pokoko said:
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. |
If that is true, it's very interesting how they don't come across any bugs while playing Skyrim on ps3 but sure do when they play other games. I find that unlikely. Extremely unlikely. Especially since Skyrim is such a long game and reviewed by so many people. Finding out about these problems didn't stop them from giving the game GOTY awards. I think it's more likely that they did encouter several problems but because they liked the game overall, they chose to overlook them (i.e. they didn't think they were a big deal).
Take Driveclub for example. Some reviewers went out of their way to update their score and deduct points because of problems they didn't encounter when they reviewed the game. They felt no need to update their Skyrim score for some reason. I think certain games are judged more harshly because they are reviewed by people who are already negatively disposed towards them. I think most people would agree that XIII-2 was better than XIII, but the reviewers were influenced by the negative reception of XIII by gamers and were too harsh on XIII-2.
