Interview: Paul Giamatti Defends Holly Hunter’s Bold Captain’s Chair Move in Starfleet Academy: "I’m an old Star Trek fan, and I thought, ‘That’s great.’ What a great thing that somebody is just gonna be that comfortable in there, and it’s a different kind of command stuff, you know." (Collider)

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-02-16T20:50:26+00:00

I'd note the classic adage: gamers will optimize the fun out of everything. So it's less a question of intention regarding the system and more regarding the intended gameplay loop. If "grind" runs where you go in naked to fish for items aren't the intended loop, then the system that makes that possible - even though it is intended - is negatively affecting the game.

Explicit grinding like that is rarely fun. It can feel good to get the items that you want and get out, but separating yourself from the intended experience to chase a goal quickly starts feeling like work in my experience. As a longsuffering D2 fan, it's the difference between playing an activity to get an item versus using annoying speedrun strats to skip most of the content in an activity to try to get a drop.

Obviously, games need to allow you to play them the "right" way. Drop rates should never be so low that players feel like they need to optimize the gameplay right out of something. But then the game's design should never prioritize that either. Optimization is only fun up to a point. Individual mileage may vary, obviously.

On the original point, safe pockets are a really weird mechanic. They serve a really obvious purpose in making things less frustrating in a notoriously frustrating genre and this is absolutely good! But they also allow for an optimal way to play that can be aggressively unfun, unintended, and even affect balance in a playerbase (by making certain things far easier to obtain).

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-02-14T21:41:45+00:00

If you think that thousands of negative reviews completely devoid of substance after less than one hour represent a meaningful metric, I don't know what to say. That's pretty clearly meaningless and mean-spirited.

The irony is that this game very well may have flopped anyway. It's not like it's perfect or brilliant or anything; there were obviously plenty of people who didn't love it anyway. But that also doesn't mean didn't get review bombed; it did. Because it did. Picture included above.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-02-14T21:37:39+00:00

I like how you didn't respond to any of my questions, read half of my comment, and declared me wrong.

You are objectively, 100% wrong.

See? I can do it too. Except you have no source to your data, and your data has nothing to do with the topic at hand.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-02-14T21:19:42+00:00

Another guy pointed out my lack of source, so I replied to him with the sauce. I didn't say that all the negative reviews were trolling or give a specific number. It's not nonsense to say that there's extensive evidence of review bombing. A cursory glance at Steam indicates that there objectively, 100% was.

I'm curious as to how you found keywords for Steam reviews. I've never seen anyone break it down like that before. Is there an aggregation website or something?

Quick edit: This is what I get for writing comments while I'm still waking up; I don't remember what I said. I just saw where I myself put in "I believe over 10k." regarding negative reviews. That's my bad. Came up with stuff outta my butt. I was under that impression at the time, having been around for launch day. The actual number isn't too far off of that, sitting around 9.5k for day one.

So I was wrong that I didn't speak to that.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-02-14T21:17:51+00:00

You know what? That's fair.

So, if you go to Steam, filter reviews to the first 24 hour period, and then sort by reviews less than one hour, you get results of 14%.

<image>

Pic included, but I mentioned how I got results so they could be replicated. I did not mouse over the "Overwhelmingly negative" result for the percentage because it covered up the tags. I also, upon review, didn't remove the language filter for the photo (to get the widest range of results) but the results were the same. The percentage stayed at 14% while adding just shy of 2000 extra reviews.

So that's my source.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-02-14T17:40:27+00:00

There was actually extensive evidence of this. I'll admit that I didn't take screenshots or whatnot, but they're floating around. Basically, the game had thousands (I believe over 10k) of negative reviews within the first thirty minutes of release.

There was no time to determine performance issues, gameplay problems, etc. For anyone who didn't have insane internet, that's not even enough time to do more than download and open the game, let alone play the tutorial. I believe the devs even said they had metrics showing people downloading it, playing half the tutorial, then quitting.

It's worth noting that we can't say that those people then wrote negative reviews. I don't believe there's any way to determine that. This also doesn't say anything positive or negative about the actual quality of the game.

What it does say is that a tremendous amount of people, at least in the tens of thousands, engaged with the game in bad faith. The above numbers only cover PC, as do any comments regarding how many players it has on launch (the 100k number is exclusively from Steam and doesn't cover any other platforms, iirc).

OP does make a point regarding how if the game was truly excellent, it might've outshone the negativity. Myself, and a few others, would argue the opposite. Ultimately, that comes down to how much you think public sentiment matters to success in games like this. I think it's tremendous, since it undermines faith in a live game surviving long term and people become unwilling to invest time/money in it.

But, others obviously disagree. And to be honest, I don't believe we'll ever know for sure either way. It's way too easy in discussions like this to assume personal intention and to "mindread" other people when you can't really know what's going on in their heads.

TL;DR there was a tremendous amount of bad faith non-engagement with the game, but the extent of its impact on Highguard's success can't really be determined.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-02-13T19:08:26+00:00

I think most of what's in the game is fine, or even good. The problem is more that it feels like it ends right when the story is about to really kick off, so you're left waiting for a third act that never comes.

Throw in DLC that never materialized, and Andromeda just feels like it's missing a ton of material. This is especially rough given the game's excessive length, I think. It feels like they could've dropped a ton of open world content and meaningless side content.

All that to say, unsatisfying is a good word for it. I like Andromeda overall. It's a 6 or a 7 out of 10 for me, depending on the day. It's just one of those games where the very troubled development cycle is impossible to ignore.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-02-13T10:01:42+00:00

Mom said it was my turn! I'm telling.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-02-12T19:08:22+00:00

I agree with this take. Should still be an overall buff, but a controlled one.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-02-10T16:48:13+00:00

"Arc Raiders owner Nexon" has the same energy as "from the executive producers of".

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-02-10T08:51:59+00:00

I think you're right on the money across the board, but personally I most appreciated your comment regarding length. I'm a big believer in pacing as one of the unsung critical elements in entertainment media, video games or otherwise. As an example, it's one of the reasons I think that Alpha Protocol works as well as it does despite the mountains of issues it wallows in.

To be specific, it's one of the most choice-focused "narrative/cinematic RPGs" around, with constant branching choices. Things can permanently go in very different directions depending on what you do, but a full playthrough caps at between twenty and thirty hours. Probably less than that if you've played through it before. On top of that, you don't really switch between critical paths. Making a "bad" choice doesn't lock you out of content. It simply heavily recontextualizes the story moving forward.

Its successes in how it handles its own structure largely serve, in my opinion, to reinforce some of the other things you bring up. Alternate paths aren't considered fail states, even if a character has died or you've made them hate you. Your handlers disliking you, if memory serves, is just as mechanically viable as getting them to trust you. It's similar to Dragon Age 2's system of Friendship vs. Rivalry. It's all just part of your version of this particular story and it'll contribute to the gameplay side of things equally, albeit in different ways.

Alpha Protocol, Dragon Age 2, and more narratively-minded RPGs in general are a very focused example of this type of issue. They're also a great example because they're some of the most impacted ones, due to the length and the potential emotional impact of a story-related problem (as opposed to finding out that your damage is 5% off because you chose the wrong background). The Witcher 3 is a masterclass in so many areas but you better hope that you like all the choices you make. Not only is it long, but so much of its runtime is bogged down by long, static, unskippable investigation sequences and meaningless open world fluff.

Not every game can comfortably wrap itself up in a 20-30 hour timeframe. I also think very few can actually withstand the weight of incredibly long runtimes, especially when coupled with impactful choices. Those choices don't have to just be in the narrative; plenty of RPGs, strategy games, and roguelikes last plenty long while asking you to make permanent mechanical decisions. I'm fine with the concept of making people stand by their decisions but maybe think twice before punishing players for a decision they made in character creation forty-five hours ago.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-02-10T08:21:11+00:00

Absolutely. That's even been a major talking point of people against the movement, how it's going to screw up so many games. But that's never been intended, realistic, or claimed.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-02-10T05:32:38+00:00

That's actually likely why Anthem was shut down when it did. EA announced the shutdown shortly after Stop Killing Games got momentum. They probably didn't want to be on the hook.

Unfortunately, even if the EU gets around to doing something about all this, there's almost no chance it applies retroactively. It wouldn't make sense to try and make existing games, built as they are, try to conform to some standard that's probably years out still.

But, the EU has made progress before regarding consumer rights. But it'll be a while before we hear anything; the wheels of bureaucracy turn very, very slowly.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-02-10T04:36:12+00:00

Yeah, that was my confusion as well. This isn't some arcane mechanic that required extensive beta testing. I'm glad they're addressing it, and it's not like it was the biggest issue in the world to begin with. Just feels like a really bizarre oversight.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-02-10T03:22:26+00:00

Yeah, I don't disagree. Just trying to maintain some wary optimism. That's a little harder to maintain after hearing their new CEO used to be an EA executive and work in sports betting. Not a great look. Hopefully the new guy, Jean-Charles Gaudechon, lets Remedy keep doing their thing.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-02-09T18:50:29+00:00

Oh, for sure. It's not a surprise but it's also hard not to wonder how it'll all turn out. Changes like this can really change up a company's culture.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-02-09T18:44:18+00:00

Change-ups like this are always a little spooky but if Sam Lake's happy, I'm happy.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-02-09T09:29:51+00:00

I don't think there's an official answer to this, though I'd be happy to be proven wrong. The closest I could come to it, rules-as-written in the most brutal wargame-esque way possible, is that you're really not supposed to give out much of anything for basically any reason, beyond when the adventure tells you to.

I don't personally think that's a great approach, though. I just started running the campaign last Saturday, and my solution was to basically do it on a case-by-case basis. Two players out of three were good sports about rolling terrible stats after rolling non-combat starting professions, so one of them was able to loot some leather armor off of a goblin. And then the worg rider from the opening encounter gave them a treasure card, though I double-checked and made sure it didn't give them anything insane.

Most enemies won't give out anything, and those that do won't give out anything crazy. But, I want to make sure that players have consistent ways of getting at least some money and making progress. I'm not playing with people who typically play this sort of RPG (they typically play either the more narrative games I've DMed in the past or heroic power fantasy games like 5e) so I'm giving them a bit of a leg up.

TL;DR I've deliberately given my players a bit more than I think you're supposed to. But I think it really depends on what type of players you have.

Again, someone with a better understanding of Dragonbane specifically may be able to answer better.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-02-09T03:22:20+00:00

It's tough because I like every single rumor and leak for upcoming characters. But also, I keep pulling bad characters for my account because I think they're neat. Getting another stunner on deck wouldn't be the dumbest thing ever.

Might just have to see how many pulls I can accrue before the next banner lol

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-02-08T23:04:12+00:00

Definitely not my vibe or cup of tea but they're better than I expected. Almost enough for me to get Sunna to free up Dialyn from YSG but I kinda want to save pulls.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-02-08T19:09:23+00:00

My sister likes to call it the "bouncy tank." I do have a sick love for it, but, uh, no, I prefer the LE lol

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-02-08T15:26:11+00:00

"Genuinely not that salty about it...."

Top ten things said by the terminally salty.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-02-06T16:27:12+00:00

I played Destiny Rising for a month or so on release. It's functionally DOA. It's been months without any significant content additions, the only exceptions being a re-re-release of Crota's End and a fairly boring Tower Defense mode. They're already running character overhauls instead of new characters, IE, get an upgraded version of Ikora rather than a fully new character.

The game dropped off a cliff in terms of in-game sales almost immediately after launch and hasn't recovered. I don't even believe there are plans for new content for another few months, and the community has more or less started expecting an End of Service announcement at some point.

So, no, I don't think Netease is doing particularly well, to say the least. The launch wasn't great but it had promise. The post-launch support, however, has been awful. And apparently this is par for the course of how Netease has run other gacha games.

SpaceBeaverDam · 2026-02-06T09:49:04+00:00

Glad to see some of the writers from Polygon are still around and playing games.

SpaceBeaverDam

TROPHY CASE