You mean like this one? :)
That was my thought when I read about it. Are they acknowledging that the FF game is an adaptation?
Not that I’m aware of, but there’s far too many similarities for it to be coincidence. It’s my go-to game when I need a Star Wars fix. Though I do wish that it had a combat engine that was a little closer to Empire at War.
I know that QT3 (read: Tom Chick) is on the FFG hate train these days, but I watched the dice tower review for this an it really looks pretty great. The only real ding I can see is that it is a long two player game, but the game itself looks great. I like that while there is combat and head on conflict, it also looks like it involves a good big of trying to outmaneuver and fool your opponent. That’s the thing I liked so much about TI3, it’s a galactic war, but there is a lot more going on than just fighting it out.
Using that logic you have to hate Tom Vasel as well. And really every boardgame reviewer ever, because saying “developers are (were) lazy” is pretty much done by everyone. Hell, you should probably ignore all reviews of anything. Games. Movies. Books. They all use the same terminology, of which “lazy” is a part of and has been forever (or at least as long as I’ve been alive).
I mean you can hate Angry Joe for a variety of reasonable reasons, but using the same terminology as every critic of every medium isn’t one of them.
I watched it played live(Tom Vasel brought his copy down here) and it’s very interesting. I think it has some really cool advantages over War of the Ring in terms of variability, and the sides are more asymmetrical. I do wonder about the balance, but we’ll see.
I think FFG cited the PC game as one inspiration. It is not an adaptation.
The basic mechanic of alternating leader activation works well.
The 2-4 players thing is just to be on the box. This game is only meaningfully 2 players.
I’m not sure if you mean video-games when you say “games”, but if you do, feathers are often ruffled when video game critics use the word “lazy”, in the same way they’re often ruffled when blanket terms like “visceral” and “fun” are used to add nothing to the conversation. “Lazy” implies the critic has some insight into the circumstances of the works development. If they do and qualify use the word lazy, I don’t see anything wrong with it. With video game development at least, I’ve never met a developer who acted lazy, even on games you wouldn’t think the developers would care about. Often there are very specific reasons that created that “lazy” implementation either having to do the production pipeline, targeting a different audience, or the idea the critic is pushing actually not being very good. If their audience doesn’t care about the conditions the product was made under (nor should they have to in my opinion) then maybe the critic shouldn’t imply to an otherwise unaware audience that a game is bad due to a lack of effort by the developers when they have no idea if that’s the case.
It does bother me when Tom Vasel dismisses games like that. At the same time, he seems to know everyone in the industry so maybe he is speaking from a place of knowledge. Either way, board game criticism is pretty new and almost none of the current big names in it have any sort journalist / criticism background. The closest we get on that front are the folks at Shut Up and Sit Down, and I can’t remember them calling a game’s designer(s) lazy. Seems like a totally valid reason to dismiss a critic. I still often like watching Vasel, but honestly there isn’t that much quality content to compare him to anyways, unlike video game journalism which sometimes seems more bountiful then video games themselves.
No, “Lazy” implies they didn’t try very hard in some respect or just copied shit they or others have done before. Which happens. A fucking lot. It’s an accurate term for development of anything. Hollywood is lazy when they reboot something. Bioware can be lazy when they made Dragon Age 2 (and they fucking were on nearly every level).
And I like how Angry Joe has to be a journalist but Vasel doesn’t cause Vasel is “new”. The Dice Tower debuted in 2005, Angry Joe 2008. But there were video game magazines before that, so I guess that means Angry Joe has to be a journalist. And all Youtubers are part of SAG. Oh wait.
Not to mention, the people who make games. They use the term. A lot. Actually, find me a reviewer who doesn’t use it.
Are you saying Tom Vasel can say it because he (recently) made a game? Are you pulling the “you can’t be a critic unless you’re also a creator” card? Because that’s a crap card. You hold one Youtuber to magical standards, but another Youtuber you don’t? Because… reasons? Because people didn’t review boardgames? Back when we had 5 boardgames that had been around for decades? Who’s reviewing Monopoly and Sorry?
I mean if you want to see Tom go full on Angry Joe. Everything he says could easily be said about a video game. There isn’t a magical difference. Hell, he even sounds like Angry Joe in this review. Like literally the same fucking words I’ve heard Joe use (minus cursing, but he gets pretty close imo).
Just because people worked on something doesn’t mean a company can’t be lazy. Lazy doesn’t mean everyone sat around and got drunk and did nothing. You’re reading way more into the word than anyone else in the industry, much less the general population. You don’t like Joe. Maybe his personality, whatever, but because of it you’re holding him to some mythical standard that doesn’t exist for anyone else. Do you hate Total Biscuit? Because he uses the term “lazy” in… every review basically. He hits the video options, if there aren’t enough of them, the developer is lazy. When it comes to gameplay, I’m pretty sure lazy is his most used descriptor over the years.
Now if you hate all Youtube reviewers, I don’t know what to tell ya. How you can think someone getting paid to review a game by the maker of the game has journalistic integrity, (and remember all the print magazines that came before the Youtubers and all the gaming review sites used that model and still do) but the guy who is independent from them doesn’t get to use a term that’s universally regarded as accurate and commonplace?
Visceral is meaningless, it’s a PR-word. Fun is far from meaningless. Hell, fun is the most important word to describe a game. You can talk about systems and UI and anything you want, but the ultimate question, literally the only one that matters for a game review is : “Is it fun?” If the answer is no, then it just becomes a matter of mental masturbation about what could have been and how someone else might later build on those ideas or whatever.
Edit: Also, it’s generally regarded as nicer than calling them “incompetent” or “idiots”. Lazy assumes the developers could do better and chose not to. The alternative is that they don’t know how to/can’t do their jobs, which is a much harsher criticism. If I say you half-assed something, it means I think you can do better. If I say you’re an idiot that can’t do anything right, I’m not implying you can do better, I’m straight out saying you can’t.
Who are you talking to? I’m not Greatatlantic, I just share their view on the use of the word “lazy”. I don’t even know who Angry Joe is other than the discussion here and don’t think I said anything about my opinion of him vs Vasel. I specifically said it bothers me when Tom Vasel does reviews like that, and have no idea where this nonsense about him being a developer had any affect on my opinion of him. I wanted to respond to your assertion that it’s ludicrous to be bothered by the use of “lazy” to point out there is precedence for people being bothered by it because you seemed to think this was completely out of the blue. I’m more willing to put up with criticism I don’t like in board game reviews because there’s less of it that’s any good, so I’m happy to watch Vasel talk about board games in a way I’d probably not be as happy with in video game journalism since there are so many other people I can read / watch instead. That doesn’t make Vasel better, it makes me more tolerant in that space.
Glancing over my post again, I’m pretty sure I never mentioned hating anyone. I can’t even imagine saying I hate a critic because I don’t like the way they talk about games. You seem to have a ton of pent up anger against arguments I didn’t make. What I can tell you is that it does bother me when Total Biscuit calls game developers lazy so I can relate to someone deciding to stop watching his videos as a consequence.
I think Dragon Age 2 is a great example of where that word gets weird. To take one example: there’s plenty to complain about with how boring the reused environments are. That doesn’t mean the reason they were reused was laziness. I don’t know what happened behind the scenes, but some possible alternative explanations: The environment and texture art was of a much a higher quality then their previous game so they ended up having to reduce the number of environments so that they could fit on one disc (perhaps a requirement imposed by a publisher); Feedback on the tinniness of the voice-overs in the first game convinced them to budget more space for uncompressed audio then environment art (which takes up a crap-ton of space); They were asked to develop a fully realized sequel in a year and in spite of crunching the whole time, were unable to create and implement all the environments the story called for, so they had to reuse stuff; They made an (arguably poor) artistic decision to focus on a small number of repeating locations to drive home how those locations have changed over time.
There are tons of coherent ways to talk about how much worse the game is for repeating locations without implying the game was made by lazy developers. If you don’t agree that’s what’s being implied with the use of the word lazy, reread your sentence about Dragon Age 2 which explicitly calls out Bioware as the subject of laziness.
I’m on quite the opposite end of the spectrum. I’m absolutely adoring some of the recent FFG stuff. In general I have a history of liking various FFG stuff, though not all by any means. But this looks so great, and their track record with Star Wars (and big licensed games in general really) has been strong.
Between X-wing and this I have every Star Wars game I could ever want. Well that and the old Epic Duels. Hey, it’s a fun game, if a bit unbalanced (Yoda is OP)
Eh, it’s been a long day. My bad, just ignore it. I still think going after a term that is effectively a standard in reviewing everything makes no sense.
Wow. That’s everything I had hoped to hear and more.
Stop being ‘At The Printer,’ Rebellion. I need to play you!
oooh, didn’t realize that was on gog. I haven’t played that since it came out. I loved it and all my friends panned it.
It’s a little crashy towards the late game, unfortunately. Without an autosave, you really need to remind yourself to save often or you could find yourself having to repeat large swaths.
One of my best friends and I were talking about this last night. Cannot wait for it. And I have to say I am really happy with FFG. I can’t afford a lot of their stuff so that totally sucks, but I love what they do, their quality.
I’ve watched Tom’s review now and read all the FFG previews. While this looks like it could be a lot of fun, and I’d certainly love to give it a spin, a part of me wishes I could peek into an alternate universe where some other company was able to do their take on it. I generally like playing FFG games, but many of them seem to start designing with two mechanics: a) custom dice for event (usually combat) resolution and b) lots of (usually small) cards that twist the rules. I saw an interview with Christian Petersen where he talked about how the fans of FFG games basically expect them all to feel roughly the same, and so I understand why Rebellion is another game that fits that mold, but it sure would be nice to see an epic, galactic scale Star Wars game did something pretty innovative as well.
That said, accepting its from FFG, the combat system at least looks fairly interesting. I like the way that big units and small units can hurt each other, but its much more difficult than big/big and small/small fights. So there’s the possibility for some interesting storytelling where a lone remaining X-Wing (or X-Wing squadron?) took out a Star Destroyer.
I might be wrong, but I think FFG doesn’t have the license to distribute Star Wars board games (I believe Hasbro does), only card and miniature games. It could be that they had to put miniatures in for legal reasons, so they can skirt the licensing issues and call it a miniature game.
The game seems pretty innovative and unlike their other games to me, and I’ve played all their dudes on a map games.
Rules are posted now:
Hopefully it really is just down to a couple of weeks till the game is available to us non-youtubers. I am starting to understand Tom’s uptick in video activity ;)
Tom Mc
THANK YOU Tom Mc! I am so excited for this one and pray that I get this in early April. Once a year I have a War of the Wing session with three of my pals, and this might have to become a tradition as well. It’s like my dream board game.