FngKestrel

Just got done watching the video. I was hesitant because I haven't finished the game yet, but wanted to see what the fuss was about.

Anyhow, I'm vastly amused by this. Sure many magazines call it flawless, they get caught up in the hype. When everyone else is calling a game the most awesome thing ever, it doesn't pay to be the one magazine that turns their nose at it. In fact, most magazines are just taking the same marketing material submitted to them and adding their own captions. Take any two ZDNet magazines that cover similar material and read the reviews and previews. You'll probably find the same pictures and copy in each. But that's what marketing's supposed to do. They're supposed to hype up their product. They're bullshit artists. More so than politicians.

Next point. EVERY game ships with bugs. Every one of them. I don't care what anyone says. It could be something minor like a bad texture, or something as major as deleting the contents of your hard drive upon uninstall. Having a 4 year dev cycle doesn't ensure that every bug will get squashed. The priority of the bug is up to the producer, who, in the interest of time and resources, may have to let things be Known Shipped. Most producer's would love to ship a flawless product, but in the real world, you pick and choose what to fix. Gun bug, not a big deal, and well, pretty damn amusing. And quite honestly, compared to the number of one-hit weapons in the game, pretty inconsequential. I would have KSed it too if I were in that position.

Hit boxes. Probably a tradeoff of having a detection area that was accurate with with a hitbox that wasn't so detailed as to chug the machine that the game was running on. Don't know, I don't have access to the 3ds files.

Door blocking. I didn't see what the big deal was. It looked like he didn't successfully block the door in his second skirmish.

AI. Now this is a tricky thing. As AI gets closer and closer to approximating real behavior, there's this thing to contend with called the Uncanny Valley. Basically, human behavior is very attuned to human movement and appearance, so much so that we gravitate towards the inaccuracies. Would it be more forgiveable if it wasn't a human character, but jerky looking robot? And since we focus on the negatives, what about the positives that don't register in our mind because they are accurate. What about the times that the AI didn't get stuck? AI has a hard road ahead of them because while the AI can get ever more complex, and the scripting can be more in depth to create AI type behavior, the human mind is, at the moment, infinite in its ability to outthink the designer and the AI coder.

Blocking with a pill bottle. That was comedy. How about we just say that Combine troopers are more accurate than stormtroopers and G.I. Joe combined?

Flawless, of course not, for reasons stated above. But attacking what someone said at E3? That's like asking a used car salesman about the condition of a car. Past E3's have promised the world. Every time. And do they deliver? Rarely. E3 is where people wheel and deal and wine and dine. You tell people everything they want to hear so that you can close the deal. That's it. Anyone who takes more from that is asking for disappointment.

The final benchmark is the end user.