Erin's Razor

[The Wooster]

Erin's Razor

The truth is less exciting.

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[ZZoMBiE13]

Heh, nice.

The only Assassin's Creed I ever played was a brief rental of the second game, and them some of the Pirate one. And after Syndicate it out... I doubt that will change.

Still, to those who do enjoy them I hope you have a blast. It isn't my thing, but if people dig it then more power to them.

 

[The Enquirer]

I never would have guessed. The horror! Oh the humanity!

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

Excuse me, number 351163A...you're making a scene. Please stop your individual thought process, link back to us and get back in your cell pod!

 

[RJ 17]

You mean I don't have to listen to the opinions of some random jackass on the internet? That said random jackass' likes and dislikes might not align with my own?

Mind...BLOWN!

 

[GiantRedButton]

Bad choice of example maybe.
In the most recent Assassins creed Ubisoft did try to deceive reviewers.
For example they hid all the microtransactions and microtransactionhooks.
Arguably the worst aspect of the game is only in the consumerversion of the game while the different reviewer version of the game was superior.

It is also important to note that the whole we paid for advertising so reviews better be good thing happens and is the reason Giant Bomb came into excistance.

Sources:
http://i.imgur.com/ZWmYv4Y.jpg

http://kotaku.com/5893785/yes-a-games-writer-was-fired-over-review-scores

 

[MrCalavera_v1legacy]

Upon [a href='http://www.gamerevolution.com/manifesto/journalist-mistakes-uncharted-2-for-uncharted-4-hilarity-and-embarrassment-ensues-35247']recent news[/a] this doesn't hit far from truth.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

Maybe it's good? Most critics didn't like Unity.

 

[IceForce]

These strips never go down well,

Actually, I think you'll be surprised.

Because this...

The growing disconnect between traditional games journalism and, for lack of a better term, "core" gamers.

... This is going to resonate quite well with a fairly large portion of the userbase of this site.

 

[Grumpy Ginger]

You know I do wonder though with many of these games if the disconnect between reviewers and players is caused how long the critic plays it vs how long the player does. A critic has a limited amount of time and means that games that superficially shine tend to leave a good impression and they tend to get acclaim. A player gets the same but the metaphorical paint starts to chip off after the twentieth hour or so. So while critics and players might consider a game like skyrim to be brilliant after the couple of hours the reviewer quickly moves on to the next game while the player spends much more time and wonders how a reviewer gave it such high praise forgetting our own honeymoon period with a game. This seems to really affect sandbox games with generally shallow mechanics only becoming really obvious after burning through the main content.

 

[Something Amyss]

This is why we need personal opinions out of reviews, even though reviews are heavily reliant on personal opinions.

At the same time, if the type of gamer who enjoys Assassin's Creed isn't what you would define as the "core" gamer, I'm not sure why this is the big issue. I would think, then, that it's the increasing obsolescence of the "core" gamer and the lack of touch with modern gaming that becomes the problem, because no matter what the medium of journalism, a medium which so heavily revolves around franchises like this will find itself with many critics who are positive towards it.

This is more rhetorical than anything, because I think of "core" gamers in the sense of being the foundation of the market, and therefore it's the ACs and the CODs who make up the "core" gamer's library. Or, at least, are a noteworthy part of it.

Also, if movies had the same kind of score inflation games did, we'd be seeing the Transformers movies getting 9/10 all the time. This is the end result of a culture that thinks 8/10 is trashing a game and 9/10 is a firing offense.

I'm not sure what part of this you're going to get more crap for. I feel for you, Grey!

Bad choice of example maybe.
In the most recent Assassins creed Ubisoft did try to deceive reviewers.

Where does "deception" come in? I looked back at the comic, which only brings up bribes and threats. The text says nothing about deception that I saw.

The growing disconnect between traditional games journalism and, for lack of a better term, "core" gamers.

... This is going to resonate quite well with a fairly large portion of the userbase of this site.

I think we both know what people are going to hear there.

 

[Zhukov]

While I thoroughly despise the crowd that screams about corruption and bribery the minute a review fails to confirm their opinions, it does often seem like all a game has to do is have a big budget and be basically functional for reviewers to start singing its praises.

 

[Something Amyss]

You know I do wonder though with many of these games if the disconnect between reviewers and players

You mean a certain kind of player, right? Because looking at user reviews, games like the AC series rarely fall too far off the critic scores. And the one instance where they do appears to be people review bombing in protest of the practices of the game, not the quality of the game itself.

This is why I disagree that reviews are out of touch. The reviews reflect, roughly, the audience.

 

[GiantRedButton]

Bad choice of example maybe.
In the most recent Assassins creed Ubisoft did try to deceive reviewers.

Where does "deception" come in? I looked back at the comic, which only brings up bribes and threats. The text says nothing about deception that I saw.

An example where the Reviewers had the opportunity to fairly criciqe a game would have been a better example. In this case the review would have been off no matter the taste of the reviewer. So it is not a great example for the point. You could propably think of a few obvious examples yourself haha.
I am aware that the comic only listed two ways publishers attempt to influence reviews. Propably because there were no public cases of that in a long time so they are less likly to occur. certainly less likly than bad taste.

Edit: Wow quoting that right was hard!

 

[Something Amyss]

An example where the Reviewers had the opportunity to fairly criciqe a game would have been a better example. In this case the review would have been off no matter the taste of the reviewer.

Really? Were they unaware of them with the last game? Or Ubisoft's other recent titles? Several of those got praise with know MTs.

It could be that reviewers don't really care about MTs, and this was more about the audience.

 

[GiantRedButton]

An example where the Reviewers had the opportunity to fairly criciqe a game would have been a better example. In this case the review would have been off no matter the taste of the reviewer.

Really? Were they unaware of them with the last game? Or Ubisoft's other recent titles? Several of those got praise with know MTs.

It could be that reviewers don't really care about MTs, and this was more about the audience.

If that was the case they wouldn't have hidden the hooks for them. In gamedevelopment just removing something can be difficult and cause alot of bugs. Same reason the hot coffee stuff was left in the game by Rockstar.

 

[The Wooster]

You know I do wonder though with many of these games if the disconnect between reviewers and players is caused how long the critic plays it vs how long the player does. A critic has a limited amount of time and means that games that superficially shine tend to leave a good impression and they tend to get acclaim. A player gets the same but the metaphorical paint starts to chip off after the twentieth hour or so. So while critics and players might consider a game like skyrim to be brilliant after the couple of hours the reviewer quickly moves on to the next game while the player spends much more time and wonders how a reviewer gave it such high praise forgetting our own honeymoon period with a game. This seems to really affect sandbox games with generally shallow mechanics only becoming really obvious after burning through the main content.

Actually, I think you'll find the opposite happens just as often. When you review games for a living, your judgement of value gets thrown off by the fact that A: you're not spending your own money on a game and B: you become acutely aware of games that waste your time and tend towards more focused (read: shorter) games. That's why games like Gone Home do so well with critics (despite the fact that $20 for a one hour experience is fucking ridiculous) and a lot of reviewers don't really talk about campaign length.

But there is truth in the idea that more immediately impressive games review better. I think every reviewer has fallen for it at least once. For example: I think I said Skyrim was going to be my GOTY at one point. I was wrong.

 

[Karadalis]

Shit taste? I wouldnt mind that.

But the "real, real" truth is that its pretty standard nowadays to give high ratings to everything the AAA publishers shit out unless its so obviously broken that it wont even function correctly (sim city anyone?) and even THEN it will get higher scores then usual... just to be on the sure side.

Its not simply shitty taste because then they would every now and then give a AAA title a score below 8/10 or god beware a 7/10

See AAA publishers dont need to threaten anymore.. it was allready well established what will happen to you if you go against the choir and give a AAA title a low score in the past.

No one wants to be that one dude that gave kane and lynch a low score 2.0

They may harp on and spew vitriol and call EA, ubisoft and Activision out all the friggin time but yet give their games the highest of scores each and every time? And thats suposed to be only because of shit taste?

Nah..dont buy it. It simply is an unwritten rule that you dont give AAA games from the big publishers low scores no matter how shite they are.

 

[Something Amyss]

If that was the case they wouldn't have hidden the hooks for them.

Unless they didn't want the public informed, something I literally just said in my last post.

In gamedevelopment just removing something can be difficult and cause alot of bugs. Same reason the hot coffee stuff was left in the game by Rockstar.

It wasn't left in the game. The code was left on the disc. They did remove the "hooks" on that one and you had to modify the game to put it back in.

 

[Scy Anide]

You know I do wonder though with many of these games if the disconnect between reviewers and players is caused how long the critic plays it vs how long the player does. A critic has a limited amount of time and means that games that superficially shine tend to leave a good impression and they tend to get acclaim. A player gets the same but the metaphorical paint starts to chip off after the twentieth hour or so. So while critics and players might consider a game like skyrim to be brilliant after the couple of hours the reviewer quickly moves on to the next game while the player spends much more time and wonders how a reviewer gave it such high praise forgetting our own honeymoon period with a game. This seems to really affect sandbox games with generally shallow mechanics only becoming really obvious after burning through the main content.

Actually, I think you'll find the opposite happens just as often. When you review games for a living, your judgement of value gets thrown off by the fact that A: you're not spending your own money on a game and B: you become acutely aware of games that waste your time and tend towards more focused (read: shorter) games. That's why games like Gone Home do so well with critics (despite the fact that $20 for a one hour experience is fucking ridiculous) and a lot of reviewers don't really talk about campaign length.

But there is truth in the idea that more immediately impressive games review better. I think every reviewer has fallen for it at least once. For example: I think I said Skyrim was going to be my GOTY at one point. I was wrong.

I think everyone falls for it occasionally. I've purchased Assassin's Creed 3 as well as Brink; I attempted to play them both as punishment.

Sometimes I go to Metacritic not to check ratings but to see how they change and eventually settle over time. I find it interesting to compare the reviews that come out as soon as possible versus the ones that come out later where it seemed like the reviewer was actually able to take their time with it. I generally find the later reviews more useful as it can be difficult to explore what parts of a game worked and what didn't while under a deadline and against a sometimes overwhelming level of hype, but I also almost never buy a game on release nowadays so for major releases, things have often settled down by the time I get around to playing them anyways.

It's kind of unfortunate that reviews on websites can't really be updated as easily as a Steam review.