I often feel Bethesda games get a free pass for being buggy.

I dont mind however if there is a day 1 patch as the bugs only affect early reviews and not the consumer.

The problem with this is that we'd never reach a good consensus. I mean, sure, I'm all for build quality being criticised, but where do we draw the line?

OP thinks Fallout 4's long loading times are something to take into consideration. What about Bloodborne's loading times? Back in vanilla version, the thing took more than one minute to load between deaths or Lamp travelling. And that's for a game where you're supposed to die a lot. It took some patches to put it back at five/ten seconds most. Should points be deducted in that case?

It should still be docked points. Until reviewers do that companies like Bethesta will continue to ship unoptimised games, and those without the internet are stuck playing a terrible version of the game.

I agree. I think a screen tear here and there, bit of pop in, whatever is fine. Something like Halo mcc or drive club? Not good. Both games seemed to get reduced review scores from some sites and rightfully so. I can't comment on fallout 4 though... Yet.

OH! Right I forgot that pesky internet thing. I forget we didnt have that back in the day.

I see what you mean now, especially for countries with poor internet that wouldnt be able to download the patch readily at all.

I guess we as a society are so used to connecting to the net now.

This, you're paying full price for the product so the build quality should be pulled as well, on PC Fallout 4 had a bug that disabled keyboard inputs when you left the vault at the start rendering the game unplayable unless you could somehow save, exit and restart the game already outside the vault which was made harder by the fact the esc key was also disabled. 9/10 product and players couldn't even get past the starting tutorial section.

Agreed. It's baffling that certain games have a free pass on poor programming just because of its legacy.

In an ideal world, there would be a review of a pre-patch release, and then a continuously updated post-patch review. But that's unfeasible, and big websites need to give big publishers decent scores to continue to receive ads, preview and review copies from them. All of this is why reviews are largely worthless these days; they might be paid off & almost certainly out of date.

This!

• http://www.metacritic.com/game/playstation-4/driveclub
• http://www.metacritic.com/game/pc/batman-arkham-knight

Then you should play Nintendo games :). Honestly I don't mind so much even games like bloodborne got patches and only one game bothered me this generation and that is Just cause 3. For the rest I can live with it.