English MobsterStarfield review controversy traces game journalism's orbital decay
sarsaparilyptus“Decline”?
Remember when Eidos used a PR firm to strongarm websites into not publishing reviews of Tomb Raider: Underworld if they were less than an 8/10 till after launch?
“That’s right. We’re trying to manage the review scores at the request of Eidos.” When asked why, the spokesperson said: “Just that we’re trying to get the Metacritic rating to be high, and the brand manager in the US that’s handling all of Tomb Raider has asked that we just manage the scores before the game is out, really, just to ensure that we don’t put people off buying the game, basically.”
That was 15 years ago, and despite the fact that Barrington Harvey went on to lie and pretend they never said that, everybody knew that kind of thing was old hat back then too. Mainstream gaming journalism is a captured industry.
It’s Microsoft’s problem now. LOL
Jordan LundIt’s been probably 10 years or so since I was writing reviews, and I have to say, I never felt pressure to skew a review one way or another.
The biggest heat I got was from fanboys when I had a sneak peek at PAX of Duke Nukem Forever and had to report how shitty it was. “YOU DON’T KNOW!!! YOU DIDN’T PLAY THE WHOLE GAME!!! YOU HACK!!!”
And I was like “Yeah, you’re right, I didn’t play the whole game, I played what their marketing team WANTED me to play and it sucked, you think the parts they DIDN’T want me to play are going to be better?”
Surprise… the game stunk up the joint.
But when it came to reviewing games, I approached every review as if the game were a 10/10, and then as I played I looked for reasons to subtract or add points. The plusses and minuses would balance out and I’d have a final score.
As a former teacher, I used school grades, which is why I think most sites are on a 7-10 scale.
A - 90%+
B - 80%+
C - 70%+
D - 60%+
F - 59% and down.
A game can be bad because it’s a bad game or it can be bad because it’s functionally broken. D is generally the Ralph Wiggum of games, possible to like, but you have to admit it’s pretty bad.
I had to give a failing review to Assassin’s Creed Liberty on the Playstation Vita even though I really liked how it looked and it played, because it had a game breaking bug that made your save file unloadable. Ubi took 2 months to fix it, rendering it unplayable for the first two months after launch.
Once it was fixed, I amended the review, but it was plainly unacceptable to release it in a broken state like that.
orcaWhat was the worst game that comes to mind from your time writing? I used to write album reviews for a metal site years ago and one of our writers got HIM’s latest album at the time. They really just didn’t like the album and I shit you not, the review garnered 1,000+ comments from pissed off fans. It got so out of hand, we had to close comments.
Had to be Duke Nukem Forever. I was talking with one of the devs and I was legit curious as to how their process worked because it had been in hell for so long…
“Were you able to use any of the original assets?”
“Oh, all of them!” He seemed super excited.
To use 14 year old assets and be incredibly proud of that? Eesh.
Oh, and Brink! Brink was so incredibly disappointing. They had this well developed world and a fantastic movement system, solid class based shooter… but then it all fell apart in the actual implementation of it.
I really, really, wanted to like Brink, but it was unplayable.
Say you have a level where the enemy is escorting a VIP and your goal is to eliminate the VIP before they get to the destination.
You roll in, wipe the team, wipe the VIP, then someone respawns, revives the VIP, and you keep going back and forth until the clock runs out.
It didn’t matter how many times you killed the VIP, all that mattered was if they were alive or dead when the clock ran out. Win/lose. Just crap design.
Man, DN4E sat in limbo forever. I remember waiting patiently for it knowing full well it would be a mess, but I didn’t care because I was such a massive Duke Nukem fan. Definitely on my list of bad games but I managed to complete it. It was so dated and clunky.
I vaguely remember Brink and all of the hype absolutely vanishing when it came out. I think I ended up skipping it because of the feedback people had.
Thanks for sharing!
Kill_joyBrink... Sigh. I remember that trailer coming out and I watched it like every day for years waiting for it to come. I watched every dev vlog, read every update. For years I was hyped on that. At time of release my buddy and I took the week off of work. We played it for like 3 hours one night and finished it. I remember thinking "there must be a mistake. This can't be it. This isn't the game I've been dreaming about." I never booted it up again after that first night.
Brink was my CP2077.
It’s a shame, because if someone licensed the IP for, just spitballin’ here… A Fallout/Outer Worlds style game, the bones are there for a REALLY good game.
The assets, art, backstory, it’s all done, it just deserved a better developer. :(
jossboJust in case you don’t know, CP2077 is great now, and set to get better when the dlc drops soon.
I actually played through it last month and it blew me away. I cannot wait to do a second play through when phantom liberty comes out! It was so so good.
KlajanI really should go back to playing CP, I already enjoyed my time with the release Version.
But I also had a great PC and managed to not hit many Bugs during my playthrough, so I understand that my experience was not a common one.
I had a similar experience. Loved it then, like it even more now.
That happened for me too. Great 2077 experience through and through on good hardware with RT+DLSS. Had a couple bugs but nothing unsolvable like a puzzle with some saving involved, and they were things like scanning one thing early stops a scan later. Which is an unintended pretty cool mechanic lol, if only we’d been told it was a mechanic at the time.
Game got even crazier looking in recent updates and with better hardware, but I 100%ed it early and I haven’t done another playthrough since so I’ve been at the endgame through all the updates lol
I ran a gaming store at the time, with rentals. I remember when brink came out and I had the exact same experience when I took it home to try. At least I had no anticipation and didn’t pay anything for it.
The first Brink patch made it quasi-playable, but the damage had already been done.
And even after they fixed it, the AI still stank. They'd just ran back in the exact same path sometimes; to the point that you could just aim at a point and headshot all of them.
SternhammerI think Brink was game that killed my naive trust in the hype machine. So much anticipation, so much desperation to enjoy it, so much disappointment. From there on I only believed the hyperbole from proven developers but eventually Destiny killed even that. Now I’m a bitter shell of a gamer who lives by the creed, “never pre-order!”
I actually enjoyed the hell out of Destiny, then Destiny 2 fucked everything up, got patched, got better, and then Bungie turned around and went “LOL - story missions? What’s that?” and cut 1/2 the content out of the game. Content I paid for.
No more money for Bungie after that, I’m surprised it’s somehow still going.
I was damn near 1k hours in D1. I think I'm still under 100 in 2, because somehow they managed to make every single map in the entire game a heaping pile of dogshit.
Then they also took them away constantly.
BigBananaDealerduke nukem forever isnt good but i liked it, wish the online multiplayer didnt die so fast i had fun playing capture the babe with my cousin
I don’t understand the purpose of big company reviewers (for subjective stuff like media at least). If I’m watching a smaller reviewer my goal is figure out their tastes so I can ignore the criticisms that I know don’t bother me, and pay very close attention to where their tastes align with mine. Like if dunky calls a game buggy or slow paced, that’s probably more a positive than a negative, but if he says the controls are clunky, I’ll probably agree. ACG tends to like games that are less mechanically adventious and easy compared to what I like, and we have evry different tastes in storylines, but he’s a really good barometer for sound and graphics.
If kotaku or whatever releases a review it’s really hard for me to understand whose voice I’m getting, so the review is pretty useless, how do I know if the guy calling the game a challenge is the guy that infamous cuphead reviewer or a guy that has been beating dark souls since he was 4.
I have a hard time when people complain about loading screens. I’ve been gaming since the 70s guys, let me tell you about load times:
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Datasette
en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starpath_Supercharger
You’d start loading a game from tape and then you might as well go have dinner with your family because it would be 30 to 60 minutes before you could play.
Or, it could hit a loading error 5 minutes after you walked away and now you have to start all over again…
Also, the Commodore 1541 floppy drive had a serial transfer rate of 2 bytes per second. Nothing loaded quickly in the 80’s either.
But it was soooo much faster than tape! ;)
Cool dudes had fast load cartridges.
NeatoI bet you'd complain about your new car having roll up windows or no ac. Times have changed and we can do better. Especially with their budget and 6 years. It's pathetic.
yeah the half a second to 2 second loading screens are horrible. any game with loading screens i immideately uninstall
This shows you've missed the point and haven't researched the game.
It's all the animation transitions between space and ground. No Man's Sky had fifteen developers and accomplished this years ago. Bethesda is pathetically incompetent.
no mans sky had deep quests and deep conversations with unique characters? and they also used creation engine? i had no idea no mans sky was so brilliant! youve changed my mind!
Bethesda doesn't have deep quests either. The creation engine is a weight around the devs necks. I'm not sure what you're trying to say but you're making my points for me.
nah they do. and creation engine is why the modding scene is the biggest out of almost any game
Same here,
Unfortunately most of the folks in gaming media that I follow don’t write or produce proper “reviews” anymore. Reading a review from IGN or Gamespot… I don’t know anything about the reviewer so I take it with a grain of salt. Like with Starfield, I give the same weight to IGN giving it a 7 as I do with some no-name whatever tiny website I never heard of giving it a 9.5
Just have to read through the reviews. If someone docks the game for not letting you fly manually between solar systems like you do in Elite Dangerous then I just have to write-off the negativity because… of-course fucking not, did anyone expect that? With something like, the repeated knocks against the barren nature of the procedural generation leading to repetitive tedious travel - I take that more seriously, because it was something I was hoping they would have addressed when moving that direction. Something like the story sucking or the NPCs having cringey dialogue is completely subjective and means nothing without knowing the reviewer’s tilt.
ampersandrewIf someone docks the game for not letting you fly manually between solar systems like you do in Elite Dangerous then I just have to write-off the negativity because… of-course fucking not, did anyone expect that?
I think a lot of people expected that. This is the see-that-mountain-you-can-go-there studio.
That surprises me… each BGS game is extraordinary iteritive over the previous one ever since Morriwind. They’re like 20 years into iteritive design and arguably each iteration, while doing some interesting new things also takes a step or two back. Very obvious looking back over their history. They’re really a one-note-studio.
To all of a sudden expect Starfield would manage to be that revolutionary (to their formula) seems shortsighted. Even the concept of having a fully-realized BGS RPG with a near infinitely open space exploration system seems like an impossible feat. On a technical level, sure, but the space between planets would be empty and desolate… and even expecting an interesting procedurally generated continent is a big ask today, let alone a planet, let alone a solar system, let alone a quarter of a galaxy.
I wasn't expecting it to be revolutionary. I expect Bioware RPGs to be on dozens of finite maps, and I expect BGS games, other than interiors, to be seamless maps. I was expecting procedural generation to cover the difference, and I expected that if No Man's Sky could do it with maybe two dozen employees, BGS probably could too, especially given when the game went into full production. I was not, and still am not, expecting the vast majority of their planets to have something interesting on them just due to how many there are.
all-knight-partyI can understand the link between seamless exteriors and the equivalent of what that would mean in the context of a space game for Bethesda, but the technological implications of having a galactic system flight mode and seamless planet to space transitions are both completely new ideas to Bethesda and are also technically complex to implement in a game already knee deep in new tech and systems only from what we'd been shown.
There's a reason things like seamless planet transitions are only something you might be able to expect in recent years. While Bethesda could totally make that happen, it's not where I'd expect them to put their money, or they'd have probably dropped a line showing it off in the pre release footage.
At once, I understand why you might've expected that, but expecting anything not explicitly shown is never a good idea when it comes to tempering expectations.
They showed so much of the game that I was bored before I could sift through anywhere near all of it (not to say I wouldn't enjoy the game, but I know what I'm getting with a Bethesda RPG). I'm not knocking it for having a load screen between space and landing on the planet, but because we've seen that done a handful of times in recent years, as well as expectations set up from their previous games' maps, it makes perfect sense to me to expect that to be in the game.
I think it does make sense to expect that up until you realize how much of a technical undertaking it'd be to do so and whether that payoff seems worth it to them. Seamless transitions seem to me to still be in a category to show off if you have it, so that they didn't should be a red flag, but if you didn't watch all the footage then you wouldn't realize that, which I get, and I dont expect everybody to watch both the showcases like I did, thats probably over an hour of footage.
I can see why you'd expect a similar seamless experience due to their previous maps, but implementing that is completely different due to the style of game and requires new engine features to do so unlike their previous games which were already capable of it since Morrowind. You could expect them to consider doing it, but it wouldn't be a given
Having played the game some last night, the load screens haven’t been what’s bothering me but if I had to complain it’d be for the menu diving. Tab goes back a page and there are 3-4 levels of map, the city you’re in, the planet that’s in, the {system?} that’s in and the galaxy it all resides in. You can travel to any of them so you can directly land in a city on a planet in its galaxy, or just outside one.
For a little while it was telling me to press R to bring up a system map but I think that’s only in certain situations, so I’ve been pressing tab and selecting map (galaxy) or M for local map (then tab to pull back a menu).
So far there have been other little quirks, like F in scan mode prevents M, L, I, (map, quests, inv) it gets tedious but it’s again, trying to nitpick something that stood out as annoying but doesn’t actually matter? Like, it minorly affects me but then I press F and continue on my way lol.
I’d say a much bigger oversight is quest streamlining. Without too much in specifics, I was captured via “trait” (I assume) at level 5 put into a level 12 situation. My ship couldn’t survive the scenario and I had to pull back to the previous auto save (technically it was 2-3 previous, but only because I tried to win). That situation was also made more annoying due to a bad energy distribution and getting attacked pretty immediately jumping out of hyperdrive, if there was a fight advantage number I’d have been at -7 at least lol.
Rolling back the save was fine though, I didn’t continue that quest and will level up some before going back to it. First time I had to do it though and it was a little jarring since you’d expect the game stealing you to put you in relatively level-appropriate scenarios.
Overall I’ve been enjoying the game though. These gripes are pretty minor overall and I think just a little more information and distance between jumps and being attacked and it was hardly have been an issue. Oh, last thing about information I do wish the shops and certain trade areas had more labeling for like weight or details, I’ve been making a point to not overloot the raw world but even just enemy encounters fill up your weight fast and sometimes it’s hard to tell exactly what is taking it all up.
I played it for the later half of yesterday, so maybe 4-6 hours or so? The main story is a little silly but it’s a fine premise so far. People calling it absurd or ridiculous, I just don’t see what they’d want instead? The character creator was actually pretty fun with seemingly fairly varied possibilities. One encounter I’ve come across is a religious cult who are known to openly attack. Well, you can trait to be one of them so hopefully the game plays into that. If it does, I’d say the game is actually going to be quite great. If it does not, then I’d say it’s a Bethesda game that could have a little more depth but is also pretty fleshed out for the early game. Like I said, I’m only a few hours in and I’ve not visited many planets. I’ve been pleased with the choices I have available, the options I have to complete them, and the results of them even if it didn’t succeed the way I had hoped lol. I’ll have to see non-settled planets more before I comment on those.
Tl;Dr there’s some flow issues that I’ve encountered, mostly with how many menus and how often, could do with a little more information in some spots and a little less in others but overall it feels like a prettier space Bethesda game and I’ve been more pleasantly surprised. It’s ran well on a 5800x3D and a 10gb 3080 with everything but motion blur on ultra/native with RT/med. Some areas do feel less smooth, but not choppy or anything like that. Just feels like 165hz vs 60+ variable. That said, with the hardware it’d be a shame if it ran poorly.
I see what you’re getting at, I could see how someone might assume an seamless outer space based on that. As soon as you realize how much of a technical undertaking that is though, it’s easy to assume they wouldn’t go that route and not have blown that horn 2+ years ago as a huge feature. Something like that combined with a BGS RPG would be massive and I can’t imagine a world where a company like BGS or Microsoft would be wanting to keep that a secret until release.
Expecting anything that particularly in-depth without being shown explicit pre-release footage of it is an expectation trap. Bethesda was never going to make a space sim, any space sim features are a bonus and were far from guaranteed.
PC Gamer shows clearly who wrote the article, and generally they’ll be clear about what subjective reasons they had for their final verdict.
Personally, I feel they are prone to buying into marketing hypes, but at least you can tell when that is the case.
Apparently Jeff Gerstmann received the review code quite a bit later than other publications. He said it’s quite a ridiculous story that perhaps he would talk about it someday (his tone sounds like this is a story in the far future)
Jeff is ex (old) Gamespot, ex Giantbomb, and the guy who got fired from Gamespot due to external pressure from Eidos after he gave Kane and Lynch a 6 out of 10.
Bonus Podcast: Starfield Early Impressions and Review
pacoboydI’ve never even heard of Kane and Lunch so sounds like he was probably right.
i heard the first one was actually pretty good, but the second one had issues including the length of FOUR HOURS
slaytswiftfanbig published reviews are don’t mean anything to me and I’m surprised they do to most people. everything is an 8-10 out of 10. how do people not find an issue with that
NilzThe only conclusion to make is that the video game industry has matured to a point where only masterpieces are released. Bad games just don’t exist anymore.
Right??
I think you can explain much of the lack of lower scores by the fact that the games that would get lower scores are also likely to be ignored by just about any established reviewer.
There are thousands of games released every year that a site like IGN will never review. Would you find it valuable for IGN to scour Steam or the Switch eShop for terrible games just to use more of the score scale?
I agree, but what are alternatives for people who want a written text?
Find an independent critic you respect and listen to the tenor of why they say a game is good. Or ignore critics and develop your own taste and sense of which studios, directors, artists, composers, or otherwise will compel you to buy a game.
i use word of mouth mostly but its not that all critics are bad, just what seems like most, but if you find that you consistently align with a critics opinion I’d trust them
Exactly, it feels like 50/100 is the baseline and 75/100 is mediocre. 75/100 tells me I have to be a fan of the genre to enjoy it. This rating inflation really shows how dependent reviewers are. One of the reasons I like institutions like Stiftung Warentest instead of depending on some biased product comparison blogs.
You may notice that this parallels the american school grading system to a T. Most major gaming review sites and such are done by americans that spent anywhere between 4-10+ years with that being the what grading/reviewing/scoring was done in almost every interaction they ever had past childhood, there’s no wonder it’s the standard here even if it’s changed the scoring paradigm.
Exactly this. 50/100 looks like an F, because that’s what it would be on a school paper. Often we’d even be given points out of a hundred just like that. So giving a 50 to a middling/okay game feels really harsh, vs 70 (aka a C) or 80 (B).
ScrubblesEven gollum, by far the buggiest and most boring AAA game to come out in a few years was given a 64% by pc gamer. At least gamespot was honest and gave them a 2/10
Its more like the problem of Neo-liberalism and hyper capitalism at this point…
Journalism dying is just a by-product.
Commercial media has always been collaborative with whatever power structures or industries it’s associated with. Only good media is independent, and even then you get some really shitty journalists, and sometimes entire rotten publications.
stopthatgirl7This article made a damn good point about how much gaming websites depend on guides now. It hasn’t really clicked until now with me. I follow a bot on Mastodon that posts new articles from a bunch of different gaming sites, and it seems like half of them are for guides and walkthroughs. That’s where they get their ad bucks from, so that and SEO are the big focus.
Yeah, after Reddit died (as far as I’m concerned) I set up a load of RSS feeds. A lot of them are, as you say, updates concerning walkthroughs and guides. Predominantly Baldurs Gate 3.
Which is fine I guess, but it is very obvious what they’re pushing
yeah, it sucks and I just stick with the wiki source and proper sites I know. I am a hoarder so I don’t want to miss some good items I can get by accidentally wiping a area or block myself from them because of a wrong decision. Some of the generated sites are still refer to old early access stuff.
I just checked that gaming news Mastodon account I follow, and of the 20 most recent posts, 19 of them were guides.
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