by dugman
SparkingConduit wrote:
emodiu5 wrote:
dugman wrote:
Well everybody is different, the group I've finished with barely cared one way or another about final scores, we just had fun completing the game. The score in the epilogue is just a trivial side note.
This is what I was going to say. The game was a very fun experience, and the arbitrary score at the end really didn't matter to us. Sorry it soiled your experience so much.
You know, it's not so much the score that matters. I'm not upset because our score is very low. I'm upset because it seems patently arbitrary.
[o]The points just don't make any sense. To put it in perspective, you would have to have 40 fallen cities on the board to lose the same number of points. That's nearly the entire board. Not completing that one search is the equivalent of losing FIVE MONTHS IN A ROW. This is my real complaint. If we had just not played August-December, we would have lost as many points as not completing one measly search.
The military base thing is also very arbitrary. Luckily, our last remaining base was in Africa where we were vaccinating anyway, so it made sense to destroy it. If we hadn't, we would have lost 80 points, the equivalent of losing four full games in a row or having 16 fallen cities. That's just ridiculous.
The reason it does matter a little is because your world result is completely predicated on your score. So you're saying if I keep the board entirely pristine but I have one military base and Team Bravo helps me, my result is exactly the same as if 85% of the world is COMPLETELY FUCKING DESTROYED?! I'd really like to know how that's "keeping the world and its civilization on track." [/o]
I'm honestly trying to tell myself that I still enjoyed the early game a lot and having a bad experience at the end doesn't invalidate the fun I had earlier, but it does at least partially. After all, the point of pressing on with the game is to see where it ends, right? But if that ending is utter crap and the stuff you're doing during the game is supposed to affect the ending, finding out the ending is crap or doesn't really account for your choices/does so very poorly is a real buzzkill.
To put it in perspective, I've played through Mass Effect 3 six times but only actually beaten it twice. The other four times I got right up to the final mission and just stopped. The ending is just so bad I actually didn't want to continue. Pandemic Legacy left me with the same feeling. I had fun right up until the ending where I felt like I got screwed over by bullshit. That's unfortunate, but I'm not going to be vindictive and rate the game 1 or anything. It was enough to at least somewhat affect my rating, though.
To me the score isn't important at all. The score in this game is similar to the meaningless achievements you get in video games, some people like them but I never really care about them one way or another. Getting worked up over the scoring system is like getting worked up over achievements or the scoring system in a choose your own adventure game or Zork. It's just a quick rating for people who like to have a score at the end of a game. For me all that matters in the end is did we eliminate C0da and did we have fun playing the game? (Which in my case was we lost in December but still had a ton of fun anyway.)