Guy gives a negative review to Battlezone after playing 8k hours; He's right

Objects are made by men and used for many purposes. But we never love objects

Recycler here!

My god I love BZ98. For me, the remaster was frustrating. The most annoying thing was that certain things, like the combat AI, had been improved in ways that broke the balance of the single player campaign. I doubt players with the subject’s level of mastery would be bothered, but it significantly reduced my enjoyment.

It remains a rare gem, though. There are so few RTSs that place you in the world there isn’t even a name for the genre. The only others I can think of are Brutal Legend and Sacrifice. But BZ98 was the one that I discovered first.

No way to get more sniper ammo on the Nintendo 64 version very frustrating

Oh, a newer Battlezone. Not the original from 1980, the first 3D coin-op game.[1]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battlezone_(1980_video_game)

I guess Giants: Citizen Kabuto is another.

are you me? I have the same complaints and memories...

Yes, loved that game! Would have loved it more if it was actually finished.

Having the same name was an understandable marketing decision, but I think it probably harmed it in many ways. The game is interesting and different even today (although I’ve mention my reservations about it further up)

To be fair, it kinda makes sense. The person best equipped to criticise a game or work is probably often someone who's experienced it for the longest. That way, they get to know all the things that don't add up, get repetitive on repeat playthroughs, various UI and UX annoyances that get worse the more you experience them, etc.

There's a reason the biggest fans of a game or film or TV series tend to give some of the harshest criticism, and why the most active users of a tool or program tend to have the most to say about it.

The first Battlezone was an awesome game, graphics were amazing for its time. Second one was also not bad TBH.

I loved the feeling of hovering above the ground and shooting down enemies. Then if your ship was about to be destroyed, you would eject out of your ship and you could try to snipe your enemy's ship to steal theirs. When you were outside your ship, you were very weak and ships could kill you by just running over you or with a single shot so you had to have really good aim to snipe and hijack one of your enemy's ship fast. Then you could literally drive around in their bases in their ship to spy on them and they wouldn't recognize you as the enemy (until you started shooting at them). That way you could check out their positions and defensive infrastructure to decide whether or not to mount an attack and how. Brilliant concept.

I also loved that there was a goal of exploring the map to find and secure geothermal geysers as you could only start a base around those. It was one of the first truly immersive game experiences.

This was many years before counter-strike, but the game mechanics were far more complex. It definitely didn't get the hype it deserved.

There’s also a remake of battlezone 2: combat commander which is excellent. Truly excellent games!

At 8000 hours, most players have lost any connection to the design intent of "game" they're "playing" -- they've lost any intentional sense of pacing, any intentional sense of discovery, and have almost by definition disregarded any intentional sense of conclusion or completeness.

They're engaging in their own idiosyncratic experience with software that doesn't work exactly the way they now dream, but is apparently closer to what they want than anyrhing else.

In the general case, their insights are going to be a curiosity and might sometimes happen to coincide with a more broadly experienced flaw in the design. And of course they may be right on target for whatever few other "8000 hour" players.

Playing a game or using software a lot can give you some deep insights into it. But there is a crossover point where you spend so much time with it that your relationship with it isn't very related to anyone else's anymore, and your insights likewise become less relatable.

Ultrabots (1993) was another.

This is exactly why the biggest thing in gamedev, and all software dev to an extent, is getting your software in front of users as soon as possible. As a developer it isn't just that you know how it works, but you'll also have played the game or used the front end of the experience for thousands of hours.

New eyes will see fresh flaws. The user might not be right about how to fix the flaw, but they are absolutely right about where the flaws are.

My first thought on reading the title was "8k hours is a lot of quarters".

Really enjoyed this article last week. I wonder how obvious or how long it would take most players to see the difference between the (preferred) original, and the redone Remastered.

The part about why the author spent another 600 hours playing after the negative review is heartwarming as heck: to help other people modding.

Battlezone 98 was an incredible game for me, even if I didn't get far into it. The blend of fps and rts felt sweeping and epic, gave a sense of scale I hadn't experienced. The game ran incredibly smoothly on the Pentium mmx with crappy voodoo banshee.

My hours logged is nowhere near Sacrifice, a game with incredibly different setting (planes hopping wizard currying favor with local dieties), but both games had that blend of first-person and rts that was incredibly challenging & of incredibly neat scale, teaversing huge open spaces. I only play them once or twice a decade now, but they're games that recur in my thoughts a lot.

It's an online multiplayer PvP game. There is no pacing, conclusion or completeness like a single-player "estimated 40 hour playthrough" game, discovery is a metagame, and a review veering into historiography can add relevant and useful information for prospective players because of it, not in spite of it.

Uh, it can be multi-player. But the single player campaigns were the business, IMO.

Command and Conquer:Renegade was a (somewhat)contemporary of bz98 and scratched that BZ itch.