409 réponses à ce sujet

[StingingVelvet]

Rubbish Hero wrote...

deleterguy wrote...

Great succes, more console bashing..
Hey you guys, not all console players are retarded 12 year old.

The problem is, developers seem to think they are.

Yes, this 100% completely.

[Hulk Hsieh]

UndercoverDoctor wrote...

Rubbish Hero wrote...

deleterguy wrote...

Great succes, more console bashing..
Hey you guys, not all console players are retarded 12 year old.

The problem is, developers seem to think they are.

The sad truth.

Judging by the behavior of people posting in the forum, maybe the developers aren't wrong after all.

[DarthRomance]

I think whoever wrote the IGN preview was high.

[ShakeZoohla]

WingsandRings wrote...

ShakeZoohla wrote...

Aratham Darksight wrote...

Do game publishers really have any sort of veto power over what gets written about their games? Because if they do, then whoever signed off this piece deserves a hefty kick in the rear.

If not, however, then I find it ridiculous to say that EA/Bioware deserve this because "IGN was accurately reporting what the demo showed". IGN's assumption that every dialogue node would only have 3 options is a completely unreasonable one. The existance of a single such node in no way implies that generality. The freaking dialogue wheel itself has 6 spaces!

It would seem that IGN didn't bother to actually ask and confirm their assumption, since the Bioware staff running the demo would presumably know that it's not true. So unless EA really has the power to tell IGN "no, you can't publish that about our game", I don't see what else could have been done on their side to prevent this.

It's freedom of speech.  Bioware showed it, and journalists wrote about it.

I don't know what this article was, but FREE SPEECH did not come into play, dammit, unless Bioware was threatening to prosecute the author.

Which is what the post I quoted was suggesting. 

[Aratham Darksight]

ShakeZoohla wrote...

Which is what the post I quoted was suggesting.

No, I wasn't. I was responding to this:

TheMadCat wrote...

See the problem is this. Developers and publishers simply don't hand off demos to an outlet, tell them to write a preview for it, and then completely forget about it until the preview is released and to the public. Typically developers/publishers are hands on, are clarifying aspects, ect, as a sort of damage control to prevent gross errors such as these. Articles are also typically given several run overs to make sure they're not just nonsensical BS before putting it up.

So while IGN certainly has a poor track record, I'm certainly not pinning this all on the writer. EA/BioWare as well as IGN are at fault for this one, someone should have pointed out and clairfied some of this gross simplifications and misconceptions before letting this thing get posted up, if these are indeed gross simplifications and misconceptions to begin with.

That sounded to me like TheMadCat was saying that it's common practice for games sites to present their articles to the publisher for approval and I asked whether that was really the case.

[TheMadCat]

Firky wrote...

TheMadCat wrote...

Firky wrote...

TheMadCat wrote...

See the problem is this. Developers and publishers simply don't hand off demos to an outlet, tell them to write a preview for it, and then completely forget about it until the preview is released and to the public. Typically developers/publishers are hands on, are clarifying aspects, ect, as a sort of damage control to prevent gross errors such as these. Articles are also typically given several run overs to make sure they're not just nonsensical BS before putting it up.

How do you know developers and publishers have a hand in what is written in a preview?

Never said they have a hand in actually writing the preview, what I said was they don't simply hand off a copy and forget about it. Typically the writer plays the game in the company of a developer or two as well as a couple of other reps from the publishers to help explain things, expand upon features, and similar things. Demos are incredibly small and compact and it's easy for a writer to make inncorect assumptions so the developers and publishers do what they can to explain it in detail as the writer experiences it.

But do you know that that is the process or is this an assumption? It's an interesting question and I think it's quite relevant to this discussion.

Apart from frustration that a previewer accidentally made some kind of obvious error, I can't think of another reason why developers/publishers would want to have any other input into a preview. Do gamers want to read a preview that they think developers/publishers have influenced? Personally, I'd rather read a preview that mistakes darkspawn for orcs and know that the previewer's impression is genuine than it reading like an advertisement for DA2. Having said that, hopefully the previewer would have enough experience of the game/genre to question and correct major errors before submitting their article.

If anyone has proof that this is the way things are "typically" done, I'd be really interested to hear it. My experience of writing previews is actually the exact opposite - but one person's experience is one person's experience, of course. In my experience, you do just get a demo and never hear back from the developer/publisher. There is no pressure to write anything except your honest impression of whatever demo, interview, hands on, preview code you are given.

It's the process described to me by a Gamespot editor a few years back, they aren't simply handed a copy and told to go crazy. It's always in the company of a rep or two from the developer/publisher who commentate and clarify aspects of the demo as they go on. The article is always reviewed by the editors of the outlet to make sure everything is well written and appropriate and it's typically shown to a rep from the publisher/developer to make sure there are no glaring inaccuracies (IE. Orcs instead of Darkspawn). It's not tso much done to add pressure, it's just to make sure everything is clearly understood and there are no unnecessary amateurish errors which would put the outlet, the publisher/developer, and the game in a bad light when it's not warranted. 

[angj57]

This article would scare me if I had any faith in IGN's reporting on this sort of thing. But I don't. I remember a preview of Oblivion that implied that they had basically thrown out all of the Elder Scrolls lore; and while I definitely had problems with that game they certainly didn't do that. I also remember a preview of the Star Trek MMORPG that was clearly written by a guy who had nothing but disdain for the franchise and refused to even check wikipedia to figure out what it was even about.

It would be a shame if anyone took this too seriously.

[Haexpane]

I was being cautiously pessimistic before, hoping to be wrong and they would not strip out the RPG features.



Then the 1up preview repeated much of what the IGN preview said



"Ninja Gaiden.." combat

Press A to BadAss

[Tinxa]

It really annoys me that the 3 dialogue options shown is automatically taken that ALL DA2 dialogue is going to be like that. You just choose one line during combat, how many options does a situation like that need!!! It's like if they only showed that one scene of DAO where a guard demands a password and you get options:

*attack*

"Hey it's me! Just let me pass!"

"Er... The lion is sleeping"

And say : "You can only choose among 2 sentences of dialogue or attack in DAO" in a preview.