Jennacide said:
Therumancer said:
Portal 2 might be a great game objectively, heck maybe I'll love it when I eventually play it down the road, and be there two years later scraming it's praises belatedly (since I imagine it will be that long before the price goes down far enough for me to buy it). However, that doesn't change that what we're seeing here is a the result of actual reception from a good portion of the audience.
This week on "How to Undermine Your Own Argument" we bring you a great example by Therumancer.
You aren't allowed to have a nine paragraph tirade about how something is so bad, and ruining the industry, and is totally driven by greed, when you don't even own the game yet. Have you personally looked in the store yet? No. Have you seen the very tiny selection of items, all of them entirely cosmetic? No. Have you bothered to see that it WARNS YOU when items you can unlock naturally can be purchased? Nope.
I won't debate that Valve's timing on having it ingame the first day was the smartest, because I don't think it was personally. But what Shamus says is exactly spot on. And I'm not even someone that generally has a problem with Project 10 Dollar, since I only buy games new. (Though I draw the line at preorder bullshit. I have a nasty habit of pirating games I own just to circumvent preorder shit) The way Valve did the store is as unobtrusive as possible. Even TF2 has the big annoying Store Window on your main menu, the Portal 2 screen has it buried under an icon that you could not even realize it was a button, as many posters here have mentioned. And going back to TF2, the store was something fans wanted. So Valve took a leap of faith that people would want this for cosmetic fanwankery.
So it's okay that people go onto shitty websites like Metacritic and firebomb the user score with 0's as some sort of horribly misguided protest? Almost always having the audacity to say "the game isn't bad, dlc is teh ghey, so zero points!" Calling these sort of irrational people idiots as Shamus did is reasonable, I have much nastier words I choose to use. Sociopath. Retard. Entitled dipshit.
Before you go off on me, you might want to head back and read what I actually said. I have made no criticisms of "Portal 2" and it's quality as a game. Thus not having played the game is irrelevent. I am simply commenting on the reception it's receiving, which is something I'm in the same exact place for as someone who has played the game.
I did comment on DLC, that is true, but then again I say the same thing about DLC in general. It has nothing to do with Valve doing it specifically, since I've said the same exact thing about companies like Capcom releasing stuff that is just as trivial over the years.
HOWEVER, at the same time you might notice I also said that I think DLC has had little to do with what we saw with the rating slide I was commenting on. The reason being is that people have been critical of DLC for other games in the past, and it has had no noticible effect. People seem to be argueing that what we saw was the result of trolls, but then again trolls have been around for a long time, as have people angry over this issue. That means that for a visible ratings slide there had to be more going on than some kind of "raid" against the game.
I have no opinion on the game itself, because as you note I have not played it. I have not criticized it or it's quality. All I have said is that I think there are a good number of dissatisfied customers.
Now, if you read the responses I've gotten to my post you'll notice that plenty of people jumped down my throat the way you did, because they went into "attack fanboy" mode simply because someone said something that they thought was bad about th egame or their favorite company. Most people relented when I responded and they went back to read what I actually said. A few others have actually come out in support of what I said, after having read what I wrote the first time.
You might disagree with my analysis of the situation, but don't jump down my throat for things that are well out of context to what I was saying, or act like having not played the game has anything to do with what I'm discussing. The point I was making about having not played the game was specifically to point out that I am about as neutral as your going to get as far as the game itself goes, I don't love it or hate it, I'm looking entirely at the reception.
Now, since I originally wrote the message you responded to, the ratings have increased. Of course whether this is due to genuine reviews, or people padding the score, is impossible to say. Given what Bioware tried, it's quite possible that Valve managed to find a way to shill their own product but didn't get caught. Or perhaps things have just evened out to an accurate review score which is below the professional ones, but not terrible.
The bottom line here is that the fan response is less positive than anticipated overall, and notably lower than the professional review score. Mostly the point of my post is that the point losses early on that caused this aren't likely to be caused by the DLC backlash (even if I hate DLC) or some kind of troll activity, because those things generally don't have much of an effect when they hit other games, so why would they suddenly matter here? The only reason to argue that it's suddenly a big deal, is if your basically trying to defend this game BECAUSE it's "Portal 2" or a Valve game. If it was another game series losing points, would you immediatly assume it HAD to be trolls of one sort or another? Probably not.
