Is CD Projekt Most overrated Developers of today?

[Hawki]

Greats come and greats go - remember when Bioware was the top dog?

Um...sort of?

BioWare is weird for me. Mass Effect was the first I'd heard of them. I played it, and absolutely loved it. Then I played Sonic Chronicles and all that good will evaporated. Apart from that, the only other BioWare game I've played is some of Mass Effect 2, and if anything, I'm more interested in Anthem than anything else. But that aside, at the very least, BioWare has created its own IPs, which is more than I can say for CDR.

And mind you, that isn't unique to CDR - Telltale has made its name entirely on tie-in stories to established medias - but then again, people aren't putting Telltale on a pedestal (not anymore at least).

 

[Bombiz]

but the data that you linked to didn't prove that most games get 80+ scores/it's hard for a game to score under 80. The guy who got the data even disagreed with you when you said the vast majority of scores are between 8.5-9.5. the data you linked to me in that thread says that they get any where from 78 to 68 on average. And I just gave those games as examples. if you want we can go through the 150+ pages of action games that scored 72 or below.

Even if my personal game GOAT scored a 98, I'd still call it overrated because that's ridiculous for any piece of art to score that high. Thus, every game is overrated.

wait so just because a piece of media got 98/100 everything in that media is overrated? cause their are movies that have scored that high before.

But that data also would include all the shovelware and shitty licensed games that would get released. The average game score with those type of titles is already at a 74, it's going to go up to at least the upper 70s or low 80s when you filter out the obvious garbage. With regards to what I said to a game being an "accomplishment" to score below an 80, I meant that for games coming from known publishers and developers that would mainly be considered AAA, which I said to you a few posts ago. Would you bet any money that Spiderman is going to end up with a Meta lower than 80?

(....)

Every game is extremely overrated because reviewers really just utilize the 70-100 section of the scale. What movie has ever scored a 98 for the average score? I always use RT for movie overalls because there's more total reviews. And even something like Citizen Kane has an average score of 9.4. If you were to look for the "Citizen Kane" of gaming, you'd find 107 of them already as there are 107 games with Metas of 94+ in such a young medium.

So by every game being over rated you just mean the the market of AAA games then? which isn't nearly every game out there. I'll admit that AAA games have a hard time getting a bad score from professional review sites but to say that EVERY GAME is overrated because of that is absurd. That criticism would only apply to AAA games. unless you would have data that would say other wise. And the data that was provided in that thread didn't say that.

The TC in that thread misinterpreted my post there (I probably could've worded it better as well). What I said is that a single game will likely have the vast majority of its reviews be in a 1.0 or 10 range; for example, the 8.5-9.5 range I threw down. I'll use Witcher 3 PS4 (since it has the most reviews at 79) because the thread is about CDPR. Out of the 79 reviews, 63 of those reviews all fall in at the 90-100 range so 80% of the reviewers scored the game with in the same 10% of the review scale. Where's the differing of opinions you get from movie critics? Not only do games usually have over a movie's worth of writing (and much more in say Witcher 3's case) to criticize (and writing is very subjective), games also have the game part obviously that can also be as subjective. It should be harder for games to score higher than movies just because there's so much more content there to criticize and so much more that can go wrong. Compare that to the Incredibles 2 Meta where 23 of 51 reviews fall within the 80-90 bracket (the highest populated "section"), which only amounts to 45% of all reviews vs 80% of Witcher 3 reviews that all fall into a 10-point bracket. Don't you find it extremely odd that so many people would agree that ANYTHING has approximately the same "goodness"? Where's the differing opinions at? Where's the critics that don't like Witcher 3? Start a thread here and you'll find several people that don't like Witcher 3 for valid reasons. You wouldn't even get the biggest fanboys of Metal Gear Solid end up with an average score of a 94 for MGS4 (which is what its Meta is at). There's a single negative review for FFXIII, and that's a love/hate game.

I would assume majority of games would be in a 1.0-10 range? I still don't get where you come up with this majority of ALL games fall into this 8.5-9.5 range you came up with. for AAA games sure but not for EVERY type of game.

 

[CaitSeith]

I'm just asking for differing opinions in video game reviews. You can legitimately find say God of War or Uncharted or Witcher 3 or GTA bad games for legitimate and logical reasons, where are those reviews and criticisms at from "professional" critics?

Define "legitimate". Like, what does legitimize game criticism or an argument in it? Intent? Methodology? Phrasing? Vocabulary? Perspective? Balanced structure? Background?

Not sure what makes being in Metacritic "professional" (neither in the actual or the sarcastic definition of the word). After all, Metacritic itself treats game scores and movie scores very differently. And the moment a critic goes against the score trend, they receive a barrage of hatred from Metacritic users (like the one who gave to Zelda: Breath of the Wild a 70).

EDIT: Differing opinions and differing scores are separate things.

Just about anything is legitimate. What makes a good reviewer is their ability to convey the "why" they liked or disliked said thing. Several people have pointed out GTA's extremely linear missions in an open world from Yahtzee to Mark Brown to Errant Signal. Dan Houser's writing is pretty poor and the story in Rockstar's games are definitely spotlighted and a major part of their games. There's major areas in Rockstar's games that can be greatly improved but they are rated as near perfect masterpieces? It doesn't make much sense. Errant Signal's GTA4 video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E32j9ufrpoE] points out the major problems in the criteria in how games are scored. I want to know how well/poorly someone genuinely enjoyed a game with well communicated reasoning, game reviews are devoid of both those things usually.

Professional just means they get paid for doing it. The reviewers at IGN, GameSpot, Eurogamer, etc all get paid for writing reviews.

I can't really comment on his observations on GTA IV as I haven't ever played it nor know any details of it (so I can refute or agree about the parts he assured I have more fun with or find more memorable); but I have to say something because it's most of his video. The most I can get from that is his observations is "GTA IV doesn't excel in the qualities I look for in a videogame. I find the seriousness in the story conflicting with the satirical humor outside of it and disjointed from the mechanics" (as a side note, I find unfair of him to compare it to Skyrim, as the later was released 3 years afterwards).

His commentary on metacritic reviewers doesn't go deeper than showing scores. He doesn't explain any of the reviews or tries to find if his observations are shared by any on them, nor he comments why the points they glorify are meaningful enough (heck, he doesn't even mention their points). He just steps back, looks at the scores and throws a couple of plausibly sounding theories to make the reviews sound less legitimate, without having to even read them. Maybe he is right (we are talking about 2008, lots of broken clocks were right), but for what he shows in the video, he is still guessing and jumping into conclusions. In other words, I couldn't find where he points out the major problems in the scoring criteria; just a shallow "I don't agree with their scores, so they must be wrong".

I feel unfair for criticizing Errant Signal video in this way. It's clearly intended to analyze GTA IV, not the reviews; but for being something you recommended to watch, I'm posibly missing something that you clearly saw in it.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

So by every game being over rated you just mean the the market of AAA games then? which isn't nearly every game out there. I'll admit that AAA games have a hard time getting a bad score from professional review sites but to say that EVERY GAME is overrated because of that is absurd. That criticism would only apply to AAA games. unless you would have data that would say other wise. And the data that was provided in that thread didn't say that.

I would assume majority of games would be in a 1.0-10 range? I still don't get where you come up with this majority of ALL games fall into this 8.5-9.5 range you came up with. for AAA games sure but not for EVERY type of game.

All games are still overrated. It's just that the AAAs almost always get scored an 80+ and if they aren't 80+, they're probably upper 70s with only a few that actually get say lower the say 75. We have the occasional Destiny, Kane & Lynch, Battlefront 2 but those are very low in numbers. Games below AAAs still get overrated, look at Vampyr at 70, I played it and not one element in the whole game I would consider above average outside of the music score. 5/10 is average, not 7/10. When you see a 5-6/10 score, don't you think that game is shit? Whereas you should think it's average or slightly above average, but scores across the board are inflated. Again, what do you think the chances are that Spiderman will score less than an 80 on Metacritic? At best like maybe a 10% chance and it'll still be a 75+. Isn't that a problem? Whereas I personally gave Uncharted 4 a 4/10 and gave God of War a 6/10 (though I think I should lower that because everytime I think about it, I like it less). Uncharted 4 was IMO below average and GoW was slightly above average. Also, just think about if there was a "fresh" RottenTomato rating for games, just about every AAA game would literally be at 99%-100% fresh; FFXIII would be 99% fresh BTW.

Again, I wasn't saying all games fall into a 8.5-9.5 range. I was saying most game's review scores (just take a single game) fall into a 1.0 range, which I just used 8.5-9.5 as an example. Like if you look at Witcher 3, 80% of its review scores fall between 9.0-10. Where's the differing opinions at? I did the same thing with Incredibles 2 and the highest concentrated "bracket" was 8.0-9.0 but only 45% of all reviews fell into that bracket.

I can't really comment on his observations on GTA IV as I haven't ever played it nor know any details of it (so I can refute or agree about the parts he assured I have more fun with or find more memorable); but I have to say something because it's most of his video. The most I can get from that is his observations is "GTA IV doesn't excel in the qualities I look for in a videogame. I find the seriousness in the story conflicting with the satirical humor outside of it and disjointed from the mechanics" (as a side note, I find unfair of him to compare it to Skyrim, as the later was released 3 years afterwards).

His commentary on metacritic reviewers doesn't go deeper than showing scores. He doesn't explain any of the reviews or tries to find if his observations are shared by any on them, nor he comments why the points they glorify are meaningful enough (heck, he doesn't even mention their points). He just steps back, looks at the scores and throws a couple of plausibly sounding theories to make the reviews sound less legitimate, without having to even read them. Maybe he is right (we are talking about 2008, lots of broken clocks were right), but for what he shows in the video, he is still guessing and jumping into conclusions. In other words, I couldn't find where he points out the major problems in the scoring criteria; just a shallow "I don't agree with their scores, so they must be wrong".

I feel unfair for criticizing Errant Signal video in this way. It's clearly intended to analyze GTA IV, not the reviews; but for being something you recommended to watch, I'm posibly missing something that you clearly saw in it.

You don't really need to have played GTA4 to understand most of it because all Rockstar games are basically the same game as GTA3, I haven't played GTA4 either. They all feature totally linear/scripted missions that don't take advantage of their open worlds, controls that are behind the times, and all feature the same type of writing from Dan Houser. Dan Houser is worse than even freaking Kojima at telling instead of showing. I played a bit of RDR before quitting and even the opening cinema on a train was a bunch of NPCs spouting off about politics and it just continued on from here; I was like "I get it already, you don't have to spoon feed me themes and messages constantly, just write good characters and dialog instead."

Yeah, his video was more on GTA4 vs a critique on reviewers. He does point out how GTA4 is sorta the black sheep in the GTA franchise where the vast majority of gamers didn't find it to be the 98/100 masterpiece that it received. He does point out how critics seem to rate games more based on how polished the content is vs how much they actually enjoyed it (aka how "good" it is). Basically that whole thing where reviews skew towards being "objective" even though you can't objectively score anything. You see it with gamer mentality as well like how you'll constantly read a post where someone says 'GameXYZ is at worst an 8/10 objectively speaking' to discredit a review as being bias like say Jim Sterling's 7/10 Zelda score. It's the reason why if you look a game's review scores, you'll find a very high % of reviews all in a 1.0 range like how 80% of Witcher 3 reviews fall in the 9.0-10 range. It's OK to not like a game regardless if your a professional reviewer or just a normal gamer.

The other reason why I linked to the video was not just for his take on critic reviews but the fact that there is plenty of things to not like about GTA, which is rather devoid in professional reviews.

 

[Mad World]

no Rockstar is still the most overrated of them all.

Yeah - Rockstar does seem to be pretty bloody overrated. The amount of stupid, boring missions in their games is staggering. Also, it's pathetic with respect to how little they seem to care about the singleplayer. They've thrown in tons and tons of content for the online portion, and we all know that it's because of the stupid Shark Cash Cards. It's great for people who like that, but for people like me (who only do singleplayer in GTA V), it sucks.

As for CD Projekt Red: the Witcher 3 is quite fun, but it seems to be a bit overhyped.