First reviews for Battlefield 3

[Aprilgold]

So? My thought is simple, BattleField 3 only gains such a high score because of hype, read anything on the Faults of Game Reviewing to understand further.

Yeah, it's not like they genuinely like the game or anything. All games journalists are paid off if they disagree with us, right?

Ok, since you don't know the downsides yet, I'll explain them.

1) If you give a game that is below a hearty recomendation, you are VERY close to losing review copies in the future.
2) Give the game less then a perfect, like the OPs example, your mail box will be full of angry fan boys or girls who are strictly mad that you didn't give their favorite game a perfect.
3) The scale is scewed to avoid losing a publisher's trust or invitation to a party, you may even lose a scoop on a game.

Once again, the scale is now on the high numbers, not the lows. 5-10 are actually 1-5 now, you can see IGN for a best example, look at how many games their giving 9s or 8s, what'll you'll quickly discover is that those are given out like hot cakes.

I never said that it was that they disagreed with us, its just that reviewers are now at a point to where they can't give a game lower then a 7, because teams that are lending them the game to review might just revoke doing that in the future, or even letting them interview the Dev team anymore.

 

[Frostbite3789]

I love how a bunch of people skip straight to accusations of bribery.

I reckon I'll give that a try as soon as the Skyrim reviews hit the wires.

The double standards will be astounding. Because we know it'll be buggy as hell, it's a Bethesda game. But the same people saying overlooking BF3's flaws is wrong will be quick to defend Skyrim's numerous bugs and why they should be overlooked.

 

[PeePantz]

Personally I'm not getting Battlefield 3. At all. Unless EA changes its EULA/TOS/whatever it's called to something a little more customer friendly. So I'm saving my money Skyrim.

Oh yes, I thought Battlefield was only Multiplayer. B2 and B1942(or whatever year it was) and B2142 all only had multiplayer and the single player was just multiplayer with bots. Now for story you want Bad Company.

http://www.gamespot.com/pc/action/battlefield-3/news/6331203/ea-changes-origin-eula

I think it comes out on the 27th where you're from.

 

[Frostbite3789]

Personally I'm not getting Battlefield 3. At all. Unless EA changes its EULA/TOS/whatever it's called to something a little more customer friendly. So I'm saving my money Skyrim.

Oh yes, I thought Battlefield was only Multiplayer. B2 and B1942(or whatever year it was) and B2142 all only had multiplayer and the single player was just multiplayer with bots. Now for story you want Bad Company.

They changed the ToS months ago. But that wasn't reported by any gaming sites, because such a story wouldn't get publicity and site views. Only the sensationalist ones will.

 

[Supertegwyn]

So? My thought is simple, BattleField 3 only gains such a high score because of hype, read anything on the Faults of Game Reviewing to understand further.

Yeah, it's not like they genuinely like the game or anything. All games journalists are paid off if they disagree with us, right?

Ok, since you don't know the downsides yet, I'll explain them.

1) If you give a game that is below a hearty recomendation, you are VERY close to losing review copies in the future.
2) Give the game less then a perfect, like the OPs example, your mail box will be full of angry fan boys or girls who are strictly mad that you didn't give their favorite game a perfect.
3) The scale is scewed to avoid losing a publisher's trust or invitation to a party, you may even lose a scoop on a game.

Once again, the scale is now on the high numbers, not the lows. 5-10 are actually 1-5 now, you can see IGN for a best example, look at how many games their giving 9s or 8s, what'll you'll quickly discover is that those are given out like hot cakes.

I never said that it was that they disagreed with us, its just that reviewers are now at a point to where they can't give a game lower then a 7, because teams that are lending them the game to review might just revoke doing that in the future, or even letting them interview the Dev team anymore.

Give me proof and I will believe you. I know that sounds like a dick move but without proof your argument doesn't hold water. If they don't get release copies, they can buy it on release day. If they get flamed, they can change their spam filters. If a publisher doesn't invite you, then you make a sensational post about how said publisher has wronged you and whinge about it. That will get views.

 

[Programmed_For_Damage]

Being the antisocial bastard I am I'm only interested in the single-player campaign. The reviews have certainly piqued my interest, but I think I may skip past it and save my pennies for MW3.

 

[Aprilgold]

So? My thought is simple, BattleField 3 only gains such a high score because of hype, read anything on the Faults of Game Reviewing to understand further.

Yeah, it's not like they genuinely like the game or anything. All games journalists are paid off if they disagree with us, right?

Ok, since you don't know the downsides yet, I'll explain them.

1) If you give a game that is below a hearty recomendation, you are VERY close to losing review copies in the future.
2) Give the game less then a perfect, like the OPs example, your mail box will be full of angry fan boys or girls who are strictly mad that you didn't give their favorite game a perfect.
3) The scale is scewed to avoid losing a publisher's trust or invitation to a party, you may even lose a scoop on a game.

Once again, the scale is now on the high numbers, not the lows. 5-10 are actually 1-5 now, you can see IGN for a best example, look at how many games their giving 9s or 8s, what'll you'll quickly discover is that those are given out like hot cakes.

I never said that it was that they disagreed with us, its just that reviewers are now at a point to where they can't give a game lower then a 7, because teams that are lending them the game to review might just revoke doing that in the future, or even letting them interview the Dev team anymore.

Give me proof and I will believe you. I know that sounds like a dick move but without proof your argument doesn't hold water. If they don't get release copies, they can buy it on release day. If they get flamed, they can change their spam filters. If a publisher doesn't invite you, then you make a sensational post about how said publisher has wronged you and whinge about it. That will get views.

Heres one:
http://www.examiner.com/video-game-industry-in-long-island/problems-with-video-game-reviews

I was looking for one from Destructoid, but couldn't find it, so I decided to go with what I COULD find.

This one sorta fits, but not perfectly.
http://www.destructoid.com/the-official-destructoid-review-guide-2011-203909.phtml

Anyhow, yes, these problems exist. Infact, you can write IGN or Destructoid and ask how full their mailboxes get when they don't give a game a high score, most likely they'll say something along the lines of "It doesn't get that full." But thats just code for "It gets full of hate mail" and maybe they'll tell the truth.

 

[Jandau]

An overhyped multiplayer focused modern military FPS from a major publisher is getting inflated review scores! This is new and unexpected!
[/sarcasm]

Seriously, though, gun porn army games are as mainstream as you can get in western gaming at the moment and the lowest common denominator....

Can we, as the gaming community, stop using that term? It only makes you look like a snob, and it's really not gonna help with the Escapist's reputation of being elitist hipsters.

But it's true. I'm not saying everyone who plays such games belongs to that category, but as a rule, the most popular things tend to fall into that category. It's not a matter of snobbishness, it's a matter of how the market works. I myself like Gears of War and I don't deny there's a lot of that particular denominator in there as well.

 

[Athinira]

Heres one:
http://www.examiner.com/video-game-industry-in-long-island/problems-with-video-game-reviews

I was looking for one from Destructoid, but couldn't find it, so I decided to go with what I COULD find.

This one sorta fits, but not perfectly.
http://www.destructoid.com/the-official-destructoid-review-guide-2011-203909.phtml

Anyhow, yes, these problems exist. Infact, you can write IGN or Destructoid and ask how full their mailboxes get when they don't give a game a high score, most likely they'll say something along the lines of "It doesn't get that full." But thats just code for "It gets full of hate mail" and maybe they'll tell the truth.

I don't necessarily disagree with the fact that reviewers are WAAAAY to generous these days with the high scores (for whatever reason), but i do disagree with more games deserving a 1-3 score (even if they are downright terrible).

Unlike television (including movies), books and other forms of entertainment, video games also have technical standards, which needs to be taken into account as well. These are things like a game:
- Crashing a lot
- Having performance problems (original Deus Ex at it's time anyone?)
- Other technical problems (like saves not working, settings not saving etc.)

Even if a game has downright terrible gameplay, voice acting, graphics etc. it can still do better than a "better" game, if that better game has some of those technical issues and the worse game doesn't. In other words, the lowest video game review scores are reserved for the games that just doesn't work properly (and are shit at the same time). It's not like movies, because i have never heard any movie review complain about the movie crashing their DVD player all the time.

But again, you are still right at the other end of the scale. I have only played some of the beta of Battlefield 3, but from what i experienced (as well as the fact that the single-player compaign is still likely to suck as it did in Bad Company 2), i guess that if i were to review it, my score of it would probably be somewhere around 7.5-8.

And i guess that Yathzee won't be too impressed either.

 

[Supertegwyn]

So? My thought is simple, BattleField 3 only gains such a high score because of hype, read anything on the Faults of Game Reviewing to understand further.

Yeah, it's not like they genuinely like the game or anything. All games journalists are paid off if they disagree with us, right?

Ok, since you don't know the downsides yet, I'll explain them.

1) If you give a game that is below a hearty recomendation, you are VERY close to losing review copies in the future.
2) Give the game less then a perfect, like the OPs example, your mail box will be full of angry fan boys or girls who are strictly mad that you didn't give their favorite game a perfect.
3) The scale is scewed to avoid losing a publisher's trust or invitation to a party, you may even lose a scoop on a game.

Once again, the scale is now on the high numbers, not the lows. 5-10 are actually 1-5 now, you can see IGN for a best example, look at how many games their giving 9s or 8s, what'll you'll quickly discover is that those are given out like hot cakes.

I never said that it was that they disagreed with us, its just that reviewers are now at a point to where they can't give a game lower then a 7, because teams that are lending them the game to review might just revoke doing that in the future, or even letting them interview the Dev team anymore.

Give me proof and I will believe you. I know that sounds like a dick move but without proof your argument doesn't hold water. If they don't get release copies, they can buy it on release day. If they get flamed, they can change their spam filters. If a publisher doesn't invite you, then you make a sensational post about how said publisher has wronged you and whinge about it. That will get views.

Heres one:
http://www.examiner.com/video-game-industry-in-long-island/problems-with-video-game-reviews

I was looking for one from Destructoid, but couldn't find it, so I decided to go with what I COULD find.

This one sorta fits, but not perfectly.
http://www.destructoid.com/the-official-destructoid-review-guide-2011-203909.phtml

Anyhow, yes, these problems exist. Infact, you can write IGN or Destructoid and ask how full their mailboxes get when they don't give a game a high score, most likely they'll say something along the lines of "It doesn't get that full." But thats just code for "It gets full of hate mail" and maybe they'll tell the truth.

No you misunderstand: I completely agree about review scores being too lenient, what I mean is proof that the gaming industry "influences" these decisions.

 

[Aprilgold]

Heres one:
http://www.examiner.com/video-game-industry-in-long-island/problems-with-video-game-reviews

I was looking for one from Destructoid, but couldn't find it, so I decided to go with what I COULD find.

This one sorta fits, but not perfectly.
http://www.destructoid.com/the-official-destructoid-review-guide-2011-203909.phtml

Anyhow, yes, these problems exist. Infact, you can write IGN or Destructoid and ask how full their mailboxes get when they don't give a game a high score, most likely they'll say something along the lines of "It doesn't get that full." But thats just code for "It gets full of hate mail" and maybe they'll tell the truth.

I don't necessarily disagree with the fact that reviewers are WAAAAY to generous these days with the high scores (for whatever reason), but i do disagree with more games deserving a 1-3 score (even if they are downright terrible).

Well, you are wrong sir, look at Movie reviews, don't they give low scores.

 

[Athinira]

Well, you are wrong sir, look at Movie reviews, don't they give low scores.

How about you go read my post again, because the point went so far over your head that I'm genuinely afraid you only read the part you quoted and forgot the rest.

Look. Games have to reserve the lowest of the lowest scores for games which are not only bad, but who also suffers from technical problems. Movies don't. Why do you think movies are more often scored on a scale with 4-6 stars being the maximum, rather than with the 1-10 scale that games more often use? A 4-5 score for a game can easily be said to be the equivalent of a movie getting 1-2 stars out of 6. It's not like movie reviewers have to reserve truly horrible scores because they come across movies that won't play in neither the cinema or on their DVD/Blue-Ray player, but it's quite common that occasionally games will turn up that simply won't run on most configurations, runs terribly or crashes all the time.

If you go read the reviews for the lowest scored PC games on GameSpot, you will see that most of them (if not all of them) cite technical issues as one of the main problems for the game (beyond the game just being generally shit). You will also notice that while there are plenty of PC games that has gotten a score lower than 2.0, 2.0 happens to be the lowest score that has ever been awarded to both Xbox 360 and Playstation 3 games (and only two Playstation 2 games has gotten under that score). Why? Because Console-games rarely have technical issues, pretty much only facing framerate problems most of the time, while PC games have alot more technical issues.

 

[Sentox6]

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/2011-10-25-battlefield-3-review-review

Eurogamer 'only' gave it 8/10. Single player is pretty bad, and tries to copy CoD to poor effect. Multiplayer is superb.

That seems about right.

 

[Awexsome]

A lot of reviews tend to mix the versions of console and PC when I'd like some clarification. Sometimes I wonder if they're not giving credit to the PC's better multiplayer with 64 player online or if even they're not being hard enough on the glitches and performance on console version.

 

[MikeWorks]

The whole select group of sites getting early copies is so dodgy. Why can't EA / DICE just send everyone a review copy at the same time like every other publisher does?

 

[Aprilgold]

So? My thought is simple, BattleField 3 only gains such a high score because of hype, read anything on the Faults of Game Reviewing to understand further.

Yeah, it's not like they genuinely like the game or anything. All games journalists are paid off if they disagree with us, right?

Ok, since you don't know the downsides yet, I'll explain them.

1) If you give a game that is below a hearty recomendation, you are VERY close to losing review copies in the future.
2) Give the game less then a perfect, like the OPs example, your mail box will be full of angry fan boys or girls who are strictly mad that you didn't give their favorite game a perfect.
3) The scale is scewed to avoid losing a publisher's trust or invitation to a party, you may even lose a scoop on a game.

Once again, the scale is now on the high numbers, not the lows. 5-10 are actually 1-5 now, you can see IGN for a best example, look at how many games their giving 9s or 8s, what'll you'll quickly discover is that those are given out like hot cakes.

I never said that it was that they disagreed with us, its just that reviewers are now at a point to where they can't give a game lower then a 7, because teams that are lending them the game to review might just revoke doing that in the future, or even letting them interview the Dev team anymore.

1. No, they don't. I've listened to a lot of podcasts hosted by game journalists, and they say they don't ever get asked to change a score. GamesRadar, IGN, Destructoid, especially, have given low or low-ish scores to games by big publishers and have still reviewed the next games.

2. Professionals don't give a shit. I'll go back to GR; an editor there gave Infamous a 7, and he got blasted. But you know what, the same reviewer reviewed Infamous 2, and gave it an 8. The same outlet also shit on Tomb Raider: Legend, and got the next game to review. Destructoid shit on Assassin's Creed II, still reviewed BroHo. They shit on FFXIII, still got FFXIII-2 ads on the site.

3. What scoop? Most game news is revealed via press releases. They can't get scoops; they and the person who gave them the "scoop," would be fired.

How about you read my other comment ON THE SAME PAGE, goodness people, its right on Page 3.