@project343 said:
Most of those perfect scores reviewed the leveling experience of The Old Republic. That leveling experience is, by most accounts, spectacularly well-produced. The negativity comes in when we talk about the missing/buggy (at the time) end-game. Those reviews are not 'wrong.'
Maybe not, but they're representative of a pretty major problem I have with mainstream games journalism. I feel that the system relies on a lot of positive momentum, pressuring sites and their writers to heap praise on big releases to keep themselves in the public eye. This article from way back on the Driv3r controversy discusses what I'm trying to get at:
The most successful gaming magazine currently in print (Official Playstation 2 Magazine) reaches less than 5% of its potential audience of PS2 owners, and most mags struggle for even a small fraction of that. The overwhelmingly vast majority of gamers never buy or read videogames publications (and who can blame them?), and hence what those mags say about Driver 3, or what their reasons for doing it are, will never even enter their sphere of consciousness. When the nation's biggest game retailer offers no-quibble money-back guarantees on any game if you don't like it, why pay someone else five or six quid to illiterately and ineptly judge a half-finished version of it for you, when you can just try it for yourself for 10 days (probably at least twice as much time as the reviewer got to spend with it, and you've got the proper finished version too) with no risk and make your own mind up?
So here's the real lesson of Drive-three-er, chums. Videogames magazines and videogames publishers nowadays exist solely as a mutual-support network aimed at squeezing money out of your pockets and into theirs. They know only too well that the days of games mags are numbered, so they have no interest in building reader loyalty, and hence no interest in integrity. All they want is to get as much cash out of you as possible before they die forever. And the best way of doing that is by hyping publishers' games, artificially inflating readers' enthusiasm, getting lucrative advertising from the publishers in return, and meanwhile cutting back on staff and budgets to the point that even reviewers naive enough to want to do their job properly simply don't have the time or the resources for it.
To criticise games mags for doing that in the current climate is a bit like criticising a hungry tiger for killing antelopes. Driver 3 is going to sell in huge numbers regardless, because gamers are credulous and stupid and 97% of them don't read reviews in the first place, so why cut your own throat and piss off your advertisers by telling the few readers you have left something that most of them don't want to know anyway? Also, the harsh truth is that magazine readers deserve no better - if you're going to buy Official Playstation Magazine in hundreds of thousands and let the likes of Arcade die, then you're sending a pretty clear message out to the mag publishers, and that message is "We like being spoonfed bland corporate cheerleading tripe that says all games are great and worth buying, because that makes us feel good about buying them, so please give us more". The number of people rushing to games forums to defend Atari's right to rip them off with a cynically-priced, half-finished, shoddy rush job of a fundamentally-broken game (and even if you somehow manage to glean some enjoyment from it, those things are true regardless) only serves to back up that bleak assertion.
I've bolded the parts I think are relevant. Now, obviously things are way different now. I'm talking about online publications, for one thing, and I don't think marketing teams need to pressure journalists in praising their games anymore--they're more than happy enough to do it themselves because it generates traffic, maintains readership, and fosters the writer's reputation as a positive person. But I also think there's more to it than that.
Eric Kain describes how, as a games writer, he tries to put on different "hats." That is, he takes different attitudes when fulfilling different journalistic roles, distancing the person who provides new information on upcoming games with the person who evaluates them.
Perhaps the problem is that there is simply too much of the hype-style posts, too much of the enthusiasm, and too little of the investigative reporting. Maybe there aren’t enough sites covering the industry in depth. Maybe this is a more crucial shortcoming than “corruption” or compromised reviews. Of course, this is the case across the entertainment industry. Read about TV or film and you’ll encounter the exact same thing. Same goes for tech, which largely consists of posting specs and rumors and the occasional company profile.
But one thing is certain: the latest screenshot for GTA V is going to attract eyeballs. It may not be “news” in the proper sense, but it’s something people want to see. And there’s really nothing at all wrong with video game writers giving their audiences what they want, so long as when it comes to reviewing games or writing candidly and honestly about the video game industry, we do so with a critical but fair eye.
Now, I find that the mainstream press completely fails to do this role-separation when it's time for reviews. The person writing up the enthusiastic previews is often the same person writing glowing reviews upon the game's release. I don't think there's any malicious intent behind these writers. They're not being paid off by publishers, and they're not even inflating their real opinions on the game. But what they are doing is falling into their own self-generated hype instead of putting on that critical mentality. Any time a new AAA title comes out, I can go to any mainstream review site--IGN, Gamespot, Destructoid, Kotaku, Eurogamer, or god forbid The Escapist--and get the same blandly positive 8, 9, or 10 review that won't cover any of the flaws I find when I actually sit down with the game. I've completely lost my faith with this system, and as I said earlier, it's the reason why I have to come to sites like Giant Bomb or seek out trustworthy voices like The Sess to get a "real" professional opinion on a game.
There's a good chance I'm just a cynical asshole and all of these DMC reviewers were trying to be objective and the review system's not broken. But maybe they're falling prey to the hype-trap that I can't help but see cloud the responses to most big name releases? Either way, Adam's review bucks the trend significantly and I thought it deserved it's own thread.
For what it's worth, I just want to say I regret writing the OP the way I did. It was petty and about as immature as the stuff Adam was criticizing in the review. I have real problems with DMC, but I've always tried to discuss them in a mature fashion. I did not do that here. If I could, I would rather have tried to start a real conversation about the issues I just discussed above.
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