Metacritic and something about it that goes amiss

[pokoko]

naruball said:

TheGreatOther said:
Actually I think most games these days get a lot of point docked for technical issues that were not really an issue for reviewers in the past generations.
A prime example of this is the Last Guardian, this game has the same performance and camera issues that SOTC had but it's getting points taken off for them while SOTC got a free pass.

Last gen, a game like Skyrim which was nigh unplayable at times due to it's technical issues was able to score higher than any game this generation has so far, a game with that many issues these days would find it hard to hit 80 on metacritic.

Could be wrong but I strongly believe that in the case of Skyrim they'd overlook these problems even if it was reviewed today.

Rather than overlook them, most reviewers probably did not encounter anything very terrible.  People often extrapolate "I had problems" or "some people on the forums had problems" to "everyone had problems".  The worst PS3 bug, for instance, did not affect everyone and usually only manifested after more hours of play-time than you'd see with most reviews.  If a reviewer did not experience particular bugs then they won't show up in the original article.

There is also the philosophy of the good counter-acting the bad against the philosophy of technical deductions being more important than content.  I can completely understand someone enjoying a game so much despite any problems that they give it a high score.  I can also understand someone being harsh over technical issues.  People have different outlooks.  There is no standard formula so we see both counted together in a "meta-score".

In the end, honestly, the real take-away is that numerical scores aren't a very good system for judging video-games and are a terrible substitute for reading actual reviews.  I really have very little sympathy for anyone who makes a decision based on scores.