Profile of Inverse

You seriously overstate of how much combined arms in coh 1 there actually was.


Were ranger, airborne blobs "combined arms"?

Was zombie grenspam "combined arms"?

Was sniper spam that was super annoying and also you saw it in pretty much all games ever "combined arms"?


Sorry, but coh 1 also had a very shitty metagame throughout most of its life.

At a high level CoH1's meta was really never like this, because in CoH1 homogenous unit groups are a lot easier to beat than combined arms. Sure, there were situations where single-unit spam was the best option in CoH1 (funny enough it was situations that mostly involved the OF factions), but if you went into a game against a good player with the mindset that you were going to primarily build one unit and one unit only, you were going to have a very hard time winning.

The thing with strategies that involve single-unit spam is they're generally relatively easy to execute but relatively difficult to defeat. They're also extremely inflexible. And once you get to a level where your opponents know how to play against them, they're very hard to win with because they don't give you many options. I can't speak to CoH2, but that's how it was in CoH1.

As for the OP, I agree with a lot of the comments, but I don't necessarily agree with the conclusion. I don't think it's really ever been a balance problem, but more a design problem. The vanilla matchup in CoH1 wasn't always balanced, but people always loved playing it because it was designed in a way that encouraged active and dynamic gameplay. It combined tactical and strategic decision-making in a very unique way. Ever subsequent faction design in Company of Heroes has strayed from the model of the core factions, and they've suffered as a result in my opinion.

I guess I just don't understand why you'd go to a game review to read about things like performance or value from a stranger when you could just as easily get that information from friends and other, more reliable, sources. The price difference over books and movies is another reason I'd rather listen to someone I trust than a reviewer I know little about. People don't read consumer report game reviews anymore because they don't provide anything you can't get from other sources you trust more, like friends or internet communities. I don't think it's because people aren't interested in game reviews in general, I think it's because people aren't interested in the particular game review style that 99% of press outlets publish. If book and movie reviews were written like game reviews, I bet you people wouldn't care much about them either.

I also disagree that game reviews have no future. The quick analysis of performance and value that you talk about is exactly the sort of thing that a review shouldn't concern itself with, because those aspects of a game you can judge much more easily by talking with friends and reading forums. I have friends I can talk to who I trust a whole lot more than some random reviewer when it comes to that kind of thing. If that's all game reviewing is about, then yes, I agree that it won't be around much longer.

But why should that be all game reviewing is about? There's nothing stopping game reviews from turning into in-depth looks at titles that you seek out after you've finished the games, just like movie and book reviews are now. In order to do that, you need people who are willing to work hard and put some serious effort into formulating interesting discussions that attract people who are looking for something a bit more than your standard forum conversation when they've finished a game. Shawn Elliott's S.T.A.L.K.E.R. review that I linked earlier is a perfect example of this approach, but it's an approach that's risky and that involves difficult, time-consuming work, which is a big negative in an industry that isn't exactly known for its writing quality.

Consumer report game reviews are dead, and rightfully so, because people have enough sources to draw from these days that they don't need reviewers telling them what is and isn't worth their money. But I'm willing to bet that, just as there are people who consume book and movie reviews in droves as a way of furthering their immersion, there is a large audience of people who would support a more studied and sophisticated style of game reviewing. It's just unfortunate that there are only a very small number of writers in the games press right now that would be able to pull it off.

Pretty cool dude right there.

Nah, it's not just IGN, 95% of "games journalism" is god-awful. Gamasutra writes some great stuff, and I've read some really good articles on Polygon as well. Tom Chick of Quarter to Three and Jeremy Parish (think he's at Polygon?) do quality work, and I enjoy reading their stuff. I really only followed the games media closely back in the CGW/GFW days when Jeff Green and Shawn Elliott were still writing and hadn't moved over into development yet.

IGN is like Gamespot, their reviews are all about "Should I buy this game?" I hate that shit, it's so pointless. Imagine reading a book review that went over pros and cons, broke things down into paper quality and appearance and pacing and plot all while claiming to be "objective".

If I want to know if a game is worth buying, I'll talk to friends and people I trust who I know share my tastes. If I'm going to read an article on a website, I want it to have some interesting and substantial content. That's why CGW/GFW was so great. Writing like that is pretty rare in gaming these days unfortunately.

EDIT: Some interesting reading on the subject from a lot of big names in games journalism...

http://shawnelliott.blogspot.ca/2008/12/symposium-part-one-review-scores.html
http://shawnelliott.blogspot.ca/2009/02/symposium-part-two-review-policy.html

And an example of a well-written review that is both informative, thought-provoking, and enjoyable to read. This is Shawn Elliott's Review of S.T.A.L.K.E.R. Shadow of Chernobyl:

http://web.archive.org/web/20071219135933/http://www.1up.com/do/reviewPage?cId=3158131

This isn't gameplay and there's already a thread about it.