elheber's forum posts

Avatar image for elheber
elheber

2895

Forum Posts

0

Wiki Points

8

Followers

Reviews: 1

User Lists: 0

#1 elheber
Member since 2005 • 2895 Posts

Videos auto-playing in video pages make sense. They don't make sense anywhere else.

I clicked on the review article for The Tomorrow Children and walked away, then when I'm 15 feet away my computer starts blasting an ad at max volume for the rest of the office to hear.

Not cool.

Avatar image for elheber
elheber

2895

Forum Posts

0

Wiki Points

8

Followers

Reviews: 1

User Lists: 0

#2 elheber
Member since 2005 • 2895 Posts

Does this mean you'll also start using sexually suggestive and pseudo-gross thumbnails? I mean, if the largest consideration is if it improves the chances of an article being read, this seems like the end game. Just, like a shot of Laura Croft's armpit zoomed-in or something.

That said, GS and Justin Haywald, I'll admit that I've noticed the headlines are better than when I first started complaining about them. There's a few turds out there, but for the most part they're descriptive of the content. When the entire article fits on a headline, such as a simple release date announcement, then it really isn't worth a 500-word article. And if this is the case, then the headline should at least describe what the other 440 words are about.

I don't know what the solution is. But if the news is that Rocket League sold another million copies and you DON'T just want to put that in the headline, then maybe it doesn't deserve an article.

I'm happy with most of the work you guys do here. I wake up to your website. You guys may not change your policy on this, but it's still important we give you this feedback so you can weight it against your analytics.

Avatar image for elheber
elheber

2895

Forum Posts

0

Wiki Points

8

Followers

Reviews: 1

User Lists: 0

#3 elheber
Member since 2005 • 2895 Posts

There's also a long-running bug in which clicking on a the link from a comment reply notification will NOT take you to the comment in reference if that comment is in anything but the first page of comments.

Avatar image for elheber
elheber

2895

Forum Posts

0

Wiki Points

8

Followers

Reviews: 1

User Lists: 0

#4 elheber
Member since 2005 • 2895 Posts

@juboner:I want to tell you that if you'd just read my article, you'd find I've already discussed this. But I know your time is valuable so I'll paraphrase what I said:

In a nutshell, modern games are getting so big and complicated that modern developers have found creative solutions to help them make big and complex worlds a lot easier. Instead of building a game room by unique room, they're simply pre-fabricating a bunch of stuff and then plopping them down on a large map. It's the difference between micromanaging and macromanaging. Games tend to be buggier (think Fallout 4 or Just Cause 3) but given how much stuff is in them, you're bound to do things nobody else has ever done.

Aonuma is trying to make an extremely large world, but he's trying to hand-craft every inch of it. It's impossible.

Avatar image for elheber
elheber

2895

Forum Posts

0

Wiki Points

8

Followers

Reviews: 1

User Lists: 0

#5 elheber
Member since 2005 • 2895 Posts

Eiji Aonuma was describing emergent gameplay when he said, "in the past titles, if a player found a different solution to the on we’d intended, we’d call it a bug." Emphasis added. In an excerpt from my article a few day earlier, I said this (emphasis also added):

In oversimplified terms, emergent gameplay is often unintended game design that emerged directly from the rules of the game (hence “emergent”), rather than being explicitly designed for a specific purpose. If there’s a wooden door, and you need a door key to pass through, it’s traditional design. If you couldn’t find the key and you wonder, “that door is wooden… what if I try to burn this door down with my torch,” and it works, then it’s emergent game design.

Essentially, Aonuma is bragging about finally allowing for emergent gameplay. Players finding solutions the designers didn't plan for, essentially. But in our shared examples, the very opposite is the case.

I'm not saying the game is going to suck. I'm saying it's taking cues from other modern game design principles and failing to understand them. The game could still be very good in the classical/traditional way.

Avatar image for elheber
elheber

2895

Forum Posts

0

Wiki Points

8

Followers

Reviews: 1

User Lists: 0

#6 elheber
Member since 2005 • 2895 Posts

About a week ago, I posted an op-ed about how Eiji Aonuma doesn't understand emergent gameplay. A few days ago, Edge published an interview with him in which he says EXACTLY the things I was worried about. First I'll show you an excerpt from my op-ed (the images and captions are part of the article), then I'll show you a quote from the interview:

"And this is where The Legend of Zelda: A Breath of the Wild should make us worry. Let’s take a look at shots from the debut trailer:

Nintendo explicitly sanctioned that bee hive for use on this Bokoblin.
Nintendo explicitly sanctioned that bee hive for use on this Bokoblin.

These successive screenshots show Link shoot a bee hive, and then the angry bees attack the Bokoblin resting right next to the tree the beehive was hanging from. In the next shots, you see a couple of boulders precariously perched above a pair of resting enemies; Link pushes one of them down and, just as planned, the boulder takes out the enemies.

Director Eiji Aonuma made sure that if there is a boulder, then there is something it is for.
Director Eiji Aonuma made sure that if there is a boulder, then there is something it is for.

Sure, you could fight the Bokoblin’s directly, mano a mano, but there’s also clearly a “right” way to kill them each time. The developers created tools that should serve emergent gameplay, but they are just using them to make classic puzzles all over again. It’s like taking the batteries out of an electric razor and trying to shave by scraping the blades across your chin."

So that, in part, was what I said. Then just days ago in the interview with Edge, Eiji Aonuma said this with respect to how he's learned his lesson about designing a modern Zelda game:

In the past titles, if a player found a different solution to the on we’d intended, we’d call it a bug. But for this title we created puzzles with multiple solutions. Even battles against enemies have a puzzle element: you can push a rock off a cliff and defeat them that way, or have bees chase them away so you can sneak up and take their weapons. Even if it’s a strong enemy, there are a lot of strategies, and it’s not just about battling.

Aonuma literally used exactly the same examples I used to show he doesn't know what emergent gameplay is, and used them as examples of emergent gameplay! It's analogous to claiming to be a great burger chef, then proudly showing off the two worst examples.

I know speaking ill of a hyped Zelda game won't win me any popularity contests, but it must be said.

*raises flame shield

Avatar image for elheber
elheber

2895

Forum Posts

0

Wiki Points

8

Followers

Reviews: 1

User Lists: 0

#7 elheber
Member since 2005 • 2895 Posts

@wemmick: "Approaches" to make them "less" irritating, you say. As opposed to simply dropping the auto-play altogether.

It doesn't fill me with confidence, wemmick, but I hope whatever you have planned blows my mind.

Avatar image for elheber
elheber

2895

Forum Posts

0

Wiki Points

8

Followers

Reviews: 1

User Lists: 0

#8 elheber
Member since 2005 • 2895 Posts
@br0kenrabbit said:

Autoplay videos should exist nowhere on the internet. A lot of us open tabs in the background for future reading, it's a PITA to have a tab suddenly start blurting out sound and music and you have to stop what you were doing just to turn it off.

Every one of us knows how to click on a video to make it play. I may be hard to believe, but for real.

Well, autoplay should exist for direct links to videos. If you know you're clicking on a link to a video you want to watch, that's perfectly fine. Pretty much everything in the Video section, for example, should auto-play. It's the videos in news articles (and even review articles) that shouldn't.

Avatar image for elheber
elheber

2895

Forum Posts

0

Wiki Points

8

Followers

Reviews: 1

User Lists: 0

#9 elheber
Member since 2005 • 2895 Posts

It's not a "half-step" like the rumored PS4.5/PS4K/PS4 Neo, right?

Microsoft has been for a while now trying to combine their Windows and Xbox platforms into some type of unified system. The end game seems to be a family of Xbox consoles that all games can scale across (old games on the new systems, new games on the old systems) just like PC. Microsoft claimed as much for at least the XBO and Scorpio.

And in this sense, Project Scorpio would be the end of the "traditional" hardware cycle where one generation replaces another. As long as games are made to scale with the hardware like PC games do, Microsoft could bring out a new console any time they want. They could even launch a high end model alongside a cheaper model with lower specs at the same time. It's like this generation is being extended indefinitely.

So the real question that I was hiding until the end: is Sony also pulling this same shtick with the Neo? The rumors are that it'll share its library with the PS4... so does that mean Sony had the same plan? Is this generation the "last" generation because it'll go on forever?

Avatar image for elheber
elheber

2895

Forum Posts

0

Wiki Points

8

Followers

Reviews: 1

User Lists: 0

#10 elheber
Member since 2005 • 2895 Posts

@wemmick: Here's an update that may or may not be necessary. The same ad auto-played again in another page, except this time the video was frozen (the audio played) and there were no controls for me to mute it. I clicked on it to see if the video controls popped up, but it just opened another window and kept playing. I had to exit the page entirely.

More info is probably not necessary, but I just had to let you know this ad took it to the next level.

I'm running vanilla Chrome, no extensions other than Google Docs. It opened a new tab to this page:

https://adclick.g.doubleclick.net/aclk?sa=L&ai=Cnm3__QVXV5C3OY6vBbmatPgN1cabgAeF6MOlH8CNtwEQASAAYMne6IbIo5AZggEXY2EtcHViLTE5OTE2Nzk2MjQzMzEzNjnIAQngAgCoAwGqBOYBT9AX6ndyy7t5ScSzwvoqV8qoFLYjtpdYSd0kq49zwtQRuK7xZlXKIpuOqfY_HzlI9pPaFgkj0zHFipgUamlm7UhIwoorzgNHb_FUrbABglpy-glRYbkrGcepEe0xItqTqiBzDZsUACWBWJgSm8jxz4vvTZA-gut0BCrlu6M6BbJQtNyI6lx9ZDyxHi2wqjn47ar36Ydx1bfKpr71ubC7DMZtqOLaLGVZjHW6skGwhMjS8bV54XAM2ycswN8yjs8zUuqFr3Nji1hFI_rEK2zmSQWX0TIEPARB1hbcLlEHbL_Fh-Nrv_PgBAGABqywy-nk9Zu2XaAGIagHpr4b2AcA&num=1&sig=AOD64_3I8Asj9eMNPq5SHVA_dA8MUXWXvg&client=ca-pub-1991679624331369&adurl=;?;dc_lat=;dc_rdid=;tag_for_child_directed_treatment=?http://us.burberry.com/sale?utm_content=tradingdesk_performance&utm_campaign=SS16&utm_source=dfa&utm_medium=cpm&utm_id=4395748_9566485_1506332_129942471_303336418_71444906