The internet throwing a tantrum over a perfectly decent RPG is not very remarkable.
Most (not all) of the people who commented on the HALO 4 review would not understand this article. It would require several more 'tits' and 'awesomes' to get to their level.
Rotten Tomatoes is smart enough to distinguish the positive reviews from the negative reviews and assign a score accordingly, why can't Metacritic? Tom's scale is not really any different from Roger Ebert's and yet Rotten Tomatoes isn't giving films ridiculously low scores because Ebert gave a film 3 stars out of 4 (omg, only a 75%?!?!). Blame the aggregator, not the critics.
Couldn't agree with you more. Who a reviewer is and what they say about a game is always more informative than the score they give it.
I look at the ign reviews, but not the scores. With Edge in particular, the review is the thing. Sometimes their score almost seems arbitrary, but their reviews are excellent.
Got directed here from kotaku, by the way. Enjoying it so far.
Of course by 'occasional competent review', you mean an occasional review that coincides with your own opinion. And, seriously, LOL at your asking him to be 'fair' in his reviews.
Tom, you're a bit like a teacher marking English exams and fighting a one-man war on grade inflation. It's pretty harsh on the students/games you mark if you're not grading on the same curve as everyone else. And it's a lot easier to change your stance than to change everyone else's.
It's not like it's difficult to understand a 75% on the standard reviewer scale. It means 'you could have fun with this game but there are other better games so you might as well play one of those instead'.
Schreier's lead example about Fallout: New Vegas is perhaps the weakest he could've picked. As a consumer, bugs are exactly when a publisher should be withholding bonuses from developers. Those aren't subjective at all. Stuff either works or it doesn't. Other technology doesn't get a pass from bugs. Why should games?
Then the review examples he cites only further undermine his point. The Escapist gives the game a solid 80 despite lamenting,"It's disappointing to see such an otherwise brilliant and polished game suffer from years-old bugs." 1UP writes, "If only it was a stable product and didn't ship with so many bugs, I would've given New Vegas a higher score," and then gives the game a respectable 75.
When a game is repeatedly called out for being saddled with bugs and still garners an 84 and 82, the real problem is completely contrary to the one Schreier is so focused on.
Congratulations. You just successfully argued against ever fixing any broken system anywhere.
It's just so much easier to conform to it and adjust because fixing it might hurt someone.
I love that you bring Rotten Tomatoes into this, as I feel that is a better model. The reality different critics should, and do, have wildly divergent tastes and opinions. Rotten Tomatoes gives a quick 'this many people liked it, that many didn't' and you are left to figure out which one you would be. A game may get a 60-70% metacritic rating where 75% of the people don't like it, but for that percentage that do they may love it. Metacritic has no way of recognizing this.
I disagree I think if a studio is dependent on metacritic it is due to mismanagement and frankly selling out to big publishers. These are harsh times and I understand the allure of Triple A gaming, consoles and potentially big money from EA but studios are now proving time and again that publishing independently is a viable option. I understand people playing it safe and wanting to go for a steady job but the industry is an unstable one, layoffs after a project is complete is the norm and really if these people are relying on bonuses then they need to find a steady job in programming.
Give me an honestly personal review of a game over some pathetic attempt at "objectiveness" and "fairness" any day. Objectiveness and fairness are as much dependent upon the individual reviewer's perspective as anything else.
No one will ever agree on what either term means, so we end up with people using the two terms in an attempt to smash any review they don't like for their favorite games. Every single review ever is biased by something from the reviewer's perspective. Attempts at fairness are just as much bias as anything else.
Keep up the good fight Tom.
I think he meant your scores were anomalous or divergent, perhaps.
I don't think it is unfair. Publishers want good games, so they try to provide an incentive for developers to make good games. The problem is that game quality is impossible to measure objectively.
Metacritic is used as a proxy towards game quality, it's not perfect, quite frankly it may not even be good. But I would argue that there is no better right now.
When did publishers stop using sales as a metric for success? How does a critically acclaimed game that doesn't sell even merit a bonus if it doesn't break even? Publishers writing a metacritic score into their bonus agreement are just like the thief who promises to teach the king's horse how to speak. They've nothing to lose, it's just another hurdle for the developer to jump over.
Shorter DKD: "game reviews are not objective, but Tom should be objective."
Maybe you're the one not thinking things through, guy.
Seriously. I don't know why gamers keep bringing up the New Vegas example. That game flat out didn't work right for huge amounts of people. It led to a complete PR shitstorm.
I'm not sure why Obsidian deserves a bonus after all that. If anything, what happened there is the system working as intended.
I disagree. Using a review score does not automatically imply an "objective constant value". It's simply another indicator, like a very brief introductory or closing statement, that represents the author's opinion.
It's up to the author to explain their scoring system and to the reader to understand that system.
So many comments, and no one points out the typos:
"Adam Sessler really unloaded on Metacritic in Scrheier’s [sic] article"
"I told Schreir [sic] in our conversation that my main obligation was to my readers."
I hope so. If the author of the Kotaku article considers Mr. Chick's opinions an aberration, then he's part of the problem.
There's a basic problem with this reasoning: developers don't do the QA on games. Publishers do.
Is it reasonable that Obsidian takes the flak for the publisher (Bethesda) failing do their job?