Removed by mod

Because it’s pressvertising.

Veilguard has had a year (at least) of relentless, shameless astroturfing, ever since BG3 got GOTY, because EA knows it’s not gonna be even close to competing with it and they (rightly) fear Veilguard will get shat on, especially since Bioware is on a 2 games abject failure streak with Andromeda and Anthem both failing horribly and Inquisition having at best a mixed reception with how buggy and repetitive it was at launch.

As a rule of thumb: if an article comes out before a game’s actual release, it’s positive about an aspect the game or franchise is known to be lacking in, and it sounds like John Oliver’s parody of a corporate shill? It’s pressvertising.

It’s access-for-coverage, a trading of favours that stays undisclosed because technically no money changed hands; however, in the past we’ve seen what happens to outlets that don’t kiss the ring and use the access to actually speak negatively of the product, or even neutrally, so we know there is an implicit (and explicit if you know the history of these dealings) pressure to be positive at any cost.

So in short: it’s a bad article pretending to analyse the content they have early access to when really they’re just advertising the game uncritically. It’s literally just source-washed marketing material.

Here’s to a multi-year long process to port the campaigns from BG1 and 2 into 3.

I mean, would you? It looks like the most generic checklist driven product I’ve seen yet.

It’s so spineless it may be more lobster than game.

If anyone’s got a code they’re not using I’d happily take it off their hands 😇

Henry and Hans are going on a lads holiday. Awesome.

In reality you should be able to get an anonymized reference number to show your vote was tabulated correctly though.

The reason there is no such thing in elections, is to prevent vote buying/extortion.

In Italy it’s such an extreme problem that any ballot where the party is not marked with a cross on the party logo and (if present) a block capital name next to it on the provided line, is automatically discounted, because stuff like writing a name a specific way or using crosses, checks, dots, or other symbols was used to track vote buying/voter intimidation in mafia controlled territories.

Some vote counters and polling station overseers would be on the take and keep track of if the votes they expected to see showed up when counting ballots and report back.

If you were able in any way to prove something beyond the equivalent of an “I voted” sticker it would immediately be used to ensure people voted a certain way or to exact some sort of backlash on those who didn’t.

LMAO way to assume shit about me.

I only go by steam reviews and gameplay videos/demos, if the games aren’t recommended by someone I know personally.

Game journalism has always been essentially marketing, the publications are way too tied to the industry and way too dependent on advertising from the same companies and products they’re supposed to be criticising, hence why big titles that get less than an 8 are equivalent to normal games getting a 2 or a 3.

Good games will rise to the top organically, some might get lost in the shuffle but it won’t be the perennially 2 weeks late big budget crap apologists at whatever game “”“news”“” publication you care to name to fix that.

That’s all mainstream reviews have been for AAA games for the last decade+ anyway.

+1 for this, would be nice to have proper lemmy style spoilers.

Can’t have clever satire reinforced by mechanics, people might be too stupid to get it!

I fucking hate that we successfully fought the right’s obsession with media being meant to be emulated only to get the left’s version of the same.

Oh oof, it happened to a friend of mine as well, not fun.

Not fun to fix, either.

He’s objectively not that important of a person.

He’s the EIC of a tiny journalistic outlet that basically lives off of one or two of its content creators’ clout (one of whom was Frost), and a terminally online asshole on his own time.

Good for Frost for getting rid of that albatross, basically; Calandra is about as useful as a sawblade made of dicks, his survival in the public sphere is entirely predicted on people wanting to work for him, and any one person deciding not to is a step in the right direction.

He’s a culture war brained team sports guy who has his own doxing server and has sent actually organized harassment campaigns against the families of people he is beefing with online.

That guy shouldn’t manage a Target, let alone have a platform.

Good to see Calandra getting blasted publicly, the man is a humongous piece of shit so I hope yahtzee follows suit and I can go back to watching his stuff too.

Gonna sub to frost meanwhile.

They really should have called this “the palworld company”

Must have been the bass player.

Almost done with Persona 3 Reload, still the best story out of the 3D personas, and I’m starting on Manifold Garden, which is very interesting and quite trippy.

It’s Ubisoft, they’ve been allergic to finishing shit for decades now.

I love that this comes out of Dragon age’s dev team, as if they weren’t part of the reason why people started being so aware of reuse and just general laziness.

Also, nobody cares about reuse, we care about reuse that makes the game worse.

The fact that dragon age 2 had 6 dungeon tilesets they reused super lazily with a very mediocre random generation algorithm and they got shat on for it doesn’t mean all reuse is bad, it means the ratio of content to playtime has to be higher than whatever that fucking was.

But most of all, going from a completely bespoke, no repetitive side quests, all killer no filler CRPG to whatever the fuck DA2 thought it was going to be? Step down, no matter how much of it would have been original assets, it was just worse design and a lower overall level of craftsmanship. I could throw that gameplay loop together in a day of work, it’s just not interesting.