Comment by ono@lemmy.ca on 'The Game Just Fundamentally Undermines Itself': Game Designer Breaks Down 'Baldur's Gate 3's Most Fatal Flaws

‘Baldur’s Gate 3’ can be a fantastic experience and a bad game at the same time.

Most of us over at !baldurs_gate_3@lemmy.world seem to agree that the author is either trolling or picked the wrong dump stat for an aspiring game critic.

I wrote a more detailed response over there.

This is such a absurd statement I’m inclined to agree about the trolling.

Maybe you love the characters, maybe you love the world, or maybe you love the character creator. That’s all well and good, but the fact of the matter is that all of those things—and a good many other aspects that Baldur’s Gate 3 has been praised for—are poor measurements of evaluating a game. If these subjectivities were the most important aspects of games, then we could say that chess or soccer are bad games. And I don’t think I need to explain how absurd that statement would be.

To be fair, soccer is a terrible RPG.

Depends how much you like to RP in football manager I guess.

I mean, what does he think makes a good game, if not sorry, characters, and world? Must a game only be evaluated by it’s rules and systems? Then guess what, BG3 is built on DND 5e, arguably the most successful RPG system of all time. What even is his complaint?

It sounds like his teacher thinks games should be evaluated for their development of tension and consistent messaging. It sounds like they would penalize a game for having a story with twists and surprises, because those either break messaging consistency or deflate tension. And, of course, quicksaves are evil.

I can kind of see where they’re coming from, but it feels like a very academic, navel-gazing place, akin to pretentious art critics talking about color, composition, and allusion to past masters, or a film critic talking about Dutch angles and long takes. Things that may contribute to the artistic quality and even the enjoyment of a piece, but are not components that us rubes actively look for. The fact they try to lump BG3, soccer, and chess all together under one system of evaluation tells me that they’re going to use some really bizarre criteria.

I agree with them that it isn’t an objective measure of quality, but who rates any form of art or entertainment by objective measures only? The whole point of them is to be subjective.

Gaming media has a difficult time differentiating their thoughts on games as a consumer product and games as art. For the former, it’s useful to have objective measures. For the latter, subjective.

But what is an objective measure for game quality? You’ll often see things used like total hours needed to complete it and things, but those are not measures of quality. Enjoyment per hour should be, but then it’s back to subjective. There isn’t an objective measure for a game being good. You can look at things like framerate and such, but it still doesn’t measure quality you can make your game very simplistic and get high FPS, and graphical quality is mostly subjective.

Viewing games outside of their context as a product for entertainment, which is inharently subjective, is always flawed.

Those are in fact all objective measures of a game’s quality. FPS on certain hardware, game length, frequency of crashes, the presence of microstuttering, lists of features, these are all things that can be quantified, and by being quantified they are made objective. You can take this information and compare games against each other to make purchasing decisions, critique them, etc. Those decisions are subjective, yet they are based on objective data.

But I didn’t say that we should only use objective measures to evaluate games, nor do I agree that we can only evaluate games subjectively. We need both, gaming media should give us both, but we both need to be able to distinguish between them.

Even as a consumer product it’s not really possible to boil it down to objective measures. Just like clothing follows tastes and fashions that are inherently subjective, or books, movies and TV shows etc.

What even is his complaint?

That he doesn’t a fraction of the talent required to make a game this good.

I can feel the saliva-moistened Cheeto crumbs being sprayed into my face.

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'The Game Just Fundamentally Undermines Itself': Game Designer Breaks Down 'Baldur's Gate 3's Most Fatal Flaws(www.themarysue.com)

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