How strict is Obvious Beta's criteria?

Got it. I was just asking.

TRS Queue | Works That Require Cleanup of Complaining | Troper Wall

Options we've gone over so far:

• Make Obvious Beta Trivia
• Make Obvious Beta an Audience Reaction

Are there any other options people would like to pitch?

I guess there should be a rename option as well. Anyone have anything else to suggest before I queue up?

Edited by badtothebaritone on Dec 3rd 2022 at 7:30:44 AM

I remember a TRS draft called Unfitting Release that was basically a YMMV version of Obvious Beta, but it never went anywhere.

Rename would probably work more.

I swear Loid, you can't draw worth shit!

I'm shocked that it was never YMMV'ed given the opinionated title.

This is a tricky one.

It's definitely "a thing" and it's quite a hot topic nowadays in gaming. "Obvious" perhaps still isn't the best title, however.

Just glancing over the examples, there are way too many old games on there that, while they may have some hilariously major bugs (like a stat that does nothing), weren't something most people would have actually have known at the time, and it's only in hindsight that we have datamined or otherwise shared these things about those games (like, "everyone knows" nowadays that the first generation of Pokemon games had some serious issues, but no one I knew back then knew most of them and the Strategy Guides I had reported the intended mechanics rather than their actual broken state).

Since you couldn't patch back then, companies took it a lot more seriously to make sure a game at least worked on launch, even if it was still broken in places. That made the really broken games all the more notable, because they were rarer. This trope probably had its origins thinking about those games, before it became common enough to blur the lines.

Early Access, for instance, can makes things really complicated. In theory, Early Access is a way for games to get feedback from a wide audience in an intentional beta and shouldn't really apply here. In practice, well, Early Access seems to mean different things to different people. Some teams keep the label on their game years after it's fully featured and working, other teams seem to merely use it as a defense against any criticism of a game that still barely functions after a decade. For the former, they're technically an "actual beta" without being this trope, while the latter fulfill the spirit of this trope while technically not applying. That's not even getting into everything in-between.

Edited by Jokubas on Feb 1st 2023 at 2:12:52 AM

I feel like Obvious Beta should either be a trivia item (about the objective fact that a game is broken) or audience reaction (about how people feel about the game's broken-ness). It's about something within the work itself, but it's not a creative decision like tropes are supposed to be.

Early Access is just glorified beta testing.

There's even Super Early Access, which is just glorified alpha testing.

Edited by Nen_desharu on Feb 1st 2023 at 11:25:36 AM

Kirby is awesome.