More concerning than Bethesda’s decision to withhold early review codes from certain outlets is how heavily some sites are relying on the game to drive their business.
It’s been probably 10 years or so since I was writing reviews, and I have to say, I never felt pressure to skew a review one way or another.
The biggest heat I got was from fanboys when I had a sneak peek at PAX of Duke Nukem Forever and had to report how shitty it was. “YOU DON’T KNOW!!! YOU DIDN’T PLAY THE WHOLE GAME!!! YOU HACK!!!”
And I was like “Yeah, you’re right, I didn’t play the whole game, I played what their marketing team WANTED me to play and it sucked, you think the parts they DIDN’T want me to play are going to be better?”
Surprise… the game stunk up the joint.
But when it came to reviewing games, I approached every review as if the game were a 10/10, and then as I played I looked for reasons to subtract or add points. The plusses and minuses would balance out and I’d have a final score.
As a former teacher, I used school grades, which is why I think most sites are on a 7-10 scale.
A - 90%+
B - 80%+
C - 70%+
D - 60%+
F - 59% and down.A game can be bad because it’s a bad game or it can be bad because it’s functionally broken. D is generally the Ralph Wiggum of games, possible to like, but you have to admit it’s pretty bad.
I had to give a failing review to Assassin’s Creed Liberty on the Playstation Vita even though I really liked how it looked and it played, because it had a game breaking bug that made your save file unloadable. Ubi took 2 months to fix it, rendering it unplayable for the first two months after launch.
Once it was fixed, I amended the review, but it was plainly unacceptable to release it in a broken state like that.
Gaming journalism is in a sorry state. I am thankful that we live in an age where I can just watch someone play something for a while. Seeing how they react and how the game flows can be a far better gauge of quality than a published review.
Of course, it also makes you run the risk of spoilers, which sucks. There are a few YouTubers out there making what I would say are fair reviews, but that could change in an instant.
big published reviews don’t mean anything to me and I’m surprised they do to most people. everything is an 8-10 out of 10. how do people not find an issue with that
“Decay”
What’s left to decay? It’s dust now. Remember when Eidos used a PR firm to strongarm websites into not publishing reviews of Tomb Raider: Underworld if they were less than an 8/10 till after launch?
“That’s right. We’re trying to manage the review scores at the request of Eidos.” When asked why, the spokesperson said: “Just that we’re trying to get the Metacritic rating to be high, and the brand manager in the US that’s handling all of Tomb Raider has asked that we just manage the scores before the game is out, really, just to ensure that we don’t put people off buying the game, basically.”
That was 15 years ago, and despite the fact that Barrington Harvey went on to lie and pretend they never said that, everybody knew that kind of thing was old hat back then too. Mainstream gaming journalism is a captured industry.
Apparently Jeff Gerstmann received the review code quite a bit later than other publications. He said it’s quite a ridiculous story that perhaps he would talk about it someday (his tone sounds like this is a story in the far future)
Jeff is ex (old) Gamespot, ex Giantbomb, and the guy who got fired from Gamespot due to external pressure from Eidos after he gave Kane and Lynch a 6 out of 10.
yeah but now he’s just a guy in a spare bedroom with 4.5k patrons and under 40k youtube subscribers (of which I am one)
it’s not that hard to blame game studios for not really thinking he’s worth it anymore
More likely that they know he’s probably not going to give it a glowing review, especially after Fallout 4, so he didn’t get one. This is something many publishers have historically done. It keeps reviews higher at launch so that people looking at reviews or metacritic scores see more positive information than after the dust settles.
Stuff like this is why I never buy new games. Not only can you not trust the critics, but players get so blinded by hype and buyers remorse that they’ll ignore everything bad about the games they love.
It’s always wiser to wait for the hype to die down and see what the retrospective consensus is
You also get fixed bugs, discounts and “all DLCs included” bundles. Welcome to c/patientgamers@lemmy.ml!
It’s not like we’d be lack of games to play anyway (avoiding eye contact with my Steam library)
Is there any reason to follow game journalism outlets anymore? Reading some positive/negative Steam reviews and watching some gameplay footage on its own gives a really good impression of what a game is like IMO.
I haven’t followed professional outlets for a long time. It’s pretty obvious most of them do not have enough time to give a proper review to these massive, 120+ hour long games. I used to read Computer Gaming World. Their reviewers would often mention that their rules required them to complete the game. Most of the reviews I see today, they don’t even necessarily get the whole fuckin’ game in their review copy. Just look at BG3.
Phenomenal game, with a solid story, incredible characters, fun game play, and just… Bugs. Lotta bugs. Especially after the first act. You might not even realize you are getting them because so many are that things that should happen, don’t. The reviews for it clearly only covered the first, most polished act. And even then, they didn’t actually mention bugs there and while it’s the most polished, it is still far from perfect. As time goes on and more people push further into the game, now those same review outlets put out editorials reporting on players bitching about the bugs on social media. Things that should have been covered in their own official reviews in the first damn place.
If all they’re going to do is write a bunch of bullshit they were likely paid to say, and then rely on users to generate more “news” content for them, I’m just going to stick with going straight to other players. There are still plenty that think for themselves and give honest, detailed descriptions of the game while trying to limit their personal opinions and bias. I want to be told how the thing actually is and make my own mind up based on my opinions; reviews can be objective.
Sounds like the real problem is publishers not actually finishing their games before release, so even if reviewers did try to play the whole thing, they couldn’t. The switch to digital downloads (over pressed media) has created an opportunity to do more with a game, but the reality is that it’s simply made games more expensive (since there is no resale market) and, worse, created an entire generation of game developers and managers who think that the launch date product is like a rough draft copy of their book report for Freshman English.
