To clarify, I don’t have a problem with “using the full scale” to rate games. When he first started it I think it was fair to complain that he was exploiting metacritic to give his reviews more weight because their system was assuming that reviewers all use the same scale. Now, though, I think you have to fault metacritic for not scaling the reviews based on the range actually employed by their sources, instead of the one nominally employed.
What I do have an issue with, though, is a rating scale where Civ:BE was twice as good at launch as Stellaris. I’ve already had more fun with Stellaris than I did in Civ:BE and I was happy to give that game a shot.
Tim_N
1922
Something I am doing with Stellaris: I create a race I think is cool, unique, and with a backstory I made up. I play a game with them. Then, when I start a new game, I tell Stellaris that the last aliens I made have to be one of the AI countries I find in this new game. Rinse and repeat. The end goal is that after sixteen or so games everyone in the galaxy I encounter will be races I have a history with and already filled with character. Might not work for some people but I am having fun with it.
It’s not a problem of full scale, it’s a problem of being a different scale. 1 means Tom hated it. Maybe it kicked his dog. Formatted his disk. Called his momma names. Or just broke his heart, looking like a great game but ending up as a bad one. :D Doesn’t matter. It’s not an objective scale, and isn’t pretending to be (like other scales pretend, as if objective reviews were possible).
I can hate a awesome game. I can love an awful one. The worth of a review from me depends on how much you value my opinion. That’s how it should be.
But, for someone expecting a 1 to mean “awful game, unplayble trash” it looks like trolling.
Personally, I haven’t played enough to agree or disagree with Tom’s review, but I can easily see where he’s coming from. The personality one is a major issue for non prebuilt content. And really, MoO races (my favorite 4X game) didn’t have loads of personality, not really, but they felt like they did, and that’s what counts.
MikeJ
1924
Yes, being able to reuse your race as an AI player is a nice feature. Can you choose the AI personality they will use?
I didn’t say he didn’t explain his complaint, I said his complaint misses the point. Instead of focusing on the randomly-generated name of the race, it would make more sense to focus on their ethos and their planet type. That’s why I made the analogy I made. Maybe the differences from an opponent’s point of view between enemies of different ethos…es? isn’t big enough to provide variety, but the complaint that you can’t get attached to randomly generated names is then irrelevant. I don’t think making sure that trait A is always paired with trait B and given the same empire name would improve the game.
But you could also see it the other way around : personalities build up as the game goes on, and they are not “pre made”. In my game there are aliens that i came to love and others that i hate, it’s just that the story builds up as i’m playing. For me this is better than knowing who i will love and hate EVERY game (as in Civ personalities for example).
robc04
1927
I agree with this. My extent of caring who the other races are is based on how big they’re getting and do they have an area I want to expand into. No one has done anything to make any of them feel different from each other. I imagine some of this can be related to a particular game setup like others have said, but they feel bland. I don’t hate my time with the game or anything and I want to play some more to see what happens, but I do find myself firing up a game like Mini Metro to fill in some time when I could have fired up Stellaris, so that says something I guess.
Then again, I don’t typically play strategy games to create stories, I play to try and work the systems and get successful results. Sometimes this results in exciting gameplay moments that are cool. My main problem with Stellaris is that there doesn’t seem to be that many interesting choices to make.
robc04
1928
It doesn’t mean it’s twice as good. Metacritic’s use of Tom’s rating is what makes it appear that way and like you mention that is on Metacritic.
MikeJ
1929
I wonder if having an empire develop a personality over the course of a game has to do with how threatened you feel. If you don’t really need allies to win, it’s hard to develop much feeling for them. Enemies that can’t realistically win don’t seem so worrisome.
Also, I’m thinking the bonuses and special mechanics for species in a space game need to be more significant than in a historical game where everyone is after all, human. Paradox is used to bonuses being rather subtle and a lot of things depending on context and geographical position. It would be nice to up the significance of the species traits a lot, and think of traits that shake up how they play even more.
I really have to disagree with that review score. Reading the review, which is the important part of it, I was guessing it was going to be a 3 Stars, this is competent, but lacks features of its competitors without adding much to the formula.
But 1 star? C’mon, I think if everyone read that review without looking at the score, they would have guess 3, or maybe 2 stars. 1 stars is the worst possible score, it almost feels punative. This is coming from someone whose last 4X game was GalCiv2 or Civ5, so I am no grand strategy super fan or expert. But, this game seems excellent to me. I have dropped plenty of hours into it, and restarted once. I just don’t see the 1 star score being justified by my experiences or the text of the review. As a reviewer, I would think that would be your goal to have a critique and score line up with one-another. It didn’t feel that way to me.
There have been plenty of negative reviews of games I have read, and some of Tom’s negative reactions to AAA titles and other games have been contrary to popular opinion, but in a lot of those cases, they felt justified, like a point-counterpoint. Even if I didn’t agree with the score, I could agree with the overall points to where I could see that the score was justified. Thinking critically about why a game is good or bad is important, but you lost me on this one.
Paradox definitely needs to put this quote on their site:
“I like Stellaris!”
;)
Reading the review, which is the important part of it, I was guessing it was going to be a 3 Stars, this is competent, but lacks features of its competitors without adding much to the formula.
I don’t know, reading the title–The bone-dry sci-fi of Stellaris, a game that doesn’t even work–seems to foreshadow the score.
-Todd
KevinC
1933
Not going to happen. Okay, I shouldn’t speak so authoritatively since I have no connection with the project, but Steamworks is pretty heavily integrated at this point. They’re integrated with the Workshop, the netcode is all Steamworks, etc. It seems to me it would take some drastic event, like a Steam comet, to retrofit all of that.
Yeah, Paradox went full Steam. Steam gives them not only a sound matchmaking platform, but the perfect way to sell lots of DLC. They’re not turning their backs on that.
I remember when they said “DRM-free is great, we love it, it’s the right thing to do”, but that Paradox is long gone, and I don’t see it coming back ever.
Logistics and time certainly play a role, too. I remember buying into CK2 when they were still supporting some alternate version of it (GamersGate, maybe?), and the headaches the two separate-and-similar-but-not-identical code branches caused them seemed endless, and the non-Steam owners always kinda ended up feeling like second-class citizens, anyway.
He literally gave it double the score. If he didn’t want it to appear to mean “twice as good” then perhaps he should use a scale that makes that clearer. Like, say, give it a 7 and Stellaris a 6 :p Nitpicking about magnitudes aside, though, my point is that the scale should have some internal consistency and if that’s the case he is claiming that Stellaris is worse than Civ:BE. That’s just incorrect and it makes it hard to take his score seriously. Perhaps it truly is how he felt at the time he wrote the respective reviews, and you can make arguments for some amount of inflation over time, but I think don’t the average quality of 4x games has improved so much in between the reviews that Stellaris needed to meet a higher bar. Civ:BE fails at all the major things he mentions (“personality”, endgame management, weak techs & other bonuses) but was also less innovative and less fun at the start. Is it crazy to expect him to look back at the scores he gave other similar games in the last several years and then consider how the one he’s reviewing stacks up against them?
I’m not saying his complaints aren’t valid ones - he’s a smart guy with some clearly explained issues with both the interface and the endgame of Stellaris. I just think those issues are less serious than he sees them, and the review feels overwrought as a justification for a clickbait “Worst. 4x. Ever.” rating.
Well, just to be sure you’re in the loop (since it’s only been mentioned like three times in this thread), do recall that Tom’s personal rating scale is a little. . . off-kilter compared to most.
His level of hatred for a particular game really is basically his to define. . . even if, of course, he’s completely wrong about this one ;)
Spock
1938
I don’t have a problem with Tom’s star-rating system. Movie reviewers do much the same. Personally, I thought his review read like a 3-star review. (And yeah, earlier in this thread he did say “I like Stellaris!”, so he musta liked something about it. :)
But I do think Metacritic shouldn’t just translate star scores into 1=20%, 3=60%, etc. If I were Metacritic, I’d consider two or more aggregate scores. 81/1.5*. Maybe that’d be too complicated.
I’m all out of popcorn. :(
Bring on the patches!
Actually the 1.1 patch looks pretty good. I’d link to it but I’m ultra tired right now and don’t want to.
(It has sector AI improvements, even)
