Carzy Zarx’s PC Gaming Emporium - Catch Up on All the Latest PC Gaming Related News

[JEMC]

vivster said:

JEMC said:

We'll have to disagree there. What I expect from a review is an objective, accurate description of a game, with its pros and cons well explained and how they can affect gameplay.

After all, that's why they are called reviews, not editorials or opinions.

As for Metacritic and other similar things, I couldn't care less about them than I already do, and the only time I've used them was to find more reviews of a certain game, not to look at what score it has.

Lastly, I already said that I believe that there are no perfect or 10 games, like movies, books, etc. so we don't need to go there again.

Which is what the review does. The review perfectly explains all the flaws and all of the good things. That's why people should read the reviews and not just the score. It's not like the score is hiding the flaws. And as we have already established there is no objectivity in a gaming review because everyone has different priorities. I mean, are you trying to tell me that there is an objective distribution of priorities that counts for all games and people?

A PC gamer will review a game differently than a console player and that is how it's supposed to be. Because PC players want to read a review from someone who has similar standards and priorities for games. And people who hate micro transactions will want to read a review from someone who is sensitive to that as well. What good is an "objective" score of 90 when the game contains things that will categorily be rejected by some people?

Games need and should be reviewed by a lot of different kind of reviewers and the reviews should reflect that. You can easily list all the flaws and positives of a game and still not recommend it because you didn't have fun or because the game contains some objectionable content.

You just have an unhealthy obsession with scores.

If you read a review and then decide that the score does not reflect your formed opinion that's fine. That just means you have different standards than the reviewer. So you go look for reviewers who share your that's and then you can trust them. Demanding that all reviewers should adhere to your standards is a bit silly.

Reviews aren't entertainment, they're consumer advice. Would you take advice from someone who doesn't share your values? I know I wouldn't.

I honestly don't care about scores, I lost faith in them a long time ago. When I want to know about a game I look for user's opinions and some gameplay videos to see if I'll like it or not.

What I'm just saying is that if there's a score, it should reflect what the review says. That's why I said that I didn't understand negative reviews that end with very good scores and viceversa.

Also, PC games reviews should be the same as console games reviews, just with the added tech info to know if it runs well or not and if there's much difference between the different settings. There are a lot of games where there's almost no difference between high and very high/ultra settings, albeit a huge drop in performance.

HoloDust said:

JEMC said:

We'll have to disagree there. What I expect from a review is an objective, accurate description of a game, with its pros and cons well explained and how they can affect gameplay.

After all, that's why they are called reviews, not editorials or opinions.

As for Metacritic and other similar things, I couldn't care less about them than I already do, and the only time I've used them was to find more reviews of a certain game, not to look at what score it has.

Lastly, I already said that I believe that there are no perfect or 10 games, like movies, books, etc. so we don't need to go there again.

I agree that picking the right reviewer for a game is important. I would never give an FPS game reviewer the task to review something like Cities: Skylines, for example, but even then, there needs to be some objectivity.

There's nothing wrong in giving a game a 7/10, which is still a very good score, because of its flaws and making it perfectly clear in the review that gamers that are into the principal aspect of the game, open world games in this case, will be able to forget the flaws and greatly enjoy the game, while the rest of gamers will "only" find a good game that does one thing very well, but that isn't that good with the rest.

Yeah, well that's the thing with non quantifiable stuff and objectivity. Slapping number on review just makes it even harder.

Take Witcher 3 for example - for me, that game averages around 8 - some things are 9.5, but other, like RPG elements and world design are as low as 6 or 7. Or take combat in it - I think it's fairly good, while I find Souls combat to be average at best (and I'm ssaying this as someone who finished and liked all 4 Souls games), the very thing they have been lauded for.

My 2 cents - there are waaaay too many mainstream reviewers out there, who don't know shit about genres they're reviewing and/or are reviewing those games for mainstream audience.

There has been a lot of discussions about why reviewers can't be fully trusted. From the fact that many of them aren't really journalists, only die-hard gamers that managed to get a job in the industry and that are incapable of hiding their fanboyism, to past revelations of publishers threatening to stop paying for advertising on review sites if they got bad scores, to clear cases of reviewers getting carried away by hype.

But that's something hard, if not impossible, to fix. Even movie reviews suffer the same problems, and they've been around for a lot longer than videogames.