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Easy Allies |OT| The New Era
- Thread starter Auctopus
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I was going to throw out a "Cease this!" but it wasn't worth it :p
Everyone knows 9 is the best anyway
Wow! EZA are killing it
That number will start dropping at some point most likely but at this rate it could end up leveling off above 50k
I like Trailer Jones, but I have a problem with how silly the scoring is.
Look at the last trailer (Smash): Brandon gives it an 8.9, Ben says he thought they were looking at a 7.something, Huber gives it a 8.2, Brandon adjusts it to 8.4 (minus 0.5 due to unknown reasons), Huber adjusts it to 8.4 as well (0.2 more, why!?), Ben gives it 8.9 (the highest score after having been the most critical and saying it was a 7.something), but he isn't even sure of it.
First of all the 100 point scale makes no sense and never has before (I had the same problem with the E3 conferences scoring), second, they keep adjusting the scores without any real justification and it just looks weird, third, there are no apparent technical parameters, it seems as if they just pick what they feel at that moment and change it on a whim.
Still, it's a minor complaint, I like the show itself.
I don't undertand this POV: it's the Hall of Greats (as in great games), not the Hall of Great Presentations.
The presentation should be an added value, not the focus. If a presentation sincerely sways someone to vote for a game, that's a plus, but voting for Myst or Pandemonium just because Ian and Don made a video about them is super silly, especially if you don't have a personal history with that specific game.
It's not a debate competition or an art project, it's the induction of the best games the Allies have ever played into a "pantheon" of greatness.
Look at the last trailer (Smash): Brandon gives it an 8.9, Ben says he thought they were looking at a 7.something, Huber gives it a 8.2, Brandon adjusts it to 8.4 (minus 0.5 due to unknown reasons), Huber adjusts it to 8.4 as well (0.2 more, why!?), Ben gives it 8.9 (the highest score after having been the most critical and saying it was a 7.something), but he isn't even sure of it.
First of all the 100 point scale makes no sense and never has before (I had the same problem with the E3 conferences scoring), second, they keep adjusting the scores without any real justification and it just looks weird, third, there are no apparent technical parameters, it seems as if they just pick what they feel at that moment and change it on a whim.
Still, it's a minor complaint, I like the show itself.
I don't undertand this POV: it's the Hall of Greats (as in great games), not the Hall of Great Presentations.
The presentation should be an added value, not the focus. If a presentation sincerely sways someone to vote for a game, that's a plus, but voting for Myst or Pandemonium just because Ian and Don made a video about them is super silly, especially if you don't have a personal history with that specific game.
It's not a debate competition or an art project, it's the induction of the best games the Allies have ever played into a "pantheon" of greatness.
Really all that needs to be kept in mind lol.
Like you said, it's minor for me as well and ultimately doesn't noticeably affect my enjoyment.
The most important number to me is that patron number. If they can get that number north of 8,000 I think a studio is a lock.
Yea 9000 was always my number to hit and be comfortable. Allows for gaps in D&D, sponsors, etc
Well it seems absurd to me to put any thought or effort into the presentations whatsoever if this is the attitude. I think this is why Damiani wants a bunch of games to automatically go in, because if you bring a Chrono Trigger or an Ocarina of Time, they are a shoe-in even if the nominator just sits and says nothing for 10 minutes.
It's a show, not a Buzzfeed article - if they're going to put some flair into making it entertaining, then why not at least have them, for instance, rank the presentations at the end and have the one they think is best guaranteed not to get frozen for a year if it gets no votes? Just little things like that can make for fun additions to the stream.
I get that it's the Hall of Greats and therefore ultimately the best of the best should be in there, but I also think it's a shame that cool presentations can get forgotten about once the votes go in.
I agree on one hand that this should be about the games. However, I also like your suggestion for rewarding the best presentations.
6,8,10,12,14... It all checks out to me.
Yep, exactly.
Their current patron/donation average is still stupidly high. Great community, but probably not the most ideal position to be in.
Like, $8250 is purely based off 24 Patrons.
24 PATRONS!
Out of 7500.
But yeah, the income number is fucking fantastic. But stability should be the main focus. And Patron numbers brings in stability.
Hopefully they seize the moment, get the studio, get maybe more shows, or bits, or guests, or whatever, and that snowballs in more Patrons.
I haven't played enough FF games to say which one is the best (I have played a big chunk of VIII (End of Disc 3, start of Disc 4), finished X (back in the day), played a bit of X-2, finished XIII and XIII-2, I also played a couple of hours of VII and maybe 30 minutes of VI, but not enough to comment on them).
VIII was my first FF (and first JRPG in general) and it has a warm spot in my heart because of that (I know, I am somewhat biased because of that).
But it was the change of the looks of the game that made me try a JRPG/FF game in the first place as I didn't like the typical style of JRPGs back in the day, it's possibly also the reason why I skipped IX like an idiot (I did a big 180 on that one later in my life, but yeah). Hell, I only started playing more JRPGs in the 360 gen and this gen (which is a shame as I really like them now, but I still don't play them enough because of the time needed to finish them).
I honestly never understood why people seem so down on it (I know that the looks are something that a lot of people don't like). It's not my favorite JRPG by a long shot, but I really enjoyed what I played (even though I had to start over 2 times because of not reading properly the first time and not understanding anything after disc 1 and not being able to access my savefile the second time). Not sure why I never finished it, but I did enjoy quite a lot of stuff about FF VIII.
But again, I am not saying it's the best one, as I didn't play VI, VII or IX, which are viewed by a lot of people as the best. I think I liked X even over VIII (even though I am not the biggest fan of the more closed of nature of that one). I am also one of the people who didn't dislike XIII and XIII-2 (I do like the combat system in those), so you can take that as you will.
I still want to play IX, VI, XII and VII (in that order). I own all of those on PS4, but I just don't find time to start them.
People just like different FF games and I do believe a lot of people will like their first FF game a lot.
Nothing wrong with that. People have different tastes. It's not that there are plain bad games in the main FF series (as far as I have heard at least).
edit:
I forgot that I also own VI (on an SNES Classic), so added it to the queue (not sure if I want to play that first or XI).
I also forgot about XV, which I have played for some time (20 hour or so, I guess), but I am in chapter 2 as I play JRPGs very slowly by doing a lot of side quests, so I can't comment on that one too much either (except that I prefer turn-based combat over this action based one). I still want to go back to it though.
The major thing I realized when I went to bed (just after I wrote my long text here), is that my favorite FF game is Lost Odyssey ;). That game feels so much like a Final Fantasy game to me and I think I prefer it over the real FF games I have played.
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I get what your saying but that's the way the patreon is designed and I can't see that ever changing. It's the way most crowd funding efforts see to go honestly.
VIII was alright. Not my favorite, but it's not as bad as a lot of people say it is. Drawing and Junctioning were interesting ideas, but in practice they made the game boring. The grind of drawing magic was mind-numbing, especially early on. The whole "enemies level with you, so junction to get the stat advantage" angle was interesting but led to dull combat as it discouraged casting your best spells since you'd want to junction them to your stats or whatever. Also, just don't have a level up mechanic at all if you're going to do that...just increase enemy stats and have you offset it with better equipment and junctions. Otherwise, I like the unique character actions, though I wish the weren't mostly relegated to limit breaks and they had weaker unique abilities for general use like in VI. GFs soaking damage for you was a cool concept. While I get that the animations were long to allow for the boosting mechanics, they could get tiring. Overall, the gameplay was dripping with cool ideas, but they just weren't well executed.
On the story side, the plot was pretty awful and full of contrivances, but some of the characters were interesting. I think Laguna's story is much better than Squall's, so I'm glad we actually got to play a great deal of it rather than just learning about through dialogue or non-interactive flashback. Rinoa is a problem...she really has no reason to have any interest in Squall. Most of your party members are sort of one-note, and the common history they share was a pretty poorly handled story beat. I liked the lore for the origin of monsters in the world. The towns and cities were also well done...generally good world building. Overall, it was an OK 40 hours to spend on a game in high school, but I don't see myself ever replaying it.
3/5 - Swamp, but not like a bad one
On the story side, the plot was pretty awful and full of contrivances, but some of the characters were interesting. I think Laguna's story is much better than Squall's, so I'm glad we actually got to play a great deal of it rather than just learning about through dialogue or non-interactive flashback. Rinoa is a problem...she really has no reason to have any interest in Squall. Most of your party members are sort of one-note, and the common history they share was a pretty poorly handled story beat. I liked the lore for the origin of monsters in the world. The towns and cities were also well done...generally good world building. Overall, it was an OK 40 hours to spend on a game in high school, but I don't see myself ever replaying it.
3/5 - Swamp, but not like a bad one
Well, not really. If i'm not mistaken of the top 100 patreons (by money), EZA has the highest average of money per patron. So they are the most susceptible to big variations every month.
Fair enough. I dont know anything about what other patreons look like. I was talking in a bigger picture sense, like political campaigns or charities. It's hard to get a grasp on how other patreons break down because they choose to hide there numbers. Just as an example kinda funny games has a $10K tier which would mean insane fluctuation if they ever managed to not fill that and they have less patrons than EZA does, 6342.
I think they all did a pretty good job explaining themselves considering it's two of the presentors first real time on the show (I believe).
Take the Smash example, and I have to work off memory here so forgive me for any mistakes, Ben was referring to Brandon's score when expecting a 7, as Brandon was being fairly critical. Brandon made it clear that he may change his score by what the other two say as they would understand how the trailer portrayed the game better than him. Huber convinced him to go down with how he thought Ridley's moves et wasn't perfectly portrayed.
Ben only was really critical of one nitpicky part, and in fact was so positive of the violence portrayed in the moveset presentation that Huber was convinced to go up (Brandon wasn't as he explained that it didn't contain the big reveal he wanted).
All of this seemed pretty straight forward to me, even though I disagreed strongly. And I find it only natural that they mostly rate trailers on emotion as that what trailers for the most part use to convince. The horror, the nostalgia, the comedy. These big budget trailers are so highly produced, that finding technical problems would at most result in small nitpicks (or pet peeves like Kyle's pre-order thing).
That said, they were again very clear about the technical problems of the Resident Evil trailer in regards to the unintended effects of the camera, so that doesn't seem out of their wheelhouse either.
Woah. I just typed way too much about trailers... Now I know how Jones feels.
Edit: Can't argue with the 100 point thing, but it seems to feel natural to them so eh.
I love Huber. Seriously, dude puts a smile on my face every day.
But docking points because it's a CG trailer kind of sucks. Haha. You really gotta look past that and judge it for what it is.
But docking points because it's a CG trailer kind of sucks. Haha. You really gotta look past that and judge it for what it is.
I think Ben meant that he thought Brandon was going to give it a 7, not that he was going to give it a 7 himself.
Brandon said beforehand that he was probably going to change his score because he didn't know enough about Smash and Metroid, so he wasn't sure if he went too much or not.
I have not clue why Huber changed his score, it's Huber we are talking about, it just popped into his head (which is why watching Huber is fascinating/fun and sometimes exhausting at the same time).
Also, those scores don't mean a thing. They are just for show, especially when Kyle is there, which I don't mind as I love his reactions to trailers, but it looks to me he doesn't like to score things (which is ok, I love when Kyle is on this show).
It's the conversation/discussion what makes these types of videos what they are imo (a bit like every review in fact).
I understand where you are coming from, but in the end it's all done for fun. Not to have a serious list of scores for trailers (at least, that's how it looks to me).
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MrMette already partially covered how I was going to respond. When Huber and Ben talked about the seven range, they meant that that's what they expected Jones to score the trailer because he made it sound like he was going to be harsher for the trailer than Huber and Ben were going to be. Jones then decided to dock some points after hearing the others' criticisms. I'm pretty sure Huber also specified that the reason he changed his score was because of Ben's point about how Ridley's ferocity or whatever comes through the moves that they're showing.
Personal thoughts on the Ridley trailer: I actually disagree pretty heavily on Ben's thoughts on it. I love the hat spin and while I do agree that it's not what Ridley would probably do (he knows how dangerous Samus can be and would just attack her unrelentlessly), this is not a trailer Metroid game. It's a trailer for Smash Bros. which is fun and silly, so I do think that the hat spin is a good bridge to Smash gameplay.
The ending shot of the trailer was also something that I didn't like. I feel like the two reasons it's there are to point out that Metroid is also represented in Smash by ZSS and to whos Metroid fans that "don't worry, Samus isn't weak in this game", which has been an issue for fans with Other M. Both of these are fine by themselves, but I don't think it really works when you try to do both at the same time. Because I feel like the ending is a message to Metroid fans, I feel like it needs to follow Metroid-universe logic more than the hat spin part, and in-universe Samus has a hard time dealing with regular Space Pirates when she's just in her Zero-Suit. That's why that part of Zero Mission is mostly just sneaking around. I don't think she'd be dumb enough to fight Ridley head-on in her un-powered state.
Overall, I wouldn't go beyond an 8.0 with the score for that trailer. On the other hand, me and Ben were pretty much on the same wavelength when it came to the Cyberpunk 2077 trailer, while Jones and Huber were extremely positive about it. I would've given it a flat 9.0 too. The averages that the RE2 and BGE2 trailers got are really close to how I would've rated them as well.
Agreed. I do like the suggestion to find some way to reward good presentations— the Greats are the Greats, but good presentations are a treat for the viewers and an illustration of someone's actual love for a game.
I feel like those dead ringers are supposed to get in there with little to no challenge. The allies will keep adding obvious classic games to the list which is totally the point of it. Once all the big name classics are there, then we'll get some seriously controversial picks due to how convincing their presentations are. So don't worry, those will be weighed a lot more heavily in the future.
Oh, absolutely. Despite the average per patron thing, as i and others mentioned here before, usually when they had big bumps at/following E3 it would come with a lot of uppledges and you woudn't see the number of patrons growing a lot. This time around they got 7,5k patrons which is a fantastic growth for them even in comparison to last month. There are many reasons to be excited about how things are going.
It's tricky to compare anything to Kinda Funny - not just because they have hidden their total dollar amount, but also because they actually have two Patreons. I'm sure a huge number of those are the same people pledging at around $1, but it's still twice the dollar amount than EZA are able to offer.
I think the scores are the least important thing about Trailer Jones...in no way are they given the same weight as review scores, and they're not intended to. I'm much more interested in the dissection and discussion. Everyone has different criteria for what makes a good trailer, that's what makes it fun.
i do agree with lowering score for all cg trailers
all cg trailer may be okay as first reveal, but videogames aren't a cg movie form entertainment so if you keep showing cg sure you're telling me something with the trailer storywise, but you're not really telling me how the games will be, how will it play and how will it looks. if you keep making cg trailer up to the release day i'm not gonna there day 1 to buy the game
For sure, they are one of the biggest video game patreons and the only one that I know anything about so that's why I picked them specifically.
Meh. I think this is very silly. It's to sell the story to people and the BG&E trailer did that extremely well. We know it's a while off but we've also seen gameplay.
So it's either that or they just don't show anything. Gotta be able to put biases aside and judge it for what it is, I think.
I guess I misinterpreted what Ben was saying. Also, I get that there are explanations for the changing of scores, it's just that the paper-thin difference 0.2 or 0.5 points make, combined with the many changes and the mild reasons given or extrapolated make everything look needlessly complicated. It's mostly due to the 100 points scale being silly in itself. About the bolded: yeah that's where I'm coming from as well, that's why after the nice discussions they had, the segments when they score feel weak in comparison; I'd prefer they used a smaller scale (20 points like in their reviews, or even better 10 points) or at least that they decided on a score and stuck with it without wavering too much: changing your score after you've heard the other scores seems cheap.
I think CG trailers are bad, flat out and are only acceptable after it youve already shown gameplay OR if you show gameplay directly afterwards, which BG&E2 did show gameplay afterwards but they purposly obscured it from view for people not in the audience. What are they trying to hide?Show it or dont but dont half ass it.
They have also shown charecters walking around before but it's so bare bones that while its technically gameplay, it doesnt show anything.
I want to say if your game is more than 3 years away just dont show anything but with there whole space monkey program and artist collaboration efforts I understand why they have to show something. It's just a bad position to be in all around.
They have also shown charecters walking around before but it's so bare bones that while its technically gameplay, it doesnt show anything.
I want to say if your game is more than 3 years away just dont show anything but with there whole space monkey program and artist collaboration efforts I understand why they have to show something. It's just a bad position to be in all around.
I wonder what you mean by it being a bad position to be in. For them it's a great way to garner interest, they're expanding their team, bringing fans along. For us, we just get cool trailers, even if they might be a bit shallow for now. It might be bad for the trailers purists perhaps, but then even Jones is on board.
For me, your game gets to be at two E3s before I just dont care about the game anymore. I'll check it out when it gets released but I'm over hearing coverage about it. Nothing needs a three years or more marketing campaign.
It's a bad place to be in because with so much fan involvement ubisoft doesnt gwt the option of going dark and just toiling away on there game. I think we have another watchdogs situation on our hands. Prepare yourselves for arguments about downgrades and missing features because they are coming.
Who knows though, maybe ubisoft knows exactly what there doing and everything will turn out great. I'll check back in three years from now and see.
I 100% agree with Huber on the BGE2 complaint. It is 100% a "short film" and not a trailer, in the same way that the character videos accompanying OverWatch are not "trailers" for that game. That said, if that is what they want to grade, I do think the BGE2 movie is a good one, I just don't see it as representative of the game in any sense. This goes beyond a general aversion to CGI trailers, which I think is what Ben was attacking Huber on. The CGI trailer for Shadow of the Tomb Raider for example, is clearly just a glossy version of Lara killing folks in the Jungle (i.e., the game). It is a trailer (a CGI trailer, but still a trailer). The BGE2 movie is likely a good prologue for the events of the game (and whatever they make up) but it is not a trailer. In my opinion, YMMV of course.
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