Cliffy B the idiot?

So, an honest opinion about Mirror's Edge and a comment about Betas ruining that feeling you get when playing an anticipated game for the first time. Sounds reasonable to me.

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I think Mirror's Edge will be great, too, but they're showing me too much parkour, I want to see the gunplay.

Now that's what I call a real EPIC fail

Different strokes for different folks. Maybe he won't like mirrors edge, it's very different gameplay and not everyone will like it. Hell, not everyone likes GOW or for taht matter shooters at all.

I know in this instance the demo of Mirrors Edge made me want to buy it even more than I already did, and I did buy it, and I'm loving it.

Anyway I've heard many people say that they play demo's of games to decided which one they spend their money on, and I've heard people say they didn't buy games because they didn't like the demo...never heard anyone besides him say they wouldn't buy a game BECAUSE they liked the demo.

Maybe he's right about it ruining the moment of truth feeling, but from a business standpoint he's wrong.

So, if you don't want to ruin that feeling, don't play the damn demo. It has nothing to do with a company RELEASING the demo.

I have to agree with him regarding the mirrors edge comment, personally the jumping around stuff never appealed to me that much. Not so much that I would buy the game because of it. I've heard the actual shooting and AI mechanics are pretty pants. If I wanted a jumong around game I'd buy a platformer ;p That being said I'll buy it some day.

His Mirror's Edge comments were not "I want to see more gunplay in Mirror's Edge" but "I want to see more of THE gunplay in Mirror's Edge". We know it has guns and shooting in it. We just haven't seen much of it, and the little I've seen, personally, looked clumsy. It's absolutely a valid comment.

His Beta comments and past comments on the PC however are, in fact, dumb.

At the very least, he's nowhere near as dumb as Bobby Kotick.

Quote from dux

How does a beta ruin a game, all it does is make me want the game more. Every beta of a game I've played I've proceeded to purchase.

It doesn't ruin it necessarily, it just depends. I'm sort of a purist, so the idea of being sent half the multiplayer of a game doesn't really excite my interest or improve the experience. I kinda like loading up the single player first and taking in the game bit by bit as was intended. If you take Gears 2 as an example, which I think was what the answer was in refernece to, you could potentially be revealed levels/characters/weapons/enemies that are unraveled through the campaign. These thing's work better for some games than others.

I doubt many people give a shit about that stuff, but I don't see why it's stupid to avoid doing a beta for it.

Cliff is a media ho, and part of me really hates him (As one of my colleagues perfectly puts it, he has a very punchable face). That said, he knows what he's doing. He definitely knows how to make tight mechanics and games that just work through and through.

I'll admit that a lot of games recently that have released "betas" 1 month before the games hits the shelves is kinda ridiculous. When you're that close to shipping then its a fucking demo, not a beta.

There's no question he's a kickass designer though...

Quote from Minotauro

There's no question he's a kickass designer though...

Apart from the spam button in Gears 2, doing my fucking head in.

Quote from dux

How does a beta ruin a game, all it does is make me want the game more. Every beta of a game I've played I've proceeded to purchase.

lucky you =)

all the betas i ever played turned me off from the game and it resulted in me not buying it except for crysis

... but it made me lower my expectations ten fold

... i should have lowered it times twenty.

so what i am saying is yes stay the fuck away from betas and cliffy is right for saying the same.

he is however not right for saying that the mirrors edge pr focuses on the wrong features of the game.

the mirrors edge trailers focus on exactly what the game is about.

something i think david jaffe would greatly appreciate if cliffster and his pr team would do aswell for gears:

http://criminalcrackdown.blogspot.com/2 ... ising.html

It depends on the game, a lot of "beta" periods are just a marketing phase to get people talking about the game and allow people to have a demo play. Certainly his comment does not apply to genres like the PC MMO's and RTS titles or Console/Arcade Fighters where beta periods will bring a lot of important balancing, playstyle and exploit feedback very fast.

I gotta agree with Cliffy on the beta comment, they ruin a lot of games. Most recently the new wrath of the lich king, because of the beta (PTR), most top guilds had the time to practice on everything in the expansion and it took them less than 70 hours from launch to level up to 80 and clear the entire content of raid bosses (should have taken over 2 weeks imo).

Not that I love Cliffy or anything, because I side with Mazy on the punchable face thing, but I gotta say he has a valid point when it comes to Mirror's edge, I think little we've seen of the fighting looks really... bad

So what if some uber-nerds clear the content in PTR? The point of the test period is to make sure it works, is balanced correctly and to give them a period where these things can be changed, if Blizzard did massive changes to bosses/loot/abilities after they have gone live there would be an outrage, especially since most MMO players seem to think that making skills weaker or enemies harder during balancing is a giant taboo.

MMO's are one of the genres where beta's and test servers are essential. BWL was added without a PTR and the encounters were terribly buggy on release, WoW classes are still a random bag of tits in WotLK and I hate to think what it would be like without extensive testing if that is what we have after a year of development and 4-5 months of beta.

You make a good point, but it doesn't take half a million testers to test an encounter... it takes 50.

I'm not saying it is wrong of blizzard to do what they are doing, all I'm saying is that I agree with Cliffy's point of view on the negative effects that releasing a beta will have.

But in a closed beta everyone else will bitch the uber-guilds had an unfair advantage!

It does remove some of the excitement of the new encounters though; I do see where you’re coming from completely. It was a shame seeing all TBC bosses drop so fast and so many going down as the PTR goes up, in legacy Molten Core was only being explored by a tiny amount of guilds and encounters like The Four Horseman* completely halted progress for months – you got a tiny trickle of information and it was much more exciting.

Unfortunately this stems from other things as well – guilds have got very good, raids have got much easier to organise, and the poor class design has hamstrung encounter design to gear-checks and gimmicks.

* Though this was many due to the “Oh, Blizzard actually don’t want a balanced raid composition. Bye bye, Warlocks, let’s fill this puppy with overpowered, pampered Warriors.”