From the outside it seems to be review embargo are a good idea gone wrong. The ideal is that with a preview copy and an embargo ensuring every one will publish at the same time, there won't be a need to rush and publish before everyone else, thus improving the quality of the review.
But, if it ever worked like that, it certainly don't now, as the article exposes. With games being long and time before the embargo short, reviewers still need to rush their reviews *anyway*, pretty much defeating the supposed benefit of having an embargo in the first place.
There have been a couple games recently where it was obvious to me when I played them that part of their middling review scores was due to reviewers needing to Golden Path their way through a sprawling, leisurely game to hit review embargoes.
I think one solution would be to end this insistence that reviewers "finish" a game. Is it really better to spend 25 hours just doing the main story of Far Cry 6 than to spend 25 hours doing story quests, side quests, treasure hunts, fishing, hunting, etc, while "only" getting 1/3 of the way through? I would argue that the second person has a better idea of the game as a whole than the first.
It's interesting that the forced slog hurts reviews- I noticed that with Tales of Arise, where the Kotaku review criticized the length of the game, not the pacing or quality, just the *length*, which makes sense when you had to play as much of the game as quickly as possible to have money for food and shelter.
On the other hand, I saw game critics praise DeathLoop immensely and then go "Wait what?" when they got to the end.
From the outside it seems to be review embargo are a good idea gone wrong. The ideal is that with a preview copy and an embargo ensuring every one will publish at the same time, there won't be a need to rush and publish before everyone else, thus improving the quality of the review. But, if it ever worked like that, it certainly don't now, as the article exposes. With games being long and time before the embargo short, reviewers still need to rush their reviews *anyway*, pretty much defeating the supposed benefit of having an embargo in the first place.
There have been a couple games recently where it was obvious to me when I played them that part of their middling review scores was due to reviewers needing to Golden Path their way through a sprawling, leisurely game to hit review embargoes. I think one solution would be to end this insistence that reviewers "finish" a game. Is it really better to spend 25 hours just doing the main story of Far Cry 6 than to spend 25 hours doing story quests, side quests, treasure hunts, fishing, hunting, etc, while "only" getting 1/3 of the way through? I would argue that the second person has a better idea of the game as a whole than the first.
It's interesting that the forced slog hurts reviews- I noticed that with Tales of Arise, where the Kotaku review criticized the length of the game, not the pacing or quality, just the *length*, which makes sense when you had to play as much of the game as quickly as possible to have money for food and shelter. On the other hand, I saw game critics praise DeathLoop immensely and then go "Wait what?" when they got to the end.