News Portal 2 PC metacritic score sabotaged

I started typing a more rant-type post, but I'll just say "Well that's a bit silly of them"

Thankfully the rating is starting to go up now (7.3) so hopefully it'll be at a more fair rating soon enough.

I haven't played Portal 2 (yet!) but from everything I hear, it truly is an awesome PC game. Is sad to see some people moaning about it.

I can kind of understand Amazon rating sabotages for games with OTT DRM, but not complaints that an apparently awesome game is 'consolified'.

 

A few people (including myself) noted that while there were more puzzle elements (gels, light bridges etc) some of the more complex actions were toned down. There are very few complex portal actions (multi-portal in the air, precision shots, quick reaction shots). As for the map layout in regards to loading, it seems odd. all the early test chambers are 1 map each - in portal 1, they were in sets of 2 up until about test chamber 8 I think. I was suprised when doing a short chamber I was loading again.

After listening to some of the commentary nodes, I learned that sometimes the player isn't actually where the viewpoint is, they are in a bit of the level that has been locked off. So maybe some of the new stuff needs more of these hidden areas that you can't have too many chambers in one area.

As for the "Saving Game... Please don't turn off your console" message, that can be explained away by looking at the files. If you look at the file that the game gets that message from, there are 2 versions of that line -

"Saving Game... Please don't turn off your console" [!#PS3]
"Saving Game... Please don't turn off your PS3 console"[#PS3]

In theroy, adding the line "Saving Game... Please Wait" [#WIN32] or editing the !#PS3 on to that would cause that line to be shown. Apparently NOT having that line in the console version causes them to fail the cert for that console. PC version is only certed by themselves. It's basically an oversight and can be fixed by anyone with NOTEPAD installed on thier machine.

Portal 2 is a PC game, but the gameplay might have had some consessions made.

 

I never bought a COD after the 4th one.

 

w00t! the game world at a all time low! How sad and pathetic

 

I noticed the frequent loading on it, but I'm assuming that's more to do with valve making it be able to be run on older machines. Since the loads are fast, why should we care? Does seem like my portal gun has aiming assist thought... oh well, don't care, it's a fun game

As far as the indie games go, no-one was forcing anyone to buy them, I already had killing floor, and I bought Toki Tori because it looked fun and was £1.75, the rest didnt really interest me - and shock horror I didnt buy them.

 

Whiny kids will whine.

 

madness. valve will be one of the last devs to over consolify a pc game. i've seen some BAD consolification - devil may cry 3 - as far as i remember no way to remap keys at all with on screen messages to press b or triangle etc, in spite of not having a controller. i loved when the first time i loaded it said press start to begin, and having to press every key on my keyboard to find out which key correspond, which was some random key like k or something; resident evil 4 - had to run a separate exe to use the mouse, which felt tacked on like some of the first games to have mouse support. then of course we have tons of games with crap textures etc because it has to work on consoles and they couldn't be bother to have hi-res texture pack for pc version. i could go on and on, but portal 2 does not look or feel like console game.

 

"Consolification" is the new buzzword, and quite frankly, I am sick to effing death of the constant whining. So your game has been made easier and aimed at casual gamers? Hm... let's see... maybe it's got something to do with casual gamers outnumbering the hardcore bunch (and this being bit-tech, most people are likely to be fairly serious gamers) [probably - i am guessing] 20:1.
Get over it... /rant

 

LOL.. I boycotted the game, got it cheap online and then sold it and made a fiver, MW2 made me monies

 

Damn pussies! 32 euros for 8h gameplay + 7h co-op gameplay. I can't even begin to imagine how console gamers are gonna play this without a keyboard and mouse (tho I think that about all FPS). If they didn't want the Potato Pack, they could just have waited for the normal release time. PUSSIES! Portal 2 Cheesecake! It's damn awesome! I got in 2~3h gameplay yesterday (Siberia mirrors were the fastest IMHO).

EDIT: pussies as in ***** cat

 

Yeah Resident Evil 4 needed several mods to be playable. A mouse one like you say plus another to remap the keys. Also was worth getting a mod for the graphics as the PC version was worse to look at than the console equivalents.

Can't see why people are moaning about Portal 2 at all. Hope the meta score goes up.

 

im confused how are loading times slow? its pretty fast for me actually...

but i have to say i would have preferred a PC exclusive. the "Please don't turn off your console" thing is pretty weird too. they should have noticed it.

 

The beauty of Steam is that they can patch it out very quickly to fix that problem.

 

I agree and this is the only thing I found slightly disappointing. After watching the trailers I was expecting this kind of thing to be much harder and I like that kind of challenge.

I'm not yelling "consolification" for this

 

Agreed. Some of the puzzles definitely weren't as challenging as I had hoped (there were some pretty frustrating puzzles in Portal 1), but, they had said they toned it down a bit due to people not completing Portal 1 because of this difficulty curve.

What would have been nice is if they kept the Challenge levels for those of us who want a higher difficulty level, especially for the co-op portions as I found those incredibly easy but loads of fun.

Still wouldn't call it consolified though.

 

I didn't even know there was a save screen. It was always instant for me, and my PC is a few years old. All the complaints about this game are completely ridiculous. I've clocked single player twice, once with the commentary nodes, and I'm looking forward to the coop. Valves best game yet as far as I'm concerned.

 

Heaven forbid that the designers give you hints that introduce you to the basic mechanics of the game! And it's downright shameful that Valve mixed up ONE WHOLE SENTENCE within the PC build of the game for something so important as the message that displays for 0.5 seconds when saving the game.

Blasphemy! BLASPHEMY! Off with their heads!

 

this. people are just whining cause they didnt have any idea that there would be a possibility of a free copy of Portal 2 involved

 

I'd put that in the "mainstream" category. Particularly after making Portal 1 free a lot of people who just enjoyed the fun, unique gameplay and interesting story started hopping on the bandwagon, not just the ones who liked the challenge. Just a shift in the game's direction.

Reminds me of God of War's puzzles. The first game had some that were fairly challenging, but by the third game they were almot non-existent. The more popular the game gets the less they can put in things that may alienate those who can't figure all the puzzles out.

 

yep and as shallow as this will make me look ; I hate casual "gamers". I hate them for ruining my "hardcore gaming"