From the start of the site through the Super Mario Maker review, Jeff's most common review score was a 4 (and it's not close). Of the 5 reviewers with at least 20 reviews, this is their average review score:
Brad: 3.79
Patrick: 3.75
Ryan: 3.49
Jeff: 3.48
Alex: 3.28
Now, this is not a random sampling of games, since the reviewers are only reviewing games they want to review. Alex was at one time known for reviewing bad games, which has pretty much stopped (which is probably why this site almost never gives 1 star reviews anymore); it may be Brad or Patrick are or were more inclined to review games they thought they'd like. And Jeff has reviewed more than 100 more games than anyone else.
Still, the fact that he's practically tied with Ryan and has given basically 3 and a half stars as his average score shows he isn't negative about most new games, but in fact positive, as, contrary to what some sites might have you think, that is a positive score. Maybe not as positive as fans of those games would like, but still positive.
I'm really looking forward to December when Jeff & Brad are pushing The Witness as GOTY while Vinny keeps mentioning not being able to get into it and Austen talks about how he hates its politics.
Anyway, I didn't play The Division beta, but the enemies in the Unfinished video didn't look anymore bullet spongey than something like Borderlands.
All of you defending Bethesda, consider MMORPGs. Larger scope, more systems, multiplayer, considerably less buggy.
... What? I've played some MMORPGs over the years and the genre is rightly infamous for launching with buggy, broken messes of games. None of those games I played were within a country mile of Fallout 4's stability on release. When I tried to play WoW day 1, the server I wanted to play on basically exploded because too many people chose it and it took them like 4 days to get a replacement in place. Not to mention the last beta patch for WoW introduced an issue where my computer would sometimes randomly power cycle after playing the game for 30ish minutes and that continued into release. I finally fixed it by underclocking my processor. That's probably the worst technical issue I've ever had in twenty years of PC gaming.
Your comment kind of confuses me, because literally the last Fallout game (New Vegas) shone in a variety of ways 3 and 4 didn't even come close to.
Too bad New Vegas is a fucking garbage fire on the technical front. I waited for over a year and a half to buy that game on PC, because tons of people mentioned it being quite a bit more buggy than Fallout 3. When I got it, it came with a bunch of DLC and official patches, and I did something I rarely do, in that I immediately went to the Nexus mod site after booting it up briefly, and installed some unofficial bug fix mods to try and fix as much as I could.
In spite of that, it CTD'd for me like every 3-5 hours I played. Not enough to make it unplayable, but enough to be really fucking annoying. I also had quests break, tons of clipping issues, falling through geography, getting stuck on objects, etc. Basically everything that could break for me in that game did break for me.
Meanwhile, I'm 60 hours into Fallout 4 and have had 0 performance issues running it on high graphics settings on PC, had no CTDs, no major bugs, no quests break so far (something I did have happen a few times in Skyrim, much less New Vegas), very few clipping issues, no falling through or getting stuck on geography, etc. I've had exactly one object that I should have been able to interact with that I couldn't (No Nose's terminal in Goodneighbor), which was annoying, but didn't break a quest. I have had very little open world jank in Fallout 4 in general.
The jankiest thing I have experienced is that AI Companion pathing is still pretty suspect at times, but it's been a minor annoyance compared to the nuclear bomb of technical disappointments that was New Vegas.
So when @jeff asks why they haven't improved the series in a technical sense? The answer is they have.
@gizmo88:Console reviews for the game are higher than the critical scores. PC are about half that.
What "user scores" are you talking about on the game's release day?
User reviews on Steam are pretty bad currently. 63% positive when I just checked. A lot of that seems to be related to performance issues on AMD cards though. I wouldn't buy it on PC if you have an AMD until a patch and/or new driver fixes issues.
So where's the split console/PC review for Arkham Knight? If FO4's tech issues are enough to drop the rating from 4 to 3 for consoles, then there should have been a PC version of the Arkham Knight review that dropped it from 4 stars to 1.
@wrathofgod: The weird thing about this review to me is, @brad reviewed the 2013 game, gave it 4/5 stars and then says this game is a "great step up" over that game. Yet this is also 4/5 stars. I realize when you're grading on a 1 to 5 stars scale, with no half stars, each star can represent a pretty broad swathe of games, so maybe the 2013 game was a low 4 (almost 3) stars game and this one is a high 4 (almost 5) stars game. But it still looks weird, and I agree that text doesn't do a great job explaining why this isn't a 5 stars game.
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