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VXIII on 08 October 2014
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Intrinsic said:
VXIII said:

A blackout to other reviews before writing your own is good, but a complete media blackout is not. Understanding the game and the vision / ambition behind it is important. A good reviewer need to decide how to judge a game before judging it. Knowing the design choices, which was executed well and which was not, how those choices contribute to the overall game design. For example, you shouldn't consider linear design as bad in itself. But you should judge how well it served the story and the level design (like in The Last of Us), if the story and level design were bad then linearity was indeed a bad choice. Of course, you can have an opinion about open world would have served the overall experience better, but that doesn't make what the developer tried to achieved is bad.

Other example is FF XV (not reviews but still..), criticizing having all male characters with an obvious lack of understanding of the point behind it. 

We are saying the same thing but differring slightly. I agre with most of what you said.

To further push my point I will dial back the clock to the 90s. Back then we got reviews in whatever monthly issue of a magazine we read. Back before the internet and media overload. Then, the first time most reviewers got there hand on a game and could actually see enough of it to talk about it was when they got a review build of the game. And they were forced to give the game enough time since the issue carrying the review was gonna be a month  away anyways. Then we got a lot better reviews than we do now. Then when yu read a review, it pretty much summed up exactly how you would feel when you actually play the game. The reviewers then captured all the little naunces that made a game great or annoying. Not so much these days.

I still feel that a complete blackout is better. A game would speak for itself. Whatever vision ws intended by the develoer will either cary through or not. If the developer was making a survival horror, but after your blackout you came out feeling like it was an action game where you blasted away at grotesque looking things then that is what the game was. You would say its an action game with some cheap scare tactics here and there. But going into a game review with a preconceived notion of at least what to expect in my opinion already gurantees that your opinion is going to be slanted, either for better or worse.


While you do have a good point, but what you are suggesting is not practical or realistic. We are becoming more and more connected by the day, there is no other way around it.