That's what's funny about how your reasoning works. You'll take the fact that review bombing happens and conflate that into convincing yourself it's "proof" that this is what happened to DoW III, and that's why it failed.
You can't actually support that argument, however, nor can you even adequately explain WHY people review-bombed DoW III. The silliness about back-flipping Gabe was reasonable criticism, as was the MOBA-style gameplay and graphics. You may not agree with it, but it was legitimate criticism. People weren't angry at Relic for anything unrelated (think Brie Larson with Captain Marvel). The criticism was gameplay-related.
Even if we did accept that there was some concerted effort to review-bomb DoW III, your argument falls flat on its face anyways for one key reason: review-bombing doesn't even work! Good games/movies will survive and thrive amidst the pathetic criticism of trolls, because people are generally intelligent enough to see when it's happening!
It's definitely not always, but it certainly is usually.
The problem with the review bomb argument is that it supposes there's an unusually large group of idiots unfairly attacking DoW III (for reasons unexplained). On top of that, it requires you to believe that people were dumb/ignorant and fell for it.
The argument you'd have us believe, therefore, is that a bunch of vicious idiots convinced a bunch of thoughtless fools that game is bad. Ignore all of the documented criticism and how the simpler and more reasonable explanation is that people just straight-up didn't enjoy the game.
I'll leave you with that. See you perhaps in 2020 (if this forum is still around).
This is a continuation of the DoW II community site (it even has the same web address), which existed far beyond the lifecycle of DoW II. Some people even date back that far (and I'm not even talking about me), so I wouldn't worry
@Amoc said:
That's what's funny about how your reasoning works. You'll take the fact that review bombing happens and conflate that into convincing yourself it's "proof" that this is what happened to DoW III, and that's why it failed.
No, I take the fact that day 1, tons of negative reviews flooded the page, most with less than 2 hours played as proof. AKA review bombing. It takes more than 2 hours to get to grips with a strategy game. Anyone reviewing with less than that is insincere at best.
@Amoc said:
You can't actually support that argument, however, nor can you even adequately explain WHY people review-bombed DoW III. The silliness about back-flipping Gabe was reasonable criticism, as was the MOBA-style gameplay and graphics. You may not agree with it, but it was legitimate criticism. People weren't angry at Relic for anything unrelated (think Brie Larson with Captain Marvel). The criticism was gameplay-related.
It wasn't reasonable criticism. For one thing, Gabe doesn't backflip. He does a forward flip. So everyone repeating "Backflip" (yourself included) is merely parroting a propaganda talking point. Kinda proves my point that people aren't making reasoned, personalized criticism. For another thing, the gameplay is less "MOBA-style" than DoW2 and for another, the graphics look nothing like any MOBA I'm aware of. Those are, once again, just nonsense talking points that were pushed early by the likes of Arch Warhammer on youtube for clicks and picked up by the reddit community and pushed ad nauseum regardless of reality. People were angry at Relic from the off because Relic presented the game poorly and created the opening for these criticisms. They showed a campaign mission that was supposedly late game but looked stilted and scripted with very saturated high contrast colors. They were proud of the elites, especially Solaria, they wanted to show it off. That backfired by giving bottom feeders on youtube something to latch on to to hate.
A hate mob on youtube is way more clicks than positivity.
@Amoc said:
Even if we did accept that there was some concerted effort to review-bomb DoW III, your argument falls flat on its face anyways for one key reason: review-bombing doesn't even work! Good games/movies will survive and thrive amidst the pathetic criticism of trolls, because people are generally intelligent enough to see when it's happening!
Actually, review-bombing works super well especially when polygon, eurogamer, etc. aren't out there saying "This item is being review bombed. Fight back." And people are intelligent enough to see what's happening but they don't have the time or care to look. Countless interviews have taken place where developers on Steam say as soon as your game hits that "MIXED" review status, sales STOP dead. That's because there's too much going on in life to look critically at every game. I've said this like 30 times: People use short cuts. And steam provides a handy one with that thumbs up thumbs down icon on the store listing. As soon as a niche game reaches that thumbs down, it's absolutely toast.
Tons of good games and movies have died because of public perception. Tons of terrible ones have "Survived and thrived" amidst legitimate criticism due to hype. Because people are intelligent, but they don't have time. And people are psychologically vulnerable to bandwagoning, herd mentality, and a load of other well known and well documented flaws.
That's why advertisements work. That's why propaganda works. And the fact that you don't understand that is another psychological flaw called a BIAS or BLIND SPOT. In this case it could be called CONFIRMATION BIAS wherein you only allow information that confirms your bias into your mind. Which is why for 2 years we've been having the same argument and you keep propping up the same straw mans (as you do in your next post about me saying everyone else is stupid when I've said like 100 times that this doesn't require anybody to be stupid, only human) to tear down with the same pointless, wrong, and fact/logic free arguments.
So I dunno why I'm typing this when I know like the previous several dozen entreaties, you will simply ignore all the parts that would undermine your understanding of things and make up new stuff to attack that I did not even say. See you in 2020.
@Amoc said:
That's what's funny about how your reasoning works. You'll take the fact that review bombing happens and conflate that into convincing yourself it's "proof" that this is what happened to DoW III, and that's why it failed.
No, I take the fact that day 1, tons of negative reviews flooded the page, most with less than 2 hours played as proof. AKA review bombing. It takes more than 2 hours to get to grips with a strategy game. Anyone reviewing with less than that is insincere at best.
>
To be fair. It took no time at all to realize what they had done to Dow, you didnt need to spend hours ingame to realize this.
To be fair. It took no time at all to realize what they had done to Dow, you didnt need to spend hours ingame to realize this.
What they'd done? You mean successfully synthesized DoW1 and DoW2 into a micro-heavy but macro relevant game that attempts ambitiously to solve one of the lingering problems in the RTS genre (that being their incredibly snowbally nature) ?
Took me more than 2 hours (which is what? Like 3-4 rounds if you play them back to back) to fully appreciate what they'd done. But I suppose if one were to be a lame about it ya could just load it up, play once online and then go post angrily about how it was ruined without giving it a chance to show you what it is. Sure. Seems like a reasonable qualified opinion.
They succeeded at none of the above. Folks who played the beta knew right out of the gate that the game was a hot mess.
You'll have to come up with a better explanation for why the hundreds of thousands of DoW I and DoW II fans turned away from DoW III immediately after release.
Spare yourself the effort of explaining psychological terms that you don't seem to understand and clearly have no perspective on. You're literally the poster-boy of the phenomena you're describing. Look up "cognitive dissonance" and have a good read-through. That might prove illuminating, but I highly doubt it in your case.
The game sucked. That's the bottom line. That's why everyone who bought the game abandoned it. That's why DoW I and II fans didn't stay. That's why the reviews were mediocre and the Steam user reviews were poor. That's why Relic decided it wasn't worth trying to salvage. It was so far off what anyone wanted to play that it was literally dead-on-arrival.
I'll leave you to your echo-chamber so you can spin your creative explanations and spectacular exercises in denial to anyone left here.
I myself was frustrated during the beta. But I'd also consumed a lot of skepticism about the game in the form of videos and reddit posts. It shaped my perspective. I had been playing Starcraft 2 at the time and so I tried to play the game like Starcraft 2. This did not work. Because the game isn't meant to be played that way. At first I blamed the game and dismissed the struggles as the game's fault as did so many others. And admittedly, at launch there were some big balance issues that contributed to this. But EVERY competitive game launches with balance issues on that same level. So in an experimental environment we have to rule that out as a deciding factor since it was to be expected and Relic were relatively fast at addressing balance concerns. Could they have been faster? maybe. But they didn't do nothing. So being that every game runs into this we have to look for things that don't affect every game.
For example: not every game has Total Biscuit (a sincere RIP here) spend 50 minutes trying to play the game like SC2 then asserting the game is crap just because he stinks hard at it (while completely not understanding a load of mechanics nor bothering to learn about them).
This is the problem. Strategy games are complex. If you want to understand one there's an uphill battle. This used to be NBD for the RTS genre because there wasn't quickplay. So people would learn to play through campaign missions and/or by playing skirmishes against the easy ai until they could beat it, then the medium ai, then the hard ai. This taught them the game and so they could appreciate it or at least understand what was going on when they lost. Quickplay teaches you nothing unless you already understand the basics. It's just an "increase rage" button.
So here we have the biggest gaming youtuber shitting on the game for an hour. We have one of the biggest Warhammer youtubers shitting on the game before it was even out. Countless other youtubers are shitting on the game based on "GABE BACKFLIP ALSO COLORS?!?". And the loudest voices on reddit are constantly attacking anyone who tries to get a positive conversation going about DoW3. Then Relic basically uses their twitter feed to promote their charitable giving and trips instead of engaging on the topic of the $60 AAA game they just launched. The biggest thing they did was the "Did you know?" videos but those were too little too late and not broadcasted widely enough (they only posted them on twitter afaik). /shrug, it's obvious to me why people turned away from it, most without giving it a fair shake (including people I know IRL who were indeed fans of DoW1 and DoW2 whom I later convinced to give DoW3 a shot and they loved it. Unfortunately too late). The preponderance of exposure about the game was negative, most of it irrationally so or based on lies/misunderstandings (such as Total Biscuits video). Anywhere you looked to find about the game you'd be turned away before getting to the stage of giving it a shot yourself. And that's reasonable. That's what humans do to save time and get on with life. And in the environment described above it makes sense why most people didn't dig in enough to get to the meat of it which doomed it to a small, atrophying community and caused Relic to pull back from it.
I know what cognitive dissonance is. None of my thoughts or beliefs are contradictory though. So I think maybe you don't need to be throwing around terms you clearly don't understand? Regardless, I think what you intended to suggest is that I'm living in a bubble (which is what Confirmation Bias does, the thing I told ya about last episode). But considering I used to hold a similar opinion to yours but changed it through open minded exploration, I'd say I'm probably less in a bubble than you are.
I've gone back and used what actually happened to show you how what I've said makes sense. I've painted you a picture (multiple times from many different angles) that is based on the actual historical record of this game's prelaunch, launch, and immediate post launch. I've used LOGIC and FACTS not EMOTION. Occasionally I have resorted to anecdote (as above). You otoh have ONLY used emotion. "I hate this game, ergo everyone who isn't playing it, chose not to play it, or never gave it a chance also hates this game."
That's just not logical. It's egocentric, emotional, nonsense.
@charlando said:
TotalBiscuit harassed many and wished death upon others. Including but not limited to "Get cancer and die", ironically.
It's not really what this forum is about, but people grow and change. He had 9 years to become a better person since those tweets. I'm not of a mind that people can't or don't change (otherwise we'd all have no point in living after we made a mistake). And regardless of how disagreeable I found his opinions and methodologies for "reviewing" games (especially when it comes to DoW3 which as I stated, he put barely any effort into), I don't think there's any thing redeeming in dredging up the bad tweets of someone who has passed on. Especially when said tweets were well in the past.
i don't know it this was already on the table at some point, but does somebody think - we might at least become an Last Stand mode like DoW2 had if we might get enough support in the community? it broke my heart seeing my beloved franchise get stomped in the ground.
I think all of you are looking at this the wrong way. relic have shown that they are trend setters for the AAA market. Look at that specific market for the past quarter, its littered with the smouldering husks of original IP products from well known studios chasing trends. And lets be completely honest, DOW3's biggest mistake was trend chasing. You can go look over at bioware right now, its so step for step it feels like deja vu for DOW3, including but not limited to, lead devs leaving the IP to work on the new shiny project. Their game? Dragon Age 4, our game? Age of Empires 4. So as you look at the current gaming landscape, with games out there like 76, and anthem. relic were waaaaaaaaaaay ahead of the curve, a good 8 to 9 months ahead of everyone in the gaming economy.
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Comments
Amoc
That's what's funny about how your reasoning works. You'll take the fact that review bombing happens and conflate that into convincing yourself it's "proof" that this is what happened to DoW III, and that's why it failed.
You can't actually support that argument, however, nor can you even adequately explain WHY people review-bombed DoW III. The silliness about back-flipping Gabe was reasonable criticism, as was the MOBA-style gameplay and graphics. You may not agree with it, but it was legitimate criticism. People weren't angry at Relic for anything unrelated (think Brie Larson with Captain Marvel). The criticism was gameplay-related.
Even if we did accept that there was some concerted effort to review-bomb DoW III, your argument falls flat on its face anyways for one key reason: review-bombing doesn't even work! Good games/movies will survive and thrive amidst the pathetic criticism of trolls, because people are generally intelligent enough to see when it's happening!
Draconix
Well, perphaps, but I dont think its always.
Amoc
It's definitely not always, but it certainly is usually.
The problem with the review bomb argument is that it supposes there's an unusually large group of idiots unfairly attacking DoW III (for reasons unexplained). On top of that, it requires you to believe that people were dumb/ignorant and fell for it.
The argument you'd have us believe, therefore, is that a bunch of vicious idiots convinced a bunch of thoughtless fools that game is bad. Ignore all of the documented criticism and how the simpler and more reasonable explanation is that people just straight-up didn't enjoy the game.
I'll leave you with that. See you perhaps in 2020 (if this forum is still around).
Gorb
This is a continuation of the DoW II community site (it even has the same web address), which existed far beyond the lifecycle of DoW II. Some people even date back that far (and I'm not even talking about me), so I wouldn't worry
Draconix
Whatever, at least I enjoyed Dow3 and it is what matters to me. And I'm not the only one on this forum who liked this game.
Thought I honestly understand why it was heavily criticized but well.
Decepticats
No, I take the fact that day 1, tons of negative reviews flooded the page, most with less than 2 hours played as proof. AKA review bombing. It takes more than 2 hours to get to grips with a strategy game. Anyone reviewing with less than that is insincere at best.
It wasn't reasonable criticism. For one thing, Gabe doesn't backflip. He does a forward flip. So everyone repeating "Backflip" (yourself included) is merely parroting a propaganda talking point. Kinda proves my point that people aren't making reasoned, personalized criticism. For another thing, the gameplay is less "MOBA-style" than DoW2 and for another, the graphics look nothing like any MOBA I'm aware of. Those are, once again, just nonsense talking points that were pushed early by the likes of Arch Warhammer on youtube for clicks and picked up by the reddit community and pushed ad nauseum regardless of reality. People were angry at Relic from the off because Relic presented the game poorly and created the opening for these criticisms. They showed a campaign mission that was supposedly late game but looked stilted and scripted with very saturated high contrast colors. They were proud of the elites, especially Solaria, they wanted to show it off. That backfired by giving bottom feeders on youtube something to latch on to to hate.
A hate mob on youtube is way more clicks than positivity.
Actually, review-bombing works super well especially when polygon, eurogamer, etc. aren't out there saying "This item is being review bombed. Fight back." And people are intelligent enough to see what's happening but they don't have the time or care to look. Countless interviews have taken place where developers on Steam say as soon as your game hits that "MIXED" review status, sales STOP dead. That's because there's too much going on in life to look critically at every game. I've said this like 30 times: People use short cuts. And steam provides a handy one with that thumbs up thumbs down icon on the store listing. As soon as a niche game reaches that thumbs down, it's absolutely toast.
Tons of good games and movies have died because of public perception. Tons of terrible ones have "Survived and thrived" amidst legitimate criticism due to hype. Because people are intelligent, but they don't have time. And people are psychologically vulnerable to bandwagoning, herd mentality, and a load of other well known and well documented flaws.
That's why advertisements work. That's why propaganda works. And the fact that you don't understand that is another psychological flaw called a BIAS or BLIND SPOT. In this case it could be called CONFIRMATION BIAS wherein you only allow information that confirms your bias into your mind. Which is why for 2 years we've been having the same argument and you keep propping up the same straw mans (as you do in your next post about me saying everyone else is stupid when I've said like 100 times that this doesn't require anybody to be stupid, only human) to tear down with the same pointless, wrong, and fact/logic free arguments.
So I dunno why I'm typing this when I know like the previous several dozen entreaties, you will simply ignore all the parts that would undermine your understanding of things and make up new stuff to attack that I did not even say. See you in 2020.
Liljagare
>
To be fair. It took no time at all to realize what they had done to Dow, you didnt need to spend hours ingame to realize this.
Decepticats
What they'd done? You mean successfully synthesized DoW1 and DoW2 into a micro-heavy but macro relevant game that attempts ambitiously to solve one of the lingering problems in the RTS genre (that being their incredibly snowbally nature) ?
Took me more than 2 hours (which is what? Like 3-4 rounds if you play them back to back) to fully appreciate what they'd done. But I suppose if one were to be a lame about it ya could just load it up, play once online and then go post angrily about how it was ruined without giving it a chance to show you what it is. Sure. Seems like a reasonable qualified opinion.
Amoc
They succeeded at none of the above. Folks who played the beta knew right out of the gate that the game was a hot mess.
You'll have to come up with a better explanation for why the hundreds of thousands of DoW I and DoW II fans turned away from DoW III immediately after release.
Spare yourself the effort of explaining psychological terms that you don't seem to understand and clearly have no perspective on. You're literally the poster-boy of the phenomena you're describing. Look up "cognitive dissonance" and have a good read-through. That might prove illuminating, but I highly doubt it in your case.
The game sucked. That's the bottom line. That's why everyone who bought the game abandoned it. That's why DoW I and II fans didn't stay. That's why the reviews were mediocre and the Steam user reviews were poor. That's why Relic decided it wasn't worth trying to salvage. It was so far off what anyone wanted to play that it was literally dead-on-arrival.
I'll leave you to your echo-chamber so you can spin your creative explanations and spectacular exercises in denial to anyone left here.
Decepticats
I myself was frustrated during the beta. But I'd also consumed a lot of skepticism about the game in the form of videos and reddit posts. It shaped my perspective. I had been playing Starcraft 2 at the time and so I tried to play the game like Starcraft 2. This did not work. Because the game isn't meant to be played that way. At first I blamed the game and dismissed the struggles as the game's fault as did so many others. And admittedly, at launch there were some big balance issues that contributed to this. But EVERY competitive game launches with balance issues on that same level. So in an experimental environment we have to rule that out as a deciding factor since it was to be expected and Relic were relatively fast at addressing balance concerns. Could they have been faster? maybe. But they didn't do nothing. So being that every game runs into this we have to look for things that don't affect every game.
For example: not every game has Total Biscuit (a sincere RIP here) spend 50 minutes trying to play the game like SC2 then asserting the game is crap just because he stinks hard at it (while completely not understanding a load of mechanics nor bothering to learn about them).
This is the problem. Strategy games are complex. If you want to understand one there's an uphill battle. This used to be NBD for the RTS genre because there wasn't quickplay. So people would learn to play through campaign missions and/or by playing skirmishes against the easy ai until they could beat it, then the medium ai, then the hard ai. This taught them the game and so they could appreciate it or at least understand what was going on when they lost. Quickplay teaches you nothing unless you already understand the basics. It's just an "increase rage" button.
So here we have the biggest gaming youtuber shitting on the game for an hour. We have one of the biggest Warhammer youtubers shitting on the game before it was even out. Countless other youtubers are shitting on the game based on "GABE BACKFLIP ALSO COLORS?!?". And the loudest voices on reddit are constantly attacking anyone who tries to get a positive conversation going about DoW3. Then Relic basically uses their twitter feed to promote their charitable giving and trips instead of engaging on the topic of the $60 AAA game they just launched. The biggest thing they did was the "Did you know?" videos but those were too little too late and not broadcasted widely enough (they only posted them on twitter afaik). /shrug, it's obvious to me why people turned away from it, most without giving it a fair shake (including people I know IRL who were indeed fans of DoW1 and DoW2 whom I later convinced to give DoW3 a shot and they loved it. Unfortunately too late). The preponderance of exposure about the game was negative, most of it irrationally so or based on lies/misunderstandings (such as Total Biscuits video). Anywhere you looked to find about the game you'd be turned away before getting to the stage of giving it a shot yourself. And that's reasonable. That's what humans do to save time and get on with life. And in the environment described above it makes sense why most people didn't dig in enough to get to the meat of it which doomed it to a small, atrophying community and caused Relic to pull back from it.
I know what cognitive dissonance is. None of my thoughts or beliefs are contradictory though. So I think maybe you don't need to be throwing around terms you clearly don't understand? Regardless, I think what you intended to suggest is that I'm living in a bubble (which is what Confirmation Bias does, the thing I told ya about last episode). But considering I used to hold a similar opinion to yours but changed it through open minded exploration, I'd say I'm probably less in a bubble than you are.
I've gone back and used what actually happened to show you how what I've said makes sense. I've painted you a picture (multiple times from many different angles) that is based on the actual historical record of this game's prelaunch, launch, and immediate post launch. I've used LOGIC and FACTS not EMOTION. Occasionally I have resorted to anecdote (as above). You otoh have ONLY used emotion. "I hate this game, ergo everyone who isn't playing it, chose not to play it, or never gave it a chance also hates this game."
That's just not logical. It's egocentric, emotional, nonsense.
charlando
TotalBiscuit harassed many and wished death upon others. Including but not limited to "Get cancer and die", ironically.
https://i.imgur.com/JYm1jCl.png
Decepticats
It's not really what this forum is about, but people grow and change. He had 9 years to become a better person since those tweets. I'm not of a mind that people can't or don't change (otherwise we'd all have no point in living after we made a mistake). And regardless of how disagreeable I found his opinions and methodologies for "reviewing" games (especially when it comes to DoW3 which as I stated, he put barely any effort into), I don't think there's any thing redeeming in dredging up the bad tweets of someone who has passed on. Especially when said tweets were well in the past.
Gorb
Hi, this isn't about TotalBiscuit, please do keep this on topic. As you were.
Moderator Post
Zasig
i don't know it this was already on the table at some point, but does somebody think - we might at least become an Last Stand mode like DoW2 had if we might get enough support in the community? it broke my heart seeing my beloved franchise get stomped in the ground.
Strangequark
I think all of you are looking at this the wrong way. relic have shown that they are trend setters for the AAA market. Look at that specific market for the past quarter, its littered with the smouldering husks of original IP products from well known studios chasing trends. And lets be completely honest, DOW3's biggest mistake was trend chasing. You can go look over at bioware right now, its so step for step it feels like deja vu for DOW3, including but not limited to, lead devs leaving the IP to work on the new shiny project. Their game? Dragon Age 4, our game? Age of Empires 4. So as you look at the current gaming landscape, with games out there like 76, and anthem. relic were waaaaaaaaaaay ahead of the curve, a good 8 to 9 months ahead of everyone in the gaming economy.