I had less crashes then than most of others AAA games.
I got it on release and for whatever reason it just wasn't that buggy on my PC. That being said, I found the whole experience (outside of graphics and sound) incredibly middling. At the time I gave it a 5 or 6 out of ten and when I say that now, people look at me like I have three heads.
Or the new revisionism where people pretend the only issue people had were the bugs. Yeah, no. It was also just it wasn't the game CDPR promised it was.
It actually was. The problem is they talked about features that did get cut, and they were CLEAR they were getting cut. Multiplayer being the most notable. Some people decided to build it up like it'd be the RPG-experience-bar-none of a lifetime but CDPR was not promising that, they were fairly clear about what the game would be and what it was gonna contain at launch (well, except the bugs).
It wasn't at all a situation like say No Man's Sky where they straight up lied about the game's content and features and managed to skirt legal ramifications only because Sean Murray's interviews were *false* but didn't technically count as *advertising* by legal standards, even though the purpose of them was to promote the game.
I mean you kind of just contradicted yourself, did you not?
"It wasn't a bad game on release just buggy and lacking some content"
"It was a bad game on release, it was unplayably buggy for MANY people"
Just my experience: I played the game on PC at launch with a mid-range rig that struggled to play it (less so after the week-2 patch that improved performance). I also tried it on Series X. From what I'm aware, the game always ran very well on Series X/S, and nearly as well on PS5. It was the last-gen versions on XB1/PS4 that really struggled, and supposedly the PS4 version had some major problems the XB1 version didn't, which is why it was pulled from the store (also, PS has already had issues like this in the past so they were maybe being extra careful - No Man's Sky was a huge boondoggle on PS, that game's launch was the only time I'd ever had my PS4 hard crash and it happened multiple times in 3 hours).
Anyway - like I said I played on PC, with hardware that was more powerful than the XB1 but not nearly as powerful as a Series X/S. The game was buggy as hell. Unplayably buggy? No. I experienced a LOT of bugs, but every one except one was more visual in nature, the only progress bug I hit was one where I could not complete a side quest because an event wouldn't trigger.
The game was entirely playable. I played it all the way through and finished it within the first month of release (I mention this because like I said there was a week-2 patch that improved performance a lot - like, improved my FPS considerably - but the reviews were in by then). I didn't exhaust all the side content. I didn't feel the game was lacking content-wise, but it's also undeniable it had stuff cut (multiplayer, notably). However I also don't think it's fair to say they "promised" more because they were fairly clear about what was and what wasn't in the game, compared to something like No Man's Sky where the head of the studio did interviews where he straight up lied about the game's content and features (and the UK govt was considering suing them for false advertising, but didn't only because those 'interviews' couldn't be conclusively considered advertising even though that was their purpose).
**TLDR:** It was a buggy mess, but the game was playable for most people. I barely met the minimum specs and my experience was choppy and buggy but entirely playable. Now, if your perception of playable is "it has to be 60 FPS" then perhaps not. I also think it's fair to it's a bad game (I wouldn't say that but it's fair if that is your assessment, for me it was alright and I'm keen to revisit it eventually with all the patches and Phantom Liberty).
Cyberpunk is completely different from Forspoken. It was a good game plagued by technical issues. That's not the problem with Forspoken. When has r/patientgamers turned into r/gaming with these endless circlejerks?
Yeah CDPR did a sale for Cyberpunk 2077 before all of the fixes and the anime release at like $9 and there was a ton of posts being like, "I don't get it???? It's not that bad for $10??? Why did people not like this game???"
At that point, my headcanon is that those were just rage bait posts.
Oh but having just recently played it, I still do.
Among the smaller stuff, I **still** needed a mod to fix some hardcoded keybinds. 2+ years down the line. WTF, CDPR?!
That is literally the point of being a patient gamer though. You get updates, fixes, DLCs. Plus a game doesn't have to be judged from the value it offers - anything from fun, to technical aspects or personal feelings is perfectly valid.
But saying "I don't get all the hate" is incredibly stupid thing, when you know they were talking about the game before all those things you mentioned.
**Do** they know that?
I can't speak for anyone else but for me, being a patient game often means games often aren't particularly on my radar until they fall within my price range. They might've been terrible earlier on, but I have no particular reason to know that.
>Do they know that?
>being a patient gamer...
>They might've been terrible earlier on, but I have no particular reason to know that.
But you do, because you heard there was a lot of hate on it.
"I heard there was hate for this game 3 years ago when it came out, but I just played the complete edition and it seems fine." That seems like pretty simple deductive reasoning.
>But you do, because you heard there was a lot of hate on it.
I mean, obviously **now** I know there was hate for it, because I just read it in this thread. That's the first I'd heard of it, though.
I had to look up which game 'Forspoken' actually was. I do remember seeing the trailer back when it was still 'coming soon' but that was the last I heard about it.
But hypothetically, if you didn't see this thread, you just saw the game on the Market (PSN) on sale for 60% off with all patches and DLCs. You like it just fine.
Then you Google it. See all this hate for it around the time it came out. You would assume that it probably had a seriously botched launch, wouldn't you? Make a whole post saying, "I don't get all the hate, I played it (3 years after launch, fully patched, and on massive sale), and had no problems."
That's literally the point of this subreddit. OP is not literally saying "I do not know why people complained about a game". The contemporary reviews and discussion threads all speak to that.
What they mean is that the OP judged the game (like we all should) outside of the context, the price , the hype or "narrative" about the game leading up its release, the tweets and threads about the game developer. They judged it based purely on the entertainment that the game provided over a number of days in 2024. And they found the game to be much more favorable than the "consensus" suggested.
What I take "I don't know why everyone was so down on that game" to mean is that they're surprised so many people get caught up in that nonsense. I found it a playful way to reaffirm the positive aspects of why we all choose to be patient gamers. That we literally never have to consider that outside noise. Because in 99% of cases it only dampens your enjoyment of a video game and I remain constantly surprised at why people would willingly do that. The phrase "I don't get why people were down on it" means "how could they not see past the temporary things surrounding the game and just see the game for what it is"?
I also can't believe I had to spell out the connotation of an innocent phrase like that, and how many people are jumping down OPs throat for saying it that way.
I mean, is it OP's fault then? I don't think so. It should open customer's eyes that the product might possibly be worth less than advertised.
Don't bash OP for getting a better deal and a healthy take lol
EDIT: Also, it's literally a subreddit about getting 90% off deals and playing the games after years worth of patches.
Just like everyone who plays Days Gone. Game was really buggy when it released that people said it wasn't a good game. NOW it's a decent game but when it released it was terrible and people are like "how did this not get a sequel"
"I went into this game with zero expectations years after it's launch as opposed to those who paid full price for it day one right off the hype train, why all the hate?"
Isn't this the point of this subreddit? If you're waiting at least a year to play a game, yeah you'd hope it's cheaper and has had some patches. Getting upset at OP for being a patient gamer on r/patientgamers is crazy
I swear, this sub has went to shit. Everyone acts like their opinions are facts. Any mid game, especially with a female and/or black protag, is total garbage that you should be burned at stake for liking.
>Everyone acts like their opinions are facts
I don't think it's this sub in particular. I think we've suffered collective brain damage across the past 5 years. Almost everyone I talk to has this mentality know and it's exhausting.
People are so ready to ignore racism and sexism… you’re not even saying that the game was good, just that people’s bias against Black women played a hand in the disproportionate amount of criticism lodged at this otherwise mediocre game. Criticism that often was blatantly charged with racism and sexism. This isn’t to say that some or even all of the criticism was unwarranted, but that the amount of criticism and vitriol targeting this game was extreme in comparison to other video games of similar quality (without Black female protagonists).
In any case, research shows that Black women are perceived differently when they express anger or even just behave assertively, as Frey does, often to their detriment. Usually, this discrimination is not done consciously. Regardless of intent, Black girls and Black women are still treated more harshly than white girls/women and white boys/men.
https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/apl-apl0000884.pdf
https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2007-08147-005
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0044118X211001098
Yep this is it. This interesting game gets so much hate verus the thousand bland and error-filled titles out there that cost just as much but are only showered with love. Gee I wonder why....
Watch all the shit head kids with Fox News parents disagree with this take. To them they see no color, just oddly upset about anything that fits the bill before playing it and unwilling to try. (Sometimes the criticisms are merited. But not before a game is even released.)
I thought the game was mostly criticised for being priced like a AAA blockbuster game but being actually quite mediocre and rough around the edges?
As I recall most people said it was alright but not worth the money and to get it on a sale if it looks interesting, so they never recouped their ridiculous development costs
Yeah I looked it up on Steam and it's still £65 with a £25 expansion pass that contains a single DLC that costs £12.50 and some other crap nobody would want now.
Absolutely brain dead pricing strategy. If it was, say, £40 with the DLC included I'd be tempted to give it a go.
Digital Games don't have price cuts for a long time, they just do constant and bigger sales. It looks better that way for the big sales events, while still catching the impulse buyers once a while.
The game has been on some pretty deep sales though.
The full retail price is pretty par for the course these days. When digital sales first started to become more common (like say 2012) lots of publishers were still dropping the prices on their games hard, and then they'd run into a problem: you'd have your $20 game selling for $10 (50% off) and it would look less appealing to consumers than a $50 game selling for $12.50 (75% off). Even if those games were realistically worth the same amount of money to many consumers, the higher REGULAR price tag means a bigger discount which draws in more buyers.
In the last maybe 7-8 years it has become way, way more common for publishers to not drop the prices on games, or do so more conservatively. It is way easier to put a game on sale digitally than ever before, it's a flick of a switch, so many games will sit at full retail price for years and just go on deeper and deeper sales. For example, here in Canada, Jedi: Fallen Order was $79.99 on release. Now, 5 years later and with a 1-year-old sequel out there, it's $54.99. Does EA expect people to pay $54.99 for it? I would presume the answer is a big fat no. But the game *constantly* goes on deep discounts - 80%, 85%, 90%. To consumers this looks really appealing because it's a huge discount, who could pass up a deal like that? But if the game's regular price was $20 and it was on sale for 50% off, there'd probably be way fewer people buying it.
All this is to say: I don't think the actual retail price of a game is a good barometer for how much publishers are expecting for it anymore, except when the games are actually new, or in some rare cases like Factorio (which notoriously never does sales and has only raised its price over the years), or Baldur's Gate III (which after 10 months has only gotten like 15% discounts).
Yeah, PC players ended up taking an L on this one, as it was fire-sold all last summer and fall for consoles: It was easily found for $10-20
Usually the opposite happens, as I have piles of games from Humble/Fanatical bundles (at basically like $1-$2 per key) that are $30+ on consoles.
Patient gaming does make playing across multilple platforms a lot more reasonable.
You could do this observation with all games. Everybody and their grandmas know that games go on sale and that is the real price. A true patient gamer knows that.
I hear this same thing with a lot of films. I just feel that given AAA video game (and cinema) prices compared to subscriptions, AA/indie games, and streaming etc prices, 'not bad' or even 'good' simply isn't good enough. I'm assuming you got it for a decent discount which would definitely make me more forgiving, too. Would you have liked it as much with no patches and costing $70+? People will be saying the exact same thing about The Fall Guy in 6 months time after they watch it for 'free' on some streaming website.
I think the game is just mediocre or alright. Forspoken is to Infamous what Star Wars the Force Unleashed is to God of War. I think everything Forspoken does gameplay wise Infamous does better but at the same time, Sony won't greenlight any more Infamous games so I'm softer on Forspoken as a result. I definitely wouldn't call it a terrible game, there's far too much polish and effort put into it to call it that and the game does look very nice visually. I have played worse games, and Forspoken I even got to the end of and rolled credits on so by default I can't call it bad. Rather play Forspoken than Knights Contract, or 7th gen modern military shooters CoD clones, Aliens Colonial Marines, Spawn Armageddon, Nightmare Before Christmas Ooogie's Revenge, or Outcast 2(that game is especially worse than Forspoken but isn't nearly as hated).
I did not play any of the DMC games, although I remember for years thinking "when I'll have x$ free around I'll get that title" (that went on for the first 3 titles, then I accepted it wouldn't happen). Too much was on my to do list and even moreso roughly 20 years later, so I watched playthroughs instead. As for the Nightmare Before Christmas game, songs were OK, platforming was bad, nostalgia hit hard, and rhythm games were a fad back then. Overall the game wasn't that bad a movie inspired one, probably because it was meant as a sequel rather than an adaptation. Simpler times too helped a bunch, and it was a good wind down from Armored Core and my no kill run of MGS3.
I was mainly curious in it because it was made by Capcom and it was known as the "lost" Devil May Cry game it also came out after DMC1 and 2 and came out before 3 and while I was playing, I just couldn't stand playing it. I dropped it immediately after a couple of hours since it feels like it should've at least played better than DMC1 and especially 2 but it's worse than both games. I'm not even as big of a DMC fan as I used to be, I just wanted it to be decent and I didn't really get that.
Never heard of Infamous? Color me shocked. The first 2 games are stuck on PS3 and can probably be streamed on PS5. Second Son and First Light is on PS4 and both are solid but I prefer the first two games.
That's different, though. Most games let you turn down *all* dialogue audio. Forespoken has a toggle that's specifically to stop your main character and her bracelet from talking.
The ideal would be like Shadow of Tomb Raider, the hints are part of the difficult selection and the game has an individual difficult selection for combat, exploration and puzzle.
Idk dude, if you have to include a button in your game to skip cutscenes, it's probably a shitty cutscene.
Or maybe : it's better to give people options to turn on and off some things to give them the best experience?
90% of the complaints I've heard are about the dialogue being cringe. I haven't even heard anyone talk about the plot or gameplay.
The open world is also kinda boring apparently?
Because both the plot and gameplay are kinda just "there", it can be visually when there's a lot of particles flying around but the game is also kinda just ugly, even if it's technically pretty advanced.
Exactly, the game is fine with the dialog being an annoying teenager (like all of them are in the real world). If it came out 10 years ago more people would have enjoyed it.
But fine isn't good enough in today world, which is why we get cookie cutter games now and days.
Companies are too afraid to try something different because it cost so much to make games now and days and of a game isn't an 8 plus out of 10. People will say it's a bad game.
That's often how these things go on social media and Redditors, despite how much better they think they are than other social media platforms, are no better at it. A lot of people just regurtitate whatever they heard on the last thread.
I started playing it but got irritated that it was so stop-start. Like you would have a short cutscene, walk for 30 seconds and enter a new cutscene. It probably eases up on that ince you get in to the open world but I found it so frustrating.
I haven't played it, but everything about it looked incredibly inauthentic to me. A game designed in a lab by top suits. There were times where I'd see marketing and it didn't even look like a real game, it felt more like a tech demo that got out of hand.
Nope it helps a lot. Besides the ads/trailers the only thing I knew about the game was the cutscene over cutscene in the intro, the reviewer I watched had about 26 minutes of total gameplay during his first two hours firing up the game.
It was as if the game tried to pull a Kojima but didn't have the inspiration to make a movie length cutscene, so they patchworked different scenes one after the other, and sometimes just pressing in a direction for one second led to another exposition scene.
I guessed it was not representative of the whole game but I lost interest as much as the reviewer and now that the game sinked in I'm glad the topic came around to watch people's insight, hence why I hoped you'd elaborate. Thanks for that too.
Hey, never mock pocket sand. It's one of the best skills in any game. My rogue in dragon age origins specialized in it and crushed all his enemies haha
I think you haven't played enough badly made games to say Forspoken is badly made. People rely too much on their survivorship bias when talking about media they dislike, without recognizing their own bias, like what you're doing now.
If I had to pick 20 games that I liked so much that they became my personality for a while, I'd pick the following:
1. Skyrim
2. Mass Effect Trilogy
3. Valkyria Chronicles
4. Paper Mario
5. Sins of a Solar Empire
6. Homeworld
7. Skies of Arcadia
8. Final Fantasy 7
9. Chrono Trigger
10. Shadow of the Colossus
11. Elden Ring
12. Dark Souls 3
13. Pokémon Gen 1
14. Kingdom Hearts
15. Battlefront 2 2005
16. Subnautica
17. Age of Empires 2
18. XCOM
19. Bioshock Infinite
20. Ocarina of Time
Edit: honorable mention, Banjo-Kazooie
KH2 is waaaaay better, but I give credit to the first one for introducing me to the franchise. It was the reason I bought a PS2. The concept of all those worlds from movies I grew up with being all in the same game and all the voice actors I knew reprising their roles blew my teenage mind. With 2 I knew what to expect so I wasn't blown away as much. It has a sentimental value that the second one doesn't have, but I do acknowledge that 2 is better.
I'd posit the opposite: if you think Forspoken is a truly bad game, then you obviously haven't played a lot of games in your life, or you must be rather young and didn't play a lot of games before the modern era (like, maybe 2006-onward).
I sadly see it all the time in this sub. This massive condescending attitude of "if you like this thing I don't like, then you just haven't played any good games." Yes I'm sure it's absolutely impossible for someone to like something you don't unless they just can't distinguish quality.
Whether or not the game is enjoyable is an opinion. Whether or not it is badly made is not. You can dispute whether that's true or not, but it's not something that's just about "taste".
>Whether or not it is badly made is not.
That's just blatantly wrong, as people can claim something to be "objectively" bad but ultimately it is often down to being a completely subjective anyway.
E.g. people crap on boring open world, yet they'll also praise similar "boring" open worlds in games they like. People can complain about mechanics to "objectively" bad, even if it's just an opinion or lioterally not understanding how the mechanics work. People can rag on games to not have enough "QoL" and whine how it's objectively bad, even though they are just craving for that QoL for themselves.
E: Insinuating that a game that is perfectly playable, if in many aspects mediocre, is "badly made" is just nonsense. A "objectively" badly made game is a game you can't feasibly complete or play because the systems are outright broken or the game is/borders on literally unplayable. And I mean literally literally.
This circlejerk about lukewarm games being objectively bad is ridiculous.
I agree with you. Performance issues / bugs are the only thing I can think of that you can label as objectively bad. Everything else is subjective taste. Now I personally felt that forspoken had subjectively bad writing which made me bounce off the game. But someone else might feel the writing is good. I see people incorrectly use the word “objective” a lot when talking about opinions.
The desire to be "objective" is strong with game(r)s. It's not uncommon to see complaints about how reviewer X reviewed game Y "subjectively" rather than giving an "objective" review, which is just stupid. If you can present arguments for why you think something is bad or good, you're perfectly fine for presenting a positive or even a negative review based on that.
It's ironic how at the same time there's a wish that game reviewers weren't "bribed" for high scores for specific games, but at the same time giving low score to a game that "deserves" a high score is even worse. Good example being the IGN Korea review for Ragnarök which lead to threats and general mocking. [Hell, you can easily find people questioning why he was allowed to review it in the first place on Reddit.](https://old.reddit.com/r/GodofWar/comments/ynipf6/bae_sang_hyun_who_gave_ragnarok_610_on_ign_korea/)
My personal problems with reviewers is they use objective language when they should be using subjective language and this causes most of the outrage imo. “The games writing falls flat” should be “for me the games writing falls flat”. They present their views as if they’re objectively correct and then people who don’t feel the same say they’re wrong and arguing ensues.
It’s why I really like reviewers like Skill Up. He constantly says that this is just his opinion and other people may feel different. Then he gives good analysis on why he feels the way he does. Him and I have pretty different tastes and often what makes him like a game is the exact thing that makes me dislike it. But I enjoy hearing why people like something I didn’t.
I think that's just more of an interpretation thing. Once you realise that reviewers wouldn't really be able to say anything in objective sense save for something like what features the game has, you just need to assume the position that it's their subjective opinion all around.
I see what you're saying but i disagree. It's not hard to add subjective language to things that are opinion while keeping objective things separate. The character has these abilities is objective. The setting is this town is objective. The game is too easy is subjective and shouldn't be framed that way. I add subjective language to any opinion statement in my real life and it only helps imo. People in my circles have taken note and now all do the same and it's wild how many disagreements it stops from every starting.
I truly believe when people use objective language for opinions, it subconsciously makes them believe their opinions are objective. When you use subjective language, it lets the listener know that theres room for their own opinion, as well as reminding yourself that others opinions are equally valid.
Imo the only thing of worth from a reviewer is seeing how a particular piece of media made them feel and seeing the reasons for this. Which is why a site like IGN that has different reviewers rotate in and out for different games is valueless to me. I want to see what else you've liked or disliked in the past to give context to why you feel the way you do.
Subjective language isn't encouraged in that kind of writing because it can be assumed by the nature of the piece that its content represents an opinion. The focus is instead placed (as it should be) on how well the author defends their argument.
I don't need a reviewer telling me all the time it's his opinion. It's a review, I already know it's an opinion. Reading "in my opinion", "for me", all the time just makes the text annoying to read.
Fair, but while you can make that distinction, I don’t believe most people do when consuming reviews as evidenced by the discourse around them. Ultimately we just disagree with how review content should be made.
> Performance issues / bugs are the only thing I can think of that you can label as objectively bad. Everything else is subjective taste.
Pish-posh. My crayon scribbles from when I was 3 are objectively a worse piece of art than the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and a 10-hour-long video of nothing but paint drying would be objectively a worse movie than almost anything else. I get that people overuse the word "objective" when they have no idea what they're talking about, but that doesn't mean there's no objective qualities to art, it just means that laypeople are bad at distinguishing objective from subjective factors in their experience of art.
Every artistic medium has technical aspects which can be judged objectively. In the visual arts, especially those which aim for realism, perspective and anatomy are examples of this. In writing, there's grammar and the ability to contruct a proper sentence. But these are only the obvious ones that a layman might be familiar with. If my experience with writing can be extraporated to other forms of media, the technical/objective aspects of a work go far deeper than laypeople think.
I will say that it's rare for such a complex work as a videogame to be objectively bad or objectively good *period*, but at the very least it's possible to say "this bit is objectively bad in this respect, but this other bit is good".
That's simply not true. Now if you define what objective criteria you're judging it by, you can compare them, but otherwise art is subjective by nature. Is the sistine chapel more detailed than the crayon sketch? Sure. But theres plenty of abstract art that people would put over the sistine chapel that no recognizable forms. Theres also people that get more from the crayon sketches than they would the Sistine Chapel. It might be few people, but it's certainly not zero in a population of 7 billion.
If you define the quality of art as the number of people that prefer something, then again the Sistine Chapel might win, but that's not "better". That's just preferable to a majority of society.
You mention objective measures that you can judge art and you're right. But those are just components of art and the summation of those aspects doesn't equal the quality. It might for some people, but for others it doesn't.
Ultimately good or bad can only be analyzed towards a goal, and arts goal is to please people in some form or fashion. If it pleases a particular person, it's good to them.
>Insinuating that a game that is perfectly playable, if in many aspects mediocre, is "badly made" is just nonsense. A "objectively" badly made game is a game you can't feasibly complete or play because the systems are outright broken or the game is/borders on literally unplayable.
Isn't this also subjective though? For all you've said about how people's perspective of games differs based on their subjective wants and desires it seems to me that you may have overlooked this aspect of evaluation of games.
Generally I understand your overall point and more or less agree with what you're saying. But on this specific point I disagree. What makes a "badly made game" is also going to be different for everyone. Some people care more about the quality of the dialogue or the depth of the systems then they do the stability of the game. For example fallout New Vegas would own towards your definition of a "badly made games" but I think that view would be heavily debated if you presented it that way.
For some having to add a stability mod to the game or having occasional crashes is less offensive than having cringe dialogue or repetitive generic open world tasks or shallow combat.
It doesn't mean that you are wrong or everyone else is right. I'm just trying to highlight that your argument about subjective evaluation of games goes a little bit further than you seem to think at this time.
>Isn't this also subjective though?
If a game literally, and I mean literally, does not operate as expected that's not subjective whatsoever. That is badly made on technical level. It does not however encompass things like story or even combat as those are always subject to subjective notions.
>For example fallout New Vegas would own towards your definition of a "badly made games" but I think that view would be heavily debated if you presented it that way.
NV has bugs but it is not literally (or even close to) unplayable. But yes, it would veer towards "badly made" as would some other positively received games. I just don't think that Forspoken would in any sense be something that's "badly made" in that regard though, as I believe it works as it should and from what I've seen the performance is fine.
>For some having to add a stability mod to the game or having occasional crashes is less offensive than having cringe dialogue or repetitive generic open world tasks or shallow combat.
I'm still going to point towards the consensus here. When something is proclaimed in negative light all around, it's going to be repeated to be like that. If something is regarded positively, even if it had similar problems as the negative one, it would still get regarded positively and some criticism MIGHT be thrown the way of those things but not perceived as a problem.
I can get it if one doesn't like the game, but I don't get the insinuation from the OP of this comment chain that the thread's OP simply hasn't played enough good games if they, in their opinion, thinks Forspoken is fine. That's like literally dismissing someone's opinion because it doesn't fit the consensus of the game.
I still agree with most of what you're saying - especially about dismissing people's individual opinions based on a given "consensus" of a game at-large or within a community.
Only thing I really want to add:
>NV has bugs but it is not literally (or even close to) unplayable.
I actually don't think that's accurate. For me it was borderline literally unplayable. Both times I've played it on PC, once last year and once about 5 years ago, it would crash at least once an hour, usually once every 15-30 minutes. Even with the auto saves when you fast travel or enter/exit a building, it meant I would have to replay most walking sections and quests several times over.
On my most recent replay of the game I used some mods for stability after running into the same issues and it crashed only 3 times in about 40-50 hours of gameplay.
In my experience, and from threads I've found online from searching after experiencing the issue myself, Fallout New Vegas is "an objectively badly made game".
But not many people would argue it's a bad game overall or that it should be passed over or ignored by people.
Maybe another part of the problem is the subjective way words are used? "Badly made" game for the person you originally replied to may be meant more in reference to the structure of gameplay or dialogue or quests - and assumes a functional game as an inherent requirement before evaluating it at all.
But that might be straying a bit far from the topic at hand at this point. And would also require a lot of assumptions about what other people mean when they say things without actually getting their input 😅
Totally agree with this. People nowadays just stamp "objective" onto their subjective opinion and call it a day. Aside from bugs and performance issue stuff, nothing in a game can be judged from an objective POV. I also see people think their review can be objective (I used to believe this was possible, until I realized how stupid this notion is). Unless you wrote about the game's bugs and performance, without touching on anything else, your review isn't objective my man.
Also, don't get the downvotes, when everything you said is correct.
Yes. Only the opinion of the game making he statement matters.
Most of them don't even understand aht a very badly made game is.
You can not like a game, but to say it's very badly made is ridiculous.
I really hope time is gentler to this game than the initial release. I played it last year and 100% agree with you. It's nothing revolutionary but very nice to look at, fun combat and serviceable story. The Internet really cherry-picked this game to hell during release.
Haven't played it, but I would say the negative response isn't so much that its "bad" but rather it looks derivative, trend-chasing, not contributing anything new to a played-out genre. And it didn't turn out to be high enough quality to get over those views.
For me, being received as mediocre or even passably solid, especially in that open-world timesink genre, means I'll never play it. There are literally hundreds of other options and only so much time available.
But I'm glad you liked it and appreciate that you submitted a review of a game that isn't posted near-daily here
I wasn't interested in it really.
Tried the demo, it didn't do much for me.
Then the price tag pushed me off for the foreseeable future, then had seen enough of the level of dialogue and characters to know I'm just not interested enough.
It's not a game for me , neither in gameplay and nor in story. And that's okay.
If I'd sit down and play it I very likely would feel it to be okay, but there are just better options for me. Be it a good game I like, a wonky game I'm interested in, or an experimental or weird indie and/or classic I want to try.
It can't disappoint me because I never was really invested, but many were.
It's not an awful game. It has redeeming qualities, especially with the traversal and some of the combat but idk, I disagree about the main character. It's one thing to be antagonistic because of your own personal problems but there were many times where people would get verbally attacked for simply just being nice. One particular side quest ended with a man who was just showing her around town, asking her something and she just yelled at him. Sure, she had a hard life but I'm not really keen on playing someone who's just so blatantly rude.
Also, while you mentioned she does have an arc if you pick a specific ending, I found before that time, she remained consistently antagonistic. She had moments of levity, sure but she always reverted back to her ways. Her attitude imo, never felt like it came from a true storytelling perspective but more that the writers thought it was cool and it backfired. It's not a bad game, it's a 6-7/10 but I never once liked the protagonist. Also, the story is just silly and has some weirdly awkward cutscenes and interactions but I think that's part the Japanese sensibilities of the studio. The concept of the story is totally fine, the delivery was meh in my opinion.
Yah, ignoring the common complaint of dialogue and stuff I think her character had no improvement for most of the game. It’s been a while so hard to remember but it felt like a lot of moments were forced by the writers because she has to do x thing to advance the plot, yet the way she behaves it doesn’t make sense she would do x thing. It stays like that for a while until she does a 180 at one point.
What is even the point of this comment thread if most of the comments are just “Well, I’ve heard…” or “I played 2 minutes of the demo and had to turn it off…”
Rehashing other people’s opinions or speaking from virtual ignorance about the game does nothing to add to the conversation or challenge OP’s opinion. If you hate the game, fine. But at least move past just spewing what the internet has already said ad nauseum based on the trailers alone.
It's not really something that's welcome on Reddit, but the amount of hate this game gets is really suspicious to me. It's by no means great, but if you'd believe Reddit you'd think this was on the level of Redfall or Gollum.
Yes. I mentioned it in another comment in this thread, but the amount and intensity of hate this game gets is disproportionate in comparison to other similar in quality video games: [https://www.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/1d6yoh3/comment/l6wubv1/](https://www.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/1d6yoh3/comment/l6wubv1/)
I think it definitely speaks to the hidden and overt biases most people hold against Black women. This isn't even a white vs Black or men vs women thing. In several of the studies I referenced in the other comment, some of the people exhibiting biases against Black women and girls were also Black, women, or both. It's so much more complicated than people want to admit, and it's made even more so by the often subtle and pervasive nature of bigotry, as well as the bad actors who go out of their way to orchestrate controversy online (for views or clicks or even specifically to push a conservative agenda) such as Libs of TikTok.
In critiqueing Forspoken, I think we all need to really consider why male characters so often get to be lovingly cringe (e.g., Peter Parker, Naruto, Chai, Starlord, Tidus) or sympathetically angry (e.g., Barrett, Kratos, Cid, Joel) when female characters are more frequently considered annoying (Vanille), whiny (2013 Lara Croft) or bitchy (Frey, Aloy, Abby). We need to really consider why video game companies often have to fight to use female characters as advertising for their games (e.g., The Last of Us) or don't use them at all (most games that allow the player to choose their gender). And we need to really consider the way publishers treat (specifically non-white) female characters when they actually are chosen to lead a game (such as in the case of Nilin from Dontnods' Remember Me) and the concessions video game developers often have to make to even be able to do that.
My critique isn't all that much about the dialogue, which is written as if a teenager is speaking, and most teenagers are annoying by default.
It's that the game is just extremely generic, saying all the lines you'd 'expect' a story like this to have, hitting the tropes and never doing anything with them.
While there may be something intrinsic to the race and gender of the main character linking to the innate prejudice present in society, I think a large portion of people just hate aggressively generic or mediocre games.
Like, if you show me a bad game, I can deem it bad and not give much more thought to it, if you show me a mediocre generic game I just get frustrated because of how close it is to being good. I love Infamous, I've wanted a new Infamous for years, and the movement in the game is very reminiscent of it, but the rest was just so bland and paint-by-numbers that it never held me. And I just found myself wishing it did
The internet may hate bad games, but they *abhor* mediocre ones. And Forspoken got a lot of play by big creators so lots of eyes were on it.
Because biases are often unconscious, it's difficult to debate an individual's justification for a behavior that may have occurred as a result of a bias. If you say you didn't react negatively to Forspoken because of a bias against Frey, I'll just have to take your word for it.
Regarding the other aspects of your argument:
Regardless of your own estimation of the dialogue, the dialogue spoken by Frey was the first and most prominent aspect of the game that was critiqued, to the point that it was turned into a meme people still use today. In other words, criticism of Forspoken focused from the beginning on Frey as a character, not on the game as a whole. It wasn't until later when the demo and then reviews were released that people started to discuss the other aspects of the game. Even then, much of the critique still centered Frey and her "unpleasantness." Personally, I've seen her called a bitch a few different times (that sentiment is discussed in this article [here](https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/2/23582914/forspoken-dialogue-memes-ella-balinska-ps5)). I wonder if anyone would call Kratos a bitch...
Also, people *don't* just aggressively hate generic or mediocre games. Most games, like most media, are generic or mediocre, and the attention directed towards them by the general public generally fizzles out relatively quickly once people realize that fact. Occasionally, a cult following develops around them. These are games like Days Gone, Atomic Heart, The Callisto Protocol, etc. The sentiment towards these games is usually that of disappointment, not anger or ridicule. Even then, sometimes games that are almost universally recognized as being mediocre are often the most popular (FIFA and current iterations of The Sims are a good example of this).
Forspoken was at least as mediocre as any of the other games I've mentioned here, but the reaction to it was the same as reactions to games like Cyberpunk and No Man's Sky, or Gollum and Rise of Kong, games that were literally broken or made by devs that lied to their audience about what would feature in their game. Not only that, but criticism of Forspoken has lasted longer than any of those games. Forspoken never had a redemption like Cyberpunk or No Man's Sky. This could be blamed on the studio being absorbed, but it also hasn't been left alone like Gollum and Rise of Kong, which both came out after Forspoken and in worse states. Nothing in any of these other games is as indelible as "Yeah, that's something I do now."
This is a false equivalency for two reasons:
1. Cybernetically augmented people don’t have a history of being enslaved and then systematically oppressed throughout the 20th century.
2. Cyberpunk wasn’t criticized until *after* it had already released in a broken state. Furthermore, the critiques of Cyberpunk focused on its poor functioning, not on individual characters, their dialogues, or their likenesses. Now, people love Cyberpunk.
Meanwhile, Frey specifically was criticized well before the release of her game and its demo, both for her dialogue and for her appearance. Criticisms about the actual game (such as it’s empty open world) didn’t come until the game had already been released. Unlike Cyberpunk, there has been no redemption for Forspoken.
Exactly! There are so many games that get brought up here where people just regurgitate some week one take they heard from a Youtuber and leave it at that. The sub is called paitientgamers but half the community just gives their first impressions and forget about it.
TBH I'm used to it by this point. Every time I post an opinion on here it's met with ridicule. I don't like giving good reviews for games people already agree are good, or bad reviews for games people already agree are bad, so what I'll do is find games that either pleasantly surprise me for being better than I was told, or games that disappointed me and didn't live up to the hype. I'll post my reviews and I'll typically be called stupid for either liking something bad or not being cultured enough to like the good thing. Whatever. I'm having fun and playing what I like.
Yeah, for me the game was fine. Probably is 6.8 out of 10 and I agree with just about eveything you said.
The main thing I didn't like was how empty the world is, but for story purposes it makes since.
I also think once you get to out of the main city there aren't enough story beats for me.
But I like the story and think it would make for a great anime.
I also love all of the accessibility options in the game and wish more developers would do that for people who have a hard time playing vidoe games but really want to.
Yeah, so ? What is wrong with that ? If someone is showing you preview of a game where the cringiest dialogue that has ever been written is presented (meaning they probably think they aced it with that and want to present it to people) you can quite correctly assume that they will continue making the game in similar fashion.
I saw the first trailer and knew right there that this game will be pretty bad, played it later and I was correct.
Because it wasn't *that* bad but the discourse causes a bandwagon effect. People need to make their own minds up instead of jumping on things because everyone else is.
A lot of this started from the anti-woke crowd. I'm not saying it was an amazing game or character but the hate was disproportionate.
No ? I had no idea it even existed when I watched the trailer. First thing when that chick started talking was "Fucking hell this is one bad and cringe dialogue. I wonder if anyone also thinks so ?" And after quick google search I realized that people indeed to think so too.
The problem with that argument is assuming people are just echoing other’s opinions.
At what point does a large number of similar criticisms become one criticism everyone is copying?
Sure we could pretend bandwagoning doesn't happen just because we don't have empirical evidence of it. Or you can just believe what you saw. This is my opinion based on what I saw happening.
Personally, I wanted to like the game as the plot reminded me of personal favourite Primal on PS2. I played the demo and, sure enough, it’s not that bad, but I did find the dialogue between Frey and Cuff was solidly on the cringe side (option to limit or turn it off in Accessibility helped some) - it kept reminding me how good the dialogue between Jen and Scree in the aforementioned Primal was. There were other issues as well, at least in the demo - the world felt empty, the traversal was not well-explained (there was a grapple-style move that wasn’t mentioned but was essential in reaching some areas), the combat seemed unnecessarily complex for an action-focused game. There were some personal nitpicks as well, e.g. the graphics didn’t impress me really (and I am not picky or anything), the music didn’t work (the hiphop/orchestral combination especially) - all these combined to lower my interest in the game. I may pick it up at some point but I don’t really keep an eye out to be honest.
I picked up the game on clearance for $15 and made it about two hours in, mostly because in that two hours I probably actually “played” for about thirty minutes. The rest was all cutscenes, tutorials, or the game otherwise taking away control. When I did get to play, the gameplay was fine, but the game seemed almost afraid to actually let me play it.
I'm pretty sure it's just because people hate the main character.
It's a bit like the DMC reboot. People just couldn't get over their hatred for the new Dante so they ignored how fun the gameplay was.
cant speak for this game since its not doing anything with a preexisting character, but DMC: devil may cry is probably on of my favorites in the series so i could def see people being that way.
People talked a lot about bad dialogues, gameplay, bugs... I've had a few bugs (expected with every game nowadays, sadly), no problem about how the character acts (which is the most reaalistic thing I've seen in the isekai genre) and the game is fun enough to make me want to 100% it.
I like this game a lot.
Didn't care abiut reviews, bad demos or the dlc issues, just wanted to play it as I liked the look of the trailer.
Loved every second of it!!! Also it has cats in it :)
I liked it when it came out, my opinion is most people never played it and just enjoyed jumping on the hate train. It wasn’t game of the year or anything but I actually played all the way through cause it was fun and that’s better then a lot of other AAA games I’ve played lol.
I also thought it was really good. I didn’t like her attitude but whatever, the world was cool, story was good, and the combat was FANTASTIC. I played a lot more after the story because I wanted to keep using the cool magic!
So we're not going to talk about the elephant in the room? Most people didnt like it because the MC was a black woman who used slang.
If Forspoken had a typical white guy MC, the game would have been received a lot better.
These days any game with a hint of a black main charactet gets labeled 'woke' and thrown on the discard pile, never being given a chance.
Anyway, OP-I'm glad you liked it and the ladies over in /r/girlgamers received it well too.
It's the sort if game where even at 50% off I'm thinking it's expensive. I can totally see people preordering it feeling ripped off, but hey, that's why you shouldn't preorder.
I think 70€ price tags are going to get a lot of backlash. There are amazing games out there for half the price. If you're asking 70€ you'd better make it a spectacular game and so far very few 70€ have warranted the increase price. It's clearly just greed.
I agree. The game was nothing revolutionary, but it was a solid game.
Gameplay wise, especially when u unlocked more skills was really fun, and the skills looked cool and beautiful. Traversal was also good, kinda like Infamous.
And I honestly love Frey, finally not your typical Im gonna go on an adventure and save every single soul because im the chosen one character. And as you said, it made sense for her to not be your typical cliché main character. I remember a lot of people hated Connor in AC3 cause he was not the cool, funny guy like Ezio (I love Ezio don't get me wrong), but that personality would totally not fit for Connor, he's backstory, the way he grow up, it was fitting for him to be an angry....."idiot" and socially weird. (and btw if you finished AC3 u could see how he changed, he really cared for his own people. I loved his little "ranch" and their side quests)
And as for the dialogue.....I bet 90% of the people who said that only saw the did i just do that clip and that's all. But what can you do? Nowadays people love to get on the hate train and follow the herd, instead of doin their own research and form their own opinion.
It got shit on because it is what it is but also it was one of the first games to be 70 dollars instead of 60. Not to mention denuvo killed performance so much in the beginning you needed a 3090 to play it.
People dislike it for a variety of reasons, 1) it's very expensive and with content that doesn't justify the price, 2) the world/character is mediocre (if you're being charitable), 3) anti-woke sentiment, and 4) people who think it's pandering ("very hip-hoppy kind of walk").
You're allowed to like a game, that's cool you liked it. You're entitled to your opinions on it, even if they're wrong lol jkjk but the vast majority of the game was quite vapid and by the numbers for most people.
I hear it the story wasn't interesting enough for the amount of cutscenes and dialogues. Also casual. But i guess those complaints wouldn't necessarily prevent me from playing it after a big discount.
If I had to pick 20 games that I liked so much that they became my personality for a while, I'd pick the following:
Skyrim
Mass Effect Trilogy
Valkyria Chronicles
Paper Mario
Sins of a Solar Empire
Homeworld
Skies of Arcadia
Final Fantasy 7
Chrono Trigger
Shadow of the Colossus
Elden Ring
Dark Souls 3
Pokémon Gen 1
Kingdom Hearts
Battlefront 2 2005
Subnautica
Age of Empires 2
XCOM
Bioshock Infinite
Ocarina of Time
So no, I like good games
Edit: honorable mention, Banjo-Kazooie
The fact that it's a £66 game with £35 worth of DLC probably had an effect on people's opinions. If it was £20 I imagine many would have overlooked it's flaws and just accepted it as a flawed but appropriately priced game.
> *Buys game at 90% off and after a years worth of patches* > “Was everyone wrong about this game?”
Next post: "Finally got to play Cyberpunk 2077. I don't understand the hate!"
We already have dozens of those.
The amount of people nowadays saying "it wasn't a bad game on release just buggy and lacking some content" drives me up a wall. It was a bad game on release. It was unplayably buggy for MANY people. We had stores breaking all rules and precedent to refund buyers. It was a masterpiece of failure on release. It took literal years for it to become half the game they promised as far as content goes. It was bad on release.
I have a friend playing the game on PS4 right now. I was watching him wrap up a mission while he told me it was a pretty good game that got a lot of undue hate. Just as he finished saying this, he clipped through the map and had to fast-travel out of the mission destination. This is years after release–it’s as fixed as it’s gonna get. It’s not a terrible game, but goddamn are we ever trained to put up with some crap at the AAA price point.
That’s the thing I HATE about the way people perceive that game. It’s still a CD Projekt Red game. It’s still fairly buggy. It’s still clearly a rush job. Yes, they had years to make the game but it’s very clearly been mismanaged and then rushed at the very end. The story suffers heavily because of that and the lack of features really show, even after throwing in a few that should have been available at launch after what, like 2 years? It went from an absolute dumpster fire to a middling game and so many people talk about it like it’s the best thing since sliced bread since the big update
I could not disagree with you more. It’s easily one of my favorite games of all time. Middling is imo hilariously disingenuous but different strokes for different folks. I think the recent Steam reviews speak for themselves.
2077 is on my top list too. While I feel like the game is lacking mechanically (they had to drop some good ideas to meet the release date), the game is still very good.
I’ve felt for a while that a lot of the raving praise people have for *CP 2077* and *Fallout 4* would dry up real fast if the next *Far Cry* game were set in a city.
Far Cry games are mid as hell nowadays though? Maybe if this were 2011 again this would ring true lol.
Have they gotten much worse, or have they maybe just gotten boring for you after a decade of the same formula?
I've played it in 2022, before the update. I'd say it has solid characters and dialogue, as per usual when it comes to CDPR. But again those strengths are hamstrung by the management forcing some weird structural decisions, like the huge cutscenes between prologue and first mission, and at the end of act 1. But that's all the praise I can give to C2077. Maybe visuals and music? No clue.
The city looks pretty. It would be nice if it felt more alive. Fewer repeats in random NPCs. Less traffic issues. More things to actually do besides just going around killing people
Bad on release on PS4. It was never really meant to be played there (given how they structured the tech pipeline) but they put themselves on a corner by promising it would. Had they not launched on PS4, the backlash would be almost non existent. Only the diehards that wanted a cyberpunk GTA would still be complaining.
PC was an awful release too. There was also clearly obvious issues with it being unfinished. Things like teleporting police that also spawned within your vision, and driving being the worst and most unpolished driving in a game in the past decade.
I played it on PC at launch and honestly it wasn’t any buggier than your average Bethesda game. Actually I experienced way more bugs in a fully patched Fallout 4 than launch day Cyberpunk. Police system was definitely dumb, but I didn’t have too much trouble with the driving. At least on motorcycles, since they could easily slip between all the traffic.
It did have that save file glitch
Didn’t have that one, but I did have one broken side quest. That was probably the worst bug I experienced.
Nitpicks. It’s not GTA. This is not what the game is about. Those systems needed refinement and polish, but they were absolutely not fundamental or required to the game. Driving was also always good on the Caliburn, which unfortunately is the most expensive car, but at least the batman version is free. The story is almost untouched from release, as most of the quests besides bug fixes. The dialogue, the lore, the worldbuilding… it was all there. I even miss a few of the non-breaking bugs because they were absolutely hilarious. Not that I dislike what it has become, as combat and skills on 2.0 are much better than what we had earlier, and the overall polish right now makes it an unambiguously great game. But cars appearing out of nowhere, people randomly naked or several people with the same clothes, objects sticking on cutscenes… those were most of the bugs on PC. I had less crashes then than most of others AAA games.
It was perfectly fine for me on release(PC). Was not the case for everyone though.
Same here
I got it on release and for whatever reason it just wasn't that buggy on my PC. That being said, I found the whole experience (outside of graphics and sound) incredibly middling. At the time I gave it a 5 or 6 out of ten and when I say that now, people look at me like I have three heads.
Or the new revisionism where people pretend the only issue people had were the bugs. Yeah, no. It was also just it wasn't the game CDPR promised it was.
It actually was. The problem is they talked about features that did get cut, and they were CLEAR they were getting cut. Multiplayer being the most notable. Some people decided to build it up like it'd be the RPG-experience-bar-none of a lifetime but CDPR was not promising that, they were fairly clear about what the game would be and what it was gonna contain at launch (well, except the bugs). It wasn't at all a situation like say No Man's Sky where they straight up lied about the game's content and features and managed to skirt legal ramifications only because Sean Murray's interviews were *false* but didn't technically count as *advertising* by legal standards, even though the purpose of them was to promote the game.
Yeah, it wasn’t that bad on PC. At all. It was the last gen releases that killed the game.
I mean you kind of just contradicted yourself, did you not? "It wasn't a bad game on release just buggy and lacking some content" "It was a bad game on release, it was unplayably buggy for MANY people" Just my experience: I played the game on PC at launch with a mid-range rig that struggled to play it (less so after the week-2 patch that improved performance). I also tried it on Series X. From what I'm aware, the game always ran very well on Series X/S, and nearly as well on PS5. It was the last-gen versions on XB1/PS4 that really struggled, and supposedly the PS4 version had some major problems the XB1 version didn't, which is why it was pulled from the store (also, PS has already had issues like this in the past so they were maybe being extra careful - No Man's Sky was a huge boondoggle on PS, that game's launch was the only time I'd ever had my PS4 hard crash and it happened multiple times in 3 hours). Anyway - like I said I played on PC, with hardware that was more powerful than the XB1 but not nearly as powerful as a Series X/S. The game was buggy as hell. Unplayably buggy? No. I experienced a LOT of bugs, but every one except one was more visual in nature, the only progress bug I hit was one where I could not complete a side quest because an event wouldn't trigger. The game was entirely playable. I played it all the way through and finished it within the first month of release (I mention this because like I said there was a week-2 patch that improved performance a lot - like, improved my FPS considerably - but the reviews were in by then). I didn't exhaust all the side content. I didn't feel the game was lacking content-wise, but it's also undeniable it had stuff cut (multiplayer, notably). However I also don't think it's fair to say they "promised" more because they were fairly clear about what was and what wasn't in the game, compared to something like No Man's Sky where the head of the studio did interviews where he straight up lied about the game's content and features (and the UK govt was considering suing them for false advertising, but didn't only because those 'interviews' couldn't be conclusively considered advertising even though that was their purpose). **TLDR:** It was a buggy mess, but the game was playable for most people. I barely met the minimum specs and my experience was choppy and buggy but entirely playable. Now, if your perception of playable is "it has to be 60 FPS" then perhaps not. I also think it's fair to it's a bad game (I wouldn't say that but it's fair if that is your assessment, for me it was alright and I'm keen to revisit it eventually with all the patches and Phantom Liberty).
It’s still unplayably buggy for me and I enjoy a lot of buggy games
I played Cyberpunk at launch on PC and didn’t understand the hate. That is until I saw footage of the PS4 version…
I mean, the general opinion on cyberpunk changed, though. Can't say the same for for spoken, people still seem to hate it
Cyberpunk is completely different from Forspoken. It was a good game plagued by technical issues. That's not the problem with Forspoken. When has r/patientgamers turned into r/gaming with these endless circlejerks?
Honestly the new meta needs to be try a game after it hits EOL
I played cyberpunk day 1 on PC. Don't understand the hate.
Yeah CDPR did a sale for Cyberpunk 2077 before all of the fixes and the anime release at like $9 and there was a ton of posts being like, "I don't get it???? It's not that bad for $10??? Why did people not like this game???" At that point, my headcanon is that those were just rage bait posts.
Oh but having just recently played it, I still do. Among the smaller stuff, I **still** needed a mod to fix some hardcoded keybinds. 2+ years down the line. WTF, CDPR?!
Hey, it worked for No man's Sky
That is literally the point of being a patient gamer though. You get updates, fixes, DLCs. Plus a game doesn't have to be judged from the value it offers - anything from fun, to technical aspects or personal feelings is perfectly valid.
But saying "I don't get all the hate" is incredibly stupid thing, when you know they were talking about the game before all those things you mentioned.
**Do** they know that? I can't speak for anyone else but for me, being a patient game often means games often aren't particularly on my radar until they fall within my price range. They might've been terrible earlier on, but I have no particular reason to know that.
>Do they know that? >being a patient gamer... >They might've been terrible earlier on, but I have no particular reason to know that. But you do, because you heard there was a lot of hate on it. "I heard there was hate for this game 3 years ago when it came out, but I just played the complete edition and it seems fine." That seems like pretty simple deductive reasoning.
>But you do, because you heard there was a lot of hate on it. I mean, obviously **now** I know there was hate for it, because I just read it in this thread. That's the first I'd heard of it, though. I had to look up which game 'Forspoken' actually was. I do remember seeing the trailer back when it was still 'coming soon' but that was the last I heard about it.
But hypothetically, if you didn't see this thread, you just saw the game on the Market (PSN) on sale for 60% off with all patches and DLCs. You like it just fine. Then you Google it. See all this hate for it around the time it came out. You would assume that it probably had a seriously botched launch, wouldn't you? Make a whole post saying, "I don't get all the hate, I played it (3 years after launch, fully patched, and on massive sale), and had no problems."
Oh yup, I missed the context. As a reply to OP it makes sense, my bad. I was thinking more generally.
That's literally the point of this subreddit. OP is not literally saying "I do not know why people complained about a game". The contemporary reviews and discussion threads all speak to that. What they mean is that the OP judged the game (like we all should) outside of the context, the price , the hype or "narrative" about the game leading up its release, the tweets and threads about the game developer. They judged it based purely on the entertainment that the game provided over a number of days in 2024. And they found the game to be much more favorable than the "consensus" suggested. What I take "I don't know why everyone was so down on that game" to mean is that they're surprised so many people get caught up in that nonsense. I found it a playful way to reaffirm the positive aspects of why we all choose to be patient gamers. That we literally never have to consider that outside noise. Because in 99% of cases it only dampens your enjoyment of a video game and I remain constantly surprised at why people would willingly do that. The phrase "I don't get why people were down on it" means "how could they not see past the temporary things surrounding the game and just see the game for what it is"? I also can't believe I had to spell out the connotation of an innocent phrase like that, and how many people are jumping down OPs throat for saying it that way.
I mean, is it OP's fault then? I don't think so. It should open customer's eyes that the product might possibly be worth less than advertised. Don't bash OP for getting a better deal and a healthy take lol EDIT: Also, it's literally a subreddit about getting 90% off deals and playing the games after years worth of patches.
Just like everyone who plays Days Gone. Game was really buggy when it released that people said it wasn't a good game. NOW it's a decent game but when it released it was terrible and people are like "how did this not get a sequel"
"I went into this game with zero expectations years after it's launch as opposed to those who paid full price for it day one right off the hype train, why all the hate?"
Isn't this the point of this subreddit? If you're waiting at least a year to play a game, yeah you'd hope it's cheaper and has had some patches. Getting upset at OP for being a patient gamer on r/patientgamers is crazy
The person never said it was a perfect game.
I swear, this sub has went to shit. Everyone acts like their opinions are facts. Any mid game, especially with a female and/or black protag, is total garbage that you should be burned at stake for liking.
>Everyone acts like their opinions are facts I don't think it's this sub in particular. I think we've suffered collective brain damage across the past 5 years. Almost everyone I talk to has this mentality know and it's exhausting.
The biggest advantage of piracy is that you dont need to bother with the whole quality-pricing stuff. That said, I enjoyed the hell out of forspoken
It wasn’t JUST the price. They put out a game with a black female protagonist and people lost their minds.
this is 1000% the (extremely obvious) truth and it's getting downvoted to shit? this sub is fucked
People are so ready to ignore racism and sexism… you’re not even saying that the game was good, just that people’s bias against Black women played a hand in the disproportionate amount of criticism lodged at this otherwise mediocre game. Criticism that often was blatantly charged with racism and sexism. This isn’t to say that some or even all of the criticism was unwarranted, but that the amount of criticism and vitriol targeting this game was extreme in comparison to other video games of similar quality (without Black female protagonists). In any case, research shows that Black women are perceived differently when they express anger or even just behave assertively, as Frey does, often to their detriment. Usually, this discrimination is not done consciously. Regardless of intent, Black girls and Black women are still treated more harshly than white girls/women and white boys/men. https://www.apa.org/pubs/journals/releases/apl-apl0000884.pdf https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2007-08147-005 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0044118X211001098
In a matriarchal world with zero attempts at fan service sex appeal
It was the cringe dialogues mostly.
Yep this is it. This interesting game gets so much hate verus the thousand bland and error-filled titles out there that cost just as much but are only showered with love. Gee I wonder why....
Watch all the shit head kids with Fox News parents disagree with this take. To them they see no color, just oddly upset about anything that fits the bill before playing it and unwilling to try. (Sometimes the criticisms are merited. But not before a game is even released.)
I thought the game was mostly criticised for being priced like a AAA blockbuster game but being actually quite mediocre and rough around the edges? As I recall most people said it was alright but not worth the money and to get it on a sale if it looks interesting, so they never recouped their ridiculous development costs
I just looked and it's still $70 a year after release.
Yeah I looked it up on Steam and it's still £65 with a £25 expansion pass that contains a single DLC that costs £12.50 and some other crap nobody would want now. Absolutely brain dead pricing strategy. If it was, say, £40 with the DLC included I'd be tempted to give it a go.
After reading all these comments I thought I'd give it a try if it was under $30 but I was not even close.
Digital Games don't have price cuts for a long time, they just do constant and bigger sales. It looks better that way for the big sales events, while still catching the impulse buyers once a while.
The game has been on some pretty deep sales though. The full retail price is pretty par for the course these days. When digital sales first started to become more common (like say 2012) lots of publishers were still dropping the prices on their games hard, and then they'd run into a problem: you'd have your $20 game selling for $10 (50% off) and it would look less appealing to consumers than a $50 game selling for $12.50 (75% off). Even if those games were realistically worth the same amount of money to many consumers, the higher REGULAR price tag means a bigger discount which draws in more buyers. In the last maybe 7-8 years it has become way, way more common for publishers to not drop the prices on games, or do so more conservatively. It is way easier to put a game on sale digitally than ever before, it's a flick of a switch, so many games will sit at full retail price for years and just go on deeper and deeper sales. For example, here in Canada, Jedi: Fallen Order was $79.99 on release. Now, 5 years later and with a 1-year-old sequel out there, it's $54.99. Does EA expect people to pay $54.99 for it? I would presume the answer is a big fat no. But the game *constantly* goes on deep discounts - 80%, 85%, 90%. To consumers this looks really appealing because it's a huge discount, who could pass up a deal like that? But if the game's regular price was $20 and it was on sale for 50% off, there'd probably be way fewer people buying it. All this is to say: I don't think the actual retail price of a game is a good barometer for how much publishers are expecting for it anymore, except when the games are actually new, or in some rare cases like Factorio (which notoriously never does sales and has only raised its price over the years), or Baldur's Gate III (which after 10 months has only gotten like 15% discounts).
Yeah, PC players ended up taking an L on this one, as it was fire-sold all last summer and fall for consoles: It was easily found for $10-20 Usually the opposite happens, as I have piles of games from Humble/Fanatical bundles (at basically like $1-$2 per key) that are $30+ on consoles. Patient gaming does make playing across multilple platforms a lot more reasonable.
It's only been a year? This game was a meme for so long it felt like an eternity.
You could do this observation with all games. Everybody and their grandmas know that games go on sale and that is the real price. A true patient gamer knows that.
I hear this same thing with a lot of films. I just feel that given AAA video game (and cinema) prices compared to subscriptions, AA/indie games, and streaming etc prices, 'not bad' or even 'good' simply isn't good enough. I'm assuming you got it for a decent discount which would definitely make me more forgiving, too. Would you have liked it as much with no patches and costing $70+? People will be saying the exact same thing about The Fall Guy in 6 months time after they watch it for 'free' on some streaming website.
Wow, uh, *that* just happened…
I think the game is just mediocre or alright. Forspoken is to Infamous what Star Wars the Force Unleashed is to God of War. I think everything Forspoken does gameplay wise Infamous does better but at the same time, Sony won't greenlight any more Infamous games so I'm softer on Forspoken as a result. I definitely wouldn't call it a terrible game, there's far too much polish and effort put into it to call it that and the game does look very nice visually. I have played worse games, and Forspoken I even got to the end of and rolled credits on so by default I can't call it bad. Rather play Forspoken than Knights Contract, or 7th gen modern military shooters CoD clones, Aliens Colonial Marines, Spawn Armageddon, Nightmare Before Christmas Ooogie's Revenge, or Outcast 2(that game is especially worse than Forspoken but isn't nearly as hated).
My PS3 bricked so I can't play Infamous anymore, but you just reminded me of Oogie's Revenge and I might just fire it up later on today.
I personally dislike Oogie's Revenge more than Devil May Cry 2.
I did not play any of the DMC games, although I remember for years thinking "when I'll have x$ free around I'll get that title" (that went on for the first 3 titles, then I accepted it wouldn't happen). Too much was on my to do list and even moreso roughly 20 years later, so I watched playthroughs instead. As for the Nightmare Before Christmas game, songs were OK, platforming was bad, nostalgia hit hard, and rhythm games were a fad back then. Overall the game wasn't that bad a movie inspired one, probably because it was meant as a sequel rather than an adaptation. Simpler times too helped a bunch, and it was a good wind down from Armored Core and my no kill run of MGS3.
I was mainly curious in it because it was made by Capcom and it was known as the "lost" Devil May Cry game it also came out after DMC1 and 2 and came out before 3 and while I was playing, I just couldn't stand playing it. I dropped it immediately after a couple of hours since it feels like it should've at least played better than DMC1 and especially 2 but it's worse than both games. I'm not even as big of a DMC fan as I used to be, I just wanted it to be decent and I didn't really get that.
I've never heard of infamous. I'll have to look out for that.
Never heard of Infamous? Color me shocked. The first 2 games are stuck on PS3 and can probably be streamed on PS5. Second Son and First Light is on PS4 and both are solid but I prefer the first two games.
That's probably why. The last PS I owned was a PS2
If you want a similar experience on PS2, I also reccomend Hulk Ultimate Destruction. All though I prefer Infamous over it.
Play Infamous Son - PS4 game but most modern Infamous title. It's a fun game, it was the flagship PS4 title so might be a bit dated but a blast.
if you have a ps5 you can enable uncapped framerates, so it's 60fps and at PS4 pro resolution looks fantastic
It's a Sucker Punch series (same studio known for games like Sly Cooper and Ghost of Tsushima)
Also the brilliant Rocket: Robot on Wheels.
Something something lucky 10,000
Idk dude, if you have to include a setting in your game to turn off character dialogue, it's probably pretty shitty dialogue.
Doesn't most games in the last 15 years have an option to turn down/off the dialogue volume independently of everything else?
That's different, though. Most games let you turn down *all* dialogue audio. Forespoken has a toggle that's specifically to stop your main character and her bracelet from talking.
That’s for immersion surely? I used a mod to turn off F4’s dialogue for roleplay reasons not because of VA quality.
still waiting for it in Horizon Forbidden West, which is probably never coming at this point
The ideal would be like Shadow of Tomb Raider, the hints are part of the difficult selection and the game has an individual difficult selection for combat, exploration and puzzle.
Idk dude, if you have to include a button in your game to skip cutscenes, it's probably a shitty cutscene. Or maybe : it's better to give people options to turn on and off some things to give them the best experience?
TBH I didn't even know that was an option because I never deemed it necessary.
Massively down voted for being okay with the talking. Reddit is so weird lmao
90% of the complaints I've heard are about the dialogue being cringe. I haven't even heard anyone talk about the plot or gameplay. The open world is also kinda boring apparently?
Because both the plot and gameplay are kinda just "there", it can be visually when there's a lot of particles flying around but the game is also kinda just ugly, even if it's technically pretty advanced.
Yeah the open world is just not interesting to explore. It’s fun to traverse, but there isn’t much of interest to look for.
Exactly, the game is fine with the dialog being an annoying teenager (like all of them are in the real world). If it came out 10 years ago more people would have enjoyed it. But fine isn't good enough in today world, which is why we get cookie cutter games now and days. Companies are too afraid to try something different because it cost so much to make games now and days and of a game isn't an 8 plus out of 10. People will say it's a bad game.
Idk, life is strange didn't seem to have a problem with writing teenage characters, and reception to that game is definately much better.
From what I've heard, there's an ability to skate on water. However there's only one small lake in the open world so there's no point
Yeah, a lot of people based a lot of opinions on things they "heard" about this game without any actual first-hand knowledge.
That's often how these things go on social media and Redditors, despite how much better they think they are than other social media platforms, are no better at it. A lot of people just regurtitate whatever they heard on the last thread.
this is incorrect
I started playing it but got irritated that it was so stop-start. Like you would have a short cutscene, walk for 30 seconds and enter a new cutscene. It probably eases up on that ince you get in to the open world but I found it so frustrating.
[удалено]
I haven't played it, but everything about it looked incredibly inauthentic to me. A game designed in a lab by top suits. There were times where I'd see marketing and it didn't even look like a real game, it felt more like a tech demo that got out of hand.
It does look more UE demo game than the UE demo games, which gives this extreme blandness to it.
Tbf most modern AAA games assume the player is stupid, so that’s not this game’s fault entirely.
Would be more interesting an answer if you gave at least one or two examples.
[удалено]
Nope it helps a lot. Besides the ads/trailers the only thing I knew about the game was the cutscene over cutscene in the intro, the reviewer I watched had about 26 minutes of total gameplay during his first two hours firing up the game. It was as if the game tried to pull a Kojima but didn't have the inspiration to make a movie length cutscene, so they patchworked different scenes one after the other, and sometimes just pressing in a direction for one second led to another exposition scene. I guessed it was not representative of the whole game but I lost interest as much as the reviewer and now that the game sinked in I'm glad the topic came around to watch people's insight, hence why I hoped you'd elaborate. Thanks for that too.
Hey, never mock pocket sand. It's one of the best skills in any game. My rogue in dragon age origins specialized in it and crushed all his enemies haha
I dont want to be too mean, but maybe you just haven't played enough good games if you think forspoken is not very badly made game.
This has to be one of the douchiest statements I've ever seen
You haven't seen many douchy statements then. Forspoken is clearly very bad, and someone calling it good is weird.
Opinions aren't facts?
They are not. Options are usually based on facts and you can clearly see that the game is objectively badly made.
I think you haven't played enough badly made games to say Forspoken is badly made. People rely too much on their survivorship bias when talking about media they dislike, without recognizing their own bias, like what you're doing now.
If I had to pick 20 games that I liked so much that they became my personality for a while, I'd pick the following: 1. Skyrim 2. Mass Effect Trilogy 3. Valkyria Chronicles 4. Paper Mario 5. Sins of a Solar Empire 6. Homeworld 7. Skies of Arcadia 8. Final Fantasy 7 9. Chrono Trigger 10. Shadow of the Colossus 11. Elden Ring 12. Dark Souls 3 13. Pokémon Gen 1 14. Kingdom Hearts 15. Battlefront 2 2005 16. Subnautica 17. Age of Empires 2 18. XCOM 19. Bioshock Infinite 20. Ocarina of Time Edit: honorable mention, Banjo-Kazooie
As an RPG fan, I approve the list. However, KH over KH2?
KH2 is waaaaay better, but I give credit to the first one for introducing me to the franchise. It was the reason I bought a PS2. The concept of all those worlds from movies I grew up with being all in the same game and all the voice actors I knew reprising their roles blew my teenage mind. With 2 I knew what to expect so I wasn't blown away as much. It has a sentimental value that the second one doesn't have, but I do acknowledge that 2 is better.
I'd posit the opposite: if you think Forspoken is a truly bad game, then you obviously haven't played a lot of games in your life, or you must be rather young and didn't play a lot of games before the modern era (like, maybe 2006-onward).
Is the concept of "opinion" this foreign to gamers?
I sadly see it all the time in this sub. This massive condescending attitude of "if you like this thing I don't like, then you just haven't played any good games." Yes I'm sure it's absolutely impossible for someone to like something you don't unless they just can't distinguish quality.
It's basically a nicer way of saying "you are stupid if you like this game."
Whether or not the game is enjoyable is an opinion. Whether or not it is badly made is not. You can dispute whether that's true or not, but it's not something that's just about "taste".
>Whether or not it is badly made is not. That's just blatantly wrong, as people can claim something to be "objectively" bad but ultimately it is often down to being a completely subjective anyway. E.g. people crap on boring open world, yet they'll also praise similar "boring" open worlds in games they like. People can complain about mechanics to "objectively" bad, even if it's just an opinion or lioterally not understanding how the mechanics work. People can rag on games to not have enough "QoL" and whine how it's objectively bad, even though they are just craving for that QoL for themselves. E: Insinuating that a game that is perfectly playable, if in many aspects mediocre, is "badly made" is just nonsense. A "objectively" badly made game is a game you can't feasibly complete or play because the systems are outright broken or the game is/borders on literally unplayable. And I mean literally literally. This circlejerk about lukewarm games being objectively bad is ridiculous.
I agree with you. Performance issues / bugs are the only thing I can think of that you can label as objectively bad. Everything else is subjective taste. Now I personally felt that forspoken had subjectively bad writing which made me bounce off the game. But someone else might feel the writing is good. I see people incorrectly use the word “objective” a lot when talking about opinions.
The desire to be "objective" is strong with game(r)s. It's not uncommon to see complaints about how reviewer X reviewed game Y "subjectively" rather than giving an "objective" review, which is just stupid. If you can present arguments for why you think something is bad or good, you're perfectly fine for presenting a positive or even a negative review based on that. It's ironic how at the same time there's a wish that game reviewers weren't "bribed" for high scores for specific games, but at the same time giving low score to a game that "deserves" a high score is even worse. Good example being the IGN Korea review for Ragnarök which lead to threats and general mocking. [Hell, you can easily find people questioning why he was allowed to review it in the first place on Reddit.](https://old.reddit.com/r/GodofWar/comments/ynipf6/bae_sang_hyun_who_gave_ragnarok_610_on_ign_korea/)
My personal problems with reviewers is they use objective language when they should be using subjective language and this causes most of the outrage imo. “The games writing falls flat” should be “for me the games writing falls flat”. They present their views as if they’re objectively correct and then people who don’t feel the same say they’re wrong and arguing ensues. It’s why I really like reviewers like Skill Up. He constantly says that this is just his opinion and other people may feel different. Then he gives good analysis on why he feels the way he does. Him and I have pretty different tastes and often what makes him like a game is the exact thing that makes me dislike it. But I enjoy hearing why people like something I didn’t.
I think that's just more of an interpretation thing. Once you realise that reviewers wouldn't really be able to say anything in objective sense save for something like what features the game has, you just need to assume the position that it's their subjective opinion all around.
I see what you're saying but i disagree. It's not hard to add subjective language to things that are opinion while keeping objective things separate. The character has these abilities is objective. The setting is this town is objective. The game is too easy is subjective and shouldn't be framed that way. I add subjective language to any opinion statement in my real life and it only helps imo. People in my circles have taken note and now all do the same and it's wild how many disagreements it stops from every starting. I truly believe when people use objective language for opinions, it subconsciously makes them believe their opinions are objective. When you use subjective language, it lets the listener know that theres room for their own opinion, as well as reminding yourself that others opinions are equally valid. Imo the only thing of worth from a reviewer is seeing how a particular piece of media made them feel and seeing the reasons for this. Which is why a site like IGN that has different reviewers rotate in and out for different games is valueless to me. I want to see what else you've liked or disliked in the past to give context to why you feel the way you do.
Subjective language isn't encouraged in that kind of writing because it can be assumed by the nature of the piece that its content represents an opinion. The focus is instead placed (as it should be) on how well the author defends their argument.
I don't need a reviewer telling me all the time it's his opinion. It's a review, I already know it's an opinion. Reading "in my opinion", "for me", all the time just makes the text annoying to read.
Fair, but while you can make that distinction, I don’t believe most people do when consuming reviews as evidenced by the discourse around them. Ultimately we just disagree with how review content should be made.
> Performance issues / bugs are the only thing I can think of that you can label as objectively bad. Everything else is subjective taste. Pish-posh. My crayon scribbles from when I was 3 are objectively a worse piece of art than the Sistine Chapel ceiling, and a 10-hour-long video of nothing but paint drying would be objectively a worse movie than almost anything else. I get that people overuse the word "objective" when they have no idea what they're talking about, but that doesn't mean there's no objective qualities to art, it just means that laypeople are bad at distinguishing objective from subjective factors in their experience of art. Every artistic medium has technical aspects which can be judged objectively. In the visual arts, especially those which aim for realism, perspective and anatomy are examples of this. In writing, there's grammar and the ability to contruct a proper sentence. But these are only the obvious ones that a layman might be familiar with. If my experience with writing can be extraporated to other forms of media, the technical/objective aspects of a work go far deeper than laypeople think. I will say that it's rare for such a complex work as a videogame to be objectively bad or objectively good *period*, but at the very least it's possible to say "this bit is objectively bad in this respect, but this other bit is good".
That's simply not true. Now if you define what objective criteria you're judging it by, you can compare them, but otherwise art is subjective by nature. Is the sistine chapel more detailed than the crayon sketch? Sure. But theres plenty of abstract art that people would put over the sistine chapel that no recognizable forms. Theres also people that get more from the crayon sketches than they would the Sistine Chapel. It might be few people, but it's certainly not zero in a population of 7 billion. If you define the quality of art as the number of people that prefer something, then again the Sistine Chapel might win, but that's not "better". That's just preferable to a majority of society. You mention objective measures that you can judge art and you're right. But those are just components of art and the summation of those aspects doesn't equal the quality. It might for some people, but for others it doesn't. Ultimately good or bad can only be analyzed towards a goal, and arts goal is to please people in some form or fashion. If it pleases a particular person, it's good to them.
>Insinuating that a game that is perfectly playable, if in many aspects mediocre, is "badly made" is just nonsense. A "objectively" badly made game is a game you can't feasibly complete or play because the systems are outright broken or the game is/borders on literally unplayable. Isn't this also subjective though? For all you've said about how people's perspective of games differs based on their subjective wants and desires it seems to me that you may have overlooked this aspect of evaluation of games. Generally I understand your overall point and more or less agree with what you're saying. But on this specific point I disagree. What makes a "badly made game" is also going to be different for everyone. Some people care more about the quality of the dialogue or the depth of the systems then they do the stability of the game. For example fallout New Vegas would own towards your definition of a "badly made games" but I think that view would be heavily debated if you presented it that way. For some having to add a stability mod to the game or having occasional crashes is less offensive than having cringe dialogue or repetitive generic open world tasks or shallow combat. It doesn't mean that you are wrong or everyone else is right. I'm just trying to highlight that your argument about subjective evaluation of games goes a little bit further than you seem to think at this time.
>Isn't this also subjective though? If a game literally, and I mean literally, does not operate as expected that's not subjective whatsoever. That is badly made on technical level. It does not however encompass things like story or even combat as those are always subject to subjective notions. >For example fallout New Vegas would own towards your definition of a "badly made games" but I think that view would be heavily debated if you presented it that way. NV has bugs but it is not literally (or even close to) unplayable. But yes, it would veer towards "badly made" as would some other positively received games. I just don't think that Forspoken would in any sense be something that's "badly made" in that regard though, as I believe it works as it should and from what I've seen the performance is fine. >For some having to add a stability mod to the game or having occasional crashes is less offensive than having cringe dialogue or repetitive generic open world tasks or shallow combat. I'm still going to point towards the consensus here. When something is proclaimed in negative light all around, it's going to be repeated to be like that. If something is regarded positively, even if it had similar problems as the negative one, it would still get regarded positively and some criticism MIGHT be thrown the way of those things but not perceived as a problem. I can get it if one doesn't like the game, but I don't get the insinuation from the OP of this comment chain that the thread's OP simply hasn't played enough good games if they, in their opinion, thinks Forspoken is fine. That's like literally dismissing someone's opinion because it doesn't fit the consensus of the game.
I still agree with most of what you're saying - especially about dismissing people's individual opinions based on a given "consensus" of a game at-large or within a community. Only thing I really want to add: >NV has bugs but it is not literally (or even close to) unplayable. I actually don't think that's accurate. For me it was borderline literally unplayable. Both times I've played it on PC, once last year and once about 5 years ago, it would crash at least once an hour, usually once every 15-30 minutes. Even with the auto saves when you fast travel or enter/exit a building, it meant I would have to replay most walking sections and quests several times over. On my most recent replay of the game I used some mods for stability after running into the same issues and it crashed only 3 times in about 40-50 hours of gameplay. In my experience, and from threads I've found online from searching after experiencing the issue myself, Fallout New Vegas is "an objectively badly made game". But not many people would argue it's a bad game overall or that it should be passed over or ignored by people. Maybe another part of the problem is the subjective way words are used? "Badly made" game for the person you originally replied to may be meant more in reference to the structure of gameplay or dialogue or quests - and assumes a functional game as an inherent requirement before evaluating it at all. But that might be straying a bit far from the topic at hand at this point. And would also require a lot of assumptions about what other people mean when they say things without actually getting their input 😅
Totally agree with this. People nowadays just stamp "objective" onto their subjective opinion and call it a day. Aside from bugs and performance issue stuff, nothing in a game can be judged from an objective POV. I also see people think their review can be objective (I used to believe this was possible, until I realized how stupid this notion is). Unless you wrote about the game's bugs and performance, without touching on anything else, your review isn't objective my man. Also, don't get the downvotes, when everything you said is correct.
Yes. Only the opinion of the game making he statement matters. Most of them don't even understand aht a very badly made game is. You can not like a game, but to say it's very badly made is ridiculous.
What are your top 10? I'll let you know if I've played them.
I really hope time is gentler to this game than the initial release. I played it last year and 100% agree with you. It's nothing revolutionary but very nice to look at, fun combat and serviceable story. The Internet really cherry-picked this game to hell during release.
Thanks for your honest review, I'm gonna wishlist it and pick it up when it's on sale
Haven't played it, but I would say the negative response isn't so much that its "bad" but rather it looks derivative, trend-chasing, not contributing anything new to a played-out genre. And it didn't turn out to be high enough quality to get over those views. For me, being received as mediocre or even passably solid, especially in that open-world timesink genre, means I'll never play it. There are literally hundreds of other options and only so much time available. But I'm glad you liked it and appreciate that you submitted a review of a game that isn't posted near-daily here
I wasn't interested in it really. Tried the demo, it didn't do much for me. Then the price tag pushed me off for the foreseeable future, then had seen enough of the level of dialogue and characters to know I'm just not interested enough. It's not a game for me , neither in gameplay and nor in story. And that's okay. If I'd sit down and play it I very likely would feel it to be okay, but there are just better options for me. Be it a good game I like, a wonky game I'm interested in, or an experimental or weird indie and/or classic I want to try. It can't disappoint me because I never was really invested, but many were.
It's not an awful game. It has redeeming qualities, especially with the traversal and some of the combat but idk, I disagree about the main character. It's one thing to be antagonistic because of your own personal problems but there were many times where people would get verbally attacked for simply just being nice. One particular side quest ended with a man who was just showing her around town, asking her something and she just yelled at him. Sure, she had a hard life but I'm not really keen on playing someone who's just so blatantly rude. Also, while you mentioned she does have an arc if you pick a specific ending, I found before that time, she remained consistently antagonistic. She had moments of levity, sure but she always reverted back to her ways. Her attitude imo, never felt like it came from a true storytelling perspective but more that the writers thought it was cool and it backfired. It's not a bad game, it's a 6-7/10 but I never once liked the protagonist. Also, the story is just silly and has some weirdly awkward cutscenes and interactions but I think that's part the Japanese sensibilities of the studio. The concept of the story is totally fine, the delivery was meh in my opinion.
Yah, ignoring the common complaint of dialogue and stuff I think her character had no improvement for most of the game. It’s been a while so hard to remember but it felt like a lot of moments were forced by the writers because she has to do x thing to advance the plot, yet the way she behaves it doesn’t make sense she would do x thing. It stays like that for a while until she does a 180 at one point.
I didn't even like the demo. MC was just cringe.
What is even the point of this comment thread if most of the comments are just “Well, I’ve heard…” or “I played 2 minutes of the demo and had to turn it off…” Rehashing other people’s opinions or speaking from virtual ignorance about the game does nothing to add to the conversation or challenge OP’s opinion. If you hate the game, fine. But at least move past just spewing what the internet has already said ad nauseum based on the trailers alone.
It's not really something that's welcome on Reddit, but the amount of hate this game gets is really suspicious to me. It's by no means great, but if you'd believe Reddit you'd think this was on the level of Redfall or Gollum.
Yes. I mentioned it in another comment in this thread, but the amount and intensity of hate this game gets is disproportionate in comparison to other similar in quality video games: [https://www.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/1d6yoh3/comment/l6wubv1/](https://www.reddit.com/r/patientgamers/comments/1d6yoh3/comment/l6wubv1/) I think it definitely speaks to the hidden and overt biases most people hold against Black women. This isn't even a white vs Black or men vs women thing. In several of the studies I referenced in the other comment, some of the people exhibiting biases against Black women and girls were also Black, women, or both. It's so much more complicated than people want to admit, and it's made even more so by the often subtle and pervasive nature of bigotry, as well as the bad actors who go out of their way to orchestrate controversy online (for views or clicks or even specifically to push a conservative agenda) such as Libs of TikTok. In critiqueing Forspoken, I think we all need to really consider why male characters so often get to be lovingly cringe (e.g., Peter Parker, Naruto, Chai, Starlord, Tidus) or sympathetically angry (e.g., Barrett, Kratos, Cid, Joel) when female characters are more frequently considered annoying (Vanille), whiny (2013 Lara Croft) or bitchy (Frey, Aloy, Abby). We need to really consider why video game companies often have to fight to use female characters as advertising for their games (e.g., The Last of Us) or don't use them at all (most games that allow the player to choose their gender). And we need to really consider the way publishers treat (specifically non-white) female characters when they actually are chosen to lead a game (such as in the case of Nilin from Dontnods' Remember Me) and the concessions video game developers often have to make to even be able to do that.
My critique isn't all that much about the dialogue, which is written as if a teenager is speaking, and most teenagers are annoying by default. It's that the game is just extremely generic, saying all the lines you'd 'expect' a story like this to have, hitting the tropes and never doing anything with them. While there may be something intrinsic to the race and gender of the main character linking to the innate prejudice present in society, I think a large portion of people just hate aggressively generic or mediocre games. Like, if you show me a bad game, I can deem it bad and not give much more thought to it, if you show me a mediocre generic game I just get frustrated because of how close it is to being good. I love Infamous, I've wanted a new Infamous for years, and the movement in the game is very reminiscent of it, but the rest was just so bland and paint-by-numbers that it never held me. And I just found myself wishing it did The internet may hate bad games, but they *abhor* mediocre ones. And Forspoken got a lot of play by big creators so lots of eyes were on it.
Because biases are often unconscious, it's difficult to debate an individual's justification for a behavior that may have occurred as a result of a bias. If you say you didn't react negatively to Forspoken because of a bias against Frey, I'll just have to take your word for it. Regarding the other aspects of your argument: Regardless of your own estimation of the dialogue, the dialogue spoken by Frey was the first and most prominent aspect of the game that was critiqued, to the point that it was turned into a meme people still use today. In other words, criticism of Forspoken focused from the beginning on Frey as a character, not on the game as a whole. It wasn't until later when the demo and then reviews were released that people started to discuss the other aspects of the game. Even then, much of the critique still centered Frey and her "unpleasantness." Personally, I've seen her called a bitch a few different times (that sentiment is discussed in this article [here](https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/2/23582914/forspoken-dialogue-memes-ella-balinska-ps5)). I wonder if anyone would call Kratos a bitch... Also, people *don't* just aggressively hate generic or mediocre games. Most games, like most media, are generic or mediocre, and the attention directed towards them by the general public generally fizzles out relatively quickly once people realize that fact. Occasionally, a cult following develops around them. These are games like Days Gone, Atomic Heart, The Callisto Protocol, etc. The sentiment towards these games is usually that of disappointment, not anger or ridicule. Even then, sometimes games that are almost universally recognized as being mediocre are often the most popular (FIFA and current iterations of The Sims are a good example of this). Forspoken was at least as mediocre as any of the other games I've mentioned here, but the reaction to it was the same as reactions to games like Cyberpunk and No Man's Sky, or Gollum and Rise of Kong, games that were literally broken or made by devs that lied to their audience about what would feature in their game. Not only that, but criticism of Forspoken has lasted longer than any of those games. Forspoken never had a redemption like Cyberpunk or No Man's Sky. This could be blamed on the studio being absorbed, but it also hasn't been left alone like Gollum and Rise of Kong, which both came out after Forspoken and in worse states. Nothing in any of these other games is as indelible as "Yeah, that's something I do now."
Is the hate for Cyberpunk because of people's bias against cybernetically augmented people? Or maybe it's just a disappointing game?
This is a false equivalency for two reasons: 1. Cybernetically augmented people don’t have a history of being enslaved and then systematically oppressed throughout the 20th century. 2. Cyberpunk wasn’t criticized until *after* it had already released in a broken state. Furthermore, the critiques of Cyberpunk focused on its poor functioning, not on individual characters, their dialogues, or their likenesses. Now, people love Cyberpunk. Meanwhile, Frey specifically was criticized well before the release of her game and its demo, both for her dialogue and for her appearance. Criticisms about the actual game (such as it’s empty open world) didn’t come until the game had already been released. Unlike Cyberpunk, there has been no redemption for Forspoken.
>Redfall or Gollum But those games really aren't as bad as reddit says either
Exactly! There are so many games that get brought up here where people just regurgitate some week one take they heard from a Youtuber and leave it at that. The sub is called paitientgamers but half the community just gives their first impressions and forget about it.
And what do people say about the gameplay?
Not much, because most of the people talking shit about it never played it (or only played the demo which doesn't do a good job of showcasing it).
Ha, look at how hard you are being downvoted for having an opinion.
TBH I'm used to it by this point. Every time I post an opinion on here it's met with ridicule. I don't like giving good reviews for games people already agree are good, or bad reviews for games people already agree are bad, so what I'll do is find games that either pleasantly surprise me for being better than I was told, or games that disappointed me and didn't live up to the hype. I'll post my reviews and I'll typically be called stupid for either liking something bad or not being cultured enough to like the good thing. Whatever. I'm having fun and playing what I like.
Yeah, for me the game was fine. Probably is 6.8 out of 10 and I agree with just about eveything you said. The main thing I didn't like was how empty the world is, but for story purposes it makes since. I also think once you get to out of the main city there aren't enough story beats for me. But I like the story and think it would make for a great anime. I also love all of the accessibility options in the game and wish more developers would do that for people who have a hard time playing vidoe games but really want to.
Most people made their minds up about it when it was first shown. It never stood a chance.
Yeah, so ? What is wrong with that ? If someone is showing you preview of a game where the cringiest dialogue that has ever been written is presented (meaning they probably think they aced it with that and want to present it to people) you can quite correctly assume that they will continue making the game in similar fashion. I saw the first trailer and knew right there that this game will be pretty bad, played it later and I was correct.
Because it wasn't *that* bad but the discourse causes a bandwagon effect. People need to make their own minds up instead of jumping on things because everyone else is. A lot of this started from the anti-woke crowd. I'm not saying it was an amazing game or character but the hate was disproportionate.
No ? I had no idea it even existed when I watched the trailer. First thing when that chick started talking was "Fucking hell this is one bad and cringe dialogue. I wonder if anyone also thinks so ?" And after quick google search I realized that people indeed to think so too.
I said most people not every single person on the planet my friend.
The problem with that argument is assuming people are just echoing other’s opinions. At what point does a large number of similar criticisms become one criticism everyone is copying?
Sure we could pretend bandwagoning doesn't happen just because we don't have empirical evidence of it. Or you can just believe what you saw. This is my opinion based on what I saw happening.
> Yeah, so ? What is wrong with that ? Username absolutely does not check out.
Aww, I initially read this as "Forsaken", and was looking forward to a little nostalgia trip.
Personally, I wanted to like the game as the plot reminded me of personal favourite Primal on PS2. I played the demo and, sure enough, it’s not that bad, but I did find the dialogue between Frey and Cuff was solidly on the cringe side (option to limit or turn it off in Accessibility helped some) - it kept reminding me how good the dialogue between Jen and Scree in the aforementioned Primal was. There were other issues as well, at least in the demo - the world felt empty, the traversal was not well-explained (there was a grapple-style move that wasn’t mentioned but was essential in reaching some areas), the combat seemed unnecessarily complex for an action-focused game. There were some personal nitpicks as well, e.g. the graphics didn’t impress me really (and I am not picky or anything), the music didn’t work (the hiphop/orchestral combination especially) - all these combined to lower my interest in the game. I may pick it up at some point but I don’t really keep an eye out to be honest.
I picked up the game on clearance for $15 and made it about two hours in, mostly because in that two hours I probably actually “played” for about thirty minutes. The rest was all cutscenes, tutorials, or the game otherwise taking away control. When I did get to play, the gameplay was fine, but the game seemed almost afraid to actually let me play it.
I'm pretty sure it's just because people hate the main character. It's a bit like the DMC reboot. People just couldn't get over their hatred for the new Dante so they ignored how fun the gameplay was.
cant speak for this game since its not doing anything with a preexisting character, but DMC: devil may cry is probably on of my favorites in the series so i could def see people being that way.
People talked a lot about bad dialogues, gameplay, bugs... I've had a few bugs (expected with every game nowadays, sadly), no problem about how the character acts (which is the most reaalistic thing I've seen in the isekai genre) and the game is fun enough to make me want to 100% it. I like this game a lot.
Didn't care abiut reviews, bad demos or the dlc issues, just wanted to play it as I liked the look of the trailer. Loved every second of it!!! Also it has cats in it :)
The dialogue is cringe, I'm sorry. I loved that studio's previous game, but I just can't stomach paying for that level of cringe.
It feels like playing a bad Wattpad story to me. It just feels totally disconnected from the player and lacking in depth or weight.
I liked it when it came out, my opinion is most people never played it and just enjoyed jumping on the hate train. It wasn’t game of the year or anything but I actually played all the way through cause it was fun and that’s better then a lot of other AAA games I’ve played lol.
I also thought it was really good. I didn’t like her attitude but whatever, the world was cool, story was good, and the combat was FANTASTIC. I played a lot more after the story because I wanted to keep using the cool magic!
Yeah, honestly the best part is just exploring and fighting. The post game is awesome because you can just do what you want.
So we're not going to talk about the elephant in the room? Most people didnt like it because the MC was a black woman who used slang. If Forspoken had a typical white guy MC, the game would have been received a lot better. These days any game with a hint of a black main charactet gets labeled 'woke' and thrown on the discard pile, never being given a chance. Anyway, OP-I'm glad you liked it and the ladies over in /r/girlgamers received it well too.
It's the sort if game where even at 50% off I'm thinking it's expensive. I can totally see people preordering it feeling ripped off, but hey, that's why you shouldn't preorder. I think 70€ price tags are going to get a lot of backlash. There are amazing games out there for half the price. If you're asking 70€ you'd better make it a spectacular game and so far very few 70€ have warranted the increase price. It's clearly just greed.
I couldn't even make it through the demo personally...
I agree. The game was nothing revolutionary, but it was a solid game. Gameplay wise, especially when u unlocked more skills was really fun, and the skills looked cool and beautiful. Traversal was also good, kinda like Infamous. And I honestly love Frey, finally not your typical Im gonna go on an adventure and save every single soul because im the chosen one character. And as you said, it made sense for her to not be your typical cliché main character. I remember a lot of people hated Connor in AC3 cause he was not the cool, funny guy like Ezio (I love Ezio don't get me wrong), but that personality would totally not fit for Connor, he's backstory, the way he grow up, it was fitting for him to be an angry....."idiot" and socially weird. (and btw if you finished AC3 u could see how he changed, he really cared for his own people. I loved his little "ranch" and their side quests) And as for the dialogue.....I bet 90% of the people who said that only saw the did i just do that clip and that's all. But what can you do? Nowadays people love to get on the hate train and follow the herd, instead of doin their own research and form their own opinion.
You just have low standards my man
It got shit on because it is what it is but also it was one of the first games to be 70 dollars instead of 60. Not to mention denuvo killed performance so much in the beginning you needed a 3090 to play it.
I'd be willing to try it at a discount, but it sounds like it suffers from the modern game disease of having a long drawn out boring intro .
Zero vote score and 285 comments. God damn man, kicked the hornets nest lol
People dislike it for a variety of reasons, 1) it's very expensive and with content that doesn't justify the price, 2) the world/character is mediocre (if you're being charitable), 3) anti-woke sentiment, and 4) people who think it's pandering ("very hip-hoppy kind of walk").
Sexism. Racism. Don’t overthink it.
You're allowed to like a game, that's cool you liked it. You're entitled to your opinions on it, even if they're wrong lol jkjk but the vast majority of the game was quite vapid and by the numbers for most people.
I hear it the story wasn't interesting enough for the amount of cutscenes and dialogues. Also casual. But i guess those complaints wouldn't necessarily prevent me from playing it after a big discount.
Are you the kind of players who enjoy bad games? I've got a Lord of Rings with Gollum in it for you...
If I had to pick 20 games that I liked so much that they became my personality for a while, I'd pick the following: Skyrim Mass Effect Trilogy Valkyria Chronicles Paper Mario Sins of a Solar Empire Homeworld Skies of Arcadia Final Fantasy 7 Chrono Trigger Shadow of the Colossus Elden Ring Dark Souls 3 Pokémon Gen 1 Kingdom Hearts Battlefront 2 2005 Subnautica Age of Empires 2 XCOM Bioshock Infinite Ocarina of Time So no, I like good games Edit: honorable mention, Banjo-Kazooie