Considering that “it’s garbage” is an opinion and not a statement of fact, that person would have made their decision that 22.5 minutes in he felt it was garbage and didn’t feel like sitting through the other 75% to verify. Just like turning on a new show, I don’t need to watch all 15 seasons of Criminal Minds to decide if I personally like the show.
Or more simply put if you get a sub sandwich and the first bite taste awful are you really going to eat the rest to verify you hate it?
Yes. But “full” is not an opinion. It’s a description of composition.
Which can be a opinion otherwise all movie reviews would be the same either good or bad. Instead each reviewer forms their own opinion about the content they then describe.
You can’t comment on the composition of a video if you didn’t watch it. He’s welcome to say the first 25% was garbage. But he can’t comment on the back 75%.
Except for the part where Choice from BDGG chimed in, who perfectly vocalized why Classic failed on a fundamental level.
It’s one thing to be defensive when someone criticizes your game, but it’s not like he’s attacking your life, right? His breakdown of what addons and what external sites like WOWhead and Icy Veins have done to the game were fairly spot-on. Hell, just about everyone knows it’s impossible to get into endgame without addons, which further breaks down how badly the game has leaned on optimizing everything.
On the bright side, pointing out that just about everyone mutes the soundtrack did push me to turn on the BGM while in a raid. (One of the older ones, you’d probably need to keep those channels clear for the new stuff.)
I found the video after watching “The Line Goes Up,” so I was interested to hear what he said about WOW.
The point of the video is that, using WOW as an example, what happens when a community drives towards optimizing the crap out of a game and what happens when the developers fail to tell which way the wind is blowing and let the community have their way. You can see this in the way that while other Blizzard games tend to be tightly controlled in regards to UI mods and addons in general, WOW is unique in that almost all the shackles have been removed.
As a result, the playerbase tend to trivialize most challenges the devs throw at them because of addons, making the devs come up with harder challenges that necessitate the need for addons, thus drawing an ugly ouroboros loop; this loop has the unwanted consequence of driving away any new players, who seek out greener pastures.
Like the munchkins of old, they’ve optimized the fun out of the game.
This trend began soon after the first damage meter came out in WOW, the mysteries of threat generation were laid bare (and made measurable with the first threat meter), and thus started the breakdown of everything in the game into pure numbers - something that could be measured and quantified.
When the players started taking the mystery out of the game and breaking everything down into mathematics, it became less about having fun for the sake of having fun and more about optimization and adopting best practices in the name of instrumental gameplay. There were other strats and compositions to dungeons and raids that would work, but all too often, players would go for what world first raiders had done because that strategy actually worked.
This behavior came to a head when Classic was released, and while Blizzard had given the players what they wanted - a return to simpler times, before the rise of addons and elitism - Classic players brought those addons and elitist attitudes with them anyway because dependence on both was so firmly ingrained into the culture that they couldn’t get away from it.
Can you link it? Id be interested to check it out.
The problem is WoW’s sound design is just not good. BGM doesn’t enhance the experience of playing WoW, in fact it often detracts. This is in huge contrast to games like Metal Gear Rising where they’ve hand-tailored the music to fit the encounter. Blizzard just uses a copy-paste dungeon track or boss tracks that don’t fit the mood of the encounter or pacing of an encounter.
Blizzard needs to not just hire composers to just make tracks, but to have joint collaboration in order to create the desired mood for gameplay moments.
I doubt Blizzard will do that though, because Blizzard already knows people turn off the music, therefore they can’t justify investing in such an innovation if people may miss out on it, which leads to a vicious cycle (nobody listens to music → no additional funding _. nobody listens to music → etc).