Barozi on 20 April 2013
| pokoko said: This is another problem with the rush to review games on or before release day. People will look back at a review score that might not be accurate anymore. Fanboys of other games will hold up a metacritic score as definitive even when a game has evolved. You'll see reviewers publish pre-release reviews that talk about certain problems even when a day one patch is scheduled that will fix key issues. That's the metacritic-obsessed environment we live in right now. The best example of how this fails the reader is something I remember from when I used to frequent Destructoid. Jim Sterling had destroyed a game in a review (I can't remember for certain, but I think it might have been SOCOM 4) because when he tried to play it during the late beta, the multiplayer had been laggy and nearly unplayable. With that, he'd simply given up and wrote his review as if the multiplayer was broken, never mind that the point of the beta was to sort out net code and server problems. In contrast, he'd given Killzone 3 a perfect 10. The problem there is that the KZ3 late beta was ALSO plagued with connection problems (I remember, I played it every night), but it seemed that he got lucky when he wrote his review and the multiplayer was going fine. KZ3 even had serious connection problems at launch (again, I was there) and required a massive patch. Keep in mind that I'm saying this as a fan of Killzone 3. The whole process just seems to arbitrary and worthless sometimes, and really illustrates why critics aren't really as important as they think they are. Another good example is Gran Turismo 5, which is a MUCH better game right now than it was a launch, yet those launch scores still stand. |
The funny thing is that exact the opposite happened with SimCity.
The first 5-10 reviews were all around 9/10 because the reviweres could play the game before it launched, so there weren't any server issues.
