/r/gaming REALLY hates War Z, and opinions
To preface this; War Z is this really rather terrible game that was thrown together hastily to profit off of the success of the ARMA 2 mod "Day Z". In short the developers actually screwed everyone a fair bit and made a shit game.
Yesterday, 'TotalBiscuit's Let's Play video was posted to r/Gaming:
Currently sitting at a comfortable +1000 upvotes, the video is a rambling rant of complaining and trashing the game.
The video is actually quite bad as he does not only point out real flaws in the game, as much as whine about perfectly normal game mechanics. "Why don't I start with tons of guns??" he for instance complains in a survivor game.
Apparently defending this game, or even just commenting on the sub-par quality of the video, is tantamount to Literally Hitler, as level headed redditors are downvoted into oblivion.
The Hivemind is swift and merciless:
Some of his arguments are true. It's buggy, you can't even swim, it looks like an alpha version, and other stuff. But I think he is way too biased. He says the game is boring because you spawn in the middle of nowhere, you don't find guns very easily and you die extremely fast. But that's the whole point of the game
-19 as of now.
KeavesSharpi isn't sure TotalBiscuit is all that funny.
Am I the only one who thinks TB is way too popular? I mean, he's not really a very entertaining voice-over is he? And a 45 minute review?
(Spoiler: He is!) -23
Trolls-Gone-Wild also doesn't like the whining:
I hated how much he whined, and it seemed like he was putting no effort towards actually playing the game, yheah its a shit game, but you play like a fuckin retard, so of course you're gonna get killed a lot.
Opinion denied! -13
Crawls around with a flashlight out
Charges into pack of 3 zombies with a spiked baseball bat
"Well, the stealth aspect of this game is bollocks"
"ricepanda, please focus more on how the game sucks" -33
zeroGamer points out that maybe TB is just stroking the Hivemind:
This seems like TB just taking an opportunity to shit all over the game because he can, and it will get views.
shouldn't have done that mate. -12 for dissenting thought.
For a journey into a horror show of circlejerky hivemind groupthink I invite you continue to scroll through the bottom sections of the thread at your own leisure. It's mostly fairly sane and thought out commentary on a very sup par and pandering video, downvoted into oblivion. I myself tried to come in and point out some BS. So I was inspired to contribute here instead; It's quite the spectacle over there!
Posted Dec 19, 2012, 6:13 PM UTC
Did you actually watch the whole video? It was a pretty thoroughly-done video. He went over all the controversy that had happened recently, all while actually playing the game for himself. He admitted he came in with a negative bias, and reasons behind his bias were confirmed during the course of the video.
It feels like you're jumping on this because you either don't like r/gaming and want to be edgy, or you don't like TB and/or the WarZ video he did.
Can't we all just agree the game is shit and people should stop buying it?
I tried to watch the video but 45 minutes of a dude whining about anything is just too much. Trim that thing down to 10 and you'd have a winner.
I kind of think not editing it was the right choice. Yes. TB is biased. He straight out states that, and even before that the video is called Bore Z. But all he does in the video is play the game. If you can mute his video and put on some atmospheric music, does it make it watchable? I would say no.
This is true, but what good would a review be if there was all praise and no criticism. It would just be a circleje- oh...
Seriously though, you both have valid points.
Edit: only in this /r/ are people this downvote happy. Welcome to SRS-Lite, you can start that counter now.
I'm not really saying it should be all praise or all criticism. Just don't make it 45 minutes long.
I think a lot of people like having a thorough review. There are plenty of short-summary-esque type of reviews, you just have to look elsewhere.
I agree totally. Didn't mean it to have come out that way.
Well that's the appeal of TB. His videos are very long but they are thorough. They give a long and honest first impression of a game. Most times I skip around to get the gist of the game. For shorter impressions of the game there are a lot of review videos.
[deleted]
There is talk about this in r/games and i think TB does need more criticism on this. I mean titling the video The BoreZ? Its not something I've come to expect of him, yet people are defending it saying other games journalists do it why shouldn't he. For one I listen to him give a honest impression about the game because my opinions are close to his in regards to the game, this applies to any other journalist and audience they may have. So when I see him taking a shot at a bad game in his titling it lowers the standard he has set and we've come to expect of him.
He also defends himself by saying he's a commentator not a journalist but he is reviewing the game and giving his opinion not telling me whats happening, I'm not watching a starcraft match with him narrating.
That being said I think this post is more aimed at TB and his minions than The WarZ
whether he confirmed his bias or not, the issue that i see is that he let it affect his gameplay. At times it felt like he would do stupid things on purpose and then spin off into some sort of mini-tirade about how the game sucks. part of it can be attributed to user error, but there is still a good bit of confirmation bias sprinkled throughout the video.
but you also have to ask yourself, did most of the commenters on r/gaming watch the whole video too?
I watched it to about the 37 minute mark. Then I made a comment about how his legitimate points were being drowned out by all the whining about stuff that really was his own fault and not the game's.
After being severely downvoted I checked the other downvoted comments, and found a lot of insightful criticism of the video being downvoted simply for not parroting "War Z sucks". It sounded like a perfect example of reddit circlejerk and hivemind thinking to me, and being a long time reader of Circlebroke, I wanted to put some effort in and share :)
I really don't care about TB or War Z in general.
I watched the whole video. While OP might be going a bit overboard, I think the people he quoted made some fair points. For example, TB made a very low effort at sneaking about before concluding that 'the stealth aspect [was] shit.' From my view, it seemed to work quite appropriately—when he moved slowly, he went unnoticed, but when he stood up or moved around, zombies within earshot went after him. Is that not how stealth works?
As well, he does point out a few textures that are quite subpar, but overall, I think stating that the graphics are 'atrocious' was way overblown. They're not 2012-quality, certainly, but I've seen much worse graphics in my time.
I don't mean to defend the game (it's shit), nor, especially, do I mean to defend the tactics behind selling it in its current state, but I think that the people quoted above are getting very unfairly downvoted for having the absolute gall to state their rather moderate opinions in the face of durr hurr hurr warz bad tb good.