(1/2) I want to preface that I am leaving this comment out of love for you and your channel. You are the first Arkham YouTuber I ever watched, are an amazing part of the community, have been nothing but nice and pleasant every time we’ve interacted, and I am glad I have been connected to through the Arkham YouTube sphere. All of this comment is meant as constructive criticism and to help point out what I think are errors in your argumentation and presentation in the video, not meant as an attack. I also want to preface that I really liked Wolverine, had a lot of fun playing it, and am looking forward to making videos about it even if I think it is a very bad game. You say the opinions you listed are just opinions that you should be entitled to, but there's a lot of objective statements mixed in there. Not everyone hates The Last of Us Part II just because of what happened to Joel. You are entitled to think that TLOU2 is good, I quite like the game for its gameplay even if I find the writing offensive to the characters and story of the first game, but there is a difference between thinking TLOU2 is good and saying that anyone who doesn’t like the story hates it because they are objectively wrong about one specific fact and don’t understand what the story was trying to do. TLOU2 is not just hated because of Joel's death and this take seems very similar to your takes on Wolverine hate. You are assuming a lot about the opposition’s beliefs despite many other reasons being given and those reasons just aren’t being addressed. When getting into the Arkham games you also mix subjective and objective, stating that you dislike Arkham Knight, like Arkham Shadow, and think Arkham VR is bad. One of those is different from the other two, since you’re making a judgement on the game’s quality and not just your enjoyment of it. You are entitled to think that, but making declarative statements like that naturally invites discussion. No opinion is above criticism, although I do understand what you broadly meant in this section. People feel the need to go after opinions far too harshly, assume the worst out of what you said, and demand you have every facet of your argument thought out or else you’re just wrong and stupid, and all of that is ridiculous, especially the people who jump straight to personal insults like in this very comment section or a lot of your community posts. Level design is not something I would bring up in defense of Wolverine. The game is filled with invisible walls, death planes, and leaving the mission area barriers. Many of these are in spots you would never expect them to be because there is no indication you can't go that way other than said artificial barriers. It gets even worse when the game forgets to put a barrier up, making it so you can get out of bounds without even knowing. The Starfield pronouns rant guy had a clip where he got out of bounds in Vancouver by just climbing a building and jumping off in a spot where Insomniac forgot to put an invisible wall, and only learned he was out of bounds when he spotted a 2D tree with textures straight out of the N64 era. The level design in this game is terrible. There is no coherent communication of what isn’t allowed to the player, you just have to bash your head against the wall and if it doesn’t work then it doesn’t work. But then again, the game is so broken that it not working isn’t necessarily a sign that it shouldn’t work. The artillery in the first mission is an excellent showcase of terrible design in terms of keeping the player on track. The way they kill you for going out of bounds is by firing artillery, but multiple parts of the level mandate you run towards gunfire and artillery to progress. The game is using something to punish you for going off the track while simultaneously forcing you to run straight towards that thing. It could very well confuse players, as it confused DSP when he did the smart thing for once and tried to walk into the woods instead of directly into a ton of gunfire. DSP is a moron, but he outsmarted this game within ten seconds of having control. “You need to tell the player where they can go, what can and cannot be interacted with. Cuz if you don't know, you're just going to end up bashing your brains against the wall for 20 minutes straight thinking that you can climb up a ledge when you actually can't and it's never what the developers intended. So instead showing players exactly where they need to go is good game design." Wolverine is the worst game I have ever seen in terms of doing this. There are sections you can go out of bounds without even realizing it because the game is so slapped together. It is very hard to tell what isn't allowed at any given moment, especially since the level design doesn't communicate the boundaries in most instances, invisible walls do. I would much rather they make it clear where I can't go than they make it clear where I have to go at every single moment. One promotes exploration and doesn't constantly pull the player out of the experience if you dare to try and explore or express yourself. The other tells the player to follow the script or everything breaks. Games should be able to account for exploration and the player using the tools available to them to do unique things. Wolverine doesn't. If you try to do anything other than what is clearly intended then the game tends to break, even if what you’re doing is achieved using the tools the game gives you and no glitches. There is a difference between just having white paint and having white paint, an objective marker, constant dialogue telling you where to go, often a companion guiding you, and semi-regularly a scent trail telling you exactly where to go. It is not either the graphics look like shit or we get neon flashing indicators of everything we need to do. Many games don't tell you exactly what to do at every turn and they survive. The Last of Us is a good example of not spelling everything out for the player but still having amazing visuals. Balancing is not something I would bring up in defense of this game. Healing strike alone makes combat trivial. A single parry or kicking someone into a wall followed by triangle automatically heals anywhere from a quarter to a third of your health bar and this upgrade is one of the first ones unlocked. Coupled with the broken healing and last stand systems also making death very difficult in a lot of instances, I have found that even on the hardest difficulty the game is only as hard as you make it. The parry system is insanely generous already and only gets easier if you take the increased parry window adaptation. I chose to forego that adaptation because I find the game very easy already and really didn’t want it to get even easier. There is a lot of what aboutism in this video and that isn’t a sustainable argument. I think the Rhino chase in the beginning of Miles Morales also sucks from a gameplay standpoint, but there's a sizeable difference between a five minute bike section and a forty second riding Rhino section in the middle of a chase that requires player input, encourages movement expression, and requires dodging of attacks. One of those encourages the player to use the tools at their disposal and for a brief moment becomes an autorunner with no fail state while the other is just an autorunner with a difficult to achieve fail state. Interacting with the first bike section is factually more dangerous than letting go of the controller. The game encourages you to do nothing through its mechanics by showing that you are less likely to die by letting the game do everything itself. Leaving the player to their own devices isn’t enough a lot of the time. Games like Roblox or Garry's Mod must logically be the best games ever if requiring specific player actions isn't a necessity of good games. If players limiting themselves is accepted game design, then sandboxes like those are automatically the best type of game since they include almost every other type of game within them. There is major goomba fallacy all over this video. You very frequently assume that two differing beliefs are held by the exact same people. You say that your community post from months ago had people all excited about the game only for things to turn a few weeks later, saying that the very same people are the ones in both camps. Not only could those be two very different groups of people, being excited for Wolverine and thinking it will be bad are not mutually exclusive. I voted in that poll that I was excited more for Wolverine, but from the moment gameplay was shown I was very skeptical as to the game’s quality.
