Quoting: Beamboom

Quoting: Purple Library GuyYou talk as if professional reviews are much better. There are some good professional reviewers, but lots of them are no better than the average "user review"--a bit longer, is all.

Writing, and reviewing is a craft, just like any other craft. It requires something. Practise. Understanding. Insight. An editor. Directions. Professionalism. A structure, and above all an ability to view something as objectively as can be, and as nuanced as required.

Leaving alone for a moment the oddity of claiming that writing a few cogent paragraphs on any given topic requires "A structure", are you seriously trying to claim that the average professional game reviewer has all that stuff?

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Quoting: BeamboomI long for the day when the world no longer put way, way waaaaay too much value into "user reviews". Most regular users are unable to consider anything obectively, nor do they have proper ability to put things into context and weight the various elements of the game.
Thats why they have only implemented a "thumb up / down", cause in case of most users asking for anything more nuanced than that is too far fetched.

You talk as if professional reviews are much better. There are some good professional reviewers, but lots of them are no better than the average "user review"--a bit longer, is all. And of course quite a few professional reviewers, while perhaps skilled, have significant conflict of interest, being part of a machine whose objective is to sell stuff. This is a problem "user reviews" do not have. And while user reviews vary wildly in quality, looking through it's generally pretty easy to spot the ones worth paying attention to.

The thing about "more nuanced" rating systems, like 1-5 stars or whatever, is that people use them tactically so they end up being exactly the same as up/down systems. That is, if you look at a thing on one of these platforms, it will almost always have an aggregate "score" that is either higher and lower than you think it deserves. So if you rate it, you will rate it one star if you want to bring down the average and five stars if you want to bring up the average. That's what most people do, they don't rate based on how good they think something actually is, they try to push the rating to where they think it belongs. The "nuance" ends up pointless, containing almost exactly the same meaning as "mostly positive".

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I'd like to point out that there is a way already now of getting some nuance from the reviews beyond "mostly positive" or whatever from the aggregation of up/downs. You can, like, read some of the reviews themselves, which are right there on the page. Usually, the negative reviews say something about what they don't like. I know, radical approach, but I've found it useful in the past.

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The trailer seems very calming.

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Thanks!

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Somehow the trailer makes me think of computer game meets "Eliza".

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I gather then that XNA is some kind of framework or engine-ish thing that helps with writing games, which being Microsoft (ritually spits on ground) is Windows-only?

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Quoting: TheSHEEEPI'm really not a fan of all that furry stuff,

That sounds sort of odd coming from your handle and avatar. Are you some kind of wool-only chauvinist?

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Quoting: jens

Quoting: PlintslîchoJust many people voicing their dislike of Electronic Arts, and frankly, you find enough of those in other forums as well. Has nothing to do with the operating system.

It depends on what you want to achieve. Are you happy with the status quo, 2% market share, every 6 month an AAA game? Sure, treat Linux like every other platform, voice your feelings and I guess that the current situation won't change.

If you want to bring Linux to the mass then you will need players like EA on board. The mass of people want to open their legacy documents, listen to their music in proprietary formats and play their favorite EA games. Once Linux has reached a significant market share you have a voice that counts and are able to influence the industry, but not before and not the other way around.

To word it differently:
I would prefer to swallow the evilness now with a bigger goal in the long run ;)

I can see people being of the opinion that big companies such as EA building their games with Linux as one of the platforms is important for the future of Linux gaming and possibly even Linux on the desktop period.

I don't see why that means anyone should shut up about their contrary opinions. Indie developers sometimes pay attention to the things Linux gaming enthusiasts say online. But I am 100% certain that executives at Electronic Arts who exist anywhere near that mythical thing called a "decision" never, ever do. So no matter what any Linux gamer may say to diss EA on GamingonLinux, it will have precisely zero impact on whatever EA might or might not plan relating to Linux. Zero point zero zero zero repeating. So people should say what they want.

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Quoting: etonbears

Quoting: razing32

Quoting: etonbearsIt is notable that any "philosophical advantage" of open development does not yet seem to have produced a significant body of high-quality games.

If I may , wouldn't this have more to do with lack of other professions joining in also ?
Sure we have coders who can script a great game.
But without artists , musicians , composers , art directors , voice actors and so on , how far can we truly get towards a great game.
Just my two cents.

Yes, that's true. For the type of game you have in mind the artistic personnel greatly outnumber the coding team ( if you assume coding is not artisic ). However, it is entirely possible to produce high quality games where most or all game assets are created procedurally by the coding team.

The real reason there are few significant open source games is simply the cost in time to organise and create them. Doing it for free in your spare time becomes a never-ending slog which, if it ever does complete, produces something that is generally out-of-date. Many people start games, but few are finished.

Indeed, aside from issues around art and so on, games are an odd combination of big project, ephemeral, and subject to rapid obsolescence. Open source projects tend to have a sort of "slow and steady wins the race" thing going. Commercial products are normally made with a big push to ship followed by some bugfixing and then relative quiescence unless they decide to release a new version, at which point they'll do a big-ish push again. With open source--sure, there will be spurts and slow periods, but basically they do well by gradual development over a number of years, starting out crappy but after a long enough time putting in a feature here and an improvement there, eventually becoming on a par with or even better than proprietary alternatives.
But with games, by the time an open source project starts to reach the "not crappy" stage, it's obsolete, either technologically or because nobody cares about that kind of game any more. The few open source games with some success tend to be in categories that are unusually stable and not very graphics-heavy.

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