As DabigRG said above, Kenny's rewrite at the end of season one was just an example of Telltale's common practice of making rewrites and changes to their games. Another example is the entire story arc of Lilly in season one of Telltale's The Walking Dead, who was supposed to be Lilly from the comics, but was changed to an original character when Robert Kirkman revealed Lilly's backstory in the novels (which was vastly different from Telltale's Lilly). The Wolf Among Us was completely rewritten before release because of the success of The Walking Dead season one (and the project leader changed from Mike Stemmle to Nick Herman). After it was released, it got another major rewrite as the season plot that involved Detective Brannigan was changed, leaving the mundy police only in the first episode. Even if you go back to their roots, episode 2 of Bone was rewritten before release to take fan criticisms into account, making it longer and diverging from the source material. Heck, they've even changed major things long after release. Bone episode one received an update that changed the intro, added extra story material that wasn't in the original release, and changed the voice actress for Thorn. On that subject, for the release of the finale of Tales of Monkey Island, Adam Harrington's LeChuck was replaced with the voice actor who voiced LeChuck in the other games, Earl Boen. Then, after release, Adam Harrington's LeChuck was replaced with Earl Boen in the prior episodes as well. And Back to the Future received a remastered version that replaced Kid Beyond's Biff Tannen with the actor who played him in the films, ride, and cartoon series, Tom Wilson. Rewrites and additions have always been standard practice at Telltale.
I didn't use user ratings as an example. I personally don't trust user ratings at all because the ability to make sockpuppet accounts is too easy and happens too often to be trustworthy. I was talking about Metacritic critic aggregated review scores (not the metacritic user scores, which have been abused with sockpuppets as much as any other site with an open rating system). Among the aggregated critic ratings, season two and three of The Walking Dead are equal. I'd personally say that Telltale handled the story in season three better than they did in season two. That's just my opinion, which isn't any more or less valid than your opinion that season two's story was handled better than season three, but both of are views are simply opinions.
I also never said all downvotes were due to people with an agenda. But the truth is that a lot of people were creating multiple accounts just to downvote people in order to push their agenda of trying to stop discussion from anyone who had criticism of Clementine. The mod tools allow us to see people who create duplicate sockpuppet accounts, and the post history of the person gives us a view into why they are making those accounts. There have been over one hundred sockpuppets created here. There were some that were people who were previously banned that were being obnoxious, and some that were joke accounts, but many of them were created by a handful of people who created dozens of sockpuppet accounts to purposely downvote posts about Clementine criticism.
Add that to the history of people abusing the open nature of the user ratings on Steam, IMDb, and Metacritic to rate a Telltale game low due to a shared agenda (for example, Jurassic Park: The Game), and it is definitely wise to take user ratings on those sites with a large dose of salt.
Add that to the history of people abusing the open nature of the user ratings on Steam, IMDb, and Metacritic to rate a Telltale game low due to a shared agenda (for example, Jurassic Park: The Game), and it is definitely wise to take user ratings on those sites with a large dose of salt.
This is why I generally don't take many sites user ratings seriously. Steam, however, actively records and displays the number of reviews that are coming directly from people who've made their purchases through their store when looking at the overall review statistics. Taking into account that they also list an "other" statistic for reviewers that bought the game through another source, and assuming every one of those was an angry fan abusing the system to downvote it, ANF has already surpassed the negative reviews of S2, and is less than 100 reviews shy of surpassing S1s negative reviews. This is without assuming S2s reviewers abused this feature to downvote it.
As DabigRG said above, Kenny's rewrite at the end of season one was just an example of Telltale's common practice of making rewrites and cha… morenges to their games. Another example is the entire story arc of Lilly in season one of Telltale's The Walking Dead, who was supposed to be Lilly from the comics, but was changed to an original character when Robert Kirkman revealed Lilly's backstory in the novels (which was vastly different from Telltale's Lilly). The Wolf Among Us was completely rewritten before release because of the success of The Walking Dead season one (and the project leader changed from Mike Stemmle to Nick Herman). After it was released, it got another major rewrite as the season plot that involved Detective Brannigan was changed, leaving the mundy police only in the first episode. Even if you go back to their roots, episode 2 of Bone was rewritten before release to take fan criticisms into account, making it longer and divergi… [view original content]
If you take the other sources out of the equation on Steam, which have a very high risk of sockpuppetry, and include the reviews in other languages rather than just English, A New Frontier has a "mostly positive" rating of 72% on Steam. It's a game that 72% out of the 6,300 people that reviewed it on Steam enjoyed, and the rating is about the same on GOG.com with a 3.5 out of 5 rating, or 70%. Because of that, it's pretty safe to say that it's at least at a similar level for the people that played it without rating, meaning the majority of the people who played it enjoyed it.
It's important to note that people are starting to feel "Telltale fatigue", which causes Telltale's ratings to go down compared to where they were when they were riding high on the Walking Dead season one wave, not because of the quality of the story, but simply because people feel the novelty of the choice/QTE formula has worn off. If Season Two were released today, it's likely that the scores on Steam and GOG.com would be similar, simply because the Telltale fatigue equation is in play.
Also remember that these forums are just a small fraction of Telltale's overall userbase, and the hate that season three gets here makes it look like the game didn't do well with fans. If anyone was around here when season two was released, they'll remember that season two was hated on these forums just as much, if not more, than season three is now.
Add that to the history of people abusing the open nature of the user ratings on Steam, IMDb, and Metacritic to rate a Telltale game low due… more to a shared agenda (for example, Jurassic Park: The Game), and it is definitely wise to take user ratings on those sites with a large dose of salt.
This is why I generally don't take many sites user ratings seriously. Steam, however, actively records and displays the number of reviews that are coming directly from people who've made their purchases through their store when looking at the overall review statistics. Taking into account that they also list an "other" statistic for reviewers that bought the game through another source, and assuming every one of those was an angry fan abusing the system to downvote it, ANF has already surpassed the negative reviews of S2, and is less than 100 reviews shy of surpassing S1s negative reviews. This is without assuming S2s reviewers abused this feature to downvote it.
If you take the other sources out of the equation on Steam, which have a very high risk of sockpuppetry, and include the reviews in other la… morenguages rather than just English, A New Frontier has a "mostly positive" rating of 72% on Steam. It's a game that 72% out of the 6,300 people that reviewed it on Steam enjoyed, and the rating is about the same on GOG.com with a 3.5 out of 5 rating, or 70%. Because of that, it's pretty safe to say that it's at least at a similar level for the people that played it without rating, meaning the majority of the people who played it enjoyed it.
It's important to note that people are starting to feel "Telltale fatigue", which causes Telltale's ratings to go down compared to where they were when they were riding high on the Walking Dead season one wave, not because of the quality of the story, but simply because people feel the novelty of the choice/QTE formula has worn off. If Season Two were released today… [view original content]
With Telltale fatigue in play, it's likely that season two would have gotten the same ratings as season three if it were released today (considering the aggregated critic ratings for both are equal), simply because many gamers feel that Telltale's 'choices mixed with quick time events' formula has outstayed its welcome.
Without a major overhaul of Telltale's game mechanics, Telltale fatigue is likely just going to be more of a factor in a lot of people's opinions of their games. It's doubtful that any QTE/choices based game released by Telltale, even one with a story as strong as the first season of The Walking Dead, could achieve season ratings in the 80%-90% range today.
as it stands it's a game that 72% of the audience enjoyed, which certainly isn't bad.
Compared to the high standards set by S1 and to an extent S2 (evident by both being around 95%), it is pretty bad.
Yeah, that's definitely factor too. I just avoid talking about it because until I put Batman in my system, I legitimately don't know how other games play besides one scene in Wolf Among Us.
With Telltale fatigue in play, it's likely that season two would have gotten the same ratings as season three if it were released today (con… moresidering the aggregated critic ratings for both are equal), simply because many gamers feel that Telltale's 'choices mixed with quick time events' formula has outstayed its welcome.
Without a major overhaul of Telltale's game mechanics, Telltale fatigue is likely just going to be more of a factor in a lot of people's opinions of their games. It's doubtful that any QTE/choices based game released by Telltale, even one with a story as strong as the first season of The Walking Dead, could achieve season ratings in the 80%-90% range today.
The mobile site doesn't let me see anything other than the total percentage, but if it's 72% without other sources and including all languages, it's oddly lower than the 74% my default settings read. Suppose it's just as possible people are using this method to force up the vote. It's not a bad number, it's just bad by comparison to previous seasons. Just as important as the number of people who did or didn't enjoy it are the number of people who actually played it. As recently as a few weeks ago I had my friends wife asking me if I knew what happened to Clementine at the end. Of the few people I personally know that played the previous games, none have actually played the game, all citing what they've heard about the shift in direction of the story. And these are people who were genuinely excited after the E3 reveal, up until the VGA trailer/preview/whatever its considered. It wasn't a question of being tired of the system, but simply disinterest in switching to a new story rather than picking up where it left off. Despite feeling the same way, I threw my money at the first two episodes on the hopes that it wouldn't be what it was starting to appear to be. I was sorely disappointed, and out 10 dollars. Others may not have been as generous.
Many of the top reviews cite issues with the story itself rather than being tired of the genre. This is a genre that needs a strong narrative to thrive precisely because of the system, and just as many took issue with the story points themselves as people who were disappointed with the departure from the story we've followed in the previous games. For the people I know, it was a simple disinterest in the direction the story took, not the series itself. Maybe 2 of them I would consider hardcore gamers, the rest are pretty casual, who initially tried the series because they were fans of the show. Us discussing the changes and watching the videos during the lead up and subsequent release of the game was why they ultimately ended up passing the game over rather than buying it. After the initial teaser, the trailers were all centered around a new character and his story rather than who the majority have spent the series with, after the second game ended on many levels of uncertainty, based on your ending. A good question would be whether or not this departure alienated other fans the way it did people I know, and myself. I played through both episodes since I paid for them, hoping it would get on track. The result was I didn't buy anything past episode 2. I was still interested in a story being told, just not the story being told. This was an issue cited in many negative attitudes towards ANF, and very well may have caused an overall disinterest in the game in much the same way that Michonne carried the TWD title, but considerably smaller interest compared to Seasons 1 and 2.
If you take the other sources out of the equation on Steam, which have a very high risk of sockpuppetry, and include the reviews in other la… morenguages rather than just English, A New Frontier has a "mostly positive" rating of 72% on Steam. It's a game that 72% out of the 6,300 people that reviewed it on Steam enjoyed, and the rating is about the same on GOG.com with a 3.5 out of 5 rating, or 70%. Because of that, it's pretty safe to say that it's at least at a similar level for the people that played it without rating, meaning the majority of the people who played it enjoyed it.
It's important to note that people are starting to feel "Telltale fatigue", which causes Telltale's ratings to go down compared to where they were when they were riding high on the Walking Dead season one wave, not because of the quality of the story, but simply because people feel the novelty of the choice/QTE formula has worn off. If Season Two were released today… [view original content]
Comments
As DabigRG said above, Kenny's rewrite at the end of season one was just an example of Telltale's common practice of making rewrites and changes to their games. Another example is the entire story arc of Lilly in season one of Telltale's The Walking Dead, who was supposed to be Lilly from the comics, but was changed to an original character when Robert Kirkman revealed Lilly's backstory in the novels (which was vastly different from Telltale's Lilly). The Wolf Among Us was completely rewritten before release because of the success of The Walking Dead season one (and the project leader changed from Mike Stemmle to Nick Herman). After it was released, it got another major rewrite as the season plot that involved Detective Brannigan was changed, leaving the mundy police only in the first episode. Even if you go back to their roots, episode 2 of Bone was rewritten before release to take fan criticisms into account, making it longer and diverging from the source material. Heck, they've even changed major things long after release. Bone episode one received an update that changed the intro, added extra story material that wasn't in the original release, and changed the voice actress for Thorn. On that subject, for the release of the finale of Tales of Monkey Island, Adam Harrington's LeChuck was replaced with the voice actor who voiced LeChuck in the other games, Earl Boen. Then, after release, Adam Harrington's LeChuck was replaced with Earl Boen in the prior episodes as well. And Back to the Future received a remastered version that replaced Kid Beyond's Biff Tannen with the actor who played him in the films, ride, and cartoon series, Tom Wilson. Rewrites and additions have always been standard practice at Telltale.
I didn't use user ratings as an example. I personally don't trust user ratings at all because the ability to make sockpuppet accounts is too easy and happens too often to be trustworthy. I was talking about Metacritic critic aggregated review scores (not the metacritic user scores, which have been abused with sockpuppets as much as any other site with an open rating system). Among the aggregated critic ratings, season two and three of The Walking Dead are equal. I'd personally say that Telltale handled the story in season three better than they did in season two. That's just my opinion, which isn't any more or less valid than your opinion that season two's story was handled better than season three, but both of are views are simply opinions.
I also never said all downvotes were due to people with an agenda. But the truth is that a lot of people were creating multiple accounts just to downvote people in order to push their agenda of trying to stop discussion from anyone who had criticism of Clementine. The mod tools allow us to see people who create duplicate sockpuppet accounts, and the post history of the person gives us a view into why they are making those accounts. There have been over one hundred sockpuppets created here. There were some that were people who were previously banned that were being obnoxious, and some that were joke accounts, but many of them were created by a handful of people who created dozens of sockpuppet accounts to purposely downvote posts about Clementine criticism.
Add that to the history of people abusing the open nature of the user ratings on Steam, IMDb, and Metacritic to rate a Telltale game low due to a shared agenda (for example, Jurassic Park: The Game), and it is definitely wise to take user ratings on those sites with a large dose of salt.
This is why I generally don't take many sites user ratings seriously. Steam, however, actively records and displays the number of reviews that are coming directly from people who've made their purchases through their store when looking at the overall review statistics. Taking into account that they also list an "other" statistic for reviewers that bought the game through another source, and assuming every one of those was an angry fan abusing the system to downvote it, ANF has already surpassed the negative reviews of S2, and is less than 100 reviews shy of surpassing S1s negative reviews. This is without assuming S2s reviewers abused this feature to downvote it.
If you take the other sources out of the equation on Steam, which have a very high risk of sockpuppetry, and include the reviews in other languages rather than just English, A New Frontier has a "mostly positive" rating of 72% on Steam. It's a game that 72% out of the 6,300 people that reviewed it on Steam enjoyed, and the rating is about the same on GOG.com with a 3.5 out of 5 rating, or 70%. Because of that, it's pretty safe to say that it's at least at a similar level for the people that played it without rating, meaning the majority of the people who played it enjoyed it.
It's important to note that people are starting to feel "Telltale fatigue", which causes Telltale's ratings to go down compared to where they were when they were riding high on the Walking Dead season one wave, not because of the quality of the story, but simply because people feel the novelty of the choice/QTE formula has worn off. If Season Two were released today, it's likely that the scores on Steam and GOG.com would be similar, simply because the Telltale fatigue equation is in play.
Also remember that these forums are just a small fraction of Telltale's overall userbase, and the hate that season three gets here makes it look like the game didn't do well with fans. If anyone was around here when season two was released, they'll remember that season two was hated on these forums just as much, if not more, than season three is now.
Compared to the high standards set by S1 and to an extent S2 (evident by both being around 95%), it is pretty bad.
With Telltale fatigue in play, it's likely that season two would have gotten the same ratings as season three if it were released today (considering the aggregated critic ratings for both are equal), simply because many gamers feel that Telltale's 'choices mixed with quick time events' formula has outstayed its welcome.
Without a major overhaul of Telltale's game mechanics, Telltale fatigue is likely just going to be more of a factor in a lot of people's opinions of their games. It's doubtful that any QTE/choices based game released by Telltale, even one with a story as strong as the first season of The Walking Dead, could achieve season ratings in the 80%-90% range today.
First half of 2018? Jesus... And I thought that late 2018 was very short.
I would not be surprised if glitchy, rushed and shitty one hour episodes become the norm now.
Yeah, that's definitely factor too. I just avoid talking about it because until I put Batman in my system, I legitimately don't know how other games play besides one scene in Wolf Among Us.
The mobile site doesn't let me see anything other than the total percentage, but if it's 72% without other sources and including all languages, it's oddly lower than the 74% my default settings read. Suppose it's just as possible people are using this method to force up the vote. It's not a bad number, it's just bad by comparison to previous seasons. Just as important as the number of people who did or didn't enjoy it are the number of people who actually played it. As recently as a few weeks ago I had my friends wife asking me if I knew what happened to Clementine at the end. Of the few people I personally know that played the previous games, none have actually played the game, all citing what they've heard about the shift in direction of the story. And these are people who were genuinely excited after the E3 reveal, up until the VGA trailer/preview/whatever its considered. It wasn't a question of being tired of the system, but simply disinterest in switching to a new story rather than picking up where it left off. Despite feeling the same way, I threw my money at the first two episodes on the hopes that it wouldn't be what it was starting to appear to be. I was sorely disappointed, and out 10 dollars. Others may not have been as generous.
Many of the top reviews cite issues with the story itself rather than being tired of the genre. This is a genre that needs a strong narrative to thrive precisely because of the system, and just as many took issue with the story points themselves as people who were disappointed with the departure from the story we've followed in the previous games. For the people I know, it was a simple disinterest in the direction the story took, not the series itself. Maybe 2 of them I would consider hardcore gamers, the rest are pretty casual, who initially tried the series because they were fans of the show. Us discussing the changes and watching the videos during the lead up and subsequent release of the game was why they ultimately ended up passing the game over rather than buying it. After the initial teaser, the trailers were all centered around a new character and his story rather than who the majority have spent the series with, after the second game ended on many levels of uncertainty, based on your ending. A good question would be whether or not this departure alienated other fans the way it did people I know, and myself. I played through both episodes since I paid for them, hoping it would get on track. The result was I didn't buy anything past episode 2. I was still interested in a story being told, just not the story being told. This was an issue cited in many negative attitudes towards ANF, and very well may have caused an overall disinterest in the game in much the same way that Michonne carried the TWD title, but considerably smaller interest compared to Seasons 1 and 2.