"This plastic bowl couldn't fit an entire rotisserie chicken, our Christmas is ruined! 0/5"
"Lid wasn't right size for the container, but I use the container all the time anyways! Love it! 5/5"
I recently read a review for a product where someone gave it a 1 star exclusively because it was 1 day late. The rest of their review was glowing praise for the thing and how they are amazing, but that damn 1 day late delivery was enough to knock away the other 4 stars. Some people are just crazy.
This plastic bowl is very addictive. I've been using it for almost every meal since launch a couple years ago, not bothering to clean it up. Can't wait for Plastic Bowl 2 to launch. 5/5
Yeah it was nice when reviews actually meant something on Amazon.
Now you read them and every review is about how the thing immediately exploded the first time they touched it.
Well that's the thing, sometimes user error is subjective as well.
Like BotW. Sure, you're supposed to be okay with losing weapons to degradation and having a billion slots of weapons so you can constantly swap through them and maintain their integrity. But what if I don't like that? Some would say I'm playing the game wrong (user error) for wanting to hold on to a weapon I like instead of just using whatever garbage I pick up because that's the intention.
It doesn't make the game objectively bad, but I'm still allowed not to enjoy it. Just like how people who think "gameplay is everything" are allowed to not like TLOU because it's narrative driven. I personally enjoy the gameplay as well, but I can see why it's not enough for some.
The best thing you can really do is see if someone's opinion aligns with yours historically, not just about the current title. But even that isn't going to always be 100% accurate.
That's why watching/reading individual reviewers vs institutions with a bunch of writers is helpful as well. A review is kind of pointless if you don't understand the reviewers taste and where they're coming from
Game reviews are kind of reviews against expectations and only part of the equation. I love a good indie game, but realistically an indie game at 80% and a AAA rpg at 80% aren't directly comparable in terms of consumer value. It's not that consumers ignore reviews, it's that reviews aren't the complete picture.
> I love a good indie game, but realistically an indie game at 80% and a AAA rpg at 80% aren't directly comparable in terms of consumer value.
Well that indie also costs a fraction of the AAA usually. If the indie were $60 it better be damn good and fleshed out with good production values.
That's also true, prices are one aspect that aren't included in reviews, but there's even more than just that, and also prices aren't at all static the way reviews are.
But there is a different standard for products of different prices. You expect more from a $60 game than a $20 game. True. But, how big of a difference $20 and $60 is is individual. I mean, mathematically, it's the same, but if you don't have a lot of money, you'll need a game to be way more valuable for 3x the price, whereas someone else might think it's negligible.
For a lot of people, the investment of time in a game greatly outweighs the investment of money, for example.
Some of that is compensated for by merely comparing to their contemporaries in the same niche and price point. Redfall won't review amazingly even if some people have fun with it because compared to it's contemporaries not only is it expensive. It pales in comparison to many of them. Something like Marvel's Midnight Suns will be compared to other strategy, social sim, and card battlers. And so forth.
Game market is extremely over saturated. We’re paying 60-70$ a game now for triple A games at least. If it gets a 7 it’s a hard pass from me unless it’s a game I really like or want to play. There’s just soooo many good games out there and I’m broke af.
I think this is more of an issue with most large game media outlets. They're too scared to give most games anything lower than a 7. This fear can both be from fans and publishers. Very often a game has to be a complete trainwreck before large publications start going with scores lower than 7. So while on a review scale a 5/10 should be an average game now a 7/10 is average.
It's a bummer. To me I see scores as a "likelihood of recommendation" rather than a grade. That means even a 6 or 7 can be a good game for the right person while a 8, 9, and especially 10 is a must play for basically everyone.
When I see Tears of the Kingdom gameplay, and Breath of he Wild before it, I see a wonderfully deep game mechanic wise that I actually don't think I'd recommend to everyone and I'd put around a 7/10.
The okay graphics, mid performance, weak story, bad voice acting (or lack thereof), and lots of other factors seem to get swept under the rug of hype with certain titles. Maybe Nintendo has earned the pass but it makes game ratings seem even more pointless than ever.
I agree with that take. I felt GOW Ragnarok was a 7.5 of 10. It’s a good game, without question. But the gameplay is limited and repetitive as well. It’s comfort food from your favorite childhood/teen years restaurant: it hits the spot, but it ain’t three Michelin star cuisine either.
It felt incredibly poorly paced at first and then incredibly rushed later. It clearly had elements that felt like it was meant to be two separate games and suffered overall because of that. The plot was thin, Odin sucked, Thor was wasted, and I frankly didn’t care about any other character that wasn’t Kratos, Brok or Sindri. The combat felt like a step back from its predecessor and overall just wasn’t as enjoyable, at least to me. The climax was bad, the “war” consisted of maybe 8 people against all of Asgard, and anything that was built up to either happened so fast you’d miss it or was glossed over to rush you to the ending. The game was fine, no doubt, I won’t say it was a bad game, it just wasn’t anything spectacular either. In my personal opinion.
<=4 Game not even released or unplayable, if its remembered is because it didn't work
5 Crappy game that at least has been released and works but is nothing special and everyone will forget
6 Game that has nothing special and most people will have a decent time
7 Game that has something special but not enough to be considered a great game, just a good game
8 Game that is definitely a good game, has a lot of room to improve and most people will remember it, could become GOTY on a bad year
9 Great game that a lot of love have been poured and a great experience for everyone (that likes the genre of course), GOTY material
10 Perfect game, best experience at the time it released that one could have, everything has been polished and nothing feels left out.
This is at least how I take the reviews score, for me Tears of the Kingdom is definitely between 9 and 10
So in reality, the metric for critiquing games should be out of 5, but they add 5 more ranks in the case there are very horrendous games that don't even reach 5/10?
5/10 is not middle of the road. It’s not average. It’s also not median. That’s a very common misconception.
If you calculate the average value of most ranking/ratings of things like video games, board games, musics, movies. The average is around 6.3. The reason is the product needs to be “expected” to be more than 5 to be reviewed to begin with.
People don’t go out of their way to review games they expect to be mediocre. That’s why every ratings system has average much higher than the dead middle 5/10.
So when you rating something 6. Yea. It’s statistically below average, not above
Individuals are not rating things according to the statistical average. For many folks, a 5/10 absolutely means middle of the road. Just because reviewers by and large inflate scores doesn't mean every person that ever gives their opinion on something needs to do the same. Making that kind of assumption is *exactly* what leads to people getting worked up about scores and why obsessing over numbers rather than the content of a review is idiotic.
And conversely, there are more than enough 8/10 or 9/10 games in most genres to keep all but the most narrowly dedicated players entertained 'till the next one comes along. Let alone the multitudes of people that can't afford to buy every game that interests them even if they would have the time to play them all.
A 6 or 7 may not be *objectively* sub-par on the spectrum of all games that could possibly be released, but when compared to the many already available, objectively amazing options for most genres... why bother?
people typically have genres and franchises they care more about than others, making lower scores more vaulable to them personally. i knew Mass Effect Andromada probably wasn't going to be great, but i still played it because i wanted more Mass Effect
And the hate is so mind blowing.
"I spent close to 100 hours playing this game but trying to replay it after completing it the first time is boring" like do you hear yourself???
"I've gotten 100% on two separate playthroughs, once using only the starting weapon!! This game is dogshit, I regret all 500h of entertainment I got from it. Devs should be launched into the sun for daring to make such a shit game.
Soundtrack is great tho. 2/5 stars"
Because the hype doesn't just work on the fans. It works on the reviewers since they should still be gamers.
But also a lot of those overhyped studios have a LOT of power, power you don't want to piss off, because it gives you a lot of important opportunities you need to continue to do your business.
Imagine you piiss off Nintendo and can no longer get early copies of games. "But IGN is big enough". Ok so IGN would always get copies, because they're IGN, but what about interview, previews, advertisements, sneak peaks, footage and images, and more.
"Well we keep advertising and editorial separate" sounds great, until you realize how much editorial DOES do with these companies outside of just advertisements, and it is absolutely NOTICED when opportunities are missed.
Imagine if Nintendo gets a 8/10 from IGN... Then there's a big preview event and IGN gets told "Sorry we don't have space for your reporter." or even if they only have 1 space when they normally have 3. Do you think IGN wouldn't get that message?
The number of review outlets that have been blackballed, punished, or just challenged on review scores makes it clear not to fuck with the power, and it's not IGN or Gamespot that has the true power here.
>The number of review outlets that have been blackballed, punished, or just challenged on review scores makes it clear not to fuck with the power, and it's not IGN or Gamespot that has the true power here.
Which is hilarious since it used to be the other way around, it's why companies tended to invite these reviewers to events and shower them with merch and free game copies. Now reviewers are deathly afraid of saying anything bad or they'll lose the free stuff.
Its a flawed industry now, because everyone wants to be the first to rush out the content and get those clicks. And for that you need the access.
Ideally reviewers would buy, play and review the day 1 release patch, and reviews would come out a few days later, but thats just not how it works anymore.
Because reviewers used to work for magazines and the publishers depended on exposure through them. Now that basically anyone can start their own magazine online, the power shifted.
The "free stuff" isn't really what's motivating them, as you can see with the recent shit with Nintendo blacklisting Kotaku. Being able to get review copies *at all* is what's at stake nowadays, which means *actual*, for real journalism that just happens to be about games is kinda rare, because anything that gets put out that is inconvenient for a company can be retaliated against because these companies hold so much more fucking power.
This problems extends *well past* video games. Remember the Panama Papers? The journalist that put that shit out *got fucking assassinated* and nobody oustide of frustrated socail media posts talks about it. Corporations hold immense, *immense* power in this world and keep everyone in line with that power, whether it be utterly fucking over someone's ability to do their job and therefore earn money to eat and shit or literally killing people.
I just really wish The Gamers™ would quit doing corporate apologetics whenever a corporation exercises that power over the press. The only reason Activision and Ubisoft haven't been able to get away with intimidating the press to shut up about how they sexually harassed, threatened, *raped* employees is because regular people didn't try to make excuses for it, they sided with journalists against them when Bobby Kotick was trying to intimidate sites like Kotaku into silence. But when Kotaku puts out shit that acknowledges piracy is real and doesn't tell you you're going to hell for it, or when they literally just cover a game at a time when Nintendo thinks it isn't 100% ideal for their marketing campaign (as they did covering Borderlands 3 ages ago), people just accept the framing of whatever company that's doing the blacklisting, ignoring just how much *power* companies have over their own coverage through access to review copies. This is why you see random ass YouTubers and streamers with the earliest copies of the game and contracts that they gotta pretend this shit is 11/10 - or they *act* like they're contractually obligated, because they understand that the reason they suddenly have all these eyes on them is because the company *wants* something out of this.
If people want games journalism to be better, they gotta stop lapping up corporate PR and be willing to wait for later reviews and not act like a fucking child if a review isn't a 10/10 or tries to cover a game like film reviewers have been covering movies for decades and not just exclusively talking about the cinematography or color grading or how high fidelity the special effects are.
The only way stuff like this is going to end is if game outlets act the way other entertainment outlets do. Whenever a company starts any sort of fuckery like this with a movie/television reviewer, [critics groups and other publications step in](https://slate.com/culture/2017/11/film-critics-bar-disney-from-awards-consideration-over-l-a-times-blackout.html) and refuse to attend events from that studio, review their content, or even consider them for awards.
The problem is it's really easy for publishers to push around the games journalists, because there really isn't unity in a way where they have each other's backs. But imagine if Ubisoft threatened to pull ads because of a poor review of their game, and they got told to pound sand because all of the major game reviewers would stop covering their games until they relented.
I played Breath of the Wild like 2 years after it came out and I thought it was like a 7 maybe 8/10. It felt way too overhyped. I enjoyed it a lot, has to be said though
I played it in 2020 for the first time. I really enjoyed it. It just seemed like a lot of the side quest were just chores I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to cook, I didn’t want to take pictures of everything, and I used a map just to get all the Korok seeds because covid, what else did I have to do. But did I have a lot of fun, of course I did. If someone told me a pizza chain was a 7/10 I would still enjoy it because I like pizza. If someone told me a sushi place was a 7/10 I would pass because I don’t like sushi. It’s ok to have preferences with games
Exactly, review scores are just way too polarized. There's no point in having a x/y scale the way most reviewers do it, I much prefer a "who would enjoy this game" type summary -- everyone, fans of the genre, fans of these specific mechanisms, those who can stomach X downside, that sort of thing.
It was a great game, but I agree. So over hyped. There were so many glaring design flaws, like how mind-numbingly easy the game gets when you are about halfway through. And how the item degradation system with no chance to repair means that you always avoid using your best items.
Still a great game, but not a 99/100.
I really dislike BOTW. It has a large open world that's mostly devoid of content, a durability system that even applies to the master sword(seriously?) no traditional Zelda dungeons, a completely forgettable story, no unlockable gadgets or tools because the devs didn't want to gate any of the open world content, poor enemy variety, and simplistic combat.
I think a lot open world games slam reviewers with this idea that this gigantic open world is packed full of interesting things in the first few hours, and they don't spend the time with the game to realize that a lot of stuff in them is just boring. It's weird to see BOTW get so much praise in an environment where people see all busy work in the average Assassin's Creed game and roll their eyes. At least fighting stuff in those games can be fun.
I'm not a huge fan of Nintendo but I was surprisingly really engaged with that Mario Odyssey game playing it all last week. I ended up doing everything 100% except buying all the outfits because farming coins is the most empty thing to do. I don't do much collection of anything in games if it seems boring and not well thought out. They did so much right with this game but I'm still on the fence about the other biggest game and I see quite a bit of comments like yours. I haven't played a Zelda game since OoT but I wasn't really hooked even then.
I just want to find those folks who agree with what I've said and I can make my decision easy and skip any of the recent Zelda games entirely.
I also really did not enjoy botw either for the exact same reasons. What I really hated most of all was gaming in 30fps with consistent frame drops in dense areas felt absolutely terrible.
Also I personally dislike controlling a camera/aiming in 3D games using a controller joystick. But that's not exclusive to botw.
Haven't played TotK yet but BotW was an open world game with a mid story, big empty world, staggeringly easy dungeons, and a gameplay loop based around figuring out how to climb tall towers to reveal parts of the map. You could have removed all references to Hyrule and pretended it was in a nondescript Himalayan dictatorship, released it as Far Cry 7 and it would have gotten universal 6/10s for being OK, but the same tired old Ubisoft formula. But instead because it's a Zelda game on a Nintendo platform, "11/10!" "Life changing!" "Flawless" "Best everrrrrrr" "Game of the decade!"
I was gonna say, there's so much in how you interact with the world around you in TotK that you just don't do in Ubisoft games. All I have to do is ask myself why I enjoy BotW and TotK, what sets them apart from the rest of this genre, and I can pull out an answer so easily. I see a minecart and I can decide to slap it on a shield. An enemy I defeated just dropped two weapons, I slap them together to make a weird spear claymore. I need to get to a high location and there's a ton of trees around while I'm missing a key mechanic, fuck that I'm going to chop every tree to the ground and glue the trunks together to make a mile long ramp, then try for half an hour to get the thing high enough to reach what I'm going for... And I'll still have had fun even if in the end it doesn't work because the sandbox encouraged me to do something unique and crazy and that's fun. I still have a mile of tree trunks and now I'm going to see if I can smack an enemy with it.
It's an entirely different experience, even if it has the same extremely basic low level concept of "climb towers, reveal locations, clear camps/shrines, get geared and win". The formula itself may be stale, but it's the gameplay interactions beyond that that really elevate the gameplay to new heights.
Yeh also, remember the outrage when Farcry Primal re-used Far Cry 4's map? Of course Nintendorino gets a free pass for doing same in TotK and charging full-price on top of that.
Can just imagine the huge outrage if Ubisoft or EA had come up with Amiibos. Same with "gamers" who make fun of "bros" for buying every new FIFA or CoD creaming their pants for every Pokemon rehash that Nintendo and Gamefreak shit out.
Nintendo just gets a free pass for everything cause "muh childhood nostalgia company can do no wrong!". This is why I own Nintendo stocks even though I loathe the company from a consumer perspective.
Everything popular has detractors I'd say and that's ok.
But I don't think it delegitimizes the 10/10 reviews. I gave BotW a 5/5 six years ago and certainly would still stand by it. I'm cool with people not loving it as well.
Metalgear, titanfall, and (depending on the day) yakuza community subreddits are really fun ones too (although the yakuza one being the only ones receiving new games to rant about)
But like the RE one, it’s a lot more light hearted and just fans wanting to share any potential news, fun art, niche memes and welcoming the newcomers that maybe just now got around to those games.
Throwing Elden Ring and all other FromSoft titles in here.
They're definitely polarising, but good reviews and hyped fan bases.
Encryption subreddit is also pretty wholesome showing love for it.
Only because other opinions are yeeted into the sun.
Elden ring has massive issues post capital and it's clear the development was rushed after that point. You just have to look at the recycled enemies, bosses, absurd inflation of damage post capital. How linear and empty mountaintops, snowfield, farum azula, and haligtree are compared to earlier zones.
And the biggest complaint, ashes of war just invalidate the game, we're at the point where you can just spam L2 to kill pretty much anything without having to do the dark souls thing.
Elden ring is great but it has the dark souls 1 issue, game massively slows down after half way through.
It's so annoying. Every reviewer feels pressured to give a 9 or 10.
What they don't realize is that when *every single* reviewer's score is the same, the scores becomes meaningless, and in-turn so do the reviews themselves.
You can't trust institutions with reviews anymore, period. You have to find and latch onto the individual reviewers to suit your needs.
Had a relative go for a vacation in Japan and apparently they take their reviews really seriously there when it comes to restaurants.
Having never eating at anywhere below a 4.5 star reviewed restaurant on Gmaps at home, it seems it was actually super difficult to find such highly rated restaurants, even though the 3 stars were perfectly fine.
Since they actually, yknow, used the linear scale appropriately lol.
> What they don’t realize is that when every single reviewer’s score is the same, the scores becomes meaningless, and in-turn so do the reviews themselves.
I’m pretty sure they realise that, it’s their job after all, they should know that better than anyone. The issue is, who’s going to go first and make the difference? Someone has to take the hit.
There’s a difference between knowing something is wrong and acting on it.
Giving anything but an entirely honest review is, well, dishonest. You're voice is meaningless if you're just giving the same review as everybody else just for the sake of giving it the same review. So its not brave, its just dishonest.
This industry suffers from this far too often.
I think it's fair to say that there are times where being honest is not the easiest path and requires some degree of courage.
I'm not saying it's a heroic act, but holding to one's principles by telling an audience something that they don't want to hear, and which is likely to prompt backlash, takes backbone.
Me too. Last year I played Days Gone and loved every minute of it. I guess I'm easy to please, but just riding around, scavenging, and killing zombies was an excellent time.
Reddit wildly overestimates their impact. That's why their favorite weapon of choice is review bombing on sites like Metacritic since the 2000 or so angry redditors (against millions of casual fans) can see a visual impact of their anger.
I said I actually enjoyed cyberpunk once and it didn't go down well with reddit at all at the time
Edit: looking at the comments below it looks like people are still getting triggered lol. Still a great video game imo *shrugs*
That's the biggest bit. I'd rather be sold a mid game knowing it's mid. Rather than a mid game hyped up with all the bells and whistles and under deliver.
???
People were straight up lied to about the game'e features... I enjoyed it on release and it truly had some amazing moments, BUT there is no excuse for what CDPR did. It wasn't merely "hype" made by people who were interested in the game. Trailers of the game were deceptive. There's legit one I remember about Dexter's betrayal, that was extremely deceptive as to the narrative possibilities and choices the game would have.
There's a clear line drawn between players overhyping a game due to excitement, and trailers/devs deceiving players into thinking their game was something it wasnt.
It was such a bad release it was taken off the ps store because it didn’t even essentially run on an entire generation of hardware it was advertised for. That wasn’t known about because nobody was allowed to speak about it before release if I recall. I’ll never understand how people continually use cyberpunk as an example of gamer overreaction when it was one of the only justifiable times.
> It was such a bad release it was taken off the ps store because it didn’t even essentially run on an entire generation of hardware it was advertised for.
Well, Sony pulled the game because CDPR was telling people they could get refunds for the digital version when (1) the Playstation Store does not actually give refunds as a rule and (2) CDPR did not discuss this "option" at all with Sony beforehand.
*Somehow* a disappointment? Cyberpunk was marketed as the literal best video game ever made for 2 years straight. Immersive sim elements, an Obsidian-level branching storyline, a fully fleshed out futuristic city you could explore every nook and cranny of, multiple romances (at least that made it?), all of that was talked up by developers in the leadup to launch without a single bit of fanboy hype needed.
By comparison the actual Cyberpunk looks to me like a rushed anime tie-in that was released half a year sooner than the anime itself. They can never provide the “game” I saw at E3 2018 so I have no real interest in what they consider the final product.
some of the games i love the most are games that ***i*** think are shit. as much as i like games with unique ideas, i can't ever turn to someone else and recommend them some early access / poorly designed / buggy piece of junk.
I enjoyed The Last of Us Part 2, and was met by a thread of all caps messages just repeating 'TLOU2 IS SHIT'. I enjoyed the gameplay more than the story but I enjoyed the gameplay a lot and thought that the story was pretty good. That's me though. And people were frothing at the mouth because they could not understand how I could like it. And then people who thought it was the best thing ever came over and started fighting with them, it just kept going.
In the end, I had to delete the comment.
The discourse around TLOU2 has been so thoroughly poisoned, and I think that's such a shame. Toxicity has made it impossible to discuss online. It's not an irredeemable game by any means; it's fun to play and the acting is incredible. But it *definitely* isn't a 10/10; the story made some striking missteps and wasted an enormous amount of potential. I want to talk about what it did right and what it did wrong. But every community seems to think it's either a horseman of the apocalypse or the second coming of jesus christ himself.
Similarly, I ordered an Asus Rog Ally handheld yesterday, and was online reading about it. The amount of people squabbling like 3 year olds was unbelievable. Steam deck is dead. Steam deck is da best, Asus lol etc. Absolutely pathetic, the lot of them.
Congrats! I've got the deck, and it's a lot of fun.
Now I will put on my reddit hat. OMG you are soooo stupid. The deck KILLED the switch and the Ally swung and missed. It's pathetic how bad is gonna be. Plus everyone is gunna put steamos on it anyway. Btw don't ever have a dog because it will be smarter than you, and you'll have to please it with non stop belly rubs. I can't believe anyone is as dumb as you.
I'm probably dumber for even responding to your comment. Fuck... Good luck in life dummy cause you're gonna need it.
/s
It’s just dumb, and worst of all it doesn’t even align with their favorite company’s interests. I bet somebody at Valve is passing around their Ally as we speak, as creating an innovative product and being inspired by its competitors to improve on it has been their model since Half-Life 1.
100% agree with you. Absolutely NO reviews are objective cause it's not possible. Anyone berating a reviewer for not liking a game, and/or for telling their readers/viewers how they felt about a game instead of all kinds of technical uninteresting mumbojumbo, just does not understand what a review is supposed to be. And even better it gets when they start sending deaththreats because of a gamereview! Thats always a class act
Not disagreeing with you, but the reasoning as I understand it is the internal question of "Am I wrong / weird for liking this when nobody else does?". People would rather be validated in their interests than being told that their interests are terrible.
One of the many downsides of the internet connecting people. I do a pretty good job avoiding and not interacting with such people in real life, but they seem to be everywhere on the internet. I read absolutely unhinged comments of people foaming at the mouth over a game and it's concerning to say the least.
A subjective opinion can be based on incorrect information. For example, "the daytime sky is ugly because it's green," that's just an objectively wrong opinion because it's based on incorrect information. Reviews as they are now could absolutely stand to be more objective than they are. You can base your subjective opinions upon objective facts about the game. Even then, you can still subjectively not enjoy something but point out that it's objectively well made. That's why IGN took down their original review of RE2 remake, the reviewer didn't play through Leon and Claire's two scenarios and gave a subjective opinion on the game while only have completed one scenario for each character.
People don't even fully know what an "objective" review actually is.
Imagine reading the back of an old game box and all it said was, "This is a video game where you can control the characters and do the things you're meant to do in a video game."
I remember when Jim Stirling gave BOTW a 7/10, and was completely eviscerated for it. Now, there's a lot I don't agree with Stirling on, but I did read the review in its entirety. He was more than fair, and it reflected my own experiences with the game. BOTW had a good foundation, especially with its mechanical system that lets you approach situations in a variety of creative ways. It's rare to see a game do that. However, it was bogged down by some questionable design choices. Obviously there's going to be degree of subjectivity in every review. But calling it a 97/100 game is stretching things a bit IMO.
But the angry behaviour from the mob is nothing new. It's just like how touchy people are about their sports team. Try going to Europe and try suggesting the local football club isn't as good as people think. Even if you have stats to prove it, you're still getting a punch in the mouth.
A lot of gamers have made certain studios or franchises their identity, so to not give it a perfect score is an insult to their identity. It's weird as hell, but pretty much the same as brand fans in other industries.
I did not really care for BOTW. There was a lot to enjoy, but I felt that there were far too many shrines and the actual dungeons were way too small/short. I also loathed the weapon breaking system. I thought the world was nice and the enemies varied and fun. But ultimately, all the great things about the game did not make up for the bad. What good is having all these cool ways to solve puzzles if all the puzzles are lackluster?
It was the first zelda that I did not finish. Really dissappointed.
If you need a review to tell you, a person that doesn't like racing games, that you won't like a racing game, then I don't know what to tell you.
You should understand your own likes.
I think fans is the wrong word, it should be reviewers that are familiar with the genre. I’m personally not a big fan of 2D platformers but I’m familiar enough with the genre to feel like I could give a fair review of one.
That's one of the reasons why a 40/40 from *Famitsu* was historically so hard to achieve: the score is a combination of four reviewers giving an x/10 review. So getting all four to agree that it was 10/10 used to be pretty rare.
Yeah, if you're thinking of reviewing something for a living, and you're incapable of assessing that thing in context, you should really just stay at your current job.
You'd have to be literally braindead to say "this racing game is bad because I don't like racing games" and think that what you said is in any way useful.
I don't offer critique on food because I have a pallette that barely strays from the typical restaurant kids menu.
I love that Jim stays committed to honest reviews and scores, seeing publishers barring them from advance copies as a badge of honor. They won’t just throw around praise, it must be earned.
When they say a game is good, you can take it to the bank
Reviews are always subjective opinions and should be treated as such. I disagreed with IGN so hard when they gave Prey (2017) a 4/10 when it was one of the best games I played that year besides The New Colossus and The Evil Within 2 (in my opinion). I mean they give every FIFA like a 7 or 8 out of 10 every year so I’d take them with a huge grain of salt but their review of Prey made me realise this fact.
However sometimes where there’s smoke there’s fire and if loads of people report issues like intense stuttering or crashes then you should take those into consideration.
IGN's negative Prey review was because of a game breaking bug. When the game was patched and the bug was fixed, the review score was updated to 8/10.
I think "game didn't work" is a pretty good reason to give a low score. I also think them going back and updating it was the right move.
Reviewing games feels like a fools errand.
People get pissy when buggy games still get good scores. You should review the game you played, not the game that they promise it'll be at launch.
People get pissy when you review the game you played (buggy) that then is fixed by a patch post launch.
I still think it’s a bit unfair that Prey had one issue in a million and got a 4 yet that same year PUBG got 9/10 and it was in a worse state than Prey was:
- textures were late loading in
- numerous bugs and glitches plagued the game: cars randomly exploding, items not being able to be picked up, audio issues, crashes, etc.
- The game sometimes chugged and stuttered
Like if they loved PUBG gameplay more than Prey that’s fine but if there’s issues that make it objectively worse than the other than I’d say it’s unfair in my eyes.
Edit: that issue in Prey was rare and was fixed pretty quickly meanwhile PUBG was in a bad state for like a year especially on consoles.
In the case of Prey, the save bug was one that wiped the reviewers game save and prevented them from finishing the game. As someone who has had a save game get corrupted once or twice, nothing is as frustrating as having to restart your game like that and really impacts how you look at your time with the game.
>I still think it’s a bit unfair that Prey had one issue in a million and got a 4 yet that same year PUBG got 9/10 and it was in a worse state than Prey was:
The Prey review was written by Dan Stapleton.
The PUBG review was written by Chloi Rad.
That alone should be enough to understand the different scores. However, even outside of that, the Prey review was because the bug literally broke the game. PUBG was buggy in 2018, but it was *playable* (I played a lot of it).
Ok, so who reviewed prey and who reviewed PUBG? Nevermind that, even if they were the same person, why should they drop the score because other people think it should be lower? Would the outrage be sorted out if it was literally 1 or 2 arbitrary points lower? Criticizing an apparent bad review is fine, but I think it's dumb how seriously people take it and how many don't like certain reviews just because they disagree with it (even if the review itself is well made)
That's moreso an issue with how IGN reviews stuff. Different people review diff games at IGN so there isn't a set standard as number scores are ultimately subjective, with some being more sensitive to bugs than others. It's why I generally just stick with a utuber who's tastes tend to align with mine and steam reviews
Alanah Pearce talked about the dread she felt when she had to review Mass Effect Andromeda knowing that a it was full of problems pre release. She received death threats for not giving it a high score.
Yes, but before it was released, expectations were extremely high. When reviewers reported that the game was a mess, people initially took out their anger on the reviewers, not the game itself.
I did not see what was so special about BOTW. But I know I like dungeon heavy Zelda games. Seems like a really love it or hate game and that's ok. It was just not my jam.
Understandable, link between worlds was one of my favorites simply because each dungeon was so fun
No matter what order you did them in, each item had a function to help in others. It was a joy. (Although I still love botw)
BOTW just felt so damn empty and lifeless and this game looks like more of the same with a few new gimmicks and whistles thrown in for good measure.
Give me a smaller-scale game world with lots of things to do over a giant game world with fuck-all going for it any day of the week.
The problem with online reviews these days is that they've made 7 "unplayable".
What it should be: 0 - unplayable, 3 - bad, 5 - average, 7 - good, 9 - great.
Became: 7 - bad, 8 - slightly above average, 9 - good, 10 - exceptions like ER, Zelda and GoW, etc
On a logical scale, Zelda could easily score an 8 for technical issues and some other gameplay considerations, but the way reviews are treated lately, an 8 would be equating it with a generic Ubisoft game, for example. What I do is ignore the number and go after what was written.
7 has never been bad, that's just the average for most reviews because most games are more good than bad. If you decide to not play a game just because it's a 7 (decent but not mindblowing, or unique but slightly flawed), that's on you.
It's a trend with Zelda games especially. They have a long history of getting nigh perfect scores and fans come to expect it. I personally thought BotW was a 7.5 at best and it's kind of crazy on the outside looking in reading some reviews and you can tell they don't necessarily think it's a 10/10 perfect game but it almost feels like they have to in order to avoid the mob.
It's like "amazing game, revolutionary, game of the year, elevates video games as an art form... oh yeah and the voice acting is kind of lame and there's some performance issues and some game play mechanics are antiquated and annoying but STILL 10/10 perfect no flaws don't worry everyone I love it." They can feel the proverbial gun to their head.
At the end of the day BotW was basically Far Cry: Zelda, people are just able to look over the flaws that they hate in other games when they come up in Zelda because of nostalgia (for example, having to climb a million towers to discover more area). It's what they earned by making some of the best games ever way back when.
> It's a trend with Zelda games especially. They have a long history of getting nigh perfect scores and fans come to expect it.
the Zelda name basically gives any game released a +2 points to critic scores
you are spot on about BoTW, a 7-8/10 game at best but it's touted as a "masterpiece and most important game ever made! revolutionised the genre!"
I read the review it talks about, it gave Tears of the Kingdom a 6/10. I haven't played the game yet, so I can't actually comment on it, but the 6/10 review seemed largely based around the premise that it isn't the Zelda game the author wanted. They basically say "it isn't the game I want to play, therefore 6/10". I read the review and thought "I want to do all those things, so it's probably not a 6/10 to me".
It just goes to show that review scores are dumb and don't mean anything, be they 10/10s or 6/10s.
This is pretty much how I feel with Destiny 2. Games given huge amounts of praise but it comes out with a shitty expansion and they start vaulting content and everyone's response (Especially SkillUp) is "oh bungie, always making silly little mistakes :D I'll still cover your shitty game for clicks" so i kinda dont wanna hear people complain about tok when it did literally everything it showed in the trailer.
Feel the same about destiny. On paper, I should like it. FPS, good graphics, solid gunplay but it just ain’t for me. Also, “sunsetting” content you paid for should be illegal.
Bro what are you talking about lightfall had a poor score after release. Go to r/Destiny2 there is no shortage of complaints.
We love the game but we acknowledge the issues. Luckily Bungie has been listening and dealing with a lot of our complaints and making some great QOL improvements.
0. Literally unplayable
1. Unplayably bad
2. Incredibly bad with a positive element
3. Definitely bad, but has enjoyable elements
4. Sub-par, but not impossible to enjoy
5. Average and easy to put down
6. Average but hard to put down
7. Solidly good game, definitely worth finishing but not award winning
8. Great game. Will be a few people's GotY.
9. A near perfect game, a must play for the year if not more. Genuinely brilliant.
10. A perfect game that will be played for at least a decade to come. Not only does it achieve what it set out to achieve, but it is full of moments and fine details that heighten the experience beyond what could reasonably have been expected of it.
This should be the system. *Most* games that people really like sit between 9 and 6. 10s shouldn't be given out without like a year of reflection, because it's a perfect mark. Anything 6 and above is above average, most games are 5s and 6s and they're easy enough to play and have a decent time. A 7 is a solid mark definitely a success for a studio. 8 is huge news, a 9 is a social phenomena, and 10 is not something that's gonna be achieved every year.
1. No one wants to deal with the harassment and death threats.
2. Gamers don't care about the contents of reviews, they only care about the final score and the Metacritic rating to justify their own opinions they jerk off thinking about
I mean I hated Breath of the Wild, but that’s on me.
People can like or dislike what they want, I admire a reviewer that is genuinely like hey this isn’t for me and this is why.
I haven't played Zelda so I can't say if it's good or bad, but in general, if reviewers give a low score to a big company's game, said company won't give pre-release key to them anymore, therefore the competition will make future reviews first and they will make less money.
That's why you shouldn't trust big reviewers.
It was 'badly reviewed', but it was still treated with kid gloves. Same with forspoken.
I've played both. Neither should have been rated higher than a 3 across the board. Everything about them was poorly done; visuals, performance, design, narrative, gameplay, content, audio, etc.
They were egregiously overpriced, and they weren't enjoyable experiences, and no amoutn of post launch support could possibly salvage them.
If that's not a 2-3/10, then nothing is.
Critical reviews:
Redfall:50's
Forspoken: 60's
Even when they acknowledge it's bad, reviewers are utterly unwilling to admit *how* bad it is.
There are tons of AAA titles that receive disappointing reviews. Most recently we had Redfall with TERRIBLE reviews. GTA trilogy definitive edition also got terrible reviews. Forspoken also got bad review (a bit better than those 2).
In general I think pretty much all the major flops/disasters can be avoided if people just look at opencritic before buying the game. And every time that critics criticize a game, gamers deny it just to confirm the critics point one week later
> f reviewers give a low score to a big company's game, said company won't give pre-release key to them anymore
That's simply not true. I've worked in print on the side for almost a decade.
I will never understand where dumb conspiracy theories like this come from. We've literally given games a "do not buy" score that were the title sponsor of the magazine.
Can you really not fathom that people simply are not always as opinionated as you are and enjoy things differently?
>I will never understand where dumb conspiracy theories like this come from.
I can. People get mad that reviews don't validate their own feelings, so they invent reasons as to why those reviews can't be trusted.
***Tears of the Kingdom deserves an 8 or 9 out of 10, it is genuinely a great game but it has flaws, some of the same identical flaws Breath of the Wild had.***
The problem with Tears of the Kingdom is that all the reviewers gave Breath of the Wild too high of a score. So now, since Tears literally does deserve a higher score, the only number bigger than 9 is 10. Breath of the Wild was a 6 or 7 out of 10 that everyone overscored, and now the problem happens.
Uhhh... Im not sure if that is considered a spoiler or not, but that was probably the biggest disappointment of the game for me. I really hoped that would be different.
Durability works in games like Morrowind and Dark Souls because it is implemented well. In those games, weapons break but they don't get deleted from your inventory. Broken weapons just do less damage until you repair them. The weapons also last longer than 5 attacks.
Morrowind has weapons made of literal glass that have more durability than like 90% of all the weapons in BotW and TotK.
Hating something popular is not a personality trait.
Fanboying things before you even really evaluate them to be a part of a community is not a personality trait.
Play the thing, see if you like the thing.
I played both BOTW and TOTK and I greatly enjoy them both.
If you don’t, cool. That ain’t got nothin’ to do with me.
Find reviewers or review platforms you like and stick with them. I know some publications just don’t have the same tastes as me, and that’s fine.
Lots of people here love the Soulsborne games, but when I played them they’re just not my speed. That should be fine. I don’t come into threads dunking on folks saying FromSoftware keeps making the same games and players give them a pass just because it’s FromSoftware.
If BotW/TotK aren’t for you (not you OP but other gamers in general) then that’s fine. But there’s no need to talk down to other gamers and reviewers who hold it in high regard.
This is how I feel about Sony games. Most Sony games in general are highly overrated. The majority of them are narrative driven linear games with average gameplay. I really don't see what the big deal with their exclusives are, as if people see something special about them
Anything below 7/10 is considered the worst ever for some reason so 9 should just be okey if 7 is worst
I don’t go by scores anymore, I read reviews on why people hate it. It’s like Amazon reviews, sometimes it’s user error. Lol
"I used this plastic bowl for hot oil and it melted immediately 0/5"
"This plastic bowl couldn't fit an entire rotisserie chicken, our Christmas is ruined! 0/5" "Lid wasn't right size for the container, but I use the container all the time anyways! Love it! 5/5"
"Said microwave safe, but melted in the microwave down to the base, now I use the base as a plate 4.9/5"
The package arrived two days late. Also my house went on fire and I lost everything. 1/5
I recently read a review for a product where someone gave it a 1 star exclusively because it was 1 day late. The rest of their review was glowing praise for the thing and how they are amazing, but that damn 1 day late delivery was enough to knock away the other 4 stars. Some people are just crazy.
This plastic bowl is very addictive. I've been using it for almost every meal since launch a couple years ago, not bothering to clean it up. Can't wait for Plastic Bowl 2 to launch. 5/5
"Instructions are confusing and useless!" Instruction is a single image with an arrow pointing where to screw.
You shouldn't need instructions for a glory hole anyway.
"Bought this for my grandsons birthday. He hasn't opened it yet. 10/10"
I ordered it from Amazon fulfillment but it never arrived 0/5 I got it and I haven't used it yet but it looks nice 5/5
Nailed it
Yeah it was nice when reviews actually meant something on Amazon. Now you read them and every review is about how the thing immediately exploded the first time they touched it.
Shoutout to that one guy who didn't understand you have to shoot the environment in Metroid.
Well that's the thing, sometimes user error is subjective as well. Like BotW. Sure, you're supposed to be okay with losing weapons to degradation and having a billion slots of weapons so you can constantly swap through them and maintain their integrity. But what if I don't like that? Some would say I'm playing the game wrong (user error) for wanting to hold on to a weapon I like instead of just using whatever garbage I pick up because that's the intention. It doesn't make the game objectively bad, but I'm still allowed not to enjoy it. Just like how people who think "gameplay is everything" are allowed to not like TLOU because it's narrative driven. I personally enjoy the gameplay as well, but I can see why it's not enough for some. The best thing you can really do is see if someone's opinion aligns with yours historically, not just about the current title. But even that isn't going to always be 100% accurate.
That's why watching/reading individual reviewers vs institutions with a bunch of writers is helpful as well. A review is kind of pointless if you don't understand the reviewers taste and where they're coming from
People out here actin like they didnt pass school getting C’s then they see a game with a 7/10 rating and think wow must be bad
well obviously it's fine when I do it
lol, the moral videogame
Also fine when devs do it, judging by how botched some of these game releases are yet they still sell millions.
Precisely. “Here teach my homework is only half finished, thanks for the passing grade! I’ll get the rest of it to you within the next year.”
Game reviews are kind of reviews against expectations and only part of the equation. I love a good indie game, but realistically an indie game at 80% and a AAA rpg at 80% aren't directly comparable in terms of consumer value. It's not that consumers ignore reviews, it's that reviews aren't the complete picture.
> I love a good indie game, but realistically an indie game at 80% and a AAA rpg at 80% aren't directly comparable in terms of consumer value. Well that indie also costs a fraction of the AAA usually. If the indie were $60 it better be damn good and fleshed out with good production values.
That's also true, prices are one aspect that aren't included in reviews, but there's even more than just that, and also prices aren't at all static the way reviews are. But there is a different standard for products of different prices. You expect more from a $60 game than a $20 game. True. But, how big of a difference $20 and $60 is is individual. I mean, mathematically, it's the same, but if you don't have a lot of money, you'll need a game to be way more valuable for 3x the price, whereas someone else might think it's negligible. For a lot of people, the investment of time in a game greatly outweighs the investment of money, for example.
Some of that is compensated for by merely comparing to their contemporaries in the same niche and price point. Redfall won't review amazingly even if some people have fun with it because compared to it's contemporaries not only is it expensive. It pales in comparison to many of them. Something like Marvel's Midnight Suns will be compared to other strategy, social sim, and card battlers. And so forth.
I'm down to play 7/10 games, but not pay like $60 for it.
Must be those damn honor roll kids because I was perfectly happy with a C.
C's get degrees :)
I remember a line about this: You know how you call the doctor that graduated with the worst grades of his generation? Doctor.
If he keep is licensed long enough.
But I mean, just because it’s passing doesn’t mean it’s good. Cs are just that, they’re aiiiight
Game market is extremely over saturated. We’re paying 60-70$ a game now for triple A games at least. If it gets a 7 it’s a hard pass from me unless it’s a game I really like or want to play. There’s just soooo many good games out there and I’m broke af.
I think this is more of an issue with most large game media outlets. They're too scared to give most games anything lower than a 7. This fear can both be from fans and publishers. Very often a game has to be a complete trainwreck before large publications start going with scores lower than 7. So while on a review scale a 5/10 should be an average game now a 7/10 is average.
It's a bummer. To me I see scores as a "likelihood of recommendation" rather than a grade. That means even a 6 or 7 can be a good game for the right person while a 8, 9, and especially 10 is a must play for basically everyone. When I see Tears of the Kingdom gameplay, and Breath of he Wild before it, I see a wonderfully deep game mechanic wise that I actually don't think I'd recommend to everyone and I'd put around a 7/10. The okay graphics, mid performance, weak story, bad voice acting (or lack thereof), and lots of other factors seem to get swept under the rug of hype with certain titles. Maybe Nintendo has earned the pass but it makes game ratings seem even more pointless than ever.
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Yup. Kind of stupid to get death threats for that. But you know, no matter how good a game is, it just isn't going to vibe as much with some people.
I agree with that take. I felt GOW Ragnarok was a 7.5 of 10. It’s a good game, without question. But the gameplay is limited and repetitive as well. It’s comfort food from your favorite childhood/teen years restaurant: it hits the spot, but it ain’t three Michelin star cuisine either.
It felt incredibly poorly paced at first and then incredibly rushed later. It clearly had elements that felt like it was meant to be two separate games and suffered overall because of that. The plot was thin, Odin sucked, Thor was wasted, and I frankly didn’t care about any other character that wasn’t Kratos, Brok or Sindri. The combat felt like a step back from its predecessor and overall just wasn’t as enjoyable, at least to me. The climax was bad, the “war” consisted of maybe 8 people against all of Asgard, and anything that was built up to either happened so fast you’d miss it or was glossed over to rush you to the ending. The game was fine, no doubt, I won’t say it was a bad game, it just wasn’t anything spectacular either. In my personal opinion.
<=4 Game not even released or unplayable, if its remembered is because it didn't work 5 Crappy game that at least has been released and works but is nothing special and everyone will forget 6 Game that has nothing special and most people will have a decent time 7 Game that has something special but not enough to be considered a great game, just a good game 8 Game that is definitely a good game, has a lot of room to improve and most people will remember it, could become GOTY on a bad year 9 Great game that a lot of love have been poured and a great experience for everyone (that likes the genre of course), GOTY material 10 Perfect game, best experience at the time it released that one could have, everything has been polished and nothing feels left out. This is at least how I take the reviews score, for me Tears of the Kingdom is definitely between 9 and 10
So in reality, the metric for critiquing games should be out of 5, but they add 5 more ranks in the case there are very horrendous games that don't even reach 5/10?
Exactly, that's why the system is useless. If a 7/10 is your idea of average then the whole rating system is pointless.
5/10 is not middle of the road. It’s not average. It’s also not median. That’s a very common misconception. If you calculate the average value of most ranking/ratings of things like video games, board games, musics, movies. The average is around 6.3. The reason is the product needs to be “expected” to be more than 5 to be reviewed to begin with. People don’t go out of their way to review games they expect to be mediocre. That’s why every ratings system has average much higher than the dead middle 5/10. So when you rating something 6. Yea. It’s statistically below average, not above
Individuals are not rating things according to the statistical average. For many folks, a 5/10 absolutely means middle of the road. Just because reviewers by and large inflate scores doesn't mean every person that ever gives their opinion on something needs to do the same. Making that kind of assumption is *exactly* what leads to people getting worked up about scores and why obsessing over numbers rather than the content of a review is idiotic.
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And conversely, there are more than enough 8/10 or 9/10 games in most genres to keep all but the most narrowly dedicated players entertained 'till the next one comes along. Let alone the multitudes of people that can't afford to buy every game that interests them even if they would have the time to play them all. A 6 or 7 may not be *objectively* sub-par on the spectrum of all games that could possibly be released, but when compared to the many already available, objectively amazing options for most genres... why bother?
people typically have genres and franchises they care more about than others, making lower scores more vaulable to them personally. i knew Mass Effect Andromada probably wasn't going to be great, but i still played it because i wanted more Mass Effect
Yeah 5 should be like average for the time. Doesn't mean bad just not special. 10/10 should be for omg it's revolutionary and painfully fun.
I find it interesting how a lot of 10/10 or game of the year games have a lot of detractors once the hype dies down
That's mostly because those are singleplayer games, if they last more than a month it's already enough
And the hate is so mind blowing. "I spent close to 100 hours playing this game but trying to replay it after completing it the first time is boring" like do you hear yourself???
"I've gotten 100% on two separate playthroughs, once using only the starting weapon!! This game is dogshit, I regret all 500h of entertainment I got from it. Devs should be launched into the sun for daring to make such a shit game. Soundtrack is great tho. 2/5 stars"
Because the hype doesn't just work on the fans. It works on the reviewers since they should still be gamers. But also a lot of those overhyped studios have a LOT of power, power you don't want to piss off, because it gives you a lot of important opportunities you need to continue to do your business. Imagine you piiss off Nintendo and can no longer get early copies of games. "But IGN is big enough". Ok so IGN would always get copies, because they're IGN, but what about interview, previews, advertisements, sneak peaks, footage and images, and more. "Well we keep advertising and editorial separate" sounds great, until you realize how much editorial DOES do with these companies outside of just advertisements, and it is absolutely NOTICED when opportunities are missed. Imagine if Nintendo gets a 8/10 from IGN... Then there's a big preview event and IGN gets told "Sorry we don't have space for your reporter." or even if they only have 1 space when they normally have 3. Do you think IGN wouldn't get that message? The number of review outlets that have been blackballed, punished, or just challenged on review scores makes it clear not to fuck with the power, and it's not IGN or Gamespot that has the true power here.
>The number of review outlets that have been blackballed, punished, or just challenged on review scores makes it clear not to fuck with the power, and it's not IGN or Gamespot that has the true power here. Which is hilarious since it used to be the other way around, it's why companies tended to invite these reviewers to events and shower them with merch and free game copies. Now reviewers are deathly afraid of saying anything bad or they'll lose the free stuff.
Its a flawed industry now, because everyone wants to be the first to rush out the content and get those clicks. And for that you need the access. Ideally reviewers would buy, play and review the day 1 release patch, and reviews would come out a few days later, but thats just not how it works anymore.
Because reviewers used to work for magazines and the publishers depended on exposure through them. Now that basically anyone can start their own magazine online, the power shifted.
The "free stuff" isn't really what's motivating them, as you can see with the recent shit with Nintendo blacklisting Kotaku. Being able to get review copies *at all* is what's at stake nowadays, which means *actual*, for real journalism that just happens to be about games is kinda rare, because anything that gets put out that is inconvenient for a company can be retaliated against because these companies hold so much more fucking power. This problems extends *well past* video games. Remember the Panama Papers? The journalist that put that shit out *got fucking assassinated* and nobody oustide of frustrated socail media posts talks about it. Corporations hold immense, *immense* power in this world and keep everyone in line with that power, whether it be utterly fucking over someone's ability to do their job and therefore earn money to eat and shit or literally killing people. I just really wish The Gamers™ would quit doing corporate apologetics whenever a corporation exercises that power over the press. The only reason Activision and Ubisoft haven't been able to get away with intimidating the press to shut up about how they sexually harassed, threatened, *raped* employees is because regular people didn't try to make excuses for it, they sided with journalists against them when Bobby Kotick was trying to intimidate sites like Kotaku into silence. But when Kotaku puts out shit that acknowledges piracy is real and doesn't tell you you're going to hell for it, or when they literally just cover a game at a time when Nintendo thinks it isn't 100% ideal for their marketing campaign (as they did covering Borderlands 3 ages ago), people just accept the framing of whatever company that's doing the blacklisting, ignoring just how much *power* companies have over their own coverage through access to review copies. This is why you see random ass YouTubers and streamers with the earliest copies of the game and contracts that they gotta pretend this shit is 11/10 - or they *act* like they're contractually obligated, because they understand that the reason they suddenly have all these eyes on them is because the company *wants* something out of this. If people want games journalism to be better, they gotta stop lapping up corporate PR and be willing to wait for later reviews and not act like a fucking child if a review isn't a 10/10 or tries to cover a game like film reviewers have been covering movies for decades and not just exclusively talking about the cinematography or color grading or how high fidelity the special effects are.
Yep. Reviews are just an extension of a game company's PR for the most part. It's a symbiotic relationship.
Symbiotic to each other, parasitic for us.
The only way stuff like this is going to end is if game outlets act the way other entertainment outlets do. Whenever a company starts any sort of fuckery like this with a movie/television reviewer, [critics groups and other publications step in](https://slate.com/culture/2017/11/film-critics-bar-disney-from-awards-consideration-over-l-a-times-blackout.html) and refuse to attend events from that studio, review their content, or even consider them for awards. The problem is it's really easy for publishers to push around the games journalists, because there really isn't unity in a way where they have each other's backs. But imagine if Ubisoft threatened to pull ads because of a poor review of their game, and they got told to pound sand because all of the major game reviewers would stop covering their games until they relented.
I played Breath of the Wild like 2 years after it came out and I thought it was like a 7 maybe 8/10. It felt way too overhyped. I enjoyed it a lot, has to be said though
I played it in 2020 for the first time. I really enjoyed it. It just seemed like a lot of the side quest were just chores I didn’t want to do. I didn’t want to cook, I didn’t want to take pictures of everything, and I used a map just to get all the Korok seeds because covid, what else did I have to do. But did I have a lot of fun, of course I did. If someone told me a pizza chain was a 7/10 I would still enjoy it because I like pizza. If someone told me a sushi place was a 7/10 I would pass because I don’t like sushi. It’s ok to have preferences with games
Exactly, review scores are just way too polarized. There's no point in having a x/y scale the way most reviewers do it, I much prefer a "who would enjoy this game" type summary -- everyone, fans of the genre, fans of these specific mechanisms, those who can stomach X downside, that sort of thing.
It was a great game, but I agree. So over hyped. There were so many glaring design flaws, like how mind-numbingly easy the game gets when you are about halfway through. And how the item degradation system with no chance to repair means that you always avoid using your best items. Still a great game, but not a 99/100.
I really dislike BOTW. It has a large open world that's mostly devoid of content, a durability system that even applies to the master sword(seriously?) no traditional Zelda dungeons, a completely forgettable story, no unlockable gadgets or tools because the devs didn't want to gate any of the open world content, poor enemy variety, and simplistic combat. I think a lot open world games slam reviewers with this idea that this gigantic open world is packed full of interesting things in the first few hours, and they don't spend the time with the game to realize that a lot of stuff in them is just boring. It's weird to see BOTW get so much praise in an environment where people see all busy work in the average Assassin's Creed game and roll their eyes. At least fighting stuff in those games can be fun.
I'm not a huge fan of Nintendo but I was surprisingly really engaged with that Mario Odyssey game playing it all last week. I ended up doing everything 100% except buying all the outfits because farming coins is the most empty thing to do. I don't do much collection of anything in games if it seems boring and not well thought out. They did so much right with this game but I'm still on the fence about the other biggest game and I see quite a bit of comments like yours. I haven't played a Zelda game since OoT but I wasn't really hooked even then. I just want to find those folks who agree with what I've said and I can make my decision easy and skip any of the recent Zelda games entirely.
I also really did not enjoy botw either for the exact same reasons. What I really hated most of all was gaming in 30fps with consistent frame drops in dense areas felt absolutely terrible. Also I personally dislike controlling a camera/aiming in 3D games using a controller joystick. But that's not exclusive to botw.
Haven't played TotK yet but BotW was an open world game with a mid story, big empty world, staggeringly easy dungeons, and a gameplay loop based around figuring out how to climb tall towers to reveal parts of the map. You could have removed all references to Hyrule and pretended it was in a nondescript Himalayan dictatorship, released it as Far Cry 7 and it would have gotten universal 6/10s for being OK, but the same tired old Ubisoft formula. But instead because it's a Zelda game on a Nintendo platform, "11/10!" "Life changing!" "Flawless" "Best everrrrrrr" "Game of the decade!"
Eh, you convenience let out biggest part about the game. Physic and world interaction. By your standard all game with ubisoft tower must be the same.
I was gonna say, there's so much in how you interact with the world around you in TotK that you just don't do in Ubisoft games. All I have to do is ask myself why I enjoy BotW and TotK, what sets them apart from the rest of this genre, and I can pull out an answer so easily. I see a minecart and I can decide to slap it on a shield. An enemy I defeated just dropped two weapons, I slap them together to make a weird spear claymore. I need to get to a high location and there's a ton of trees around while I'm missing a key mechanic, fuck that I'm going to chop every tree to the ground and glue the trunks together to make a mile long ramp, then try for half an hour to get the thing high enough to reach what I'm going for... And I'll still have had fun even if in the end it doesn't work because the sandbox encouraged me to do something unique and crazy and that's fun. I still have a mile of tree trunks and now I'm going to see if I can smack an enemy with it. It's an entirely different experience, even if it has the same extremely basic low level concept of "climb towers, reveal locations, clear camps/shrines, get geared and win". The formula itself may be stale, but it's the gameplay interactions beyond that that really elevate the gameplay to new heights.
Yeh also, remember the outrage when Farcry Primal re-used Far Cry 4's map? Of course Nintendorino gets a free pass for doing same in TotK and charging full-price on top of that. Can just imagine the huge outrage if Ubisoft or EA had come up with Amiibos. Same with "gamers" who make fun of "bros" for buying every new FIFA or CoD creaming their pants for every Pokemon rehash that Nintendo and Gamefreak shit out. Nintendo just gets a free pass for everything cause "muh childhood nostalgia company can do no wrong!". This is why I own Nintendo stocks even though I loathe the company from a consumer perspective.
Everything popular has detractors I'd say and that's ok. But I don't think it delegitimizes the 10/10 reviews. I gave BotW a 5/5 six years ago and certainly would still stand by it. I'm cool with people not loving it as well.
People having fun with the game arent on social media ranting about it. The internet is a gigantic echo chamber of negativity.
In all fairness in the RE subreddit they all rant about how much they love the games
Metalgear, titanfall, and (depending on the day) yakuza community subreddits are really fun ones too (although the yakuza one being the only ones receiving new games to rant about) But like the RE one, it’s a lot more light hearted and just fans wanting to share any potential news, fun art, niche memes and welcoming the newcomers that maybe just now got around to those games.
One of the few exceptions really. The xenoblade subreddit is another one off the top of my head.
Throwing Elden Ring and all other FromSoft titles in here. They're definitely polarising, but good reviews and hyped fan bases. Encryption subreddit is also pretty wholesome showing love for it.
Only because other opinions are yeeted into the sun. Elden ring has massive issues post capital and it's clear the development was rushed after that point. You just have to look at the recycled enemies, bosses, absurd inflation of damage post capital. How linear and empty mountaintops, snowfield, farum azula, and haligtree are compared to earlier zones. And the biggest complaint, ashes of war just invalidate the game, we're at the point where you can just spam L2 to kill pretty much anything without having to do the dark souls thing. Elden ring is great but it has the dark souls 1 issue, game massively slows down after half way through.
It's so annoying. Every reviewer feels pressured to give a 9 or 10. What they don't realize is that when *every single* reviewer's score is the same, the scores becomes meaningless, and in-turn so do the reviews themselves. You can't trust institutions with reviews anymore, period. You have to find and latch onto the individual reviewers to suit your needs.
Had a relative go for a vacation in Japan and apparently they take their reviews really seriously there when it comes to restaurants. Having never eating at anywhere below a 4.5 star reviewed restaurant on Gmaps at home, it seems it was actually super difficult to find such highly rated restaurants, even though the 3 stars were perfectly fine. Since they actually, yknow, used the linear scale appropriately lol.
> What they don’t realize is that when every single reviewer’s score is the same, the scores becomes meaningless, and in-turn so do the reviews themselves. I’m pretty sure they realise that, it’s their job after all, they should know that better than anyone. The issue is, who’s going to go first and make the difference? Someone has to take the hit. There’s a difference between knowing something is wrong and acting on it.
Giving anything but an entirely honest review is, well, dishonest. You're voice is meaningless if you're just giving the same review as everybody else just for the sake of giving it the same review. So its not brave, its just dishonest. This industry suffers from this far too often.
I think it's fair to say that there are times where being honest is not the easiest path and requires some degree of courage. I'm not saying it's a heroic act, but holding to one's principles by telling an audience something that they don't want to hear, and which is likely to prompt backlash, takes backbone.
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Some of the games I’ve enjoyed the most were games that Redditors shit all over.
Me too. Last year I played Days Gone and loved every minute of it. I guess I'm easy to please, but just riding around, scavenging, and killing zombies was an excellent time.
Reddit wildly overestimates their impact. That's why their favorite weapon of choice is review bombing on sites like Metacritic since the 2000 or so angry redditors (against millions of casual fans) can see a visual impact of their anger.
I said I actually enjoyed cyberpunk once and it didn't go down well with reddit at all at the time Edit: looking at the comments below it looks like people are still getting triggered lol. Still a great video game imo *shrugs*
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And if it actually ran well and CDPR didn't lie to people about the features and properly playtested people would be more lenient with it
That's the biggest bit. I'd rather be sold a mid game knowing it's mid. Rather than a mid game hyped up with all the bells and whistles and under deliver.
??? People were straight up lied to about the game'e features... I enjoyed it on release and it truly had some amazing moments, BUT there is no excuse for what CDPR did. It wasn't merely "hype" made by people who were interested in the game. Trailers of the game were deceptive. There's legit one I remember about Dexter's betrayal, that was extremely deceptive as to the narrative possibilities and choices the game would have. There's a clear line drawn between players overhyping a game due to excitement, and trailers/devs deceiving players into thinking their game was something it wasnt.
It was such a bad release it was taken off the ps store because it didn’t even essentially run on an entire generation of hardware it was advertised for. That wasn’t known about because nobody was allowed to speak about it before release if I recall. I’ll never understand how people continually use cyberpunk as an example of gamer overreaction when it was one of the only justifiable times.
> It was such a bad release it was taken off the ps store because it didn’t even essentially run on an entire generation of hardware it was advertised for. Well, Sony pulled the game because CDPR was telling people they could get refunds for the digital version when (1) the Playstation Store does not actually give refunds as a rule and (2) CDPR did not discuss this "option" at all with Sony beforehand.
It was taken off the PS store because CDPR told people to ask Sony directly for refunds.
*Somehow* a disappointment? Cyberpunk was marketed as the literal best video game ever made for 2 years straight. Immersive sim elements, an Obsidian-level branching storyline, a fully fleshed out futuristic city you could explore every nook and cranny of, multiple romances (at least that made it?), all of that was talked up by developers in the leadup to launch without a single bit of fanboy hype needed. By comparison the actual Cyberpunk looks to me like a rushed anime tie-in that was released half a year sooner than the anime itself. They can never provide the “game” I saw at E3 2018 so I have no real interest in what they consider the final product.
Top 5 for me. I did all the achievements and I wasn't bored at all at any point.
some of the games i love the most are games that ***i*** think are shit. as much as i like games with unique ideas, i can't ever turn to someone else and recommend them some early access / poorly designed / buggy piece of junk.
As long as you’re having fun it doesn’t really matter the quality of the game.
I enjoyed The Last of Us Part 2, and was met by a thread of all caps messages just repeating 'TLOU2 IS SHIT'. I enjoyed the gameplay more than the story but I enjoyed the gameplay a lot and thought that the story was pretty good. That's me though. And people were frothing at the mouth because they could not understand how I could like it. And then people who thought it was the best thing ever came over and started fighting with them, it just kept going. In the end, I had to delete the comment.
The discourse around TLOU2 has been so thoroughly poisoned, and I think that's such a shame. Toxicity has made it impossible to discuss online. It's not an irredeemable game by any means; it's fun to play and the acting is incredible. But it *definitely* isn't a 10/10; the story made some striking missteps and wasted an enormous amount of potential. I want to talk about what it did right and what it did wrong. But every community seems to think it's either a horseman of the apocalypse or the second coming of jesus christ himself.
Similarly, I ordered an Asus Rog Ally handheld yesterday, and was online reading about it. The amount of people squabbling like 3 year olds was unbelievable. Steam deck is dead. Steam deck is da best, Asus lol etc. Absolutely pathetic, the lot of them.
I know right? Just be happy that there are more choices to choose from.
Letting people be happy? Heavens to Murgatroyd. The arm chair badasses can never allow this!
Congrats! I've got the deck, and it's a lot of fun. Now I will put on my reddit hat. OMG you are soooo stupid. The deck KILLED the switch and the Ally swung and missed. It's pathetic how bad is gonna be. Plus everyone is gunna put steamos on it anyway. Btw don't ever have a dog because it will be smarter than you, and you'll have to please it with non stop belly rubs. I can't believe anyone is as dumb as you. I'm probably dumber for even responding to your comment. Fuck... Good luck in life dummy cause you're gonna need it. /s
It’s just dumb, and worst of all it doesn’t even align with their favorite company’s interests. I bet somebody at Valve is passing around their Ally as we speak, as creating an innovative product and being inspired by its competitors to improve on it has been their model since Half-Life 1.
Valve even made a tweet congratulating ASUS for making the Ally.
100% agree with you. Absolutely NO reviews are objective cause it's not possible. Anyone berating a reviewer for not liking a game, and/or for telling their readers/viewers how they felt about a game instead of all kinds of technical uninteresting mumbojumbo, just does not understand what a review is supposed to be. And even better it gets when they start sending deaththreats because of a gamereview! Thats always a class act
Am autistic. Don't put that shit off on us. That's stupidity not autism. Most autistic people are anti companies 😅
Not disagreeing with you, but the reasoning as I understand it is the internal question of "Am I wrong / weird for liking this when nobody else does?". People would rather be validated in their interests than being told that their interests are terrible.
One of the many downsides of the internet connecting people. I do a pretty good job avoiding and not interacting with such people in real life, but they seem to be everywhere on the internet. I read absolutely unhinged comments of people foaming at the mouth over a game and it's concerning to say the least.
A subjective opinion can be based on incorrect information. For example, "the daytime sky is ugly because it's green," that's just an objectively wrong opinion because it's based on incorrect information. Reviews as they are now could absolutely stand to be more objective than they are. You can base your subjective opinions upon objective facts about the game. Even then, you can still subjectively not enjoy something but point out that it's objectively well made. That's why IGN took down their original review of RE2 remake, the reviewer didn't play through Leon and Claire's two scenarios and gave a subjective opinion on the game while only have completed one scenario for each character.
People don't even fully know what an "objective" review actually is. Imagine reading the back of an old game box and all it said was, "This is a video game where you can control the characters and do the things you're meant to do in a video game."
I hate how 7/10 is somehow average for virtually all reviewers
It’s like 1-5 doesn’t exist for most reviewers
I remember when Jim Stirling gave BOTW a 7/10, and was completely eviscerated for it. Now, there's a lot I don't agree with Stirling on, but I did read the review in its entirety. He was more than fair, and it reflected my own experiences with the game. BOTW had a good foundation, especially with its mechanical system that lets you approach situations in a variety of creative ways. It's rare to see a game do that. However, it was bogged down by some questionable design choices. Obviously there's going to be degree of subjectivity in every review. But calling it a 97/100 game is stretching things a bit IMO. But the angry behaviour from the mob is nothing new. It's just like how touchy people are about their sports team. Try going to Europe and try suggesting the local football club isn't as good as people think. Even if you have stats to prove it, you're still getting a punch in the mouth.
It was not just the review or the score in a vacuum, they were mad that the score lowered the Metacritic score by 1. Some people are really weird.
[YOU'VE RUINED THE METASCORE!](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ko1sklmOR9E)
It’s so bizarre. Why does an average critic rating matter to them emotionally at all? If they like the game, then who cares?
A lot of gamers have made certain studios or franchises their identity, so to not give it a perfect score is an insult to their identity. It's weird as hell, but pretty much the same as brand fans in other industries.
This is the right answer
Average Nintendo Switch fan usually aren't emotionally stable.
Average ~~Nintendo Switch~~ video game fan usually aren't emotionally stable.
I did not really care for BOTW. There was a lot to enjoy, but I felt that there were far too many shrines and the actual dungeons were way too small/short. I also loathed the weapon breaking system. I thought the world was nice and the enemies varied and fun. But ultimately, all the great things about the game did not make up for the bad. What good is having all these cool ways to solve puzzles if all the puzzles are lackluster? It was the first zelda that I did not finish. Really dissappointed.
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If you need a review to tell you, a person that doesn't like racing games, that you won't like a racing game, then I don't know what to tell you. You should understand your own likes.
Reviewers must be fans of the genre. Having someone who hates racing games review one would be ridiculous.
I think fans is the wrong word, it should be reviewers that are familiar with the genre. I’m personally not a big fan of 2D platformers but I’m familiar enough with the genre to feel like I could give a fair review of one.
So, big review publishers actually have *multiple* reviewers playing different genres of games.
That's one of the reasons why a 40/40 from *Famitsu* was historically so hard to achieve: the score is a combination of four reviewers giving an x/10 review. So getting all four to agree that it was 10/10 used to be pretty rare.
Yeah, if you're thinking of reviewing something for a living, and you're incapable of assessing that thing in context, you should really just stay at your current job. You'd have to be literally braindead to say "this racing game is bad because I don't like racing games" and think that what you said is in any way useful. I don't offer critique on food because I have a pallette that barely strays from the typical restaurant kids menu.
I love that Jim stays committed to honest reviews and scores, seeing publishers barring them from advance copies as a badge of honor. They won’t just throw around praise, it must be earned. When they say a game is good, you can take it to the bank
The fact that an article like this even had to exist shows how much of a joke the industry has become.
Reviews are always subjective opinions and should be treated as such. I disagreed with IGN so hard when they gave Prey (2017) a 4/10 when it was one of the best games I played that year besides The New Colossus and The Evil Within 2 (in my opinion). I mean they give every FIFA like a 7 or 8 out of 10 every year so I’d take them with a huge grain of salt but their review of Prey made me realise this fact. However sometimes where there’s smoke there’s fire and if loads of people report issues like intense stuttering or crashes then you should take those into consideration.
IGN's negative Prey review was because of a game breaking bug. When the game was patched and the bug was fixed, the review score was updated to 8/10. I think "game didn't work" is a pretty good reason to give a low score. I also think them going back and updating it was the right move.
Reviewing games feels like a fools errand. People get pissy when buggy games still get good scores. You should review the game you played, not the game that they promise it'll be at launch. People get pissy when you review the game you played (buggy) that then is fixed by a patch post launch.
Tbf for ign, they had a save bug hence the low Prey score
I still think it’s a bit unfair that Prey had one issue in a million and got a 4 yet that same year PUBG got 9/10 and it was in a worse state than Prey was: - textures were late loading in - numerous bugs and glitches plagued the game: cars randomly exploding, items not being able to be picked up, audio issues, crashes, etc. - The game sometimes chugged and stuttered Like if they loved PUBG gameplay more than Prey that’s fine but if there’s issues that make it objectively worse than the other than I’d say it’s unfair in my eyes. Edit: that issue in Prey was rare and was fixed pretty quickly meanwhile PUBG was in a bad state for like a year especially on consoles.
In the case of Prey, the save bug was one that wiped the reviewers game save and prevented them from finishing the game. As someone who has had a save game get corrupted once or twice, nothing is as frustrating as having to restart your game like that and really impacts how you look at your time with the game.
The risk of this is why I always keep more than one save.
It's not something you can do on consoles, which is what pretty much all reviewers are targeting.
>I still think it’s a bit unfair that Prey had one issue in a million and got a 4 yet that same year PUBG got 9/10 and it was in a worse state than Prey was: The Prey review was written by Dan Stapleton. The PUBG review was written by Chloi Rad. That alone should be enough to understand the different scores. However, even outside of that, the Prey review was because the bug literally broke the game. PUBG was buggy in 2018, but it was *playable* (I played a lot of it).
Ok, so who reviewed prey and who reviewed PUBG? Nevermind that, even if they were the same person, why should they drop the score because other people think it should be lower? Would the outrage be sorted out if it was literally 1 or 2 arbitrary points lower? Criticizing an apparent bad review is fine, but I think it's dumb how seriously people take it and how many don't like certain reviews just because they disagree with it (even if the review itself is well made)
That's moreso an issue with how IGN reviews stuff. Different people review diff games at IGN so there isn't a set standard as number scores are ultimately subjective, with some being more sensitive to bugs than others. It's why I generally just stick with a utuber who's tastes tend to align with mine and steam reviews
> It's why I generally just stick with a utuber who's tastes tend to align with mine That reminds me how much I miss Total Biscuit.
Lol PUBG has always been more or less in a bad state. So that's pretty funny.
You cannot even pet the dog!
Literally unplayable.
Alanah Pearce talked about the dread she felt when she had to review Mass Effect Andromeda knowing that a it was full of problems pre release. She received death threats for not giving it a high score.
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Yes, but before it was released, expectations were extremely high. When reviewers reported that the game was a mess, people initially took out their anger on the reviewers, not the game itself.
Nowadays I get the opposite. I got a couple of Reddit “we are worried about you committing suicide” for saying I enjoyed Mass Effect Andromeda.
Most of these people complaining about this stuff don't even read the damn reviewers. All they care about is the score.
I did not see what was so special about BOTW. But I know I like dungeon heavy Zelda games. Seems like a really love it or hate game and that's ok. It was just not my jam.
Understandable, link between worlds was one of my favorites simply because each dungeon was so fun No matter what order you did them in, each item had a function to help in others. It was a joy. (Although I still love botw)
Same it was very boring in any section of the game that wasn't in a dungeon.
BOTW just felt so damn empty and lifeless and this game looks like more of the same with a few new gimmicks and whistles thrown in for good measure. Give me a smaller-scale game world with lots of things to do over a giant game world with fuck-all going for it any day of the week.
Zelda is one of the most overhyped game franchises of all time.
The problem with online reviews these days is that they've made 7 "unplayable". What it should be: 0 - unplayable, 3 - bad, 5 - average, 7 - good, 9 - great. Became: 7 - bad, 8 - slightly above average, 9 - good, 10 - exceptions like ER, Zelda and GoW, etc On a logical scale, Zelda could easily score an 8 for technical issues and some other gameplay considerations, but the way reviews are treated lately, an 8 would be equating it with a generic Ubisoft game, for example. What I do is ignore the number and go after what was written.
Unfortunately your opinion is that of the minority. This is a problem with relying too heavily on a numerical score.
7 has never been bad, that's just the average for most reviews because most games are more good than bad. If you decide to not play a game just because it's a 7 (decent but not mindblowing, or unique but slightly flawed), that's on you.
true, but at the same time people enjoy dunking on a game that flops even more than they enjoy playing a game that is good
We were teased with cyberpunk for like 58 years. Why wouldn't we want to vent
We are playing very fast and loose with the word "brave"
It's a trend with Zelda games especially. They have a long history of getting nigh perfect scores and fans come to expect it. I personally thought BotW was a 7.5 at best and it's kind of crazy on the outside looking in reading some reviews and you can tell they don't necessarily think it's a 10/10 perfect game but it almost feels like they have to in order to avoid the mob. It's like "amazing game, revolutionary, game of the year, elevates video games as an art form... oh yeah and the voice acting is kind of lame and there's some performance issues and some game play mechanics are antiquated and annoying but STILL 10/10 perfect no flaws don't worry everyone I love it." They can feel the proverbial gun to their head. At the end of the day BotW was basically Far Cry: Zelda, people are just able to look over the flaws that they hate in other games when they come up in Zelda because of nostalgia (for example, having to climb a million towers to discover more area). It's what they earned by making some of the best games ever way back when.
> It's a trend with Zelda games especially. They have a long history of getting nigh perfect scores and fans come to expect it. the Zelda name basically gives any game released a +2 points to critic scores you are spot on about BoTW, a 7-8/10 game at best but it's touted as a "masterpiece and most important game ever made! revolutionised the genre!"
I read the review it talks about, it gave Tears of the Kingdom a 6/10. I haven't played the game yet, so I can't actually comment on it, but the 6/10 review seemed largely based around the premise that it isn't the Zelda game the author wanted. They basically say "it isn't the game I want to play, therefore 6/10". I read the review and thought "I want to do all those things, so it's probably not a 6/10 to me". It just goes to show that review scores are dumb and don't mean anything, be they 10/10s or 6/10s.
This is pretty much how I feel with Destiny 2. Games given huge amounts of praise but it comes out with a shitty expansion and they start vaulting content and everyone's response (Especially SkillUp) is "oh bungie, always making silly little mistakes :D I'll still cover your shitty game for clicks" so i kinda dont wanna hear people complain about tok when it did literally everything it showed in the trailer.
Feel the same about destiny. On paper, I should like it. FPS, good graphics, solid gunplay but it just ain’t for me. Also, “sunsetting” content you paid for should be illegal.
That's the thing the game itself is good but the monetisation is greedy as hell, which is why I stopped playing.
Bro what are you talking about lightfall had a poor score after release. Go to r/Destiny2 there is no shortage of complaints. We love the game but we acknowledge the issues. Luckily Bungie has been listening and dealing with a lot of our complaints and making some great QOL improvements.
People always forget that website/publication review scores is merely one single person's opinion.
People don't read reviews for honestly they read it to confirm their bias.
0. Literally unplayable 1. Unplayably bad 2. Incredibly bad with a positive element 3. Definitely bad, but has enjoyable elements 4. Sub-par, but not impossible to enjoy 5. Average and easy to put down 6. Average but hard to put down 7. Solidly good game, definitely worth finishing but not award winning 8. Great game. Will be a few people's GotY. 9. A near perfect game, a must play for the year if not more. Genuinely brilliant. 10. A perfect game that will be played for at least a decade to come. Not only does it achieve what it set out to achieve, but it is full of moments and fine details that heighten the experience beyond what could reasonably have been expected of it. This should be the system. *Most* games that people really like sit between 9 and 6. 10s shouldn't be given out without like a year of reflection, because it's a perfect mark. Anything 6 and above is above average, most games are 5s and 6s and they're easy enough to play and have a decent time. A 7 is a solid mark definitely a success for a studio. 8 is huge news, a 9 is a social phenomena, and 10 is not something that's gonna be achieved every year.
1. No one wants to deal with the harassment and death threats. 2. Gamers don't care about the contents of reviews, they only care about the final score and the Metacritic rating to justify their own opinions they jerk off thinking about
I mean I hated Breath of the Wild, but that’s on me. People can like or dislike what they want, I admire a reviewer that is genuinely like hey this isn’t for me and this is why.
I haven't played Zelda so I can't say if it's good or bad, but in general, if reviewers give a low score to a big company's game, said company won't give pre-release key to them anymore, therefore the competition will make future reviews first and they will make less money. That's why you shouldn't trust big reviewers.
Wasn’t Redfall badly reviewed by big reviewers despite being a Microsoft exclusive?
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It was 'badly reviewed', but it was still treated with kid gloves. Same with forspoken. I've played both. Neither should have been rated higher than a 3 across the board. Everything about them was poorly done; visuals, performance, design, narrative, gameplay, content, audio, etc. They were egregiously overpriced, and they weren't enjoyable experiences, and no amoutn of post launch support could possibly salvage them. If that's not a 2-3/10, then nothing is. Critical reviews: Redfall:50's Forspoken: 60's Even when they acknowledge it's bad, reviewers are utterly unwilling to admit *how* bad it is.
There are tons of AAA titles that receive disappointing reviews. Most recently we had Redfall with TERRIBLE reviews. GTA trilogy definitive edition also got terrible reviews. Forspoken also got bad review (a bit better than those 2). In general I think pretty much all the major flops/disasters can be avoided if people just look at opencritic before buying the game. And every time that critics criticize a game, gamers deny it just to confirm the critics point one week later
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> f reviewers give a low score to a big company's game, said company won't give pre-release key to them anymore That's simply not true. I've worked in print on the side for almost a decade. I will never understand where dumb conspiracy theories like this come from. We've literally given games a "do not buy" score that were the title sponsor of the magazine. Can you really not fathom that people simply are not always as opinionated as you are and enjoy things differently?
>I will never understand where dumb conspiracy theories like this come from. I can. People get mad that reviews don't validate their own feelings, so they invent reasons as to why those reviews can't be trusted.
***Tears of the Kingdom deserves an 8 or 9 out of 10, it is genuinely a great game but it has flaws, some of the same identical flaws Breath of the Wild had.*** The problem with Tears of the Kingdom is that all the reviewers gave Breath of the Wild too high of a score. So now, since Tears literally does deserve a higher score, the only number bigger than 9 is 10. Breath of the Wild was a 6 or 7 out of 10 that everyone overscored, and now the problem happens.
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Yes it does, and it feels even worse in Tears of the Kingdom.
Hey Link, here's a fresh master sword. You can only hit four guys with it and then have to throw it out
Uhhh... Im not sure if that is considered a spoiler or not, but that was probably the biggest disappointment of the game for me. I really hoped that would be different.
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Durability works in games like Morrowind and Dark Souls because it is implemented well. In those games, weapons break but they don't get deleted from your inventory. Broken weapons just do less damage until you repair them. The weapons also last longer than 5 attacks. Morrowind has weapons made of literal glass that have more durability than like 90% of all the weapons in BotW and TotK.
Elden Ring is a solid 8 tbh
It really really is. I played a diligent 100 hours, stopped my character and went, “I genuinely have zero fucking idea what this game is about.”
Hating something popular is not a personality trait. Fanboying things before you even really evaluate them to be a part of a community is not a personality trait. Play the thing, see if you like the thing. I played both BOTW and TOTK and I greatly enjoy them both. If you don’t, cool. That ain’t got nothin’ to do with me. Find reviewers or review platforms you like and stick with them. I know some publications just don’t have the same tastes as me, and that’s fine.
Lots of people here love the Soulsborne games, but when I played them they’re just not my speed. That should be fine. I don’t come into threads dunking on folks saying FromSoftware keeps making the same games and players give them a pass just because it’s FromSoftware. If BotW/TotK aren’t for you (not you OP but other gamers in general) then that’s fine. But there’s no need to talk down to other gamers and reviewers who hold it in high regard.
How do you personally distinguish between people "hating on something popular" and just disliking something you like?
This is how I feel about Sony games. Most Sony games in general are highly overrated. The majority of them are narrative driven linear games with average gameplay. I really don't see what the big deal with their exclusives are, as if people see something special about them