Charmille said:
Subjectivity can't be wrong. That's why it's subjective. Objectivity has a truth value to it though, and as such, can be wrong.
I disagree.
Subjectivity can be wrong provided the statement on what the subject is wind up being uninformed or not experiencing the entire thing.
Let's use the recent high ratings of Total War Rome 2's reviews as an example. Many of the reviewers subjectively liked the game. They thought it was presented well. Problem is, their subjective experience was very limited due to the nature of a few factors.
1.It was released in the busiest season of gaming. Many reviewers are playing multiple games as quickly as possible to cover as many big releases as they can. So they may not be able to dedicate as much time with a game as usual.
2.Total War is a strategy war game. If we are of the mind that reviews are there to inform the potential customer of the game's qualities, objective and subjective, then the reviewer should have spent dozens of hours forming their opinion due to the grand nature of the detail put into most strategy war games. This was not done for Total War Rome 2 due to time
constraints and the length of understanding Creative Assembly's titles.
3.Creative Assembly fully admitted to creating their games for high metacritic scores. This generally means that the first few hours of the game was what was worked on for launch the most. This was when the critical acclaim came in, the sales would follow due to most video game sales happening in the first week, therefore gaining Creative Assembly an instant profit on the product.
Here's the problem.
The more customers and non-website based review/first impressionists played the game, the more they found they game was, in an objective sense, not finished. The AI would send units of 12 up against the player's unit stack of hundreds plus. The AI would try to besiege a city with 10 men. Boats would travel on land. Enemy units would march in circles while in battle. Missions would not work. It would crash often. The graphical fidelity was not matching what was shown in gameplay trailers.
My point is, the people who reviewed the game clearly had the wrong subjective opinion of Total War 2's release state. Subjectivity can be wrong in cases where the subject was only minimally experienced.
Another example was when a bunch of reviewers put out their subjective belief that Beyond: Two Souls didn't give the player choices to make.
In a game with 27+ endings...
That'd be like watching Batman Begins' first 30 minutes and then writing a review that you hated the movie due to Batman not showing up.