Not that I expect anything great from GI, but c’mon!! The game isn’t out yet and no matter what’s going on in beta right now, there’s no freakin’ way it represents the state the game will be in once it’s shipped and the throngs of unwashed masses are let in. Please! Someone make this stop!
I suspect the early reviews will only become more and more prevalent. Readers/viewers just don’t care. Also, GI is house mag for Gamestop. Their audience is built in. Why should they live by real magazine rules? Their book isn’t sold by them. Same goes for GMR.
–Dave
What is the new SWG release date anyway?
I’m gonna take a guess that this was a mistake. Wires got crossed, they thought the game was shipping, yada yada.
Game Informer was misinformed?
[snickers]
The first clue might have been the fact no one else was actually playing. You’d think other people in the game might be sorta necessary in order to explore its multiplayer-ness.
This mag - http://www.totalgamer.ca/ is about as bad as they get, or at least the print version is. Nothing gets below a B+ and every review is about 3 paragraphs or less.
Apparently this guy wrote GI and got a response - http://www.shacknews.com/ja.zz?id=7636368
Wow, that is a shining HTML metaphor for sweaty, stale unwashed ass.
Congrats.
Guess I would like to ask Steve or Jeff if their mags got this “review copy” of SWG too. I wonder if it might have been a copy sent out when they were still frim about launching back last month, then they changed it but the copies were already mailed out.
Even if this was a copy the publisher said was ok for reviewing you would think GI might want to review the game in a form close to what the gamers would get. I mean Lucas Arts doesn’t even have a new release date set. It could be months yet. This takes “beta reviewing” to the absurd.
Maybe a mistake that the review RAN, but you can’t possibly make this mistake in writing it. I mean, you can’t be sitting there, typing out the review, going “this is out, right? That game I was playing to write this review, it’s been released, hasn’t it? I’ve been playing a finished product all this time?” There really can be no crossing wires there. Nobody is THAT freaking dense.*
Why didn’t this happen a couple of months ago, when Steve wrote his infamous column?
We at CGM didn’t get a “review copy” of SWG. We’re not allowed to say if we’re in the beta, but let me just say that the beta is going on and there are still MAJOR changes happening all the time. Like DOZENS of fixes, improvements, optimizations, and changes almost weekly. Er… I mean, that’s what I hear. Because, you know, there’s an NDA about the beta.
There’s no freaking way Lucas/Verant thinks the game is in a reviewable state. Not if they haven’t lifted the beta NDA yet, even. I would hope and pray that they’re as totally pissed about the fact that it was reviewed as they should be. At the very least it’s a violation the NDA.
Was the review positive? I’m guessing it is - not much good being the shill magazine for a retailer if you don’t talk up games for people to buy.
[size=2]* except apparently Game Informer.[/size]
If you click through the shack link above, it has a link in it as well showing disgust at how well reviewed the game was in GI.
Pretty funny. I hope Verant/Lucas sue their ass off for violating the NDA.
Just think of the politics here though. GI is associated with Gamestop in a very big way. So essentially this puts a black eye on Gamestop too. I wonder if they’ll get involved in any disputes that might arise between LucasArts and GI?
Raph, I know you’re reading this. Let’s have some inside info!
–Dave
Yeah Guido, LucasArts/Verant is going to sue GameStop for the damage done from free publicity. :) GI has violated whatever trust it was depending on, hopefully lots of readers will pick up on that.
There is no “review copy” that I’m aware of. Sometimes alphas/betas are mailed that say “For your evaluation,” but if you’re ever concerned about whether something is reviewable, you just ask if it’s final.
But again, the minor problem with reviewing any massively multiplayer game before launch is the whole issue of it being “massively multiplayer.” Testing multiplayer at all is a problem when you have gold master CDs; unless you can set up games with other reviewers or the publisher, there’s no one to play with, at least until the warez kiddies have the game.
Even if this was a copy the publisher said was ok for reviewing you would think GI might want to review the game in a form close to what the gamers would get.
If the publisher said it was okay, you have a legitimate case to run the review. I can’t imagine LucasArts or Sony saying SWG was ready for review, but it’s possible they did approve it in order to get the review out simultaneously with the game; oops, it slipped. Game Informer has a high circulation due to its Gamestop affiliation, so maybe it’s worth it for everyone involved, I dunno. But you’d have to ignore a lot of missing features and bugs, with the promise they’ll be fixed, and you’d risk talking about features that may not appear in the final product. Publishers long ago lost any sort of credibility that they will fix things before ship, so unless GI is horribly naive and trusting, I’m not sure what they were thinking reviewing that game at that stage of development.
In fact, testing multiplayer at all is a problem when you have gold master CDs; unless you can set up games with other reviewers or the publisher, there’s no one to play with, at least until the warez kiddies have the game.
What warez kiddies are going to have valid, authenticated cdkeys for online play? None that I know of. It would be rather quaint to release multiplayer which does not validate cdkeys on the server side.
This is more true today than it was over the last few years, though Jedi Knight 2 had no validation. Some warez folks may have keygens for, say, all Microsoft products that might work, I don’t know. I don’t pay much attention to the whole ISO scene.
Steve is right, there is nothing that even remotely resembles reviewable material for SWG, and no way that anyone at Sony or Lucas would have said so, unless a dreadful mistake was made – and even so, I doubt that GI would have gotten the “exclusive.”
Betas however are freely available; I understand that one was sent out for every store employee of Gamestop or most of them anyway.
As far as I know there is no warez version of SWG floating around, at least not one you can play online using some key generator thing.
For other games there are ways to circumvent online keys like by using Kali (fooling the game into thinking you’re connecting through a LAN rather than the net) but that’s about it, and there has never been anything regarding a concerted breakthru on CD keys and online play, except for individual cases.
— Alan
For what it’s worth, we on the team found out about this review when a producer from Activision Europe walked up to us as we were demoing in the LucasArts booth at E3, and said “congrats on the review.” None of the LucasArts folks there knew anything about it either.
In fact, we got worried that given Steve’s editorial (which I thought was quite good) that it would end up reflecting negatively on the game and the team when the time came for reviews from other sources. Based on this thread, it doesn’t look like it will at least with you guys, which I am happy to see.
We were very flattered at the review, of course! :) Clearly, the reviewer is enjoying the game a lot, and I’m glad he is. :)
-Raph