Fallout 4 critic vs audience reviews for pc port.

[happyninja42]

I've yet to complete it. What i'm excited about is the difference between critics and consumers, which is rare on AAA games.

And you're apparently also excited to see Bethesda burn, based on what you said in your OP.

I'm enjoying the game just fine, as I have very few issues with Bethesda games. I know people talk left and right about the bugginess of the various FO titles, or Skyrim, but personally, I've never experienced the game breaking, or simply annoying bugs that people talk about.

The most serious bug I've experienced so far, is with FO 4, and it's the "You can't fast travel from here" bug. But honestly, in a way it's made the game a bit more fun. I can't magically teleport around the world, so the supply lines between my settlements is actually a useful feature. I also have to actually worry about the weather (Radiation Storms!! God I love those things!!). When the radiation storms hit, and I'm out in the middle of nowhere, it's a genuine threat to me if I can't find shelter. It's quite fun actually xD

So yeah, I don't really understand the hate for the game either, but then there are a lot of people who just don't like the Fallout series as made by Bethesda/Obsidian. *shrugs* To each his own I guess.

 

[Fappy]

I'm 28ish hours in and my only two criticisms so far are: the inventory system is a mess and "insert typical unstable Bethesda performance/bugs here". I heard the game utterly breaks with G-Sync enabled, which is a shame. The game runs at 60fps for me 90% of the time with V-Sync enabled, though for some reason I have to play in windowed borderless mode. Not sure why, but I have to do that for a couple other games too.

 

[Nimcha]

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.

Excellent post, I think you pretty much said it all! And made me laugh a few times too

 

[nomotog_v1legacy]

I must be like the only one in the world, but I never found Bethesda games that buggy. (Except fallout NV, but that wasn't made by them so ya.) I think I found one bug where a dead ghoul didn't rag-doll and every now and then I kind of get stuck in a place and have to jump my way out.

The controls is murder on PC though. That melee/grenade button is bad, and all the menus are slow to work by mouse and a little twitchy.

 

[Something Amyss]

I've yet to complete it. What i'm excited about is the difference between critics and consumers, which is rare on AAA games.

Except when a good chunk of people are simply posting crap like "OVERHYPED!!!!!" it's not so much a difference of opinion as it is the usual histrionics one should expect.

I mean, seriously, why is this a good thing?

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?

And yet, half my FL has gone MIA since the game dropped.

 

[Fappy]

I must be like the only one in the world, but I never found Bethesda games that buggy. (Except fallout NV, but that wasn't made by them so ya.) I think I found one bug where a dead ghoul didn't rag-doll and every now and then I kind of get stuck in a place and have to jump my way out.

The controls is murder on PC though. That melee/grenade button is bad, and all the menus are slow to work by mouse and a little twitchy.

Wow, really? I have been playing Bethesda games for 13 years and I have encountered every bug you could think of. I still love their shitty games though XD

As for controls, I always use controllers for Beth games (except for Morrowind). FO4 was cleared designed with controllers in mind and works fine.

 

[sageoftruth]

Scores are utterly pointless. If you want to know if the game is for you, just read the actual reviews. If you keep seeing complaints that sound like a big deal to you, then you can start having second thoughts about making your purchase.

 

[kenu12345]

I don't know man. I saw some legit negative reviews in the negative part and I think writing every complaint off is just being on the opposite end of the spectrum about what you are complaining about

 

[zombiejoe]

(Shamelessly copying my own post from another website in regards to these metacritic reviews)

I'll admit, tons of these user reviews are hacked together, and some of their points really don't phase me (great graphics and Bethesda are hardly two words I would put together), but some of these points really do concern me, specifically character customization. I got into the series from Fallout 3, and what I loved about that game (and then to a much greater extent, New Vegas), was just how complex you could make your character, just how many ways you could interact with the world, just how many ways you were able to solve a situation based on the character you made. I'm fine with Bethesda trying to cut the fat away from certain areas, but things like the dialogue wheel and the ability to easily change your S.P.E.C.I.A.L. seem like a big step in the wrong direction.
I've been trying to read a variety of reviews, both from critics and users, both ranging from positive to negative to somewhere in the middle, and I just can't make heads or tails on this one.
Of course, this all means I haven't played the game yet. I can't say whether the game is good or not until I actually have. I guess all I'm saying is that whether we like the game or not, we need to look past blind praise and blind hate and see the real positives and negatives this game has here.

 

[Something Amyss]

I don't know man. I saw some legit negative reviews in the negative part and I think writing every complaint off is just being on the opposite end of the spectrum about what you are complaining about

This seems like a fairly logical (in the loosest sense) extension of the usual "the reviewers are paid/teh bias/conspiring" shtick. People don't like when a game they like gets low scores or a game they don't like gets high scores. This seems to be the primary motivator behind the notion that reviewers are bought/biased/in league with Satan. That there are negative/critical reviews doesn't change the fact that there is an overall positive score and this bothers some people.

Following that, pointing to a discrepancy between critic scores and "gamer" scores would serve as validation.

And on only a tangential note, it's hugely ironic that people who haven't played a game are suddenly a valid source of criticism.

 

[kenu12345]

I don't know man. I saw some legit negative reviews in the negative part and I think writing every complaint off is just being on the opposite end of the spectrum about what you are complaining about

This seems like a fairly logical (in the loosest sense) extension of the usual "the reviewers are paid/teh bias/conspiring" shtick. People don't like when a game they like gets low scores or a game they don't like gets high scores. This seems to be the primary motivator behind the notion that reviewers are bought/biased/in league with Satan. That there are negative/critical reviews doesn't change the fact that there is an overall positive score and this bothers some people.

Following that, pointing to a discrepancy between critic scores and "gamer" scores would serve as validation.

And on only a tangential note, it's hugely ironic that people who haven't played a game are suddenly a valid source of criticism.

Note my point wasn't that we should take every complaint as valid, I said some negative reviews do raise points and I feel just disregard all of said complaints just 'cause its averagly positive' isn't good. I spent last night looking through the negative reviews due to this thread and while not all of them are good, I have legitimately seen reviews that raise good points that only someone who played the game would no. Either way, I just can't wait til the hype dies down and we can stop seeing things in extremes

I also think that just writing everyone off that writes a negative review as never haven played the game is highly unfair

 

[Something Amyss]

I said some negative reviews do raise points and I feel just disregard all of said complaints just 'cause its averagly positive' isn't good.

And I was explaining the reason I think this is happening (and I emphasise this is just that, what I think is happening). The "what gives?" sort of phrasing of your post made me think this is what you were looking for: the reason that people are doing it. And, all things considered, it seems unlikely you will get a candid answer.

If not, well...my bad.

 

[Neurotic Void Melody]

Something tells me this could have been easily avoided if people didn't pre-order...instead, waited for the game to come out and read the reviews for the criticisms without just looking at the score and having a hissy-fit. This is giving the elitist master-race a bad name, all acting like spoilt children. Part of me wonders if they react the same way in real life towards anything that doesn't go quite according to plan. I am, of course, a filthy casual though. So ignore these pointless words as i nibble on my turnip, playing fallout 4 and enjoying it. Disappointed that i haven't seen any bugs other than socially anxious subtitles. That is a boring bug. I want funny bugs, goddamnit!

Personally, i would recommend anyone that has such seething hatred as is portrayed so effortlessly here, to turn that hatred towards a creative project. Perhaps a violent painting or chapter one of that novel you've been meaning to start. Learn the drums. Maybe sing along to some Dimmu Borgir. There are limitless options that do not end with you making an anonymous fool of yourself.

Edit: If Methheadbra are listening(reading) and can fix anything, (i daren't go on their official site for fear of losing what little faith i have left in tinterweb public) could they please have a dedicated command in the crafting/inventory/building menu that lets me disassemble items without having to drop them singularly on the floor to then open the workshop menu to dismantle? The number of duct-tapes i've had to throw at the floor for the adhesive is quite numerous now, considering it is a key modification component. The settlers are starting to suspect something is wrong with me.

 

[mizushinzui]

In fairness at least the metabombing was entertaining. I think people would have had there valid criticisms taken more seriously had they bothered to give the game an actual score. Most of the people who posted those reviews were giving out 0's which anyone can tell you isn't true of Fallout 4, even if you don't like a game there are very few out there that actually merit a 0.

Having said that I don't think I've ever played a game that deserves a 10/10 either and a fair few places were giving fallout 4 those numbers.

IMO the game is seriously decent, and deserves at least an 8.5 but it's nothing close to perfect.

 

[Rornicus]

...This is the 3rd Fallout game from Bethesda...

This is 2 from Bethsoft. Obsidian handled NV. Here's hoping they handle Fallout: Seattle (or whatever the next one is) too!

 

[Rornicus]

Could it be that people who put dozens of hours into the game enjoyed it and would genuinely recommend it as an enjoyable game despite deviations from the series foundations? Could it be that a bunch of manchildren are whiny on Metacritic because they have unrealistic standards of beauty that they blame others for not living up to? Could it be that they're whining about a game that they haven't played? Could it be that previous Fallout games were a mess at release that people still massively enjoyed despite the glaring flaws and that people look back at them with rose-tinted glasses?

FO2: My car is here, but its trunk is on the other side of the map.

I agree there are many many people who are giving nostalgia too much credit. But at the same time, FO4 hasn't given me the same sense of story and purpose and effect on the game world as other games in the series have.

Also this annoys me to death:

FO2: Sorry Dogmeat - I guess Marcus decided bursting that guy next to you with his minigun probably wouldn't kill you.

FO4: What's that boy? A deathclaw beheaded you? Here's a stim! Who's a good puppy? Go get me the Cryolator now buddy!

It annoys me both that I lost him in a lot of FO2 runs, and that I can't lose him (or half the population of Boston apparently) in FO4.

 

[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."

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 latter is a perfectly valid complaint, and I'm in no way saying the game is a work of glory and the pinnacle of the art, nor that some of the critics might not have valid criticisms to express. Just that an off-the-cuff "0" rating is often neither an accurate nor a helpful way to express their dissatisfaction.

As for the former- for a aggregate rating to have some value, asking that said rating is compiled from those who may have actually played the game doesn't seem particularly unreasonable.

 

[thewatergamer]

I have no idea what people are criticizing, the "problems" people have with the game have mostly existed in Fallout since...forever...I think what we have here is a bunch of people that primarily play CoD or whatever shooter is popular trotting over to Fallout 4 because they heard the fallout series is good, and then complaining when it's not what they like...I'm obviously generalizing massively, but again the "criticism" I've seen is so all over the place that I just have no idea what people are even talking about half the time...

Considering many of the negative reviews complain that it's becoming too "CoD-ified", I think your assumptions are way off mark. Many of the negative reviews seem to be from fans of the older Fallout games, unhappy with the stripping of RPG mechanics, and many others are down rating it for various technical issues it has.

Yeah I did some more digging, (again user reviews are kind of hard to get information) most of the complaints seem to come down to the game being a buggy mess...which I haven't played it but it's bethesda so I'm not surprised not that it's ok by any means, my original post was again very misinformed because...meme's! went over 90 fps...flew into space 10/10, that sort of thing but now that i've dug deeper I definetly side with the fans alot more since alot of reviewers seem to be ignoring the buggy mess that the game is, especially on consoles