This strikes me as a guy that probably wishes the mainstream news media would stop airing controversial subjects that confuse the rabble.
The cat’s out of the bag. Consumers want to know. They’ll find out whether you tell them or not.
If anything, they should have talked MORE about engine, maybe gotten SWTOR to not use the abomination they used. (Hero, was it?)
I have no problem with Unity or any game engine. But folks are completely justified in passing on a game if its made with an engine they have had numerous bad experiences with. It seems perfectly reasonable to ask which game engine is used and to pass if you just don’t like games made with it.
I really don’t see how “game journalism” has done anything wrong here.
Put me down as another eye roll for Mr. Forest.
I feel the same way. I don’t really have much of an issue with Unity by itself, and certainly it’s had a democratizing effect for indie developing, but it’s gotten its negative reputation based on some really egregious examples.
It’s basically the same with a lot of things. No one cares when you do the job correctly. When you screw up everyone hears about it.
This! Some games have bugs and performance issues when they get released but they’re fixed later. But SWTOR was based on a broken, obsolete engine that couldn’t ever be fixed. We have the right to know if a game is doomed to be bugged forever before we spend our money and time on it.
I think Adrian is being completely reasonable here. First off, note that he’s saying journalists’ focus on game engines was particularly bad in the late 90s & 00s, indicating that it’s less of a problem now. Second, he’s suggesting that journalists should focus on the “specific features the game has, not engine features”.
So Adrian’s issue is whether the features of the end product, i.e. the game, can be attributed to the choice of game engine. Even if, in your personal experience, you know that you’ve disliked a high percentage of games using the Unity engine, can you be sure that the Unity engine was the reason you’ve disliked these games? In other words, have you just discovered a correlation, or a causal relationship? Consequently, is it reasonable to make out-of-sample predicitons based on this experience and stop buying Unity games?
Adrian’s likely response would be that it’s not. There are so many confounding factors shaping a game, such as the ressources that went into different departments, the talent of the personnel in the respective areas, the quality of the project management, the ressources commited to QA, etc. etc… Even if you dislike the animations in Creation Engine games, or the recent Mass Effect Andromeda fiasco, can you really blame the engine for that? Maybe they were trying to build a pathbreaking animation system for the Creation Engine and failed, maybe they just considered it a non-priority, you just don’t know.
It’s perfectly fine that gamers and journalists complain about broken, bad, or missing features. What’s not fine is when they start attributing these outcomes to factors they know nothing about.
I would also say that good game journalism (yes, think of Tom) discusses games as a personal experience, highlighting emotional responses to playing the game (is it fun!?). Bad games journalism, especially prevalent during the 90s & 00s, treated game reviews as glorified feature check-lists instead. If you have all the features (visually stunning, right!?), there was/is this assumption that a game is automatically good and should be purchased. This is the perspective where reviews should be “objective”, whatever that’s supposed to mean. Personally, I’d much rather have people talk about whether and why they enjoyed a particular game!
When game journalists highlight a game engine in a preview article or video, they’re not typically the ones all fired up to talk about it. It’s usually the publisher or developer that wants to brag about how awesome their gee-whiz engine is, or how much work they’ve put into making a third-party engine uniquely theirs for this game. (Trust me. I get a lot of PR emails and they’re chock full of engine razzle-dazzle.) Many times, this is because developers are nerds and they want to talk shop about the kickass way they’ve solved a particular problem or share a cool programming methodology - think John Carmack waxing eloquent about lighting in the Quake Engine back in the day. Other times, it’s because a publisher wants to boost their marketing with buzzwords and “speeds and feeds” of their proprietary tech - think EA and Frostbite or Ubisoft talking about Anvil.
Now, there’s an argument to made that game journalists shouldn’t get caught up in the tech blather, but video games are inherently a tech-based hobby. It’s hard to separate the engine and performance from the product. Note that we didn’t much talk about the tech behind movies, choosing to focus instead on how a movie made us feel, until the tech took front-and-center of the screen.
There are a few highly publicized cases of a Unity game playing fine on PC then playing absolutely abysmally on console. Broforce on PS4, for example. In some of those situations, the developers themselves blamed Unity for having poor single-thread code, a subpar garbage collection system, and an underdeveloped porting mechanism. Whether any of that is true or not, developers saw fit to shift blame to the engine and that’s how it was framed to their customers.
The other big issue with Unity comes from one of its strengths. Because it’s so easy to use, and because it comes with a flexible and simple way to share assets - down to full game systems - it’s a great platform for amateur developers. But a lot of those same first-time-out game creators aren’t just using Unity as a learning tool. They’re putting their “babby’s first viddy gamez” right onto Steam or mobile and charging people to play their garbage. On top of that, you have straight-up scammers asset-flipping or outright stealing other people’s Unity creations as well.
If someone is wary of Unity games, it’s not a feeling that comes from nowhere. That’s not really a game journalist issue. That’s an issue for the folks at Unity to figure out.
Engine stuff is also often easier to talk about and show early on in the preview/hype cycle when dev doesn’t want to have to give marketing shit about the actual game (which is often if not nearly always totally fair, because stuff changes and/or isn’t done), but hey, look at how many foozles we can put onscreen in this rendering demo!
I think talking about engines is fair and necessary.
Two FPS games using the same engine are going to share many traits. Have similar limitations and problems.
Two games made from same engine basically started from the same frame and is interesting how each one solved the same problems. Sort of like two novels written by different authors but in the same universe.
Anyway I guest is possible to ignore engines and talk about videogames only has a result, ignoring how they are made. If thats interesting, is fair too.
Angry Joe, a pretty famous YouTuber and streamer, figured out that these weeks were historically slow, so he figured it would be okay to take a break from reviewing games for a bit. The problem is that people watch YouTube channels like they do TV shows. Changes in format or content are not welcome, and going on hiatus makes people cranky.
Angry Joe is learning what a lot of this generation have started figure out. Audiences build your business, but they can turn on you, and even the supposedly “neu-media” viewers of YouTube and Twitch aren’t as enlightened as they once thought they were. Turns out that they’re just people and they have very little loyalty.
I’ll never stop banging this drum, but gamers are most entitled pricks on the planet. I don’t know what it is, but it’s a thing.
The author of this video argues that neither Joe nor his upset fans are necessarily in the wrong.
On one hand, Joe has the right to do whatever he wants on his channel. On the other hand, the fans naturally aren’t going to stay fans if he spends less time providing the content they desire.
I like Joe, been watching his reviews for years. The skits get cringy sometimes, but the guy puts in the work and reviews are always both entertaining and informative.
I am fine with him disabling comments, nothing much of value is lost. Hopefully he comes back recharged.
I like Joe too. He can be entertaining sometimes, a lot of the time. His fans aren’t wrong though either, like was mentioned above. They don’t have to stay fans.
Did some promo work with Joe. Very much a straight shooter, great partner to work with (and was very up-front with his audience that this was sponsored content, etc etc). Nothing but good stuff to say about him, from that perspective.
It’s not that the fans are in the wrong per se, it’s how they are reacting to the vacation he’s taking that’s super immature. Not all of them, but the vocal ones. I mean, really? Can’t a person not happy with his taking a small break from game reviews just… I don’t now, NOT watch the videos? Do they have to be toxic and post shit like this?
24 people gave that a like, even. WTH.
The impassioned lamentations of love lost…
Haha, you mean I can’t rage at the History Channel when they stick a mid season hiatus in my show!!? Or you know when an actress cuts their hair. I hope Joe doesn’t experience too much backlash or loss but fans reacting badly to change… not at all unique to gaming.
Regarding game engines:
I think channels like Jim Sterling devoting dozens upon dozens of videos attacking Steam Greenlight/Early Access asset flip games made in the Unity engine are what contribute to the bad public perception. These are games I would never normally see just browsing and searching Steam yet there is a whole YouTube community that thrives on showcasing the asset flips for lulz and views.