Review Preview!

I'm still trying to finish classic Ironman!

It's a tough thing for the reviewers right now because there are so SO many games out.

And let's face it, FE is a difficult game to review. There's a lot to it.  It takes a lot of time. 

But I'd rather wait for a proper review than have a rushed one.  This is a 4X game, it's not going anywhere.

Yeah it is a difficult game to review. I'm reviewing it for my organization but you sort of need a week with it to play multiple games.

  The reviewers are only on the 1st X....or maybe some of them are busy with XXX 

Plus, TBSes don't tend to favor quick reviews.  Some reviewers love 'first impressions' ... I can guarantee, even if there were no bugs, players will be frustrated by FE because it is so challenging from the getgo, it takes awhile to learn how to deal with the monsters and ruffians and its very easy.  A thorough review, I think, would account for this and recognizing the difficulty is part of the thrill.

But, yeah ... how many hours you have on Xcom now? heh.

I was talking to a friend of mine who's a journalist about the difficulties of reviewing something like FE.

Most games today (PC or console) are designed to last about 6 weeks total. That is, the average person should have gotten everything they're going to get by casually playing it 6 weeks (or 40 hours of game play). Anything beyond that is a waste of budget (in theory).

My view is that this is an outdated way of doing things.  Digital distribution means games can continue to sell.  For example, the Stardock games unit could, if it wanted, survive purely on the sales of Galactic Civilizations II through various channels. That's not counting Sins of a Solar Empire or other games.   That's because that game has a very very long replayability curve.

Look at Skyrim. They understood this and I think it's one of the reasons it's been so successful.

Fallen Enchantress is similar to that curve. But it makes it hard to review.  There's 8 very different factions to deal with. There's a ton of quests that would take a long time. I don't expect people to see everything in FE for hundreds and hundreds of hours of game play. And that's the 1.0 version and not talking about modding or the scenarios.

But right now, there's about to be a new COD game, there's XCOM and other games that have just come out. It's a very busy time for reviewers. I think the best reviews will be the ones that have the opportunity to see just how much "game" there is to FE to dig into.

amen, I think it's a good sign that we haven't seen any rushed reviews yet.. would happily wait a week or two and be sure all the reveiwers played long enough to really 'get' the game and its depth

Does anyone remember the really old days of Entrepreneur?

That's how I met Tom Chick (famous reviewer). Most of the other reviews had blatantly not played the game for more than 10 minutes and gave it meh grade. TC was one of the few who had clearly played the game (he didn't actually like the game very much but it was obvious he had played the game and his review, while negative, was spot on).

I'll take an informed negative review over a drive by review any day. At least with an informed review, you can see if you agree with their premises.   Obviously, I prefer informed positive reivews the most.

I'm holding off on offering a user review, myself.  I know, user shmoozer, too many are very binary 10/10 if they like it or 1/10 if they don't.  Me, I do take my time, but I know it'll get lost.  Right now I'm trying to hunt bugs.  I know there was an effort to make 1.0 the big unveil of the campaign, and I anticipated that without the eyes and ears and bug reports of your Beta testers, it would be bound to have bugs missed by your QA team however dedicated and competent they are ... and, yeah, there's stuff needing fixing there.  I actually tried the campaign first, but the sandbox is more matured, so I don't expect that would have too many faults.

Some reviewers I note give games a try to a first patch or so, I think I will wait until at least the first patch, but I doubt many of the big name reviewers will offer such grace with FE given what a hard lesson WoM should have been which meant FE should gleam out of the 1.0 gate.

Ask that journalist friend if they have boilerplate language written already for all the COD games, EA games, MW#218, etc. coming in the future.  They can just treat it as an Ad-Lib and fill in the nouns and verbs and post it as a review.  Just kidding.

On a serious note.  A personal request.  I've been listening to the same music for 2 years now.  lol.  Can us beta folks get some different music.  Or just an option to turn off that one main theme song, or just cut it out of the loop.  I've left it on all night over the course of the beta to see if the game crashed when I came back, never happened, but my head is currently humming that song.

I love the rain.  First time I heard it I thought it was real.  All the music is good though, as anyone who can still hear sim-city playing can attest.  Now I got mario brothers in my head.  whatever....

thanks

I kinda like it, hints of GC2 music in spots.