Review Scores; Why have we forgotten the premise

[TWRoO]

Yakuzaice said:

selnor said:

How many times of late have we seen on this very site, people not recognise 80 as a good purchase worthy game?

It seems lately that if a games scores less than 90 on Metacritic that people disregard the game as something rent worthy. When in actual fact 80 stands well for a game, a game that is not avarage but above the premise.

Metacritics themselves acknowledge games with an 80 rating are good quality games. They have the coulor of the number still in green.

As you see games over 80 will fall into awsome game territory. People I believe have forgotten this premise. We have become way to expectant here on internet forums. We all need to give far more attention to games with 80 and higher, not just the 90+. These games that score 80-90 do not get the praise they should.

Selnor out.

This philosophy might work if metacritic was actually making the reviews, but they aren't.  The problem is most review sites tend to skew scores to the upper half of the spectrum.  That is why most people view something below 80 as mediocre.  If a site rarely gives scores below a 5, most people will then view a 5 as awful, and odds are anything lower wouldn't have received a second glance anyway.

Not to mention, for most people there are more 80-100 games than than they have the time or money to play.  So if you actually use reviews to decide what to play, why would you get the game with a 65 when you could get one that is a 90?

 

Which is why people should choose the games they want based first on what they are interested in, and then on some of the review content rather than the review score.

The score/grade at the end of a review should only serve as a summary (or even the summary of a summary if it's one of those reviews that gives pointers on graphics/gameplay/sound etc at the end)... Not, as they are used now, a means to compare games (especially not across genres either, there is an arguable point thet you might want to know which of two similar shooters is slightly better, but even then the slightly is boiling down to a matter of reviewer opinion that you might not have held had you played both)