Okay, my response to this yesterday was a bit brief, so here we go:

My view on changing review scores is that, if done right, more publications should do it. Video games are almost unique in that it can change so much both for better and for worse after release. Movies, music and books are what they are and won't change unless you count Director's Cut versions etc.

BUT you have to be consistent if you're doing this, and do it both if the game changes for the better and for worse. As far as I know, Polygon has never changed a review score for the better after release because of added content, balance tweaks or similar. What do you do with a game like TF2 or Dota 2, which changes SO MUCH after release. What about MMORPGs?

And as for this particular case. As I said before, I think it's too little too late. They waited almost 5 weeks after release on the PC before doing this, and the game has been fucking broken since day 1. Why? I get that you maybe have to wait some time for the devs to fix early bugs, but this game was not even working for many people. When you wait so long it won't have much impact on anything except give your site some clicks, and it feels useless. They reviewed this game without playing it on actual live servers, and when they saw what a clusterfuck it became post release they should've done this weeks ago.

So: Be consistent if you're gonna do this.

While I believe the multiplayer deserves at least a 9/10 to begin with, dropping it to a 4/10 as a reprimand for the ongoing server issues and the general instability is justified. DICE always released their games in a wonky state, but BF4 takes the cake. It locked-up my PS3 regularly, maybe once every two to three hours of playing the game on average. BF4 on PS4, I've yet to play more than two rounds in a row, without it crashing to *Desktop* mid-game. There's also some major sound bugs on some maps, like Golmud Railway Conquest 64.

Funny thing, PS4 asks me to *Accept and Report* the crash. How about *it's unacceptable, do your QA better next time*. I want to play the friggin' game bad, but it's just not there yet - over a month after its original release.

I think these things are what makes me think Polygon should look over their review system. On one hand, I can understand not giving publishers slack for releasing a broken product, but a review shouldn't be a preview with a possible score. It just makes them look really undecided and inconsistent as they don't later (as others have pointed out) point out when those issues are fixed.

I think the term "backpeddled" is often misused. It's frequently applied to things to try and make it seem like altering your opinions to accommodate new information about a thing is something bad instead of good. Personally, I think Polygon have a pretty solid system worked out. You may want an unchanging immutable score, but the fixed set-in-stone scores other publications give games may not reflect the reality of the situation. Polygon are attempting to give up-to-date and currently relevant critical assessments of games and I think the advantage of that is obvious.

They still played that version of the game and said it was a 9.5. It's not like after launch Maxis changed the city sizes.

Yeah, that's my thought on it as well and people here are mostly assuming that the site's reasons for doing that are very manipulative and selfish (e.g. clickbait) and I just wish people would just stop bringing out the pitchforks and calling the site horrible for every little thing they are doing.

Hmm... maybe dropping the review score worked:

http://www.polygon.com/2013/12/4/5175588/ea-halts-battlefield-4-expansions

Changing review scores is such a needless policy.

GOTTA GET THOSE CLICKS

I disagree, I don't much care for battlefield franchise, but if they felt the game was deserving of a 7.5 rating that would require the game to deliver a consistent gameplay experience for players to justify that rating. You can't just put the shiny coat of make up on the pig during the fair, you gotta take that pig home at some point and your opinion of the pig might go down when he takes a shit on your rug.

I think this is good. Battlefield 4 currently deserves a 4. No game should take this long to be reliable. Good on Polygon for calling them out. and like @chiablo pointed out, EA is now magically more concerned about the quality of their game and want to do more to get it out of beta.

It's not really a "preview with a possible score". They had the final game on machines provided by the publisher. Basically they tested the actual game in a limited event in a controlled environment. What are the odds of finding issues in an 2-day event while playing in ideal conditions? I had preordered the game and played for 4 days before the first issues started to appear. It got serious after a week and I managed to get a refund shortly after.

I can't really blame Polygon for anything. They adjusted the grade later after the shit hit the fan and after giving a chance to EA to fix things. That was fair of them and at least Polygon is doing that.

Look at how crappy Machinima and IGN are. They reviewed the game under the same conditions but they gave outmost praises (9.5/10 and 9/10) to a game and stood by the review even after the shit hit the fan. They're not saying "yeah, the test under those conditions provided by EA was disproved by reality and let's have a real review" but they keep praising a shit.

I believe a review should at most change only once. And I think professionally there is good practice a pro reviewer would hold to how the product was presented. Period. That's stiff, yes, but soon Polygon's reviews will be fluctuating like the stock market . And lose all relevance.

From what I hear, that site (Polygon) lacks solidity. You believers in ' Pro Review is opinion' go there. I'll stay with the professionals who for good reason don't listen to my opinion of their 5 star scoring. That's another bottomless pit.

I'm reminded, the Polygon website design is bloody awful.

@gamer_152: The problem at that point is how long do you keep updating and monitoring the situation? Especially with things like MMO's or games that continually evolve like Team Fortress or Counterstrike GO. Do you keep monitoring the games indefinitely?

They have a dynamic scoring system. Which I imagine, seemed a great idea at the time.

Jeff admitted that he would likely change the GTA5 score knowing what he knows now. If you talk to him right now, face to face, he will not tell you it's 5 star game, he would talk about the broken aspects of it. All reviews anywhere, are only what the state of the game is in that moment. If you read ANY review and etch it in stone as the final word on any game in this online world, then you really aren't understanding the ecosystem of where gaming is these days. I don't think reviews are cheapened by being updated. I don't expect everyone to update them, but doing so to me, is only a good thing. It's a bit more perspective that I don't have to dig through forums for.

@demoskinos: I mean this may sound like a dumb answer but put simply you keep monitoring and updating for as long as it's relevant to the people who are going to be reading that review. It's not as if other websites aren't continually putting out news about and discussing the problems BF4 is having, it's just that unlike Polygon they're not incorporating that information into their review. When it comes to games like WoW or TF2, yes you can't just keep updating your review every time those games change, but that doesn't mean that it can't be useful for games that aren't designed to change drastically in the period shortly after their release. Really, I think the problem with MMOs and games like Counter-Strike GO is that game critics have never worked out a perfect way to provide assessments of games that are constantly changing.

This is a pretty shitty practice. Are they going to change it back once the server problems are fixed?

The review should be based on when the game was played. The only thing I see that is ok is to add a little note if a patch comes out or if the game breaks.

Agreed 100%. This is a shitty problem to have, but BF4 will get fixed. Obviously the issue is pretty major.

I love this game and the last patch helped things for me a bunch. But some of the obvious bugs that still exist are pretty bad and easily reproduceable. As a software engineer myself, when those types of bugs don't get fixed in this amount of time, that almost always means that the fix is very difficult to implement or the potential for harm elsewhere is very high.

Possibly, but I think they are just focused on the bigger issues right now. You know, like their game being broken lol

If the number change on a review then why have them at all? Might as well give everything a 10/10 to do devs a favor and bump up that Metacritic score.

Did this game have a two year cycle? It is so very obvious to me that games are simply being rushed out the door for profits. This has totally turned me off of the game.

Exactly why do people think this is a problem? I think review scores should be more dynamic. So many games are coming out nowadays that need a month or more of patching before they deserve a high score. Our reviews should reflect that with a "this game is busted right now stay away" instead of a "This game is busted, but I'm sure they will fix it in a few weeks, so I'll give it an 8."

Mostly because most reviews don't go up or back up, only down.

Of course I am not saying it's a preview with a possible score, but that's how it comes across to me. Because I see a preview as "here's how the game might be" and a review as "here is how the game is". Whenever they post a review, how are we to know that's the definitive review? Did they spend more than 2 days with the game? Was it done during ideal conditions? I mean, it might go two months and suddenly the game is experiencing a major issue (or maybe they just grew tired of an aspect of it that didn't bother them initially) and suddenly the score is lower. But that helps no one that has bought it two months ago. So at what point, and for who, does the score change really matter?

I don't blame Polygon for anything either. I just don't think their way of adjusting review scores is in any way constructive.

That's an entirely different issue.

Everyone seems to forget that there was a point well after the launch of BFBC 2 that it was completely unplayable, like lag, rubberbanding, the who works. It's inexcusable to me but changing a review score back and forth is really stupid, maybe put in a couple weeks with the game before assigning the multiplayer a score at all, the game is not really worse then when it launched, it's a case of not playing enough to be aware of the issues.

I seriously wouldn't have mind if there was some warning ahead of time like for example "we are not sure if the developer will update this game after launch." Because even if this is a "preview style review" it makes Polygon look like in some sort of emotional wreck, next day they are depressed or super hyper.