Portal 2 Protest: Gamers (sorta?) Pan Portal 2 On Metacritic

[MiracleOfSound]

Does it have splitscreen guys? I really hope it has splitscreen.

On consoles it does. I'm sure you could probably enable it in the pc version as well, in a similar fashion to how you enable splitscreen on L4D.

Sweet!

Finally a new game I can play with my little bro.

 

[Amphoteric]

Well I was laughing pretty much continuously throughout the first half of the game so I'd say it was worth it.

 

[Dense_Electric]

There was DRM in Portal 2?

It uses Steam, which is DRM. It is "better" DRM compared to most, but still DRM.

Ah, gotcha. See, that's the best kind of DRM - the kind you don't even know is there.

Valve fanboy? It's pretty obvious the DRM is there: you have to start up Steam before you can access the games at all.

Yes, because a FANBOY is the absolute worst thing you can call someone on an internet forum, I'm scarred and gutted for life and will now have to go cut myself to deal with the sheer pain, thank you for that.[/sarcasm]

Seriously though, yes, I'm perfectly aware Steam has to be running before you can play a Valve game. But you do know it can run in offline mode as well, right? Obviously you won't have access to multiplayer, but I don't really see how there would be DRM in that case.

And for the record, yes, I am a Valve fanboy, thank you for the complement.[/notsarcasm]

 

[tharglet]

I played WoW for about 3 years [..] and people really don't complain.

Do you participate on the WoW forums and were you around when the stuff was released? I've not played in a while, but I remember the MASSIVE amounts of qq over the shiny horse. There was also whiners over the faction/race change feature.

Yeah, it was flash-in-the-pan stuff, and very likely it was only a minority of players disliking it, but you can't say there was no complaining.

I myself only play MMOs where the pay content doesn't make itself absolutely necessary, or favours the rich (some MMOs, if you have a lot to spare you become seriously overpowered.... I don't like that).

I have absolutely zero complaints about paid cosmetic stuff. I can easily live without it.

 

[tharglet]

Does it have splitscreen guys? I really hope it has splitscreen.

http://forums.steampowered.com/forums/showthread.php?t=1847904

Not tried it, but don't need to in my house.

 

[DustyDrB]

and the co-op campaign is about 8-10

Wow, really? I need some Steam friends. I thought that would have been shorter than the single-player. Now I feel like I'm missing out.

 

[Irridium]

Let me completely break their arguments.

1: [HEADING=3]Portal 2 for the PC is a direct port of the console version.[/HEADING]

This is fucking Valve, one of the last PC centric developers around. It is a PC game first and foremost, but with better console support. How is it a port? Are there not enough controls? Because Portal 1 had about the same amount of controls. Is it in terms of performance? Because so far from a low-end laptop to a beefy rig all my playtests point to "runs really great(when you adjust settings). So how, how is it a direct port of the console version?

To be fair, it's pretty obvious that a number of concessions were made in the PC version that were clearly meant to fit the console hardware limitations. The most obvious of these are the asininely frequent load times.

I'm not saying the PC version is a port (far from it, to be honest), just that a number of design decisions were clearly only made because of the console versions.

It loaded every time you were in an elevator, just like Portal 1. Yes some were closer together, but it definitely wasn't that bad. Yeah load times vary based on hard-ware, but thats to be expected. At least it was predictable, unlike Half Life 2's loading in the middle of a level.

Oh actually it's worse. Portal uses Steam CEG, which was supposed to be the next-get super duper uncrackable copy protection. It works by creating a unique executable, which can't be moved to another computer. Now, not only was it cracked within one day, but there are hundreds of purchasers who get a 'invalid key' error and are unable to play. A few hours after launch, there was a 30-page topic on Steam forums.

Funny how it works. Everyone bitches about Ubisoft's or EA's DRM, but as soon as it's Valve, nobody notices.

That I did not know. Interesting.

 

[NickCaligo42]

we REALLY couldve picked a better target...DA2 and its ridiculous amounts of promotional DLC? dante's inferno selling us bloody level up points?

DA2 got bombed way worse.

 

[Gamblerjoe]

Maybe we just need to start taking the user reviews with some bigger grains of salt. Or heaping spoonfuls in some cases.

Anyone who doesn't most likely takes their coffee with 2 spoonfuls of stupid.

 

[rsvp42]

What are you people complaining about, the user score on all version is above 7... that's hardly bad, and it obviously highlights some issues people had with the game better for the developer while still showing them that it was still an enjoyable experience. Look at the score for DA2, now there's a real panning of a game (it's been at 4.3 for a month and a half).

Of course nowadays anything under 9 is bad it seems...

I think the original article might have been jumping the gun a bit, now that I look at the score again. But hey, I'm just the messenger.

 

[Agayek]

While I agree that the puzzles were not as difficult, I think it's a little derogatory to say Portal 2 was "dumbed down" for console players. I mean just because Yahtzee says stupid shit like that, doesn't make it true. After all Portal 1 was released for PC, 360 and PS3 and it wasn't altered on any system. Though only PC version got the big patch. Anyway, I don't really see console gamers as being dumb, so much as having different skill sets. Declaring PC gamers the "Master Race" is simply another kind of fanboyism. But everyone is a fanboy to something.

The load times are minor annoyance that was totally forgivable.

It wasn't dumbed down at all. That's not what I was trying to say.

All I was getting at was that the design was obviously influenced by consoles. I don't think that's a bad thing, at least in this case, but it did happen.

 

[Sean951]

I played WoW for about 3 years [..] and people really don't complain.

Do you participate on the WoW forums and were you around when the stuff was released? I've not played in a while, but I remember the MASSIVE amounts of qq over the shiny horse. There was also whiners over the faction/race change feature.

Yeah, it was flash-in-the-pan stuff, and very likely it was only a minority of players disliking it, but you can't say there was no complaining.

I myself only play MMOs where the pay content doesn't make itself absolutely necessary, or favours the rich (some MMOs, if you have a lot to spare you become seriously overpowered.... I don't like that).

I have absolutely zero complaints about paid cosmetic stuff. I can easily live without it.

Yes, sparkle horse etc. got flamed at release, mostly by people using the slippery slope argument saying Blizzard would start selling gear/levels and then the world would end.

 

[Pedro The Hutt]

It wasn't dumbed down at all. That's not what I was trying to say.

All I was getting at was that the design was obviously influenced by consoles. I don't think that's a bad thing, at least in this case, but it did happen.

Well, to be fair, in the audio commentary of Portal you already got to hear that oh so many chambers had to be redesigned because otherwise gamers in the test groups would get hopelessly stuck, even if the solution is damn obvious to other gamers. In the end I think Valve wanted to create a game many people could complete, and heck, I completed Portal without too much trouble but there were situations in Portal 2 where I was really scratching my head. Particularly in co-op.

And I'm sure that to newcomers to Portal the game will be very challenging too.

 

[Agayek]

Well, to be fair, in the audio commentary of Portal you already got to hear that oh so many chambers had to be redesigned because otherwise gamers in the test groups would get hopelessly stuck, even if the solution is damn obvious to other gamers. In the end I think Valve wanted to create a game many people could complete, and heck, I completed Portal without too much trouble but there were situations in Portal 2 where I was really scratching my head. Particularly in co-op.

And I'm sure that to newcomers to Portal the game will be very challenging too.

I have to ask, why does "designed for consoles" automatically mean "simpler"?

It really doesn't. As a whole, Portal 2 is at bare minimum at least as challenging as the original game was. I would say more so in a few puzzles. It's an excellent game, with interesting, and a few challenging, puzzles.

That doesn't change the fact that many of the design decisions were clearly made solely because of consoles.

 

[Bags159]

How is that any different from Portal 1? It loaded after every chamber, if memory serves.

The original Portal was usually 3-4 chambers (depending on size/complexity) between load times, at least for the first 2/3 of the game.

Aside from the frequent load times, there was a clear lack of reaction/accuracy-centric puzzles as well. For example, in the original there were several puzzles that required you to drop a portal in a fairly small area while moving at very high speeds (typically it was along the vein of put a portal on a wall, jump into the ground and loop through a few times, then hit an angled platform or somesuch). These were conspicuously absent in Portal 2. I can only assume because the nature of controllers make such puzzles an order of magnitude harder to complete.

I'm by no means saying the game is in any way flawed, just that the design of the game was clearly skewed by the existence of a console version. There's a few other examples I had, but I can't remember them, probably due to lack of sleep. I'll probably contribute a few more if I remember them.

You do realize that portal 1 also was on consoles, right? Nothing in Portal 1 took a fast reaction time. Yes, there were a couple puzzles that were "faster" than ones in Portal 2, but they not fast enough that it was any harder.

If you couldn't do those P1 puzzles on a controller than I guess the whole PC Gaming master race thing is true.

 

[Pedro The Hutt]

That doesn't change the fact that many of the design decisions were clearly made solely because of consoles.

You'll have to explain then just what you mean with "design decisions made solely because of consoles". The only thing I could possibly think of is the smaller levels and more loading screens because of memory limitations. But beyond that I can't see how the look of the game, the feel, the story or any of the puzzle designs are influenced by the fact this game had to appear on consoles too.

 

[Agayek]

You'll have to explain then just what you mean with "design decisions made solely because of consoles". The only thing I could possibly think of is the smaller levels and more loading screens because of memory limitations. But beyond that I can't see how the look of the game, the feel, the story or any of the puzzle designs are influenced by the fact this game had to appear on consoles too.

There were a few mechanics (kinda sorta, I'm not sure on the proper word) in the original game that weren't present in the sequel, ostensibly because console controls make them significantly harder to perform.

The best example I can think of is in the original Portal, one of the middle test chambers has you fling yourself out of a wall, through the ground 2-3 times and catapult over a short wall across the room. By the end you are moving ridiculously fast, and are required to make accurate portal shots in a sub-1 second window.

Portal 2 doesn't have that, at all. I assume that to be because of the limitations of a console controller. It's certainly possible they just didn't feel like including it, I can't be sure, but it doesn't seem like it.

There's also a handful of technical things they did, such as the hardcoded limit on repeat-portal-depth. These I don't really care about, as it didn't effect my rather excessive enjoyment of the game, but they are there.

 

[Still Life]

--

On a live preview at Gamespot, one of Valve's lead writers said the decision to remove 'twitch' elements was one based upon player data from Steam. According to him, players who didn't finish the original game generally gave up on puzzles with that kind of twitch gameplay.

 

[Private Custard]

Equally as pathetic, in my opinion, are the counter-trolls giving the game perfect 10's. Rabid Valve fanboys, furious that people have something to say against them.

A 10 means that it's flawless, perfect, no room for improvement. Nothing is worth a 10. Also, very few games are worth a 0.

This whole shitstorm is merely serving to illustrate what a wierd, exremely opinionated society we live in. Something's either the second coming.......or should just be locked in a coffin filled with broken glass and dog shit and then thrown off a cliff!

For fucks sake people, where's the middle ground nowadays??