@artisanbreads said:
@mariachimacabre said:
I don't know about mixed reviews. It's got a 79 on Metacritic. Reviews seem pretty positive. Just not overwhelmingly so.
The days we live in. If it doesn't get 9's it sucks to a lot of people.
But publications give out 9s so easily that if something has a 79 average, it is sort of mediocre.
The gaming review scale is still busted because it is reserving the bottom 5 numbers for games that lack basic technical competency. It would be like if films reserved the bottom 2 stars only for films that are out of focus the whole time, or where the editing is so bad that it cuts people off mid-line-delivery, or where the audio is mixed terribly and every line delivery is drowned out by sound effects. Instead, doing all that shit satisfactorily really just earns you enough respect that you get into mainstream movie theaters and actually get reviewed by critics. Your film could still easily get 0.5 stars for being absolute dreck, even though it got the technical stuff right.
Conversely, in games, if your game merely shows up without significant bugs, even if it is completely unoriginal and bland, it probably gets a 5-6. Tons of shitty, amateurish, low budget games exist that deserve to get the numbers below 5, but most publications don't have enough staff to review every game in existence, so there's a selective bias where they choose to only spend their time reviewing the games that are most likely to be good, through a combination of knowing what projects have a sufficient budget, talented dev teams, and which projects publishers are showing confidence in. By only reviewing the good games that people kind of already expect to be good, you only ever see low scores for colossal fuckups like Steel Battalion: Heavy Armor, and Aliens: Colonial Marines.
I'm sure you're already aware of all this, but still, my point stands, 79 is kind of mediocre. Pretend the video game scale starts at 5, with 5 being a zero star rating, basically. That means the Metacritic average really equates to Crysis 3 being about a 3-star game, out of a possible 5 stars. Positive, but not overwhelmingly so.
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