On the Guild Wars 2 preview: a response to the response
Lewis Denby March 27, 2012 - 8:35 pmStatement: A lot of people were very angry about our Guild Wars 2 hands-on preview, which was published on BeefJack yesterday. We’d like to address some of the concerns that people have had.
An awful lot of people disagreed with Jamie Donnelly’s preview of Guild Wars 2, which he wrote after spending three days with closed beta access provided by a PR representative responsible for the game. In fact, it’s become one of the most commented articles on our humble but fast-growing website – and a great deal of them are negative.
Since I imagine a few people reading this won’t be familiar with BeefJack, I’ll take the time to introduce myself. I’m Lewis, the editor here. I’m the one who assigned the preview, arranged the code, signed the NDA and all the other gumph related to the writing of the preview other than – y’know – actually playing the game and writing about it.
There are a few concerns that have repeatedly come up in the comments thread, which I’ll address specifically below. But firstly, for the sake of transparency, I want to talk a little bit about how we assign work internally at BeefJack. When we organise a preview, review, feature or blog post, an editor will ask BeefJack’s writers if anyone has a particular interest in the game in question. We know what everyone’s passions are, which types of game they like and dislike, and so through a combination of these details and individual writers’ requests, we assign code.
In this case, Jamie approached me after I mentioned we had Guild Wars 2 beta access available. Jamie is a big World of Warcraft player, as many in the comments thread have been quick to pick up on, but he’s played a range of MMOs during his gaming career – including the original Guild Wars. Jamie told me he’d been following Guild Wars 2 with interest, thought the game’s features looked exciting, and asked if he could be the one to preview the game. I said yes.
Jamie turned in his preview late on Sunday night and I edited it on Monday morning, ready for publication when the press embargo lifted at 2PM. I made minor cosmetic changes to the text, but nothing substantial. It was, for the record, me who added the line “Disappointing at this stage, though” to the end of the review, as I’d chopped something out of the final paragraph and needed to reseal it. I also take absolutely full responsibility for not picking up on the confusion that may arise from the term “free-to-play” – as an editor it is my job to pick up on elements in the text which may mislead, and it was me who dropped the ball here, not Jamie.
Basically, everything went ahead as normal. And then the comments began to arrive. I take any accusations leveled at BeefJack extremely seriously, and as such arranged to speak to Jamie today to go over some of the concerns that were raised. Jamie tells me he spent a large portion of his weekend playing the beta, clocking many hours in the game. He also took the time to clarify some of the points that many of you felt were muddy in the preview, but for what it’s worth, I think they were clear enough. So. Onto some specific concerns, or things people have suggested are the case.
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BeefJack is biased towards World of Warcraft / old-style MMOs
BeefJack isn’t biased towards anyone. In fact, we’re proudly and fiercely independent, and take great measures to avoid bias, or point out in disclosures where our vision may have accidentally been coloured. This isn’t one of those cases. Is it true that we like World of Warcraft a lot? Some of our writers do, certainly – we’ve definitely always given WoW releases extremely high scores. We’re also, however, passionate about embracing innovation. We last saw Guild Wars 2 towards the end of last year, and if you take a look at that preview you’ll see that we said it looked extremely promising. Much of Jamie’s disappointment came from being excited about the genre changes Guild Wars 2 makes, but feeling they didn’t live up to his expectations.
Jamie gave Star Wars: The Old Republic 9 out of 10
Jamie didn’t review The Old Republic. One of our freelancers, Adam Harshberger, did. I assume the implication here is that The Old Republic is an old-style MMO that does little to innovate, and therefore should be praised less than the competition. In fact, Adam foresaw this sort of argument when writing his review, which is why he went to great lengths to explain why he felt the game was worthy of such a high score despite its innovative shortcomings. As far as I can remember, Jamie has never expressed to me an opinion on The Old Republic.
Jamie gave Guild Wars 2 3 out of 10
I’m still not sure where this has come from, but I’ve seen a couple of comments to this effect. We haven’t reviewed Guild Wars 2 yet. It isn’t finished. What you read was a hands-on preview based on a restricted and limited play session, and has no score at the end. So there is literally no way we could have given it 3 out of 10. Jamie assigned an excitement rating that operates on a sliding scale from ‘Meh’ to ‘Holy cow!’, on which he positioned it a little below the middle. The image name is ‘excite-2.png’, but this isn’t a score, it’s just the name of the file. The excitement rating isn’t meant to indicate any kind of final judgement on the game. It’s an indication of how giddy we are about a title. Many games that prove to be quite good get relatively low excitement ratings.
The preview isn’t objective
You’re absolutely correct, it isn’t. We want all our content to be convincing, thorough and well-argued, but we care not for objectivity. We encourage our writers to voice their personal opinions about the games they cover, and I trust them to do so because I know everyone we work with is experienced and knowledgeable in the field.
The preview is factually inaccurate
If this is the case, we want to know about it, and will absolutely publish a retraction. So far, several people have accused the preview of containing factual inaccuracies, but no one has yet provided compelling evidence that this is the case. The most common complaint in this category seems to be that Jamie stated that Guild Wars 2′s questing system is the same as World of Warcraft’s. I’ve read the article again and again and it simply isn’t true: the dynamic events are covered, and criticised for not feeling fresh enough, not for literally not being any different to what’s currently around.
BeefJack just published this for hits / comments / signups / tries to spam people with its newsletter
I’ve grouped all these together because it’s easier to answer in one fell swoop: no, that’s not the case. Frankly, a couple of days of high traffic on a single article does nothing for us from a business perspective, other than perhaps make people less likely to visit the site in the future if they believe we’re just farming for hits. It would make no sense for us to behave in this way. As for the accusation that you can only register at BeefJack if you agree to receive a newsletter, I’ve forwarded this issue to our tech guys. It certainly shouldn’t be the case. For the record, I just registered a test account now to see what would happen, and was able to sign up just fine without agreeing to the newsletter.
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Once again, I take this level of criticism extremely seriously and will always do everything I can to put right any ills. I am happy to communicate directly with anyone who wishes to email me – you can find my address on our about page. (Please don’t contact any of our other staff about this, it’s nothing to do with them.) As for the comments on the preview itself, I’m going to leave them open – but do know that any messages that are personally insulting, that simply attack the site, or which cover the same ground as I’ve covered in this post will be deleted. We want to engender a healthy and happy community of gamers here, who enjoy debate and discussion on a topic they’re passionate about. Please help us to keep it that way.
Thanks folks,
Lewis Denby
Executive Editor
beefjack.com
Comments (18)
I’m curious if you saw my comment on the original article concerning Jamie’s statement about Necromancers? In my mind this qualifies as a factual inaccuracy in that it casts the profession system as less flexible than it truly is. Although the game isn’t designed around a dedicated “tank” archetype the necromancer is a cloth armored caster with some of the highest survivability of any of the game’s eight professions. I think the problem that most people have is that although their are few outright inaccuracies the preview was written in such a way that it feels like the author didn’t have a thorough understanding of the game when he went to write his preview.
I did see your comment, yes – sorry I didn’t respond to it personally. My feeling was that Jamie’s comments were misinterpreted rather than inaccurate. It seemed that people took the comment as a criticism, rather than the mere observation it was trying to convey. I’ll look into clarifying this – thanks for the level-headed feedback.
Hi Gagelish,
Sorry for not responding to your initial comment, was a bit overwhelmed by the less reasonable responses.
I didn’t feel as though the necromancer did have that high survivability. I played around with different abilities and builds, and while I could certainly reduce the damage I took for short periods, it wasn’t enough to make me a viable “damage sponge” as it were.
Granted, I didn’t try out every possible build (time constraints), so it’s perfectly possible that there is a way of turning a necromancer into a ‘tank’ – I just couldn’t see it, and you’ll have to trust me when I say I did look for it.
Also, I think it’s important to note that the point was simply intended to highlight that there wasn’t ‘complete flexibility’. In the same paragraph I talk about the flexibility that was on show – that comment was simply to clarify that you still faced some confines within a single class, an impression that I stick by.
Hope that clears it up.
You don’t need to make a tank.
Because the game has no tanks.
I really appreciate you both taking the time to respond to my comment.
Like I said in my original post, I really appreciate when a gaming journalist has the balls to take an unpopular stance that they believe is right. Too often news sites and previews are nothing but mindless and ultimately meaningless hype. Every game is heralded as THE GAME that will change the industry forever so it’s no surprise when a game, no matter how good it is, doesn’t live up to expectations.
I think that everyone commenting on these articles should remember two things:
First of all, just because someone doesn’t like a game doesn’t mean it’s a bad game. People’s tastes vary. I bought the collector’s edition of Star Wars: Galaxies on day one and absolutely hated it. My hating it in no way devalues the people who loved it.
Secondly, you actually played the game. From what I’ve seen and read of Guild Wars 2 (and it’s a lot) I think the game looks like an absolute blast. I think that it’s innovating in ways that really have a chance to be the “Next Generation” of mmo design. That doesn’t change the fact that I’ve never laid a hand on the game and neither have many (Most? All?) of these commenters. I thought Galaxies looked awesome from everything I saw and I blindly refused to believe any criticism I read in previews. Had I been a little bit more open to reasonable criticism I might have saved myself a little cash.
For you guys, I guess the lesson is if you’re gonna take a controversial stance you better make sure you’re article is airtight. Minor ambiguities are gravy in a positive review but they’ll be blown completely out of proportion in a negative one.
I’ve been waiting a long time for a game to come along and give me that virtual home away from home feeling I remember fondly from my early days in mmo’s. Right now I’m hoping that game is going to be Guild Wars 2 and I’m hoping that you’re totally and completely wrong in your assessment, but I’m glad that you told us what you truly thought and not simply what you knew we wanted to hear.
Cheers.
You say you weren’t able to make a viable damage sponge. Did you try to create the same effect with every available profession and did you succeed with any of them? Your statement about a lack of flexibility with the necromancer only makes sense if it is not able to do something that another class can. My understanding of the guild wars 2 system is that no profession is able to be an effective damage sponge. Indeed, I’ve seen videos of guardians who tried to spec tank and they still are not effective damage sponges.
You are still dodging the issue that the design of the game has been stated to not include tanks at all and therefore the comment about the necromancer becomes irrelevant if not factually incorrect.
Factual inaccuracies? Jamie knocks GW2 for being more of the same “Kill 10 rats,” “Escort quests,” “Gather quests”. That’s knocking a specific game for the limitations of its GENRE. What’s the last RPG you’ve played where you didn’t have to gather, escort, or kill a certain amount of things to progress? RPG’s are objective-based games. So much so that even sandboxes have their own objectives, albeit leaving it to the users to find them.
It’s interesting how he says GW2 hasn’t done enough to differentiate itself from WoW, when it is far and away the most different from it? Warhammer and Rift may have Dynamic Events tacked on, but GW2 is built around it. What’s WoW or SW:TOR or TERA done to break the questing mold? They’re all exactly the same. Hell, even FFXIV at least had the gonads to attempt to come up with a different way of acquiring quests, despite how big of a failure that turned out to be. But to say GW2 doesn’t do enough to deviate? Seriously?
There was also the knock against it being a fantasy game. I’ve already mentioned this in the main article. What’s his argument here? That a game being fantasy is automatically deducted points for its originality, despite its landscapes, art, and scale to be far beyond that of something like SW:TOR’s bland, linear planets? Or is it solely based on the fact that you can’t pew pew with laser guns and glowsticks?
Again, I question Jamie’s knowledge on the MMORPG genre (or even just RPG’s in general), because the article makes it seem like he hasn’t played any RPG except for WoW. Long-time MMO fans rave about the DE system because it’s the furthest deviation from the extremely aged norm that anyone’s attempted before, and this is coming from a guy who has played several obscure titles like Atlantica Online just to try and find something different.
Good response really…
I guess we did overreact a bit. I still don’t agree with the article but I didn’t fully understand that it was supposed to be his personal opinion only. I don’t think the article was fair towards GW2 but some people just prefer games like TSW or SWTOR over GW2. And there is nothing wrong about that. I hope that the author will give GW2 another chance at release and I’ll be back to hear about it.
I think the main reason this article became a sensitive issue with the community following GW2, it’s because besides being somewhat leaning towards the negative side, it wasn’t just claiming his experience was dull and generic, it actually implied it was “dissapointing” because it felt too similar to WoW. If anything a game being as good (or slightly better) than WoW is in fact a great success.
None of the games released after WoW have achieved the same level of success because their quality is really low, their development and advertisement budget is usually 1/10-1/5 of what the WoW behemoth had. They release unfinished products with the promise of getting better after a few patches, but meanwhile they’re still charging the monthly fee and leave the first batch of players hanging with a mediocre piece of online entertainment software. I’m looking at you “WaR, Aion, FFXIV, AoC, Tabula Rasa(RIP), etc”
Now as his background and point of comparison being strictly by WoW standards, since it can be considered the best in it’s genre, can you really call the GW2 classes a carbon copy of WoW? sure you press a button, it does something, but please play a WoW mage, and play a GW2 elementalist, really, every single ability looks, feels and plays very differently from one another, and then you have summoned weapons, attunement shift effects, dagger combat for a close range mage high risk high reward, abilities have a cooldown so you don’t just stand there and spam the same skill over the course of a fight, and then you have the dodge mechanic, cross class combos etc. Or simply look at the mesmer, even if somewhat underpowered it’s a really fresh concept that has no comparison in any mmorpg I’ve played.
I don’t know what he was expecting, “to input hadoukens and kick armadillos to score goals while managing units across the map to capture the flag” it’s an mmorpg, it plays like an mmorpg. I may not like let’s say Skyrim, MW4, or Mass Effect3, and say it feels boring because they didn’t deliver anything new, but outright saying they’re a disappointment because they feel and play exactly the same as Oblivion, CoD, and Kotor respectively, sounds like a lazy and uninformed perspective from someone who barely plays any games and was picked randomly from the genre playerbase.
I appreciate that the focus of the site isn’t selling scores, and rather a personal viewpoint that any player could have, it’s just that this one felt like a huge misinformation blog post made by replygirl on youtube.
Amen
“BeefJack just published this for hits / comments / signups / tries to spam people with its newsletter
I’ve grouped all these together because it’s easier to answer in one fell swoop: no, that’s not the case. Frankly, a couple of days of high traffic on a single article does nothing for us from a business perspective, other than perhaps make people less likely to visit the site in the future if they believe we’re just farming for hits. It would make no sense for us to behave in this way. As for the accusation that you can only register at BeefJack if you agree to receive a newsletter, I’ve forwarded this issue to our tech guys. It certainly shouldn’t be the case. For the record, I just registered a test account now to see what would happen, and was able to sign up just fine without agreeing to the newsletter.”
Interesting enough, I did not find any mention of this on the previous page, which means you are possibly trolling other sites to find this out. If this is the case, for shame.
As for the article itself, I am very open to reviews and previews that don’t offer glowing reports. However, and I think I speak for many on this site, it’s not the negativity that bothers us, it’s the lack of professionalism being represented.
It is hard for me to take anything in this article serious because of so many errors that have been pointed out. It smells as though someone wanted to report on the beta, didn’t want to play it and so visited other websites and pulled their review from their comments. Whether this happened or not, who is to say. All I know is that I’ve seen better gossip columns in school papers than this.
If Jamie claims that he was in fact following the game for some time, then he should learn to use Google better because the information he spouts is horribly inaccurate. If I was Jamie, I’d admit to being a Norn in real life and being too drunk to finish the article properly. At least then I would know that he actually played the game.
Enough with the ludicrous accusations now. Take it up with me personally, or drop it.
Hi Lewis.
First, it looks like you’ve forgotten what jobs you have assigned to Jamie in the past.
> “As far as I can remember, Jamie has never expressed to me an opinion on The Old Republic”
Star Wars: The Old Republic preview
Posted November 2, 2011 by Jamie Donnelly.
http://beefjack.com/features/star-wars-the-old-republic-preview-pc/
A quote from that preview:
> “While this may sound like a compliment, the accessibility looks like it will come from the fact The Old Republic is nothing new, and will be simply be World of Warcraft with a Star Wars skin pasted over the top.”
He then go on to say that he did like the story in SWTOR. Very simplified he said the same thing about SWTOR as GW2 in his preview’s: same-same as WoW but like the story.
SWTOR he gave 4/5 on the excitement rating and GW2 2/5.
(since there are 5 levels on the excitement rating it is a 1-5 rating even if it isn’t a review score)
It just don’t makes any sense.
Well, what do you know? Jamie did preview SWTOR. If I recall correctly this was based on a preview presentation, rather than hands-on time. Don’t get too hung up on the excitement ratings, though – they’re not an exact science. And, y’know, we know how they work. They’re not designed to be read as a star rating, but a sliding scale. If you want to equate them to review scores, you could say that the low end might account for anything we expect to get a 6 or below, and then upwards from that. Would you get moderately excited about a 5 out of 10 game? It’s unlikely, and this is what we try to reflect.
Well, I explicitly said I didn’t consider it a review score and stuck with your term of “excitement rating”.
In general I don’t mind reading “bad” opinions about games I’m interested in. It gives a bit of perspective. For what’s it worth, as one who also followed SWTOR with a bit of interest up to release, that SWTOR preview gave me much less then the GW2 one. That SWTOR one was just bland and boring (probably because if as you said he didn’t even play the beta).
I do appreciate Jamie’s opinions about his beta experience in GW2. But at the same time, given all the info that available, for me most of his complaints doesn’t feel valid.
But then again, that’s just my opinion
You’re right, you did stick with that term. Sorry – I guess I’ve just spent so long being baffled by people both here and around the net saying he gave it a “3/10 review”.
The preview is supposed to be subjective, I’m ok with that. And thats why you should also be ok when we subjectively dislike it. Which I am doing. I will not read a single article in the future here. I was especially interested in the articles about TSW, but oh hey, the latest one is covered by the same Jamie guy. No thanks.
My reasons? Everything all the other people have already said. I do not see anything “experienced and knowledgeable” in that GW2 preview. I see no excuse for the misguided expectations shown, for the very obvious lack of knowledge about the game before, during and after actually playing it.
And please do not fool yourselves into thinking “oh those crazy GW2 fans defending it blindly”. I am perfectly aware of the game’s flaws, and plenty of other press people that were in the same beta weekend were capable of talking about the less-than-perfect aspects of the game and their own subjective opinions, without inciting such a response from readers/viewers like your article did. I recommend you think about that.
Pfft, unbiased my ass. I read the articles about RetakeMassEffect. I’ve never seen another site insult the campaigners so much.