kael013 said:
So let me get this straight: Average Joes write up 0-score reviews because they don't like how it's been "consolized" or whatever, that's fine. BioWare employees writing up reviews to counter the mud-slinging, however, is bad?
Yes, because they work for the company.
The guys writing the 0 score reviews are giving their opinion based on the what they think of the product itself. They have no real vested interest in taking the time other than to give their opinion, where the companies have a direct financial stake in how well a game is received. Positive reviews overall convincing people to buy the game.
Generally speaking the only time that a negative review of this sort would be contreversial would be if you could tie it to someone with a direct stake in the failure of the project. Say if Activision/Blizzard had just released an RPG of their own, and got caught trying to tank the metacritic scores of their competition in hopes of it attracting more people to buy their product.
The "Troll Factor" of people who report things negatively for the lulz doesn't matter much, because it's always present, and Trolls are always vastly outnumbered by people who want to give their opinions legitimatly.
The reason why this has become such a contreversy is because it's VERY rare to see a big and heavily promoted release like this tank out in the reviews so quickly, especially with such a huge gap between what the professional reviews and user reviews are saying (they usually wind up being within a point or so of each other).
The way things turned out with "Dragon Age 2" really stinks because before this contreversy people were noticing the score differances, and given "Dragon Age Rage" among the community itself it raises questions about the corruption of professional reviewers to rate it that high with all of the game's assorted problems. Bioware wanting to run damage control and pump up that rating makes a lot of sense under the circumstances because it was making them look bad on a lot of levels, and generating a lot of talk.
I'll be honest though, "Dragon Age 2" is getting the responses it has been getting not because it's been dumbed down and "consolized", but because it's been sloppy about it. There are TONS of console gamers that seem to be badmouthing it, so it's not some kind of PC gamer elite-ness.
I'm one of the only people that talks about it here (so far) but I'm hardly the only one who was going "WTF" when the game basically has you re-visiting the same locations again and again with new spawns, and the spawns are big groups of generic mobs that respawn in waves. When they even bother to have a spawn animation (as opposed to them just appearing unannounced) it involves somevery out of character elements like say thugs in a ghetto jumping off buildings like Ninjas, or sometimes just flat out falling out of the sky (OMG! It's raining knife wielding bums in Kirkwall!).
Complaints vary, but the point is that there is a LOT to complain about. There is a lot of stuff in this game that is just plain bad, no matter what format you play it on, and honestly you also have to wonder what any impartial, professional reviewer, who actually played this game would praise a game that has mindless waves of enemies that literally drop out of the sky. I mean seriously, the way how a lot of this stuff spawns and plays out seems like the kind of thing Obsidian would be apologizing for. This is like the "New Vegas" of Fantasy RPGs on a lot of levels, but it's not so much bugs, as much as a slapshod job in general. Obsidian at least builds these huge, epic worlds, "Dragon Age 2" is re-using the same areas as a painfully obvious way of having to do less game development. Not to mention the very limited companion options, above and beyond the much-complainted about issues about armor, why does a Thief have to drag a law-and order guardsman about since there is only one tank, or a Templar have to use a fanatically pro-mage healer since there is only one? This leads to a lot of whining from your companions no matter what you do, and it annoys nearly everyone. Above and beyond the game design, that's just flat out sloppy design, that apparently was not thought through. I shouldn't have to be annoyed just to build a balanced party.
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