"5 Words I'd like to see Retired from Game Discussion"
Click to viewThe above video was one that I found in the comments under the Kotaku article that owsf2000 mentioned and which was linked to from the PC Gamer article he linked to.
I certainly haven't been the biggest fan of TotalBiscuit lately, but I thought I'd give this video a go, all the same.
#1: Pay-2-win. TotalBiscuit seems to make a distinction between "pay to win" and "pay to skip." Well, yeah, okay, I suppose that there are, technically, differences between these two concepts. One is where you can only get access to stuff in a game by paying cash money for it. The other is where you can still get access to stuff in a game through gameplay, but it is also possible to pay cash money to get it more easily, in most cases. With that said, I still find both of these concepts to be egregiously abhorrent things that have been infecting games for a while now. If anything, though, the "pay to skip" bullshit is, as I've said on many occasions in the past, actually the worse of the two, in my opinion. The point of the latter, as owsf2000 has specifically pointed out time after time again, has been to design the games so that it is so incredibly tedious to get stuff through so-called "normal" gameplay that people are more likely and willing to cough up the dough to get it without having to grind for it. In other words, it may as well not be available at all through supposedly "normal" gameplay, and the only fucking reason it is available like that is explicitly for the express purpose of being used by the publishers/developers/fanboys as evidence against accusations of the game being "pay-2-win." (A trap which I feel that TotalBiscuit himself has fallen into during his rant here, in exactly the same way. Just notice how much he is, once again, being a huge fanboy/apologist for fucking League of Legends in this section, and how he's trying to claim that, oh no, LoL isn't really like that at all, honest injun and scout's honor and all that.) As for me, I don't usually have to deal with this sort of thing myself, because I tend to avoid most free-to-play games of this nature like the plague in the first place. I do fully agree with TB, though, that these things should be taken on a case-by-case basis, rather than everything dismissed out of the gate under an umbrella term like this. Except... the thing is, though, even when you do take things on a case-by-case basis, there have been more than enough cases where the game industry has been objectively shown to be increasing in terribleness along these lines, as a whole, such that using the blanket term to describe large swaths of the game industry actually isn't entirely inappropriate, after all.
#2: Cinematic. Um, doesn't he mean "adjective" and not "verb"? The word "cinematic" is not a verb, last I checked. Anyway. Meh, I don't really care about this one, either way. It doesn't much bother me, but I can kind of see where TB is coming from in criticizing the use of the term. I don't use it myself to describe video games. I do agree with him that the use, misuse, and abuse of it by publishers and developers and games "journalists" as a buzzword is pretty annoying. I will say this much though, the gameplay that was shown in TB's video for that The Order: 1886 game looks like the exact same sort of gameplay that almost everyone (except for me, apparently) used to completely flip their lids and lose their shit over, i.e. the much maligned QTE (at least before more recent games like Telltale's The Walking Dead came out and apparently made the QTE all the rage again). But we were discussing "cinematic" here, not "quick time event." And yeah, again, I agree with TB that its use as a marketing buzzword renders it mostly useless, but even then, the use of the term doesn't fill me with rage or anything.
#3: Overrated. Oh my God, yes. Before he even started to explain his reasoning behind this one, as soon as the word appeared on the screen but before he even said it, I was nodding in agreement. And I agree with every word he said about this stupid, overused term.
#4: Roguelike. *shrug* This is another race in which I don't really have a horse. I mean, yeah, I guess I agree that the term has become watered-down to the point of uselessness, same as all the others, but that's about it. Hell, I have seen some people call games like Diablo and Borderlands "roguelike" games, which I don't think is too particularly apt (though Diablo, I guess, fits a little better than so many of the other, more recent games to come out that have claimed to be "roguelike" or have been described as such by others). The specific aspects of Rogue that are in games which people call "roguelike" today already have their own specific terms (e.g. "permadeath"/"hardcore mode," "turn-based," "procedurally generated," and so on and so forth), so unless a given game actually does feature all or at least most of those elements, then why not just use those terms? If absolutely nothing else, it'll give the pubs/devs more (and more useful) bulletpoints on their marketing materials than just the single, throw-away term "roguelike." If Don't Starve is a "roguelike," then so are Minecraft and Terraria, neither of which I consider to be "roguelikes" at all, and yet Don't Starve shares far more in common with Minecraft and Terraria as far as gameplay concepts than it even remotely does with Rogue itself, aside from permadeath (and yet, Minecraft and Terraria both also have permadeath as an option, but you still don't hear people calling those games "roguelikes," even so). So yeah, I guess that's TB's point concerning how overused and, thus, useless the term is. But still, in the end, the use of this term doesn't fill me with rage any more than "cinematic" does.
#5: Beta. Yes, another one I agreed with, even before he started explaining his reasons why. (And this is the point where the video becomes relevant to all that Metal Gear Online Beta bullshit, particularly when he starts specifically talking about MGOB.) "Beta," as the term is used in the software life cycle, has a very specific meaning, which has been all but completely reduced into absolute rubbish through the misuse and abuse of the term by the game industry and the game journalism industry. "Betas" are not demos. A "beta" is supposed to be a piece of software, such as a video game, which is in a state of feature completeness, lacking only in bugtesting of the already existing, locked-in features, before it is to be released. Any game in which the developers are still actively adding features to said game is not even at "beta" state yet. I don't give a single fuck as to whether or not the pubs or devs of such a game are referring to their game as "in beta" or as a "release candidate" or whatever, if they are still adding shit to the game, it is neither of those things, plain and simple (and, yes, this includes games with DLC bullshit, unless it is the increasingly rare case where the DLC itself got its own, separate development cycle after the original game's full, proper release, rather than said DLC being developed at the same time as the original game). Nowadays, "alpha" and "beta" and "release" and whatnot are utterly meaningless, arbitrary labels applied to games at the frivolous, erratic whims of publishers/developers who apparently no longer know or care what these terms used to mean, if they ever did know what they meant in the first place, which may not even be the case with today's batch of developers, especially those in the indie scene without formal experience in the industry and who may be merely aping terms that they heard older, more traditional developers using. To restate once again, if a game is still "in active/perpetual development" or "unfinished," then, no, it has not yet reached "beta" stage, at least not by the traditional, original meaning of the term. And also, yes, on a related note, as touched upon by TotalBiscuit, it did indeed used to be the case that beta-testers either tested shit on their own time for free or even got fucking paid to do it, rather than having to pay to test shit, either via increased subscription fees or higher tiers on Kickstarter or microtransactions or just a straight up "you have to pay this much to be allowed into our beta test" or whatever the fucking hell else. This is, obviously, yet another aspect of the games industry about which the game publishers/developers realized that there was a rich, deep pool of clueless, gullible, stupid fucking morons for them to exploit. So, yeah, "beta" is another one about which I fully agree with TotalBiscuit. "I really think we need to take the idea of 'unfinished' and divorce it from the phrase 'beta,' outside of very specific circumstances." That's good... except that I can think of no "very specific circumstances" in which "beta" can still be appropriately applied to "unfinished" games. And, finally, I also agree with TB that most pubs/devs these days simply use "beta" as an attempted escape clause when faced with accusations that their games are broken, unfinished dreck, which is probably the worst misuse/abuse of all.