Sotimes, a professional review IS better than a fan one.

[Nicolairigel]

So, today I had a little revelation while talking with a friend of mine who I had just learned is huge fan of the first two ME games. When I asked him about the third title and what he thought, he said he refused to buy because, according to him, "reviews were extremely low." This confused me, as I believe that ME3 received critical acclaim from critics. When I informed him of this, he simply replied somewhere along the lines off,

"Meh, those 'professional' are paid off critics that'll give anything a high score."
and that he had only really focused on "user" reviews.

That's when I realized that I personally think that a websites Such as IGN or Gamespot or what have you would actually give a better and more accurate review of ME3 then most "user" reviews. This may seem like a given to some, but excluding those independents such as yatzhee I believe that the normal census has been that website reviews are "corrupt" and are in the pockets of the publishers such as EA, and that these reviews are almost if not more trustworthy than fan's reviews. Why? Because... I'll be honest, I've seen rageful comments and user reviews by fans who simply state that the game is horrible due to the bad practice of day one dlc and the ending, and both of those do not classify any game as a "horrible game." I am not saying that ME3 is a perfect game, I am not just randomly getting mad at anyone that insults it, the game does have flaws, such AS the ending and bad questing system, and I am most certainly not implying that sites such as IGN or Gamespot's review can be trust to 100%, I am simply implying one thing,

THE DISAPPOINTING ENDING AND DAY 1 DLC DOES NOT = BAD GAME.

Simple enough? You can say that "Review scores don't matter if you like the game," but more and more I see people deciding not to buy the game or even pirate it SOLELY for these two reasons. I believe that a "critic" review is at this point more trust worthy than a a fan review, since these critics usually have the control to not let extreme emotions dictate how well a game sizes-up, even if it is from the normally insulted IGN. It's not even exclusive to ME3, this rule applies to ANY game.

So escapist community, what are your thoughts? Am I just another fanboy supporting Bioware, Or do I have point hidden in my ramble?

 

[Clive Howlitzer]

I don't ever trust anything that any paid reviewer has to say about a game, in the same vein, I don't really trust user reviews either. I think both are going to skew a certain way no matter what.
If you are referring to people review bombing ME3 because they didn't like the ending, that is pretty lame but it is how they have chosen to voice their anger at Bioware, which I am fine with.
In the end, a game review is going to be biased no matter who writes it. Personally, I'd rather it biased from a fan perspective than the perspective of the publisher.

 

[Tiswas]

*looks at the Gamespot review for Skyward Sword*

Yup. They lost all credability with that garbage. Durrr! It not work although everyone else in the world has managed to make it work fine. And THEN coming back and admitting it did work.

So no. Not all paid reviewers are great. Not ONE Paid reviewer mentioned how broken Skyrim is on the PS3 yet a lot of fan reviews brought that up. Fan reviews are kinda mixed too. you get the 'BEST GAME EVER' with little to back it up and then the 'WORST GAME EVER' with little to back that up too.

I kinda just take a look at both of them and make a judgement based on that. Paid reviews in magazines usually push my decision more simply due to screenshots/videos of the game

 

[Zhukov]

"Sometimes"?

Phht.

Try, "every damn time".

I've read a lot of user reviews. They are rarely written by a person who wishes to provide advice to other potential customers. Rather, 99% of them are just people gushing or raging.

In addition, the practice of Amazon/Meta bombing has completely discredited the idea of user reviews. "Portal 2 has downloadable hats?!!!!!!?!?! Worst game ever! Zero I say, zero!!!!"

Yeah... user reviews can fuck right off and drown in the sewerage trench of a leper colony.

 

[lapan]

The best choice is to simply read multiple reviews from multiple sources. User reviews often only rate in extremes while professional reviews tend to rate some games down extremly because of it flaws, then praise a different game with similar flaws and give it near perfect scores.

 

[Jitters Caffeine]

"Sometimes"?

Phht.

Try, "every damn time".

I've read a lot of user reviews. They are rarely written by a person who wishes to provide advice to other potential customers. Rather, 99% of them are just people gushing or raging.

In addition, the practice of Amazon/Meta bombing has completely discredited the idea of user reviews. "Portal 2 has downloadable hats?!!!!!!?!?! Worst game ever! Zero I say, zero!!!!"

Yeah... user reviews can fuck right off and drown in the sewerage trench of a leper colony.

I genuinely think that "review bombing" is the reason Obsidian had so many layoffs recently. I you believe the rumors, they lost whole a ton of people because New Vegas got an 84 Metacritic score instead of the required 85. I know for a fact it had a 90 for the longest time, but when people get their anuses set aflame over one thing or another, they seem to think things will change. All it did was lose jobs, jeopardize current projects (including the South Park RPG), and cancel future projects that were in the beginning stages. People on the internet just can't seem to let people enjoy things without calling them a fanboy and telling them why they're wrong for thinking so.

 

[Wuffykins]

I genuinely think that "review bombing" is the reason Obsidian had so many layoffs recently. I you believe the rumors, they lost whole a ton of people because New Vegas got an 84 Metacritic score instead of the required 85. I know for a fact it had a 90 for the longest time, but when people get their anuses set aflame over one thing or another, they seem to think things will change. All it did was lose jobs, jeopardize current projects (including the South Park RPG), and cancel future projects that were in the beginning stages. People on the internet just can't seem to let people enjoy things without calling them a fanboy and telling them why they're wrong for thinking so.

Err... sorry to go after your example but the user scores don't factor into that. The magic 85 they were looking for was from the critic scores, and, keeping myself from another musical rendition of this particular rant, it got the 84 from the 'professionals'.

 

[Smooth Operator]

Well you seem to be mixing up some concepts here, fan is not opposite of professional, and user is not a synonym for fan.

Fan is the blindingly obvious worse choice as they will only sing praises and omit any negative points.
Problem is most of the "professionals" have no integrity and can not be trusted to be impartial themselves, not to mention the paid parties, and this isn't a joke all those big title early reviews were allowed to publish only because it serves the companies, those are not reviews those are sales pitches.

Yes a true professional should be able to put his rosy glasses off and give you an informed and informative review with all the positives and negatives, but in this industry those are very hard to find.
And there is certainly noone on IGN or Gamespot that is allowed to do that at will, their paychecks rely on publishers and they will always be influenced by them directly or indirectly.
Which is where users come in, they are not paid for, they are pretty obvious in their inclination, and while they may be pretty crude there is a lot more honesty to them, trick there is to find someone reliable enough to cover all the bases (no your standard youtube / metacritic shoutbot does not apply).

 

[dimensional]

The best choice is to simply read multiple reviews from multiple sources. User reviews often only rate in extremes while professional reviews tend to rate some games down extremely because of it flaws, then praise a different game with similar flaws and give it near perfect scores.

Very wise words I dont know why people dont try and find out as much about a game as possible using a variety of sources rather than using only professional or user reviews because they think one is better than the other. I have seen terrible professional and user reviews and great ones and usually its not hard to tell the difference. In short read as many reviews as possible then draw youre own conclusions immediate dismissal of any review before reading it is pretty stupid.

some user reviews are not really reviews though I remember one user `review` I read of Valkyria Chronicles went something like

` ha this is crap visuals like ps1 gameplay is rubbish compared to gears of war which is awesome havent even played this game really the first 2 minutes were so bad didnt look realistic at all this is a shit game get gears of war instead` rating 0

obviously I have tidied up the grammar a bit but yeah this sort of `review` is not really helpful and can be quickly dismissed as soon as read but you do need to read it first to dismiss it.

 

[roushutsu]

Depends on the review for me. Sometimes I agree with the fans, sometimes I don't. I guess it depends on what the professional reviewer is talking about and how thorough they are with their reviews.

That being said, there are times where I kinda feel bad for the pros. Back when Sonic Generations first came out, IGN gave it an 8 out of 10 and everything they said in the video summary and their written review was pretty much on the mark. It was a fair and damn good score, yet legions of Sonic fans got pissed and were nitpicking their review over stupid petty points (like "How dare he say that Sonic's friends are dumb!"). The reason? Because it's IGN. Situations like that make me shake my head.

 

[Bostur]

User reviews often have specific criticism and praise that professional reviews lack.

A lot of professional reviews lack the most important thing, the 'why'. Why is it a great game, why is the story immersive, why are the controls good. Specific details and examples. Even a poorly written review that manages to express this, is better than a professional review that skips the details.

And when I see a long list of 90-100 scores on metacritic I know at a glance they can't be trusted as a whole. Some of the reviews may be fair, but it's impossible to tell them apart.

Fringe magazines that publish reviews several weeks after the release are often more reliable than the big sites. This is no surprise to me because they had time to actually play the game.

Of course there are a lot of nonsense reviews from users, but they are easy to tell apart from the serious ones.

Nothing exceptional about this, this has been the case as long as video game magazines have existed.

 

[Smooth Operator]

THE DISAPPOINTING ENDING AND DAY 1 DLC DOES NOT = BAD GAME.

No it does not, but it hasto be mentioned and considered which all of the "professionals" fail to do, I wonder why that might be...

You can say that "Review scores don't matter if you like the game," but more and more I see people deciding not to buy the game or even pirate it SOLELY for these two reasons.

People decided to not to do business with someone who works with questionable business practices, that is the only way companies will take note of peoples objections.
How the company / consumer relationship works is something this young community of ours has yet to learn, only if we demand a certain standard will the companies be persuaded to uphold it.

 

[Fr]anc[is]

Sites don't have to be in a publishers pocket directly to be influenced. TotalBiscut talks about it a lot, but the jist of it is that if a publisher doesn't like a site, they wont send them a review copy ahead of time, so their review wont be ready to go on day 1, and thus they will miss out on a lot of traffic on day 1.

 

[Kahunaburger]

They're both pretty unreliable. The best sources of reviews are smaller-scale sources that aren't as aggressively targeted by hype campaigns but that are still professional. They generally will not appear on the metascore, and may not even give a numerical score.

 

[ChupathingyX]

Well, let me put it this way...

A "professional" review has never made me go out and try something that I eventually loved.

A user/fan review has made me go out and try something that I ended up loving!

 

[GoaThief]

but excluding those independents such as yatzhee

I don't feel he's a reviewer, let alone a highly respected one. He just happens to be a very funny cynic who talks about things he supposedly enjoys - great entertainment though. EDGE has some better reviewers and scoring system, although on occasion falls into pretension and disappears up it's own arse for a bit.

My own system for discovering and devising quality in a title is simple, read a couple of previews/reviews from both paid and unpaid sources to see if there's anything drastically wrong - if not (or the score is higher than 60%) I'll just go out and purchase if the game appeals to my tastes. I don't care much if other people like or dislike something, I can think for myself thanks. I've not played a real stinker in many years, excluding one blind purchase on Steam during their Halloween sale which cost less than a pint at the local pub.

 

[Tomeran]

Professional reviewers are usually more reliable, in my experience. I tend to agree more with them then user reviewers, Dragon Age 2 being a prime example(I actually liked that game, which reviewers gave an 7-8/10 whereas customer reviews generally thought it was the devil in game disguise).

Professional reviewers are just that, professional. They tend to take their job more seriously and present a more accurate picture of the game then fans and customers, who more let their feelings guide them in their reviews. Fans actually can give 0/10 because they didnt like some details.

But there are exceptions. Some professional reviewers clearly have other motivations, financial ones, behind their reviews. And when that happens, credibility drops fast. Not ALL reviews have that however, so its a matter of fishing out the intentions. Reading multiple reviews from multiple sources are usually the best idea.

IGN personally for me lost a lot of credibility for their sparkling near flawless review of ME3 while at the same time their website background was -riddled- with ME3 commercial, and some of their staff followed up making some remarkable statements about the fanbase in uproar about ME3s ending.

And I also find 10/10 reviews of ME3 to be...unreliable. While I agree that the ending and ME3 many little flaws does not spoil the game, and that ME3 was frigging excellent in general, giving a game 10/10 means to me utter complete perfection. No game has achieved that in history, and giving games 10/10 means pretty much that there ARE no flaws. And that is a problem many professional reviewers have with ME3, they dont bring up many flaws even though there clearly are some. ME3 is an amazing gaming experience, but to say that it is flawless is just wrong.

Not all fan/customer reviews are unreliable either. There are a handful of people out there that put a real effort in to keep their emotions at bay and deliver an unbiased, informed and proper review of their gaming experience, without tipping to the extreme 0/10 or 10/10.
And if one has problems finding those, you can always watch Zero Punctuation!