Numerical Review Scores: A Low Sodium Fly-By Analysis

[hanselthecaretaker]

All this review talk lately got me to ponder something that just goes to show how many grains of salt should be taken when considering their importance.

Let's take a popular, critically acclaimed series like the Souls games for example; on PS3/4 we have the following meta's:

Demon's Souls - 89
Dark Souls - 89
Dark Souls 2 - 91 (hmmm)
Dark Souls 3 - 89

Now, everyone familiar with the series knows that the overwhelming consensus is that Dark Souls 2 is the entry which really dropped the ball in quite a few significant ways, yet it is the only game in the series to break into and above a 90 average. We'd have to include Bloodborne in order to reach a "better" game by critics' standards, which is about the only part of this sampling that actually makes sense.

We could also take it a step further and ask why possibly the most ground breaking series of the last generation struggled to even attain a 90 average while a good number of "by the numbers" series routinely and easily reached the milestone.

In short, one need look no further than the above as to why angry diatribes and shutting down websites over these little numbers next to our near and dear games...are essentially baseless. The system is flawed to begin with, so no point turning grains of salt into rivers of it.

 

[go-10]

Dark Souls is for hardcore gamers, meaning it'll have a limited outreach and websites will generally favor more popular games that will get them more traffic. Thus metacritic has a smaller pool of reviews to draw from and smaller numbers are far easier to tip on the scale.

BotW is for casual gamers.easily accessible for everyone and because of how popular the series is with a vastly larger market websites want to cover the game sine clicks are guaranteed. Because of this metacritic has a larger pool of reviews to draw from and large numbers are harder to tip over.

so the system isn't flawed, it works just fine, what you need to keep in mind is that majority of game reviewers and websites are for profit companies, hence the popular games will get more coverage despite how good/bad they are.

 

[Saelune]

Alot of people probably played 2 because of how much 1 was praised. Dark Souls 1 is what made the Souls series a big deal. But 2 is the one released since then.

Plus out of 100 is so arbitrary. I cant quantify such a specific score. I prefer out of 10 if I have to give points. And even then I would use it more for quality of the game rather than enjoyment. Morrowind is my favorite game, but I would not give it a 10/10. It has bugs and flaws, but it is more enjoyable for me than any perfect score game.

 

[CritialGaming]

The flaws in the system don't matter, because at the end of the day people WANT a score. Doesn't matter if you use a 5-star system, 10 point system, or 100% system, people want a number and these websites are trying to drive traffic so they will continue to put numbers on review scores regardless of the flaws in logic there.

 

[Igor-Rowan]

I think that reviews, like the games must have layers, when you are young 6 and up means good, anything else goes into either "play it later", "just bad". But when you are older a number isn't enough anymore, IGN tries to include ups and downs, Polygon reviews things such as graphics, sound, story separately, but in the end we need better reviews and reviewers.

I've seen an interesting system that ranges from -10 to 10, in which the closer to its extremes, the more it's recommended whether it's good (close to 10) or so bad, it's good (close to -10); and close to the center means probably just plain bad or plain good. It's a work in progress. There is also the stars ranking system, that I think it's misused a lot, especially when they divide the stars in quarters like 1.75 stars or 3.25, it just... misses the point.

I think what we need is to drop the numbers and start making questions. Would I like this game if I'm a fan of this genre/series/franchise/developer? Would I like it if I wasn't? Would I like it for the challenge or lack thereof? Would I like it for the story and only the story? And so on.

 

[Johnny Novgorod]

So much hubbub with scores lately.
Obviously each reviewer has a different method to scoring, so an aggregate score of every review is mathematically worthless.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Video game reviewing has been FUBAR for awhile now. Just about every AAA release is GREAT!!! Reviews are nothing more than ads for games. For some reason, reviewers try to "objectively" rate games where as long as a mechanic "works", it's a good mechanic regardless of how much or how little the reviewer enjoyed it. There's almost no criticism of writing with regards to reviews either. The RPG genre is something where writing is very important, you need good characters in RPGs with a hopefully at least a decent to good story. Yet Final Fantasy XIII has 1 negative review. Same thing with games that are just basically movies in a sense like Heavy Rain. We all know how differing movies are with people (even movie critics). Where's all the criticism of the script of Heavy Rain, which is the main element that makes the game work or not work? What about MGS4? I love MGS4 for it's B-movie-ness but I very much doubt the vast majority thinks the same thing yet the game has a 94 Metacritic, that's more than Oscar movies score. At least half the game is cutscenes so half the score should be basically how good or bad a movie MGS4 was. Just look at the negative response from The Escapist's GTAV review criticizing the writing.

How does a game that is very much a love/hate game (FFXIII) not only score better than a beloved classic movie but also have less negative reviews as well? The original Ghostbusters average score is 8.1 with 2 negative reviews out of 69 reviews. FFXIII has an average score of 83 with 1 negative review out of 83 reviews. Ghostbusters has less reviews and has more negative reviews.

What proves game reviews to indeed be FUBAR is that fact that you couldn't even do a RottenTomatoes for video games because every game would basically get a 99% or 100% fresh rating because AAA games rarely get any negative reviews. FFXIII would be 99% fresh, MGS4 would be 100% fresh, Heavy Rain would be a paltry 97%. Oh, and every Souls game would be a 100% fresh rating.

Here's a thread from this site (obviously) with some hard data about the scoring of video games:
http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.872132-In-defense-of-the-number-a-note-on-video-game-review-scores

 

[tippy2k2]

To be blunt, a site that doesn't have scores with their games is generally a site that I'm not going to use.

A score is nothing but a snapshot of an authors thinking (I hate to say it as I find most people saying it are doing it as a bad thing but it is kind of true; a reviewer is giving a professional opinion, nothing more nothing less). I put scores into my movie reviews (which you should totally go read because they're super awesome and my ego dies a little everytime I see my reviews getting less than 100 views...) because it's just a snapshot of what I thought about a movie; just because I scored "Deadpool" [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/326.934544-tippy2k2-tells-you-what-to-think-Deadpool] and "Hell or High Water" [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/326.943067-tippy2k2-tells-you-what-to-think-Hell-or-High-Water] the same score doesn't mean that I think both of those movies are the greatest movies ever that deserve spots in the Library of Congress; it just means that I really liked both of those movies and I used the score to demonstrate that.

I don't want to read a bunch of different articles to see what a bunch of different reviewers thought of a game. Generally, I will read one or two of them and then use scores across multiple sites just to see if others agree or if there is mixed and/or dissenting opinion. If I notice a LOT of mixes, I will usually investigate further but I want to know as little as possible about a game, movie, book, porn, etc. before diving into it. Scores allow me to do that.

Is it perfect? Of course not. But until how good (or bad) something is has some subjective taste to it, there will not be a perfect system.

 

[Vendor-Lazarus]

I wouldn't mind scores really, but not as the inflated hype-ads they are today.
I'd prefer much more emphasis put on controls, viewpoint, game-mechanics and gameplay than today's lyric waxing of graphics and story.

A review consisting of 10 point sections divided into categories would prevent any one thing from running amok and distorting the overall score.
With this setup an aggregator would become much more fair and balanced.

I almost always avoid reviews today and go directly to forums where those that have purchased the game describes it's flaw and strengths.
If I find something interesting I can delve more deeper into a games advertised content.