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Bungie in 2013: Destiny will change gaming! The world in 2014: Lol this game is trash The world in 2021: OKAY BUNGIE WE ADMIT IT, YOU CHANGED GAMING. CAN YOU PLEASE CHANGE IT BACK NOW
@@mightymediocre3352 I mean, even with Borderlands 3 angling to be more like Destiny and those that followed, it's still a game you can play offline. Honestly, there's a lot of pretty big differences between Borderlands and Destiny on a structural level, and pretty much every other looter shooter that followed falls a lot closer to the Destiny end of the spectrum.
@@mightymediocre3352 no, Destiny definitely did it. As soon as everyone saw them make all their money back by not delivering what they promised, everyone agreed that it was the thing.
I love how he pointed out they gave him a literal list of bullet points to talk up and his response was to take the time to expressly piss on those bullet points.
He did the whole bullet pointed list and only talked about those things. He also explicitly didn't give an option on the game as a whole by the end. Market analysts would love him for following thier requirements so well.
@@ACEYGAMES When he said he only played the game for 3/4 hours, he probably wasn't kidding. Its not enough time to come up with a comprehensive opinion for a reviewer.
@@PissedGrunty then again, the fact he was only able to play it for 3-4 hours because of the servers is itself pretty damning to the quality of service one can expect from the game.
@@michaelo5665 Yeah but it being up for just some of the player base isn't good enough, several people are having the same issues where they are only getting a few hours of gameplay and lots more hours of just a loading screen.
@@jason2mate I guess I'm just special then? I have at least a dozen hours in the game without having any issues. Is this just the pc servers? I'm honestly asking because I haven't had an issue and none of the people I know playing it have either.
"And we will continue to be in development for years after launch for being unfinished. I mean, will continue to add content and support the game for years to come. Live service baby!"
Literally every word of the "stop trying to make every game cover every playstyle" rant is pure gold and God damn do I wish Yahtzee could just walk into E3, take the stage, say those words, and get the industry to stop trying to bland itself to death
kinda had the same problem in Guild Wars 2. i like playing tank, it gets me into parties easy. aoe mage is good grind-y fun too. but then they want to break the trinity (tank, healer, DPS) and i am left sad.
@WTFViewer This 100%. I've been playing Borderlands 3 lately and Shift connecting and disconnecting makes the game run like it's trying to set my PC on fire
Portal 2 was a good example of being able to optimize the game for both single and multiplayer by making it two different campaigns that focus on different things
Point is that it was optimized separately. One part of the game was singleplayer-focused, the other was multiplayer-focused. It's not like they tried to contrive a way to make both the single and multiplayer modes use the same maps and the same puzzles
yes but portal 2 still suffered from the "I know the answers" problem. Portal 2 co-op is best played as 2 people who haven't played it before, or 2 people who have. 1 new person and 1 person who's already solved all the puzzles makes it pretty boring, because person 1 knows person 2 has all the answers.
@@MarioDragon This is why every time I play Portal 2 with someone new I give it long enough that I've mostly forgotten the fine details of each puzzle, and then deliberately leave it to them to solve it at their own pace and issue me commands
There are so many reviewers that are out there that aren't IGN and Gamespot that give honest opinion and often get them out before IGN/GS does and to be honest they are far far better too.
Well PCF only really made Painkiller and Bulletstorm, and the latter was released 10 years ago. Otherwise its just porting help or support with original Fortnite. Its probably very different people working at the studio.
Seems like the safest course of action in order to find good games anymore is not to follow the studios, themselves, but rather the people in them who were responsible for making good games previously. Unless something goes horribly wrong, it seems pretty safe to assume that they'll keep making generally good games, whatever studio they end up working at. (Unless it's EA, because EA are soul-sucking hacks.)
@@USMC49er Indeed. Unlike the titles in the bland category, Balan Wonderland is not a generic, mediocre game. It's a game that got some anticipation because it stands out from the crowd. But then it released and it turns it has fundamental game design flaws, a rather confusing story, and performance issues. Balan is not bland... It's bad. Having said that... Did Yahtzee ever review Balan Wonderland? I thought that only games covered in Zero Punctuation were contenders.
@@powerthunfischdesdonners3086 Balan isn’t even bland, it’s just straight up terrible in every way. Balan won’t just be forgotten immediately like most bland games, it’ll be seen as a perfect example of everything that can go wrong with a platformer for a long time
Zero Punctuation metal album of the week: *Forever War On Hell World* by *Horror Planet* (tracks include *Fascists Versus Nutters* ) Zero Punctuation quirky indie rock track of the week: *Dispassionate Nihilism* by the *Judgemental Coconuts*
@@IveBeenWithBruma So you're saying that Yahtzee saw that list of bullet points and in recognizing a desperate plea for help, found some pity in that withered husk of heart of his?
Yahtzee, the management game you played involved you hiring security guards to murder secret agents and building rocket bases. You haven't stopped being violent, you've just outsourced it.
It seems like every time Yahtzee talks about multiplayer shooters he ends up coming back to Team Fortress 2 as the gold standard. And honestly I can’t disagree- I don’t know of any game that does what TF2 does better than TF2. After the lukewarm review he gave of it when it first came out I’m glad he’s giving it the respect it deserves.
You thought that was a lukewarm review? His only real criticism of it at the time was that there were barely any maps to choose from- which at the time, was true, the hundreds there are today all got patched in later.
Team Fortress 2 was made with passion and actual work. They made the game first, then worried about making money. Triple A is more focused on “how can we make money? Let’s make a game.” And that’s the whole process. You can’t have the reward without putting in the elbow grease. Hence TF2 being on the steam top 10 more than 12 years later
At least you can exit out of Dark Souls at any time without losing progress, rather than being sent back to a checkpoint an hour before *cough*borderlands*cough*
@@user-bf5sc8pn8x yeah, was replaying borderlands 2 and had to give up on it, i don't have the time i had as a kid to play, so the checkpoints started to progressively get more and more dog shit as enemys become more spongee, also i forgot to disable online while on the warrior boss fight, so OFC the game fucking disconnected in the midle of it, and worst of all, made my PC go bluescreen of death on me and refused to properly boot until next day, that was the last drop for me, i ragequited and uninstall borderlands 2, a good game, but i hate GB software and Randy Pitchford, for all of the dog-rat awfull design choices in the game.
They do all kind of blur together at this point, don't they... with their blandy titles and their looting and shooting, some token super powers that somehow manage not to feel special in any significant way, their functional story that explains the need to shoot lots of dudes and monsters and stuff. Microtransactions, daily timesinks, fancy editions to toss money at.
I watched someone else play for about an hour and thought 'man, I haven't seen a single thing here that wasn't done just as well by any other game of the genre for at least the last three years'
I want to bring up the whole "cover-based shooter" aspect, because they do a pretty wacky thing later on in the game (I don't know how far he actually got, but here it goes). Later on, when you get to the forest level, they actually start to push you away from taking cover and instead do things a little more like Painkiller where you're constantly running around, blasting things to bits with your weapons and abilities. I actually really liked that shift because they actively encourage you to keep moving rather than sit behind a wall or a block. At some point, I stopped bothering to take cover, even when there were boatloads of chest-high blocks of wood or concrete, as I needed to dish out more damage with my abilities rather than plinking away at them from behind cover, a la Gears or Division. You quickly realize that you want to be moving as much as possible and be as close as possible to the enemy so that your abilities can heal you up and kill them quicker. Hell, there are entire levels where you're up against other human enemies and there is virtually no cover to be had, and the run-and-gun gameplay actually benefits the game a lot more, as it makes engagements more nail-biting and tense rather than feeling mundane and routine if it were strictly a cover-based shooter.
The cover is for your enemies. Not for you. With that said. The sheer durability and sheer number of most of the enemies does not make run and gun a viable stratagem in a lot of cases. Also cool downs on powers take way too long.
@@Hillthugsta You clearly haven't touched Expeditions at all. Run-and-gun is _the_ strat for getting the best gear, since you're timed and need to complete them as fast as possible. Taking cover and slowing down is the last thing you can do, since you slow yourself down and aren't doing anything. Also, cooldowns take too long? I've seen cooldowns below 10 seconds. Hell, I've seen them go as low as 6 seconds. How exactly are those long?
I feel like a big complaint with that in mind is that the push doesn’t happen soon enough. Having only played an hour or so (I know, I know), and from what friends have said, the first few hours are a slog of cutscenes and cover shooting. If they did good with the run and gun, why even slow us down to begin with, right? :/
@@Starfall1026 THIS. Outriders has one of the worst first impressions of a game in a long time. I actually respect their "teach the gamer slowly" mentality but their training section in the beginning of the game is not representative of HOW to play the game and have fun with it.
@@utisti4976 dark souls does not throw a fit if you need to step away and acknowledge the real world for a bit though, most online nonsense will have an AFK timer even if you are playing by yourself.
@@utisti4976 No it's fucking dumb in Dark Souls too. If they wanted the inventory to not pause the game for tension that's fine, but there could be a pause button separate from the inventory.
@@utisti4976 Dark Souls has a pause button. It just comes in the form of standing still in a safe area - near a bonfire, or someplace you've cleared of patrolling enemies. Alternatively you can save-and-quit to resume wherever you were. Making it a literal button to press instead wouldn't change much; just save people time when they need to deal with real life stuff, as un-hardcore as I'm sure that is. Possibly deny the occasional invader a cheap kill if you get unlucky with the PvP stuff enabled (in those instalments that have the option to switch it on or off without physically disconnecting your internet).
There should be some kind of fuckin' law that if you have single player, that you have to put in god damned pause functionality for the single player portion. You can ook and eek about "muh experience" all you want, but at the end of the day, its just sheer fucking laziness. I am playing alone, let me get up and have a piss without the fear of getting ground into paste. That whole "BUT DARK SOULS DID IT" thing can fuck right off, too. That was an outright fuck-up on the part of From Software. It added nothing, it never adds anything, and it never fuckin' will. Let me pause or piss off.
The best thing about this game is that it had a demo I could be ejected from during the tutorial because of server issues in order to find out how bad it was. Saved me time *and* money!
Another fun and creative review. I'm going to record what stood out to me. 1. Chewing a broom handle. That's a funny image. 2. Piss in a letterbox. Is this a common joke? I've never heard it before. 3. The baby is dead. Good grief. Is this a reference to the horror stories from the WOW days? [Shiver] 4. Pussyfooting. Always liked that word. It's true though. You can either do mulitplayer or you can do single player, but you can't do both equally well simultaneously. They're not miscible genres. And that's all the funny stuff that i recall for a first watch. Still in awe of Yahtz and his ability to write such an entertaining and inventive review full of amusing imagery. I rib him a bit at times, but he is truly a singular voice in the video game industry. No one else can do what he does. Must be all the bodily excretion jokes that just energize ones creative faculties if told often enough.
What I find funny about these big games in retrospect is how quickly we move on. I was sick to death of seeing ad after ad on the lead up to its release, but had since totally forgotten about the game until this review plopped onto my feed. 😂
I think "Down due to server issues" should be a staple part of the rating system for game reviews. Says so much more than "7/10, it wasn't Call of Duty."
He's made similar comparisons before when he critiqued Brink; his issue being that if you're gonna have multiple classes/types of units, make them stand out from each other. TF2 does this via the silhouettes of each character, making them visually distinct from each other.
these critques actally make good points. Most of the internet has just been saying GUUUUH IT LOOKS SO UGLY GUUUH so my inner hipster was thinking "if everyone hates it, it might be good!" So thank you for this review, Yathz, I know better now
Great review, I agree. I'm not a game critic, I'm just a poor boy. But I know why I don't like the game without playing it. It's brown. 100 shades of brown. Mud everywhere. Call me whatever you want, but I enjoyed AC games in short sessions, cause they're colorful. Is there something wrong with me? Maybe. But I'm not down for so much brown, no no no
If I might make a suggestion, never go to Yahtzee for a real review. These are comedy shows. If you really want to see what the game is life, go watch some gameplay, or better yet for this one, play the demo. I was on vacation for a week as this released, and I kind of felt in the mood for a shooter so I picked it up. It has been fun, but not nearly worth the full price. And I completely agree with the assessment that this is not optimized for single player, which is how I play games. I'd recommend it if you have friends and on a half price sale.
@@SilortheBlade Yeah. I picked it up... Its...fine. I mean, its not going to win any awards, but the story is at least interesting, and the gameplay has some satisfying elements.
@@Chris_Sizemore Those aren't really mutually exclusive. Sure the reviewer could be right but you should still make an effort to form your own opinion whether it lines up with theirs or not, especially when the reviewer in question might exaggerate positive or negative aspects for the sake of comedy.
Conceptually there might be a way to balance multiplayer and single player, it worked for Dynasty Warriors, but the games you can pull it off in probably need specific genres and lots of evaluation & iteration. Things the modern industry apparently loathes.
There should be an international law requiring the lead dev and who ever was responsible for the project at the publisher's end each doing a 20 min reaction video to the ZP review of their game while plugged into a lie detector to make sure their comments are honest. That would be equaly hillarious, iluminating and depressing.
4:25 This was quite an interesting take from old Yahtzee here. My first reaction to this was Portal 2, but it had separate single player and co-op stories both optimised for their respective number of players. My next thought was the old Lego Star Wars games. Drop-in, drop-out co-op means the gameplay is completely accessible for one player or two. Maybe there’s a different rule for couch co-op games perhaps?
Well the thing about Lego games is that they’re puzzle games more than action games. Because of this, you don’t necessarily need to rely on a partner and just keep switching to whoever you need to complete the puzzle at the time. But big action games (this also applies to Portal) need to separate their single and multiplayer into different modes, with entirely different design philosophies. It’s when you try and make it all one mode where you can play through a map with just one player or multiple players that the problems ensue, since in games like Outriders the levels are always designed with the philosophy that you may or may not have help, meaning it has to be feasibly playable either or, creating an experience with no real focus or specialization on specific mechanics or even enemy types that you learn to counter with your special abilities. Because every special ability needs to do more or less the same job of killing enemies. Because what if it’s just you? A healing ability you can do only to allies becomes practically worthless. So every level is built on the idea that anyone can accomplish any job and thus creating a bland middle ground that doesn’t really please anyone outside of those with the lowest possible standards.
"it's like playing football you know, if you let something inflate itself first, you'll have a lot more fun kicking it in the face" Jesus Christ Yathzee
Honestly I'd kind of like to hear Yahtzee's thoughts on Warframe. There's no way he make it to the big story moments like The Second Dream, but maybe he'd at least get to see Fortuna and Cetus, maybe get ground into mulch by an Eidolon? Could be fun.
I would too...unfortunately I think he'd probably get hung up on how much there is (intimidating for new players), how well it's all explained (not well enough if you're not reaching out to other players or guides), and that the key to getting almost all of it for free is time and patience. There's a lot of content and mechanics to play with and explore but it can be pretty daunting and esoteric to figure out completely alone. Funny, if he put out on social media that he was trying it out, I'm sure he'd have clans and veterans clamoring to show him the cool stuff and get him through the neat story content, but you know he doesn't want to play with others 😂
@@jguns3738 I also think the game doesn't really kick it into gear until Second Dream and all the big story expansions. Up until that point it feels like a fairly repetitive loop of going to nodes on planets, shooting stuff for 5-10 minutes, and then moving on to the next node. I tolerated it because I enjoyed the feel of the gameplay and combat, but I suspect Yahtzee wouldn't be so forgiving
@@jguns3738 no he'll give it shit for having blatant predatory price inducing frustrations, such as 3 day wait times for crafting things, and making you pay real money for slots, making the game literally not fun or not playable unless you spend 24/7 trading or spending hundreds of real money. not the mention the horrible tutorial.
I mean Jim has been getting shit on since he released his opinion on the game for this very reason, still a bloody joke that it's somehow their faults instead of the game developers.
Well people often feel that _them_ not having the same issues means that the criticism is invalid. Maybe not everyone will have those issues but if enough people have them that it's a problem, then it's a problem. But these sycophants never see it that way.
I suppose the thought process is "Ah, well, the servers aren't fully up and running since it's still in the pre-release period; they'll have it smoothed out by the time _I_ get the game". Which is just a desperate delusion, kind of like how people think that any and all complaints brought up in a game's demo will be ironed out by release _(cough Balan Wonderworld cough)_
@@ShermTank7272 I mean we have seen that slippery slope so much recently that it's not funny, so i'm not sure why so many people still defend games, Fallout 76, Anthem etc. The list goes on so long that it's hard to see how anyone still argues that it's ok and that the game will be ok when they get it, depending on the game, it might not ever even be fixed.
"We don't even have to burn it, we can just piss in the letter box!" I can do you one better: Leave a flaming bag of poop on their doorstep, ring the bell and run. Nobody's done that in years, they'll never see it coming!
Ohoho but dont forget! You can also just randomly log in to a completely naked hero as i did just after hitting level thirty! Boy what a fun time to be alive!
Yup, nothing better than a looter shooter with a bug that takes away your loot. Such a failure of a game in terms of polish. Hope you didn’t grind for certain perk combos cause you won’t get them back
I have noticed the only group of people not annoyed or out right raging over this game are the people playing on a Microsoft platform. Self included. Lack of pause and always online are the only deal breakers here.
Ding! Yahtzee is at it again! This guy be telling it like it is and I would totally elaborate too, but the rest of my opinion "could not connect to server due to internet connection error." :D
I will say that changing your world tier level will greatly help with the bullet sponge difficulty. Mine automatically changed so that enemies were spawning in 3 levels higher and it was impossible. If you lower the world tier down so enemies are your level or one level higher, it becomes a lot more fun and manageable.
It's perfectly playable solo if you pay attention to how World Tier works and set it to what's manageable instead of letting it automatically spiral out of control.
The only franchise I've ever seen pull off single and multiplayer off together effectively is Super Mario because the single players and the multiplayers are in it for the same reason, unlike the split that Yahtzee described.
I must say this is the most enjoyable ZP I've seen in a while. Not that the previous ones were bad, they weren't, but this one seems to much better writing. Plus I really that Yahtzee actually talks about the game a bit before talking about it's flaws and doesn't harp on about one particular aspect for too long. Maybe Yahtzee really has reached a higher plan of existence. Love you week Yahtz, keep it up
In regards to games not being able to be equally enjoyable in multiplayer and singleplayer, I've found Deep Rock Galactic to be just about the closest to achieving this that I've seen. Multiplayer definitely better IMO, but the singleplayer is still very fun and not a whole lot harder/more inconvenient.
I dunno. I enjoyed playing the demo. I picked Blue and spent my time teleporting around the map with a shotgun and time bubbles, constantly getting shot but healing fast enough to not die from it. It was nice to play a shooter where your abilities were actually a significant part of the gameplay. Looking at you, borderlands. I'll probably pick the game up when it goes on sale and the servers aren't as swamped. If the ability-modifying gear at the end of the demo is a non-trivial part of the full game it'll probably be good fun.
A rule I live by, is that any game can be made more fun by playing it in multiplayer. It might not be playable, but it will always be more fun. So if you want to make a fun game, make it for singleplayer, then just shoehorn in that second player without a second thought. It might completely break the game, but trust me, it will be fun. Of course this means that any multiplayer game that's played in singleplayer, will be less fun. And since games are usually made to just barely be fun, that means multiplayer games when played in singeplayer, aren't fun at all.
Actually what AAA doesn't seem to get is this idea that perhaps you have difference health and damage amounts for when the player is alone. DS1/DeS did this WELL over ten years ago!
Worth noting that People Can Fly is no longer People Can Fly, it is a brand new indie studio wearing PCF's mask. Safe to consider The Astronauts as PCF under a new name.
Wow I didn't know devs sent "review guides" out to reviewers. Not even being cynical but I'd be interested in seeing somebody with access to those release them so we can see what devs wanted to gas up about their games at launch. Maybe for games 3~ish years after release so there's no worry about where devs would sure over this type of thing affecting sales.
The game was pretty fun and enjoyable to run through in single player with the adjustable world tiers... once the servers were patched. Also, the price was right on Gamepass :)
I wonder how he'll review the multiplayer component in Arkane's upcoming Deathloop. It's trying to bridge that gap with multi- and single player, albeit not through co-op.
Whats funny is that Yaztee's complain about multiplayer is how mario lart was originally designed! They first tested the maps in multiplayer to make sure it was fun with friends THEN tested the single player mode to give solo sully something to do beyond balancing eggs near faulty wirings
When Yahtzee went off on how the dudes on the chest high walls all look the same but do different things, I said to myself "how is this still a problem in shooters? Valve solved this shit in 2007!" This is why I rarely get anything out of Shooters, since at a distance and/or a glance, you can't really tell very well what you're looking at and then I'm dead.
Dunno if I can agree with the whole "impossible to make a game equally fun for single and multiplayer" statement. It seems very easy to make both no fun for anyone after all.
"It is not possible for any game to be equally enjoyable in both single and multiplayer. You can optimize the experience for one or the other but never both. And the sooner you stop trying to cover all possible audiences at once with the same great big money making hat the better." Absolutely! Now if we can just get AAA publishers to understand the same damn thing when it comes to PvE vs PvP and Hardcore vs Casual that would be just f'n peachy. Maybe great games like SWG, TSW, and Wildstar would still be alive.
I had server issues for the first 24 hours after launch. It's been stable since. I played non-stop the last few days and the only problem I had was a hard crash when I tried to open a reward in the middle of a fight. I'm also playing it single player, and while it's clear it's optimized for multiple players, I've only had to abandon 1 sidequest so far, and that's right after hitting world level 9 against a boss. I came back to once my equipment scaled up properly and was able to take him out on the first try.
@@gargleff2691 If you don't like it, that's perfectly fine. Shitting on others because they like something makes you seem like a pretty pathetic person, however.
I was surprised to see this game get a fair amount of coverage on gaming websites. Given the cover I didn't think it was anything even remotely notable. But hearing it's a looter shooter, it all makes sense now.
There once was a man named Smittoris Who chewed on a great length of licorice I'm trying to think Of a lewd final link But I'm sadly incredibly shit at this
Apparently all the low walls are meant to be cover for the enemies, not the players, & it's the enemies that are playing the cover shooter as you run about massacring them. In practice, it's still a cover shooter but every so often you get to kill 1-3 enemies at once despite the cover element.. If it doesn't crash or disconnect or glitch out.
Outriders is a game that oozes of potential but also stinks of a developer being either completely tonedeaf or strongarmed by a tonedeaf publisher, likely the latter. Whenever you jump into combat with your awesome powers, completely ignoring all the chest-high walls and blast dudes in the face with shotguns and LMGs, it feels awesome. As long as you're constantly killing dudes you feel amazing but then suddenly you can't kill dudes quick enough and you notice all your cool abilities are on an hour cooldown and you're forced to shudder behind a wall or die horribly and be respawned at a checkpoint unreasonably far behind. Yeah I played Outriders quite a lot. Like I said, it has so much potential, the abilites are really cool and you feel amazing when you blanket a battlefield in fire or earthquakes or weird space-time anomalies, but you feel so fucking impotent when your abilities are on cooldown. The game almost begs you to team up with randos but most players don't actually want that. A huge portion of loot-game players want to play alone, play at their own pace. This is the most tonedeaf part of the game really.
“I wonder why they made it a cover based shooter” me too yatz, me too. Most annoying part of the game, they made the game somehow terrible for being in cover and out of it
@@adrians8533 Yknow most games like that implement cover systems for the enemies without making it a third person over the shoulder cover based shooter
Have some fun and do a quick side-by-side cover art comparison with Mercenaries: Playground of Destruction. I can’t tell them apart without my glasses...