For real though. There needs to be a new term coined for this B.S. Games get released these days with Silver, Gold, and digital deluxe editions, while still having a season pass, seperate DLC, and lootboxes. The entire notion of a digital deluxe edition is laughable. It's like saying we made a collector's edition of the game, but it's all digital. What? I pay extra for the statue, the artbook, and the steel case. You expect me to pay $40 more just to get missing content from the original game? Considering that I can pick up any $60 game in a physical addition for $42 on day one from Best Buy or Amazon, the digital version of a game should cost around $45, not sixty. And as the game gets older the price for a digital copy should go down. Why are years old games still listed at $60 on digital storefronts? If I can't find the game in a brick and mortar store, do you really think I'm going to pay through the nose for a digital version, instead of finding a used copy? This means that even if I wanted to support the developers by buying a game new, they are pricing it so high that I'd be a fool to not pick the game up used. It's either that or wait for a sale. But I want to play the game NOW, not in a year's time, when it finally goes on sale for a reasonable price. So I might as well buy it used, if I can't find it for new on store shelves.
The more AAA games come out released in this manner, that still get good metacritic scores, the more I lose faith in the entire video game review process. My only hope is that maybe, just maybe, these games are so damned good that if they had releases as complete editions they would have gotten way higher scores. Maybe Shadow of War is so damned good that if it had dropped all the pricing schemes it would have been hailed as the best open world game of the year. Maybe Forza 7 is the greatest racing game of all time, and lootboxes dragged the score down a lot.
For most games I don't really need to look at the review scores to know whether or not it is good. If I know the developer's past games, or if the game is a sequel I can already predict how good it is. I'm not the only one with this ability, since there are metacritic prediction threads floating around. But at the same time, there are tons of games that I discovered through metacritic. At least a quarter of my collection are games that I never would have thought to buy, if not for the spotlight that is put on them from a good metascore.
But I think metacritic is starting to really lose it's relevancy. More and more review outlets, just aren't qualified to review a game. This is why I currently use Opencritic, because I can block any sites or writers that I feel are unqualified from affecting the final score. Why don't I just use user reviews then? Well, most users are complete idiots, or simply don't have enough experience in games to recommend something to somebody of my tastes. I want the recomendations of my peers, people that have played at least five good games a year for every year they were alive past five years old. People that actively seek out good games, in the same way that a foodie actively seeks out good food. People that aren't limited to a single platform, or a few genres for their experiences. For the most part professional reviewers provide this service, but a lot of them are either cowards, or flat out unqualified to review whatever they are playing in the first place. Just look at how many reviewers IGN has on staff. They change reviewers so fast, that it's a revolving door over there. They'll hire anybody with good writing skills, and a passing interest in video games.
There really needs to be a site that takes your PSN trophy count, XBlive gamerscore, and steam achievements, and uses them to build a profile of experience for each user. Users should then be able to rate games that they have actually played on a scale of one to ten. In order to add value to the scores, each user should be limited in how many scores of ten, and zero they can hand out in a given time frame. Users should be able to set requirements for other users to be qualified to rate a game. Did Timmy rate that new JRPG as a 10/10, but Timmy has only played two JRPGs his entire life? Well then that won't show up on the review aggregate for Spike, who has played twenty JRPGs his entire life. Why? Because Spike put his settings as "only allow reviews for JRPGs if the reviewer has played at least five of them". Meanwhile another user, Johnny might not care how many games somebody has played, so Timmy's review has an effect on the score that Johnny sees.
Finally people should be made to rate a game based on seperate catagories like gameplay, graphics, music, and longevity. Gamespot used to do reviews like this, and it was a very good system. It forced people to stop and think about each aspect of the game individually, and take their own personal likes and dislikes out of the equation for a moment (or at least to an extent). Ultimately whether or not you like something is entirely subjective. Whether or not you liked the controls is just as subjective as whether or not you liked the game in general. But being forced to judge the controls seperately from the rest of the game makes for a better review. Then after each catagory has been evaluated a final score is tallied from the average of all the ratings of each catagory.
TL/DR: Game developers are greedy, metacritic is losing it's credibility, and we need a better way to do user reviews, so that professional reviewers can be rendered obsolete.
