Reviewers jumping on the hype train

[Imperioratorex Caprae]

I have serious doubts that there's a large percentage of paid reviewers who're "on the take" from AAA publishers. I'd hedge a bet to say one would be hard pressed to find any of significance beyond say IGN.

A large number of user reviews have little to no credibility or objectivity. I've seen a handful of decent reviews per game and a shit ton of, I hesitate severely to even call them this, reviews that are nothing more than "game sucks" or "x publisher is shit" type comments. And I'd also hedge bets that some of the more negative reviews are from people who may not have even played the game just decided to hate on it for x, y, or z reasons.

I am not going to pan all user reviews as I've read some that actually were more informative than some professional reviews. I do feel some of these pro critics are perhaps getting lazy or overwhelmed (I don't know them personally so I can't rightly judge their life and professional situations) and thus aren't able or willing to give a game enough time to properly review it.

Are some of them getting hyped? Perhaps but I would think its a bit forward to baseline accuse or label most of them as AAA publisher shills. No, not forward, patently false and wrong. I do believe in journalistic integrity and I am a realist. What that means is that I believe that there are more people out there who're doing their jobs and doing them the right way and there are a small percentage of scumbags who cut corners and do whatever they can to get ahead while sacrificing their integrity and character.

And when it comes to consumers, having worked in customer service in many fields, there's very little integrity there and a lot of disingenuous people who're more interested in causing trouble, making noise or getting something for free. If they can't get what they want, they'll burn the shit to the ground if they can. The least vocal type of consumer? The happy one. They don't post reviews unless they're really passionate about things or like to write. I'd wager most happy folk will give word of mouth recommendations but don't feel the need to write glowing reviews... or they're not confident they can translate their happiness with said product into words.

I don't speak for everyone, and there are exceptions to everything including my own experiences. Just because I haven't seen something, or seen enough of it, doesn't mean its not there.

 

[StriderShinryu]

Diablo 3 had several valid issues not listed in "professional" game reviews. And the fact that a single-player game is even allowed to have multiplayer lag is complete bullshit.

Define a "valid" issue so objective that it absolutely MUST be in a review of the game, or that review is rendered unprofessional. Because game criticism, short of "it doesn't work", tends to be of the highly subjective variety.

Also, and this is particularly common in PC releases with technical issues, what if the reviewer never experienced the issue in question? As an example, I know when I was playing Diablo 3 I experienced what I would call online lag maybe 3 or 4 times in the 40 or 50 hours I spent playing. I also don't have the best PC so that could have easily been a PC performance issue and not necessarily online lag. Once again, are we then ending up back at the point where a professional reviewer is supposed to hold off on their own personal opinion and wait to see what the general public consensus is? "Well, I had no issues at all with running the game, but I'm going to dock the game 3 points because an unknown number of others say they've had connection issues."

I understand how you think, yes many haters make reviews just for the sake of complaining. But overall it seems more accurate then the "professional" reviews.

The thing is, it seems more accurate to you because you agree with the user reviews and not with the professional reviews. I'm not saying there's anything wrong with disagreeing with (or agreeing with) professional reviews. Agree with the reviewers whose opinions match your own. But there is no such thing as a 100% accurate review because a review is just a hopefully educated opinion.

Well I don't agree with all user meta scores. Like mass effect 3 for example.
However many seem far more fair. Take dragon age 2 which generally is considered a dissapointment yet it has 8.2 in meta rating, but 44% from the users.
But yes people should follow the reviewers they think knows what their doing. But I still think that there is some serious problems when so many reviewers oppinion is different from the peoples.
Even if Diablo 3 was judged on a few hours played it still deserves no way near 89% Since the story was at best mediocre and gameplay lacked any challange.

They should have an educated view on things, yet many are more easily hyped then 12 year olds.

Yes, and Greg Tito of The Escapist gave DA2 a 5/5 score. You know what, I loved the game too despite it's flaws and I'd probably rate it as an overall experience maybe a 4.5/5 or even a 5/5 myself. He's a professional reviewer and I'm not, but we largely arrived at the same score. Is his review not accurate to his personal experience? Is my review not accurate to my personal experience? Both clearly differ quite largely from the user average.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Explaining what we enjoyed or didn't and why is part of the job. If something functions on paper but we're not enjoying it, we should say that and explain why. Games are something you experience, not... I dunno what you do with games. Maybe time menu load times? Monitor frame rates? Anyway, most of us are pretty open-minded and most editors assign games to reviewers who have experience with the genre or series. They're unlikely to hook someone up with a game they already know they won't like.

Also, how the hell can we be hive minds when the good ones try to stay clear of reviews of the game they're reviewing until they've handed in their piece? Heck, more often than not there are barely any reviews to check anyway, since most of us get our review copies around the same time.

Or maybe we're connected on a different level. Like telepathy? Oh, that would be neat! I've always want to be a super hero!

Just because a game got mostly good reviews doesn't mean everyone will (or should) like it. Read the reviews and think about how you feel about the things the reviewer said. Like, did he praise the openess of the world? (making blind guesses here; I have zero experience with The Witcher series) If you know you prefer linear games, you know you'll probably won't like that aspect. Be a smart reader, don't just thoughtlessly consume a review, think about what the reviewer is saying means to you.

Edit: want an example from me, one of those hiveminded reviewers? GTA games get excellent reviews and millions of players adore the series. I don't give a shit and don't play them if I don't have too. It's just not my kind of game. Other people can marry the game for all I care, but I feel in no way obligated to like it. Neither do I feel insulted by the fact that other people do like the series. Knowing your own likes and dislikes is an awesome thing. You should try is sometime

I'm saying professional reviewers have become a hive mind not because they all get together, discuss a game, and then come to basically the same opinion from that. Nor am I saying game reviewers are paid off either. I'm saying game reviewing has become what I would call standardized to where reviewers try to rate games objectively to where they won't mark off points if they don't like something, only if that something doesn't actually function. I'm not saying this has even happened consciously either, it's just sort of unconsciously happened over time. Therefore, I'm not saying this is some conspiracy or anything like that. Way back when EGM had 3-person reviews, you got more variance in review scores than you do with over 50 different reviews of a game now.

For example, Jim Sterling is one of the only people that will rate games completely based on how much he enjoyed a game. Look at his reviews for Assassin's Creed 2, Vanquish, Final Fantasy XIII, Batman: Arkham Origins, etc. I don't even agree with all of those reviews (WHICH I SHOULDN'T) but he really does honestly review games. I HATED Assassin's Creed 2 for it's overall change in structure, it basically went from Hitman-lite to GTA, I was hoping the series would be more like Hitman but it went in the exact opposite direction. Assassin's Creed 1 had focus whereas the sequel, you are doing nothing but faffing about. With Batman: Arkham Origins, Jim really hated all the minor changes to combat and sometimes such minor changes to the combat system can basically ruin it. Vanquish is one of my favorite PS3 games, Jim didn't like it, and that's fine too. Don't you also see the same mentality with gamers themselves as they see review scores for a game they haven't even played yet and will make a comment like that game deserved at least an 8.5. This same mindset that a game's quality is objective is not just on the reviewer side but the gamer side. Just look at all the shit Greg Tito took for giving GTA5 a 7/10 because he didn't like the characters, he should've rated the game lower in my opinion, it seemed liked he didn't enjoy the game much from his written review.

I hate the GTA series (and Rockstar games in general) because a sandbox game is supposed to have open-ended missions whereas GTA does not. As Yahtzee says it's an instruction following simulator. I realized that far before Yahtzee was even known, I discovered how bad Rockstar games were when I played the original Mercenaries and since then, I haven't enjoyed an open world Rockstar game and that started with San Andreas. Where's the professional reviewer(s) that shares that opinion of GTA? He/she isn't there and it's a valid critique of Rockstar's games and GTA just gets an overall score as close to 100 as possible.

One last problem as to why games all seem to get similar scores is because 7/10 is average, not 5/10. So if a reviewer likes a game, he/she has only 7-10 to score a game instead of anything over 5. That also factors into review scores being so close together compared to other mediums. It makes no sense to have 7 tenths of the scale used to score below average games. If a reviewer scores a game like GTA a 7/10, he/she is already accused of doing it just to get views, god forbid he/she thought the game was average and gave it a 5/10. Do you see say Guardians of the Galaxy fans commenting on a negative review of it saying the movie deserves at least an 8.5 thus this review is wrong? It's the entire game community, not just reviewers.

Define a "valid" issue so objective that it absolutely MUST be in a review of the game, or that review is rendered unprofessional. Because game criticism, short of "it doesn't work", tends to be of the highly subjective variety.

As to it being a single player game...it wasn't. It was an always online lobby game that could be played alone or with friends, much like Guild Wars was. You can argue whether or not this was necessary or whether or not a single player mode would've been a desirable addition, but the Diablo 3 that was released to market was not an offline title, and thus was subject to lag. Developers are not required to stay faithful to previous iterations of their IP. And as Diablo 3 is one of the fastest/highest selling games in history despite said always online requirement, I'd say Blizzard had a pretty good handle on the market for their game.

Valid issue means an issue a gamer had with a game that isn't something like "the game server was down at launch and I can't play" so 1/10 review. I'm not saying every valid issue needs to be in every review as not every reviewer is going to feel it is an issue and some reviewers may have had other, bigger issues that they focused on instead. There is no one "right" review. A lot of valid Diablo 3 issues don't show up at all in the professional reviews. I realize the 3.9 user score is extremely biased. But thinking the Diablo community felt Diablo 3 was 88/100 good is also wrong.

When you are just playing by yourself against AI enemies where there are no other players are in the world, there should not be network lag.

 

[the_dramatica]

Well big name reviewers can rarely come out and say a game is awful because they could lose their ability to request beta access/before release access to get the review out earlier than their competitors. Their sponsers are also developers, and they don't lose that either.

 

[NiPah]

Personal taste, you say a game is bad, I say a game is good.
Sure there can be other aspects to the equation, personal connections to companies, fanboyism, money and power, but most of it all comes down to personal taste.

This is also the reason why some people like country music and some people like rap, or why some people want a burger and some people want carrots, shouldn't be so amazing that people's varying tastes come into effect in games too.

 

[FirstNameLastName]

Is this another thread where we decide to perpetuate the preposterous myth of "objective reviews"?

If you've just now realized that there is disparity between professional critics and consumers then I would like to know how you have survived on the moon all this time. Do you have a special suit that never runs out of oxygen? A secret base? Or are you just naturally able to breath in space?

 

[MysticSlayer]

Or have they based their experiance on far too few hours of gameplay.
Look at Diablo 3 it had pretty good reception from all reviewers but the game was far from great.
Just compare the metacritic ratings, reviewers give it 88% while fans gave it 39%.

I think Diablo III is an odd situation. It received a lot of hate in its first week because of server issues, which may not have affected many reviewers. It also wouldn't surprise me if there were a lot of people doing "protest reviews". You know, those reviews where the person doesn't actually play the game but chooses to use things like Metacritic and Amazon to voice displeasure at something that was announced. Given the amount of shit Diablo III got for things like the auction house even before it release, it wouldn't surprise me if a good chunk of its reviews with 0 as the score were people "protesting" those decisions, and that would drag the User Score down but lack any authority while doing so.

Really, there are just those situations where user reviews aren't really reliable. There are too many instances of gamers absolutely abusing Metacritic. Heck, we see it every single year when a new Call of Duty releases. Yeah, there are times when some reviewers seem to have no clue what they are talking about, but seeing it across the board for reviews is very, very rare. It's certainly more rare than seeing a bunch of people getting angry and using Metacritic to voice that frustration.

 

[Reed Spacer]

Look at the Metacritic entry for 'Dragon Age: Inquistion'; it's blindingly obvious that it's being red-bombed and it's almost impossible to tell which ones are legitimate and which are troll votes.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Personal taste, you say a game is bad, I say a game is good.

I agree. However, where is Critic A likes game XYZ while Critic B dislikes game XYZ? That happens in every other medium. Games are pretty much universally liked or disliked by critics. Even Destiny, which kinda felt like critics "panned" it since 7s are low scores really, has only 1 negative review across all platforms. Many Hollywood blockbusters get horrible reviews across the board, not so with AAA games.

 

[babinro]

1) Reviewers are not objective. They are gamers and typically review games that are associated to genres that they enjoy. Hence why you'll always see a 4x game reviewed on the escapist by it's local 4x fanboy. You'll almost never have someone whose 'meh' on RPG's review the next Bioware or Bethesda game.

2) Reviewers are under tight deadlines due to reader expectations and can seldom play a game as thoroughly as the buyer. As such, they operate a lot on first impressions. Most people who played Diablo 3 for the first time on Normal, Nightmare, Hell and early Inferno had a blast! It wasn't until they entered the nitty gritty 'endgame' where their experience fell apart. For many people, this could easily take 100+ hours especially if you choose to play multiple classes.

3) People share different opinions. Hard to believe but true. For all the hate Diablo 3 received from the fans it also clearly has it's share of fans (I'm one of them...especially pre-AH removal). Had I been a reviewer of the game I'd have likely giving it an ~8.5 out of 10 at launch as well. The reviews largely rang true with my experience. Even though looking back the vanilla launch game was terrible compared to what it is now.

Corruption exists in all of business to some degree. But I simply refuse to believe that it's widespread in gaming to the point where dozens of major review sites are being 'paid' off to give games flattering/unflattering reviews.

I've been burned by several game reviews over the years but I can often see where the 'fun' is supposed to be. I completely regret my purchases of GTA4, Zelda Skyward Sword, Skyrim, L.A. Noire, and DA: Inquisition but I can appreciate why those games all scored well.

 

[Reed Spacer]

Personal taste, you say a game is bad, I say a game is good.

I agree. However, where is Critic A likes game XYZ while Critic B dislikes game XYZ? That happens in every other medium. Games are pretty much universally liked or disliked by critics. Even Destiny, which kinda felt like critics "panned" it since 7s are low scores really, has only 1 negative review across all platforms. Many Hollywood blockbusters get horrible reviews across the board, not so with AAA games.

The trick is to find someone who's taste more or less mirrors your own; if they like a game, you probably will too and vice-versa.

 

[Evilsausage]

Holy cow. Okay, let's see here.

Yes, reviewers absolutely do seem to fall victim to the "hype train". Whether it's because they give a game insufficient play to have a review to market early due to consumer demand, or felt pressure to pump up a score because the publisher is one of their major advertisers, or because the game hit a sweet spot for a particular reviewer but not for the audience. Anything is possible. As we've learned, it's not really an ethical problem unless social justice is involved somehow though.

Look at Diablo 3 it had pretty good reception from all reviewers but the game was far from great.

Diablo 3 got pilloried by fans for always online requirements and Error 37. Very little of its days one Metacritic score bombing had anything to do with the actual game play. Now, years after release, that day one axe-grinding makes the user score even more hilariously invalid than it was at release. User scores, as usual, are completely fucking worthless. Anyone moaning about biased reviewers and then propping up user scores as some kind of panacea is out of their mind.

Same goes for Mists of Pandaria, hated by WoW fans but got good reviews even though it major lackluster.

"Hated by WoW fans". http://strawpoll.me/1091799/r

It was never the most popular expansion, and got a fair share of ridicule for its theme, but by the end the general consensus was that the expansion was reasonably well done, and introduced some much needed renovation to an aging game. That people continued playing it through a record one year content dearth and that it still dominated 50% or more of the North American MMORPG market demonstrated that WoW fans, by and large, endorsed it. Also, what does "major lackluster" mean?

Warlords of Draenor got praised as the best Wow expansion by many reviewers. Even though it really offered nothing new, dumbed down things even more and it lacks end game content.

How did it dumb things down? How does it lack end game content? You're aware WoD enjoyed the single largest uptick in WoW subs in history, right? And that it is near universally praised by the playerbase as the best expansion since WOTLK? Where are these opinions coming from?

User reviews on Metacritic is 6,1 and i can almost bet money it will go down another 10% when people are without content(which wont take long).

Yup. Score bombed for opening week login issues. Once again, user scores are 100% worthless.

Reviewers seem to be clueless about certain things and fail to see how the game will work later on. I think these reviwers should have more knowledge then this.

So score bombing games for launch week problems is salient and forward looking? Those reviews are super helpful AFTER launch week, aren't they?

Would seem to me you're one of many people who get extremely upset when reviews do not match your personal perception of reality. It's possible there's some kind of ethical crisis afoot. Should look into that.

1.

Errors at the first weeks was not the deciding factor why Diablo 3 is conciderd a dissapointment. I have to agree overall it has some nice combat but it gets boring fast since it lacks the needed content to make an ARPG fun to continue playing.
Extreamly limited build diversity, boring loot, lack of randomized maps, limited end game content, way too easy until you got to inferno etc...Lets not forget the AH, since the game had such low chance of dropping loots 90% you would get a gear upgrade was from visiting the AH. Instead of improving on Diablo 2 it actually dumbed things down and removed far more then it added. I would say all of THAT is what made it flopp.

2.

Pandaria really didn't offer much new that we haven't seen before. Yes a new setting (which was silly) some stuff here and there but nothing noticable. Not to mention Pandaria introduced the dumbed down talent system.
Not saying Pandaria was catastrophe, but for a game to be great it has to atleast offer something more then what we got. It was mediocre and the users gave it a mediocre score. Seems fair to me.


3.

Yes WoD did see a massive spike of players returning. Most likely because it offerd a continent that resembled Outland and the level 90 boost. But people are already qutting in big numbers, i have heard even faster then people did in Mists of Pandaria. Can't say if this rumor is 100% true but i wouldn't be surprised if it was.
WoD is alright but once you been level 100 for awhile your gonna run out of things to do. Yes you got some heroics and PVP both which you can get items really fast. After that there is only raiding, haven't tried the raid content but I have heard its very low on content. Only two tiers of sets you can get far less then what you had access to in for example Burning crusade.
When they are on their 5th expansion you would expect a bit more, instead its getting more and more lazy. Its just same stuff in a different package.

4. And you know the scores are only based on that because off?? Besides i said that i can almost bet it will go down even more in time. If thats the case its not gonna have anything to do with the oppening weekend, its gonna be because they get bored.

5. Upset that it doesn't match my personal reality? So are you saying its a accurate score that Dragon age 2 got a metacritic review of 82%? I don't think you will get many people to agree on that.
Same goes for Diablo 3, it might not deserve 3.9 but its a far more fair score then 8.8% which it got from the critics.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

The trick is to find someone who's taste more or less mirrors your own; if they like a game, you probably will too and vice-versa.

Like I said, there's pretty much only 1 review of a game since they are all the same. Where's the reviewer that doesn't like Rockstar's linear missions in a sandbox? I think only Yahtzee has ever leveled that criticism and he only sorta does game reviews. Where's the 3rd-person shooter game critic that will break down how many TPSs fail with simple mechanic issues like not having a proper shoulder swap (like Uncharted or MP3) which I will find in minutes of playing the game? I like Jim Sterling but I don't really agree with him THAT much to be a go-to reviewer for me. Whereas, it's not hard to find a movie reviewer I agree with most of the time. I even found a movie critic that hates Star Wars as much as I do.

 

[SecondPrize]

There seems to be somewhat of a herd mentality for reviews these days, like a narrative nearly all the critics follow for each game. So if a few award something an 11/10 citizen kane of all years, everyone is going to do it. Same if it's bad. There's nothing hugely unusual about this but they seem to be more closely aligned than the gamers I know ever are and they seem more aligned than they were in the past.
I dunno about the difference between professional and user reviews, if the low reviews on the user side can be attributed to trolls, then they're pretty selected because the great games that you can't really talk shit about score high with both groups and the obvious trash scores low.

 

[Evilsausage]

Thanks for all the replies and ofc I don't completly agree with user reviews just like i don't agree with professional reviewers.
But you have to atleast acknowledge that that there is a problem. Not just blame everything on angry user reviews and say the professional reviews are always fair. If a game like Diablo has 3.9 in rating by its users its most likely flawed in some way. Even if the score might be a tad extream.

 

[NiPah]

Personal taste, you say a game is bad, I say a game is good.

I agree. However, where is Critic A likes game XYZ while Critic B dislikes game XYZ? That happens in every other medium. Games are pretty much universally liked or disliked by critics. Even Destiny, which kinda felt like critics "panned" it since 7s are low scores really, has only 1 negative review across all platforms. Many Hollywood blockbusters get horrible reviews across the board, not so with AAA games.

When you judge a game you have to factor in a lot of different aspects, almost no AAA game fails in all aspects.
When you judge a movie you pretty much have the story and acting, so scores can be quite extreme.

Why do so many game journalists like big name action shooters while seemingly universally hating JRPGs? I honestly don't know, back when I actually read reviews in print magazines it was a pretty small pool of reviewers and an even smaller pool of editors and management, maybe the bias spilled over? Humans are creatures of habit and imitation.

But yeah, most times when a game is playable and fun it scores high marks, everything else doesn't really matter (in a review).

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Errors at the first weeks was not the deciding factor why Diablo 3 is conciderd a dissapointment.

They are an overwhelming factor in its low metacritic score.

Instead of improving on Diablo 2 it actually dumbed things down and removed far more then it added. I would say all of THAT is what made it flopp.

Flop? It's one of the highest/fastest selling games of all time.

And in case you think it was due to hype/mislead consumers, the expansion pack sold extremely well too.

Pandaria really didn't offer much new that we haven't seen before.

The talent system wasn't "dumbed down". Old talent trees were just as prone to FOTM builds and paint by numbers point allocations as the present situation. End game content was as hard if not more difficult than before.

But people are already qutting in big numbers, i have heard even faster then people did in Mists of Pandaria. Can't say if this rumor is 100% true but i wouldn't be surprised if it was.

Source? The only metrics we have for tracking population outside of data Blizzard releases to us (Ratpr/XFire) have WoW at #2 overall amongst played titles (behind only League of Legends) and #4 (behind LoL again and two CoD titles).

And that's keeping in account that population concurrency always declines sharply after the launch week of an MMO, often by 80-90%. Concurrency drops =/= throngs of people quitting. You'd think after more than a decade of the genre existing people would have learned the trends by now.

WoD is alright but once you been level 100 for awhile your gonna run out of things to do. Yes you got some heroics and PVP both which you can get items really fast. After that there is only raiding, haven't tried the raid content but I have heard its very low on content. Only two tiers of sets you can get far less then what you had access to in for example Burning crusade.

I've been level 100 for weeks now and I still have plenty to do. More than I can reasonably hope to accomplish in the time I have available to game, which is abundant. The majority of people are still progressing through Highmaul. Other than one or two of the world's best guilds, no one has cleared it in Mythic, and the vast majority of the playerbase are still progressing through normal. Again, what is your source for this information? A buddy? Your uncle? A guy who knows a guy?

When they are on their 5th expansion you would expect a bit more, instead its getting more and more lazy. Its just same stuff in a different package.

Define lazy. Substantiate this argument. Explain why WoD is "lazier" than Burning Crusade. Do you know how much raid content BC had at launch? You are aware it didn't LAUNCH with Sunwell/Black Temple/etc, right? Do you know how many raids were in the game at Vanilla? How many raids did WOTLK launch with? Can you count to one? There's your answer.

And you know the scores are only based on that because off??

Because I was there at launch and I read them? Also I can go and read them right now if I want?

Besides i said that i can almost bet it will go down even more in time.

Well, yes, it's quite apparent you have a raging hate-on for the title despite very evidently not having played it and having the most nebulous of reasons to substantiate why you think it's bad. I'm not surprised you think it's going to do poorly.

Upset that it doesn't match my personal reality? So are you saying its a accurate score that Dragon age 2 got a metacritic review of 82%?

The "accurate" score is whatever that particular reviewer thought it merited, whether that score be 0% or 100%. You're aware reviews are subjective, right?

Same goes for Diablo 3, it might not deserve 3.9 but its a far more fair score then 8.8% which it got from the critics.

What makes a score "fair" or "unfair"? Are there rules of fairness when it comes to reviews? Is there some kind of objective metric you feel should be applied? Or do you just get stroppy when you read a review and it doesn't reflect what you believe?

 

[Aiddon_v1legacy]

It happens frequently; a lot of sites will deny it, but a lot of them do get swept up in the hype trains manufactured by publishers and rarely do journalists run contrary to the narrative publishers want to create for their game. For instance, one of the WORST examples I ever saw of this was with the attempted DMC reboot. It was weird how gamers were actually correct in lambasting the game while every reviewer/journalist couldn't wait to line up and stroke Ninja Theory's massive ego. Right up until launch, fans kept presenting arguments that were completely valid and well-demonstrated while journalists resorted to cheap shots, name-calling, and generally dismissing anything that didn't line up with their opinion. It was a smear campaign. Then the game came out, was unarguably a piece of crap and journalists STILL tried to defend it, instead of switching their tune to the complete opposite of what they had been spouting before by saying it wasn't supposed to be taken seriously, it was shut-your-brain-off entertainment, etc. For crying out loud, not a single reviewer mentioned the sniper rifle abortion scene. It was just weird.

However, I would say a better example of showing the weird double standard with reviews is how things turn out post-mortem. You know what I mean; a few months after a game that gets all sorts of awards, high accolades, and sales figures is then dissected and reviewers are suddenly going "hey, maybe this ISN'T as good as we reflected in our reviews" as if they're trying to regain the street cred they lost when said reviews were written in the first place. For example, take Assassin's Creed III; at launch, it was reviewed quite well. It was pretty in line with the other entries, rating higher than Revelations but not on the level of Brotherhood or AC II. However, by the time AC IV came out, people were lambasting III as boring tripe. Y'know, despite the fact that they praised it at launch and gave both entries the same review scores on average. Some other examples are the Mass Effect series (which would take too much to fuly articulate), Bioshock Infinite (people drooling over its plot and fighting, but then months down the line criticizing how its gruesomeness didn't match up with the swashbuckling adventure angle and its gameplay was severely dumbed down from Bioshock 1 and 2), any Elder Scrolls entry, etc. I don't know whether this is hindsight is 20/20, or that reviewers were just too gutless to admit the truth and then came out of the woodwork when the big, bad publishers weren't watching anymore and thus didn't care.

It seems a FEW games have started not being able to sweep people up in the hype train at launch; Watch_Dogs was considered a tedious bore and thus deemed unworthy of hype, Destiny failed to garner any attention beyond being just a shittier version of Borderlands, AC: Unity was torn to shreds for its bugs and considered a step back overall for the series, etc. I don't know whether this is because reviewers are getting smarter or just because even they can't ignore how disappointing or just plain crappy the hugely hyped releases have turned out to be. Either way, it's fascinating to see such things in action.

 

[NPC009]

Would it be childish if I said I'd rather stay away from this thread now?

The broad sweeping generalisations, the us vs them mentality...

Look, you want to know why so few reviewers seem to enjoy the more niche genres like JRPGs? Because we are gamers and the gamers who enjoy those genres are few in number. Wouldn't it be more worrying if the 'hive mind' had decided JRPGs are the bees knees despite the avarage gamer not getting what the buzz is all about? (I;m sorry, that was terrible.)

Now, just because there are people who do like those genres doesn't mean they're all fanboys. If anything I may be more strict than many of my fellow reviewers. When you've played hundreds of games of the same genre you won't be easily impressed. For instance, if I were to review a modern shooter, I would be more than able to report on my overall experience, but I wouldn't be able to compare it to other games in the genre. I may not even be bothered all that much by things some shooter fans consider important, such as weapons that don't look and feel much like their reallife counterpart.

Now, you could argue that it would be better if every critic reviewed every type of game. But are there that many people out there who want to read a review of a game they don't care about written by a reviewer who has about the same amount of bleeps to give? It'll rain complaints if editors started assigning games to reviewers who 'don't know what they're talking about'. There is no demand for it and it will only serve as fuel for new 'reviewers hate games/are terrible people/should all lose their jobs' rants.

Also, I don't get why there should always be reviewers handing out very lows scores just for diversity's sake. Please remember our frame of reference. We've played hundreds, if not thousands of games. We have seen the worst of the worst. Final Fantasy XIII wasn't one of 'em.

Now, if you want to feel good about your taste by reading reviews that trash the games you're uninterested in (because that's what this is really all about, isn't it? People seeking validation and getting angry when they don't get it from reviewers?), why not watch some stuff like Unskippable instead?

 

[NPC009]

About the post above me (by paragraphs):

1) Then have a reviewer specializing in JRPG's, if you don't like the genre than your review doesn't worth jack.

Sadly, finding the right people is easier said than done. Most gamer either know their stuff but can't really write all that well or vice versa. And there's a build-in setback for freelance reviewers of niche games: they are paid less. There's less demand for reviews of niche games (what with them being niche and all) and the ones that are reviewed get less space. Magazines tend to pay by the page. What does this mean? Well, it's not uncommon for me to get paid what is basically a quarter of minimum wage for a JRPG review. That sucks, because my colleague who's writing a piece on some triple A title may be paid four or even six times as much for the same amount of work.

2) Then you are a terrible reviewer, if you can't differenciate between games that you are reviewing than what's the point of even writing a review? imagine a film critic saying he can't differenciate between Die Hard and The Expandables.

And that's why editors prefer to assign games based on reviewers' experiences en preferences. There are so many games out there and most are a lot longer than the avarage movie. You can't really help but specialize.

3) But it's your job, you should care about the games you're reviewing, otherwise what's the point? Plus I'm pretty sure everyone can have a valid opinion of a game as long as it's not a part of a series and if the complaints are valid, that's the only thing that's important.

Maybe 'care' wasn't the right word... Of course we care, because like you said, it's our job to care. But you know that spark? That click when you play a game that suit your tastes so when it seems to be made for you? Well, there's likely not going to be a spark or click if you have to play a type of game you don't care much about and it's not something you can force to happen. You either feel certain emotions or you don't.

If we do find ourselves reviewing a game that leaves us indifferent, we should explain it does so. Not just state the facts (those reviews are boring to read), but really get that indifference across to the readers. After all, that indifference is part of the experience as well.

4) By low scores we mean actual scores, 90+ is a score for only the most perfect games, you shouldn't judge things by the backlash the judging will cause. As someone who didn't hate FF13, a good score would be around 80-70, not 90+.

Actually, what a 90+ means varies from publication to publication. I have written for four different magazines thusfar and most have a pretty similar scale. There 90+ means that the game is one of the best games on the system, one of those games that will probably be remembered as a classic. There it's rare to see more than one game getting a 90+ within a single issue and it's not unusual not to see any 90s at all. But there's another magazine were 90+ means something else: one of the best games that year. You'll see a lot more 90+ scores in that magazine.

So always check to grading scale. Please don't be one of those people who views what may be a respectable 7,5/10 as an insult.

5) If we aren't interested in a game why should we be angry by it getting a low score? Were talking about scores for games we might actually buy, we want them to reflect the actual quality rather than appease the fanboys. There's enough people online complaining about games.

But this is something we as reviewers can do little about. We follow the grading scale of the publication we write for. If people decide to interpret our scores differently and feel we didn't do the game justice, what are we supposed to do besides point them towards the page that explains what the scores actually mean?

I wonder if the preorder craze these past years is because people lost any belief in gaming reviews since the games are promised to recieve good scores as long as they're playable.

That would be kind of silly. "We don't know how this game will turn out and the reviewers are going to lie to us anyway, so let's all give companies our money before the game is even out!"

And you know what? Those triple A games with all the marketing buzz and the hypetrain going full speed often recieve good - as in 60/100 or higher - scores, because they're actually decent games. Good ones even.