Fallout 4 critic vs audience reviews for pc port.

[Callate]

Well, it's still at "Mostly Positive" (78%) on Steam. Given how many "users" are willing to give something a "0" on Metacritic at the drop of a hat, I'd have to suggest that 4.7 isn't really that bad.

It's not an excuse for Bethesda to fail to patch issues and bugs, of course, but I think a little perspective is in order. "0", in my opinion, ought to be a game that leaves the user scarred for life or reduces their machine to a smoking crater.

One of those "0" reviews literally begins with the words, "It's alright, but I am disappointed."

 

[fix-the-spade]

It's not an excuse for Bethesda to fail to patch issues and bugs, of course, but I think a little perspective is in order. "0", in my opinion, ought to be a game that leaves the user scarred for life or reduces their machine to a smoking crater.

At this point in their history, I think expecting a newly released Bethesda game to run smoothly and be even relatively bug free is like expecting the same from a DICE release.

They're the studio of ambitious, engaging messes and they're never going to change. I can mostly forgive them this since they've made Daggerfall, Morrowind, Fallout, Fallout 3 and Skyrim. Morrowind might be my favourite game world ever, nobody else has come up with a fantasy world quite so mundanely alien. It was still buggy as all Hell though!

 

[DoPo]

I'm not sure when everyone decided that rabid fans were the most unbiased reviewers for a game anyway. A fan is, by definition, biased. They have an idea of what is "acceptable" in a squeal and anything that doesn't fit that narrow definition is considered sacrilegious. Seems to me like the people who review games as a job will be more likely to give you a balanced review.

Fallout 4 has a lot of issues, but this is right on the money. User reviews are, have always been, and will continue to be extraordinarily useless. You have to shift through a lot of dross to mine one or two nugget of gold, and since it's very rare that users post consistently and can be recognized by name, it's pretty hard to track one guy and find out if his tastes happen to align with yours.

Anyone holding up the user review as the "honest" face of games criticism is out of their fucking mind.

Heck, a majority of user reviews are complete garbage. That's true for any user review, not just games/metacritic. An XKCD comic nicely encapsulates and summarises the issue in this strip


OK, sure, it doesn't give the complete picture of how shit the reviews can be, but, hey, it accomplishes enough in that one image. Go to Amazon or something and a bunch of the reviews are going to be as useless as those five star reviews in the comic:

Bought it, doesn't work, but it arrived really fast and it was the right colour 5/5

Got it for my son. Don't know if he still uses it. 5/5

Haven't tried it yet, but the box looks nice 5/5

These are just examples. I can't be bothered to find real reviews but such ones existed. The one with the son was especially baffling to me - I did try to find it but I can't remember the product it was on.

But these aren't the only useless ones - there are layers and layers of garbage reviews - you can have a look at the one star reviews and find a bunch of them, as well

Works perfect, it's exactly as described, but arrived a day late 1/5

Received the item, dropped it, then the seller refused to give me a refund 1/5

Or even

Got the item, it was damaged, the seller immediately sent me a replacement, didn't charge me and even let me keep the previous one. Works perfect now. 1/5

and that's before getting into the really fucking stupid one

Didn't like the colour 1/5

Didn't know that it was made of <fucking obvious material, which you can SEE on the screenshots AND it's mentioned in the description> 1/5

But wait, those aren't even the only ones! The two stupid extremes manage to actually inspire opposing stupid extremes to exist. Reviews that literally go something like "I gave it 5 (or 1) stars just because there are too many 1 (or 5) star reviews".

And, of course, there is the whole range between 1 and 5 where all sorts of crap exists - including a continuation of the above trend only with slightly different numbers, for example, it may go "doesn't work the least but I like the colour". And that review can have any number of stars, you can't even guess whether it would be 2, 3, or 4 (as well as 1 or 5, of course, but I've covered those).

That's just Amazon and it doesn't even cover the full range of inaccurate reviews. It's worth noting the "joke reviews" being a thing - there seems to be an entire trend of doing those in a particular style for a given range of products, as an example, there is a fairly famous review titled "DO NOT PUT ON KNOB AND BOLLOCKS" that is for a hair removal cream for men. It's not the only one, though - most hair removal creams for men seem to have a bunch of reviews that go to great poetic lengths to describe how painful and bad it is to apply them to...well, the knob and bollocks. It's some sort of bizarre trend that nevertheless floods the user reviews with just noise that is, at the end of the day, useless at being a user review. Even if some are quite amusing.

Anyway, there are even more examples of user reviews being crap. Quite frankly, the whole system with ratings out of five (or ten, or a hundred. Or a hundred but masked as a ten. Or few other popular variations and permutations of those.) is pretty much fundamentally broken. Probably "the best" (and I'm putting this in quotes for a reason) rating system is what Steam has with limiting the choices to two - good or bad. An alternative is to also allow neutral, but still - it's not like that is bound to only give useful reviews either - there quite a few infamously crap ones that go along the lines of "EARLY ACCESS: haven't played it yet, but I like the concept. (thumbs up)" among other bullshit ones. At least overall, there seem to be a bigger percentage of them that are useful, as opposed to the incompetent shlock that the 5+ available rating systems inspire.

User reviews are broken, have been broken, and would continue to be broken. Some of them would be useful but the amount of pure flood of worthless, ineffectual, inept, inadequate, hopeless, weak and bad ones pretty much dooms the taking any sort of aggregation to be mostly irrelevant.

 

[DefunctTheory]

What the hell happened to spoiler tags?

You only put the end spoiler code in.

[spoiler+ Spoiled Text [/spoiler]

Replace + with ].

 

[MysticSlayer]

A 4.8 on a site where it is well-known that users will do everything from writing protest reviews, troll reviews, not-played-the-game reviews, and exaggerated-negativity reviews seems OK.

And in case it isn't obvious, I stopped caring about user reviews on Metacritic. I've seen way too many people abuse it to trust anymore. I think I'll spend time reading a few critic reviews from people I trust than to trust Random Internet User #25496843 to not give the game a 0 or 10 based entirely on whether or not their mom let them go to the midnight release.

 

[Ambient_Malice]

You've got people who turn God Rays to maximum, and then complain they can't hold 60fps.
You've got people who uncap the framerate, something you should NEVER do with this type of game, and then complain when bugs start popping up all over the place.
You've got people who have no sense of perspective. If a game crashes, it's totally the game's fault and not their OS, drivers, configuration, etc. They're like those people who blame Project64 for causing BSODs when it's actually Microsoft's fault for writing a buggy kernel.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

I really don't get the hate for this game... I've been having a blast. The perils of the hype train I guess.

Some of us were shouting loudly and proudly not to listen to hype. "Remember New Vegas and your disappointment!" we said.
We were called pessimistic and that we just don't like video games.
Well at least we knew this train crash was coming, eh?

 

[Ambient_Malice]

I really don't get the hate for this game... I've been having a blast. The perils of the hype train I guess.

Some of us were shouting loudly and proudly not to listen to hype. "Remember New Vegas and your disappointment!" we said.
We were called pessimistic and that we just don't like video games.
Well at least we knew this train crash was coming, eh?

Disappointment? The hell are you talking about? New Vegas was awesome.

New Vegas was astonishingly buggy on release, and remains far buggier than any modern Bethesda game. Whether New Vegas is a great game is a whole other matter, though.

 

[DoPo]

I really don't get the hate for this game... I've been having a blast. The perils of the hype train I guess.

Some of us were shouting loudly and proudly not to listen to hype. "Remember New Vegas and your disappointment!" we said.
We were called pessimistic and that we just don't like video games.
Well at least we knew this train crash was coming, eh?

Disappointment? The hell are you talking about? New Vegas was awesome.

New Vegas was astonishingly buggy on release, and remains far buggier than any modern Bethesda game. Whether New Vegas is a great game is a whole other matter, though.

True as it may be, I still don't remember my disappointment. As such, the above statement fails to be some sort of deep, meaningful and prophetic utterance and is leans towards random gibberish. The sentence "Eggs page, frequent stamps shivering brown" achieves about the same effect for me.

 

[F-I-D-O]

The only part I understand outrage about is connecting game speed and framerate. It's a really silly mistake, and shouldn't be implemented in modern design, since it screws up high end machines and makes the game hold up poorly in the future. The only good reason genres for it are fighting games or something else INCREDIBLY reliant on exactly consistent tells and timing through animation. An FPS with the ability to freeze time isn't one of those games.

But complaining about bugs and graphics seems strange. Everyone expects this from Bethesda, so it's not like they ruined expectations - the company is also known for consistent support and fixes. It also seems that the game isn't performing as poorly as the prior entry did. The graphics have stayed consistent or gotten better since the first gameplay trailer, so they didn't mislead anyone. Map size might be a sticking point, if New Vegas had anything worthwhile in its huge desert wasteland and if F4 didn't add a shit ton of interior vertical spaces to play in.

As others have said, metacritic's pretty worthless and most fans/raters don't say anything between 10 or 0 in shouted complaints of "it sucks/rocks," so it's not like that opinions worthwhile. At least reviewers are justifying their experience. And F4 is coming out as something that does the open world formula almost exactly like F3, but at least that's a change from every game doing the AssCreed/Far Cry map with tons of collections and nothing to really do.

 

[shintakie10]

But complaining about bugs and graphics seems strange. Everyone expects this from Bethesda, so it's not like they ruined expectations - the company is also known for consistent support and fixes. It also seems that the game isn't performing as poorly as the prior entry did.

I feel like this here is a massive cop out. Just because they're known for makin buggy as shit games doesn't mean people shouldn't call them out for makin buggy as shit games.

Bethesda got super lazy and don't want to use a new engine when they know for a fact their current engine is a giant turd. They're fine with shippin that off to people and fixin holes as they pop up. In some cases, as with Skyrim on PS3, they're perfectly fine with never fixing it.

That's a problem and people keep giving them money for having such a shit attitude towards development.

Sort of related. I'm not one to go all "Eww, ugly graphics no play" or whatnot, but I do have to say the graphics are really wonky in this entry. Like, faraway shots look really good especially when light shafts pop up. Get even remotely close to somethin and the graphics look like they've barely progressed past New Vegas. Its not a deal breaker, but it is weird. Probably just another side effect of their cruddy engine.

 

[F-I-D-O]

But complaining about bugs and graphics seems strange. Everyone expects this from Bethesda, so it's not like they ruined expectations - the company is also known for consistent support and fixes. It also seems that the game isn't performing as poorly as the prior entry did.

I feel like this here is a massive cop out. Just because they're known for makin buggy as shit games doesn't mean people shouldn't call them out for makin buggy as shit games.

Bethesda got super lazy and don't want to use a new engine when they know for a fact their current engine is a giant turd. They're fine with shippin that off to people and fixin holes as they pop up. In some cases, as with Skyrim on PS3, they're perfectly fine with never fixing it.

That's a problem and people keep giving them money for having such a shit attitude towards development.

Sort of related. I'm not one to go all "Eww, ugly graphics no play" or whatnot, but I do have to say the graphics are really wonky in this entry. Like, faraway shots look really good especially when light shafts pop up. Get even remotely close to somethin and the graphics look like they've barely progressed past New Vegas. Its not a deal breaker, but it is weird. Probably just another side effect of their cruddy engine.

That stinks if the graphics scale like that. I haven't seen too much beyond trailers (waiting to pick it up after a few patches/I clear my backlog), so that's where I got my "graphics seem fairly representative of trailers" from.

My main point with the bugs is that everyone does seem to give Bethesda a free pass on it, so it's strange to see the metacritc user reviews and backlash be due to that - granted, I didn't communicate that well. Even in the leadup, people joked about how buggy or glitchy the game would be and how mods would fix it, so it isn't like those taking the effort to bomb metacritic were unaware. Also, since bugs tend to be fairly random, it seems unreasonable for every reviewer to encounter tons of completely game destroying bugs. And if reviewers lower the score because of a buggy experience, they get insulted and yelled at for giving a game a low score since "bugs will be fixed with patches" or "It's a Bethesda game, what did you expect."

I'm certain F4 will be a much better game in a few months, and I look forward to playing it. But unless I can get a collector's edition, I don't buy a Bethesda developed game day one anymore (published is a different matter). Last time I did that was Skyrim on PS3, which I abandoned due to bugs and still haven't bought on PC due to that experience. I really enjoyed New Vegas, but picked it up two years after all the DLC/patches came out in the Ultimate edition for $7.50 since I didn't trust Obsidian and really didn't trust Bethesda.

My main surprise is Bethesda regressed from earlier games to game logic/speed seemingly being tied to framerate, which probably causes all sorts of game calculation/visual mismatches on screens or to the physics engine. Since they've been using gamebryo since Morrowind I wonder if they even have a engine team on staff. At least CoD could hide it's (modified) Quake 3 engine even in Ghosts.

 

[gyrobot_v1legacy]

Well, it's still at "Mostly Positive" (78%) on Steam. Given how many "users" are willing to give something a "0" on Metacritic at the drop of a hat, I'd have to suggest that 4.7 isn't really that bad.

It's not an excuse for Bethesda to fail to patch issues and bugs, of course, but I think a little perspective is in order. "0", in my opinion, ought to be a game that leaves the user scarred for life or reduces their machine to a smoking crater.

One of those "0" reviews literally begins with the words, "It's alright, but I am disappointed."

Steam requires you to have a verified game to protest about how the game is dumbed down and considers removing foundations of the original game as a feature.

 

[the_dramatica]

A 4.8 on a site where it is well-known that users will do everything from writing protest reviews, troll reviews, not-played-the-game reviews, and exaggerated-negativity reviews seems OK.

Still playing FO4 so can't contribute itt yet, but here's some old stuff.

http://www.shacknews.com/article/50134/report-gamespots-gerstmann-fired-due
http://imgur.com/SKPqAll
http://i.imgur.com/44GtP.jpg

A basic concern with professional reviews is that they get blacklisted out of early game access if they are known for critical reviews, and getting your review on the market early is considered key for some companies. Anyway that's the tinfoil theory on pro reviews that everybody here probably already knows, just posting it just in case.

 

[F-I-D-O]

Still playing FO4 so can't contribute itt yet, but here's some old stuff.

http://www.shacknews.com/article/50134/report-gamespots-gerstmann-fired-due
http://imgur.com/SKPqAll
http://i.imgur.com/44GtP.jpg

A basic concern with professional reviews is that they get blacklisted out of early game access if they are known for critical reviews, and getting your review on the market early is considered key for some companies. Anyway that's the tinfoil theory on pro reviews that everybody here probably already knows, just posting it just in case.

Firstly, God Hand and Party Babyz were reviewed by two separate people. While I do think the math weighting on the God Hand Breakdown go screwed somewhere on the way to the final number, it still is a strange game that doesn't gel well with every player. Meanwhile, Party Babyz could be the best damn Babyz game ever made. I haven't played it, I doubt you've played it, so I wouldn't know. It is believable to me that it'd be easier to have a mechanically sound minigame collection than a brand new combat system, so yeah.

Secondly, do you have an example of reviewer/publisher collusion from this generation? All three of these are particularly old. The only reviewer/site I can think was Jim Sterling and Destructoid getting blacklisted by Konami, but that wasn't fully due to reviews. It was due to Jim flying in the face of Konami's (stupid and misguided form of) PR.

Lastly, if people actually cared about review content and not the number at the end, then they would wait even if a reviewer had to buy the game at launch and then give thoughts. While timing is key (hence embargos to give an even playing field) it's not everything. Smart companies know the backlash they get from blacklisting reviewers (as sites will say they haven't received copies when people look for reviews, and then connect the dots). Reviewer collusion might have been more of an issue in the PS2 era, but it definitely seems more toned down. Inflated review scores because of the adoption of a 7 point system founded in the Xbox/PS2 era is a different matter.

Even if game reviews were written in a gigantic pit of publisher supplied cocaine, alcohol, and other vices it wouldn't make Metacritic user reviews a viable way to judge games. It's trivial for Metacritic to get "bombed" with 0s and 10s, which makes the scale pretty worthless. At least Steam requires ownership, and you can see it's percentage is more positive. As someone already mentioned in the thread, fans are inherently more biased than reviewers. Metacritic might be a good way to see a niche audience's latest freak out, but saying "look at this professional vs consumer divide" doesn't really work in that setting.

A better example would have been Mad Max and how the overwhelming player response was positive (in pretty much any gaming community) but it reviewed poorly because it had a lot of content that critics found tiring, repetitive, and meaningless. The average customer seemed to get a lot of cool stuff in a Mad Max world, while reviewers played yet another filler-loaded open world game.

 

[F-I-D-O]

Steam requires you to have a verified game to protest about how the game is dumbed down and considers removing foundations of the original game as a feature.

Protesting is one thing. Giving a game a value/passing of complaints as a review is another. Anyone can freely post in the steam, Bethesda, or most other forums about their complaints. Calling a game that you're not interested in playing bad is judging from promotional/videos/review materials. That's making an informed decision.
Passing off that opinion as a "user review" on metacritic is another. It's not a review. It's no more useful than saying "I won't read Twilight because it looks bad." You can't fully judge or review a work unless you experience it, and Steam is in the right for making sure that in some way it's community review system gets closer to using the word properly.

 

[Glaice]

Overhype by Bethesda, lack of QA for PC port, overfellation by major critics (and fanboys) and drastic changes (more FPS, less RPG) that streamline things like the SPECIAL system and lack of dialogue/quest choices, which just turns me away from an open world game in the Fallout universe.

I'll just replay Fallout 3 instead.