Torillian said:
mornelithe said:
Well, that speaks of some issues right there. First, you have devs utilizing reviewers as a pathetic means of stress testing? Awful. Blizzard uses this bullshit line when they horrifically screw up a launch in WoW (Met a guy on one of their QA teams at Blizzcon, said they usually stress test w/ 30-50 people...what the hell??). The problem I have with that is devs and publishers (at this point), have laundry lists of people who play their titles (uplay, steam, origin, battle-net etc...), to claim they weren't able to stress test properly, is blatantly false and kind of tells be they're cutting corners.
Actually asked Bashiok (Blizzard/WoW), why they don't simply send out a worldwide communique to all active WoW players and say, we need you to log in on the PTR, and go to this area to fight this boss for X amount of time. Framing it as a stress test. You can't tell me several hundred thousand bored individuals wouldn't do it, just for shits and giggles.
Now, for a company like Evolution, they could simply rely on Sony's most avid group of users (going by gamer time/score etc...), and see if they can get people to log in en-masse to do stress testing for a new/upcoming game. Make them all sign NDA's (or tie it into PSN EULA for those specifics services etc...), and ban accounts if people are posting video (if the company feels that strongly about it).
And reviewers then, at this point, should also know better. If they know that they're on a sterilize network, that hardly reflects reality...shouldn't they simply scrap all MP facets of the review process until post-launch? I hate to keep bringing up Driveclub, but, that was a huge failure on Evolutions part, but quite a big failure on reviewers part as well. Granted, a reviewer will never know that a launch will have issues to the extent that DC did, but the picture they painted was clearly not reality. And that would push me (if I wrote) to be cautious about MP reviews, pre-launch.
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All very fair points, and I'll answer on the reviewer side of the comments.
I agree that any review before the actual release of a game should let the reader know that the actual functionality of the multiplayer could change for launch and therefore their experience will differ from that of the reviewer. In a perfect world I think I'd prefer that reviews are written a week after launch for online focused games to let the network stabilize, but unfortunately that isn't always the case.
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I know it's not, and that's where the reviewers do themselves and their readers a disservice. I can't imagine what it's like for a follower of a specific reviewer, to make a purchase based upon something written by someone they trust. Only to find that part of the game is unplayable, and the reviewer didn't mention they hadn't tested the live version of the network.
Granted, this issue is a new and emerging one, or at least, I don't think it's been quite as important until the last few years, given the...foibles that've gone on in certain games MP portion (GTA, BF, DC, Diablo 3, etc...) But, the issues have become so impactful that I don't think it's very genuine of any reviewer not to mention this as a standard MO, moving forward.
I also agree that reviews should be written a week after launch, because I just don't think you can get all the facts about a game (esp. important ones like game breaking bugs, network breaking infrastructure issues, depth of the game etc...) when they're all rushing to get their review out faster than anyone else. I think that kinda encourages quick and poor writing.
