Talk:Arcanum: Of Steamworks and Magick Obscura/GA1

GA Review

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Reviewer: Arsenikk ^(talk) 15:22, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

My main concern about the game is its overfocus on the in-fiction elements and underfocus on out-of-game elements—for instance the who development and reception is crammed into a single section. Without addition information about the development and reception, it is difficult to allow the article to meet the good article criteria.

Some comments:

1. Avoid abbreviations like "aka".
2. "Developed" should link to "video game developer", not "game development".
3. When there is only a month and a year, there is never a comma between them.
4. Dates are to be in the format January 1, 2009, or 1 January 2009. It seems that most of the dates in this article are incorrectly formatted (remove the comma).
5. The first instance of $ needs to use either "US$" or "USD" and of course still be wikilinked.
6. First instance of "experience point" should be wikilinked.
7. The sentence "Every five levels one additional character point is awarded, (every 5 levels 6 character points are awarded) the leveling is capped at level 50; since the character starts at level one with five free character points this makes for a total of 64 character points." is very difficult to follow, and seems a bit trivial. The idea here is not to make a comprehensive description of the game mechanics, but to describe the basic.s
8. The phrase "balanced and frantic[18] and overly simplified" needs at least one comma or an "and" removed.
9. It is not really that good to describe something as the same as another game. If a person has not played the now aging games of Diablo or Fallout, they will not understand the references. Both these games are ten years old now, and although popular then, it is unreasonable to have expected people to have played them.
10. If writing about a continuum, don't use a slash, but instead an endash (–), which is not to be confused with a hyphen (-). Therefore there is magic–technology and good–evil.
11. Never use contractions in mainspace on Wikipedia. Instead of "they've", use "they have". This is not necessary on talk pages or similar, where a more informal tone is often used.
12. The first sentence of the second paragraph under "setting" is very long and awkward.
13. Don't wikilink the proper name "Mountain Ranges" to "mountain range", as it gives the impression that the link goes to the place in question.
14. In the whole section, there are numerous capitalization errors with the word "the", which should not be capitalized unless at the beginning of a sentence.
15. The "setting" section seems unbalanced as part of the whole. The amount of detail the world is described in is at the verge of trivial, and a thinning of the content would probably make it more encyclopedic. There are several discussions and examples that go way beyond the detail expected in an encyclopedia, particularly when taking into consideration the fairly small development and reception section[s].
16. Perhaps a bit beyond the GA criteria, but the word "utilizing" will almost always (and certainly in this instance) read better if replaced with "use". The word should only be used when in context of efficiency (e.g. high utilization).
17. "Tesla Gun" should be de-caplitalized, unless there is one particular gun (and only one) that is called that in the game.
18. The word "modernized" should be "modern" and please remove the wikilink, which goes to an article on a sociological concept.
19. There is a certain about of overlinking in the "setting" section, in particular the repeated link to some of the races.
20. Never, ever use an ampersand (&) in prose or headers. Use the word "and".
21. Development and receptions should be two separate sections.
22. I expect more information on development, such as when it started, perhaps some initial ideas and background.
23. I would have expected more from the review section (which is barely a paragraph), in particular individual comments (either paraphrased or quoted) to look at the array of reviews. What is important is to see if there are elements that the reviewers agreed were good, agreed were not good and if applicable, what they disagreed on. The prose used by reviewers is just as important as the scores, because this is where more subjective parts of the game can be discussed. Look at some of the reviews that gave bad scores, and try to find the essence of why the reviewer didn't like the game, and similarly with the good scores. All games have a trade-off, and this is often the cause of the disputes between reviewers.
24. I would have though a different location would be better to decribe the editor, probably in the "gameplay" section.
25. The section "unofficial patch" is rather confusion, because it starts off with talking about an official patch. It gives the immediate impression that there were no official patches.
26. What is meant by "...large portion of game content unused"?
27. The "sequel" section is rather short, and can lead the reader to actually believe there is a sequel. Instead, stick it in the "development" section.
28. The stray sentence "All music composed by Ben Houge." seems to be redundant to the previous paragraph. Also, please avid single-sentence paragraphs, they look hideously unprofessional.
29. Remove all "see also" entries. An ideal article has no such. Instead, they should be linked in appropriate places in the prose. It is also a bit difficult to understand why three of these are in the "see also" section at all.
30. "Conductivity", "hybrid", "spells", "stealth" and "Tesla" all link to disambiguation pages.
31. Ref 40 is dead.
32. While the map image is okay, there is not screenshot of a "typical" screen during normal play, making it very difficult to understand how the game is played. Please add such an image.

I am placing the article on hold. Arsenikk ^(talk) 15:22, 15 December 2009 (UTC)

Reply

1.  Done
2.  Done
3.  Done
4.  Done
5.  Done
6.  Done
7.  Done
8.  Done
9.  Done
10.  Done
11.  Done
12. Which sentence? They all seem to be fine to me. Sanguis Sanies (talk) 10:18, 19 December 2009 (UTC)
13.  Done
14. More specifically? “The” used in the context of a pronoun (The United States) is capitalised. Sanguis Sanies (talk) 10:18, 19 December 2009 (UTC)
15.  Done
16.  Done
17.  Done
18.  Done
19.  Done
20.  Done
21.  Done
22.  Not done There seems to be very little development info about, given this was 2001 and the internet was a newfangled thing there are probably a lot in printed magazines, but unfortunately I don't have much access to them, IGN has a series of Behind the scenes stuff but that doesn't give us anything practical to go on. Sanguis Sanies (talk) 08:22, 21 December 2009 (UTC)
23.  Done
24.  Done
25.  Done Changed to Patch Sanguis Sanies (talk) 08:22, 21 December 2009 (UTC)
26.  Done The rest of the paragraph explains it; "including endings, audio, artwork and animations, as well as adding higher quality versions of location maps, and higher bit rate music files" and others Sanguis Sanies (talk) 08:22, 21 December 2009 (UTC)
27.  Done
28. The stray sentence is part of the template.
29. Really? Most articles; including GA and FA articles, have See Also. Sanguis Sanies (talk) 10:18, 19 December 2009 (UTC)
30.  Done
31.  Done
32.  Done

The sentence has now been moved and is "The Unified Kingdom — a rapidly industrialising and technologically the most advanced kingdom; the Kingdom of Cumbria — a deteriorated kingdom ruled by an old conservative king and the Kingdom of Arland — a small but thriving monarchy west of the Stonewall range." This is too long, and need to be broken into smaller parts. Also, never use more than a single instance of punctuation dashes in a single sentence (either one dash or a double used in lieu of a commma). Emdashes are never to be spaced. Regarding the capitalization of "the", this is incorrect if used in the middle of a sentence. For instance, one would write "...in the United States...". However, for works (such as "while reading The Lord of the Rings...", this may be acceptable. The length of the development section is now sufficient, particularly since the other development-related information has been packaged into a single section. If the stray sentence is part of the template, I suggest either modifying the template, the input parameters or manually creating the table. In the way it is now, it cannot be used in a GA article.

See WP:See also. There is a common misunderstanding among many Wikipedia editors that a "see also" section is a good thing. The best place to put wikilinks is in the prose and subsequently in a navbox; only when these two instances have been exhausted should a "see also" section be used. Such a section is okay for the early stages of an article, when relevant links may not have the necessary prose to be included. There are also some links that just cannot be put into the main prose or a navbox—and for these a "see also" section in a mature article is allowed. Although usually a good guide, be aware of using the WP:OTHERCRAPEXISTS argument with other GA and FA articles. All GA articles are flawed (the criteria allow less-than perfect articles, and allow large amounts of MOS-noncompliances to be overlooked). Also look at how old the FA article is; for instance most FA articles passed in 2006 would quick-fail todays GA criteria.

Nice work :) There are still some issues and I am placing the article on hold, but it is looking much better now. Arsenikk ^(talk) 11:28, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

 Done Sanguis Sanies (talk) 14:48, 21 December 2009 (UTC)

I will pass the article. However, there is one thing I seem to have overlooked, and that is that three refers (26, 27 and 29) are missing access dates, and that there is an inconsistency in the formatting of the access dates. I'll ask you to fix it up, but assume good faith that you'll do that even if I pass the article right now (so we don't spend another three days here). Nice work; I hope to see more classic RPGs (or any other game) here at GAN in the future :) Arsenikk ^(talk) 11:33, 24 December 2009 (UTC)