Why are Rockstar games rated so highly by reviewers?

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

I see where you're coming from, but it's never felt inorganic to me. People talk about politics! You can have characters just talking about politics sometimes! It doesn't all have to be veiled allusions and such. I agree that Max Payne was really heavy-handed with that stuff, but I think RDR handled it just right, personally.

Regardless, can you name some games that actually do fit your definition of showing, not telling, with regards to political issues and such? Most games I can think of that deal with politics at all tend to do it in a very unsubtle, up-front kind of way similar to Houser's but with (generally) less wit. (e.g. Assassin's Creed, Mass Effect, The Witcher).

The writing in video games are so bad that it's hard to come up with examples within the medium. Most games don't really try to be about anything, the plot is just there to link the action together and nothing else much like a Jackie Chan movie. There are very few, if any, games like Watchmen and how the whole movie is commentary on the sad state of humanity. Bioware shows you major ethical issues by allowing the player themselves to choose. Hideo Kojima does a decent job even with all the cutscenes and dialog; in MGS3, the "scene" dictates much of what each character ends up having to do.

What I am saying is, Rockstar comes up with a decent idea, characters with potential and a world that is intriguing, only to miss the mark at implementation. I loved Max Payne 1 and 2. Max Payne 3 just wasn't for me. I couldn't handle him whine about how crappy his life is - it comes off more as self loathing than gritty or ironic, which is PAYNEFUL to say the least (see what I did there?). Nor could I enjoy seeing Mr Payne's world degenerate into another generic cover-based shooter. I tried it, didn't like it.

Maybe I am weird for thinking games have to be, you know, fun? Maybe they don't deserve a 9/10. They're not terrible, but anything more than 8/10 for an inconsistent game filled with chores is a bit much.

I hated how Max kept saying how he saw that he probably wasn't going to be alive 5 minutes from now. Does Max not experience what he just fucking did and the situation after situation he gets out of? MP3 also broke the cardinal rule that cover shooters should not degenerate into a game of whack-a-mole and that's what MP3 became most of the time.

It's a chore in itself to just get to the missions most of the time.

Agro's (the horse)controls in Shadow Of The Colossus put RDR's horses to utter shame.
Agro's never been matched as a horse, in any sense.


And I'm not even particularly fond of Bethesda, aside from Dishonored. Like Rockstar, Bethesda leaves a lot to be desired.

And Argo's controls aren't even something that hard to do in my opinion. The controls are simple and the horse behaves like a horse.

I don't like Bethesda's games either because they are just horrible at writing, I don't care for any of their characters. And Dishonored was not made by Bethesda.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

I play a lot of third person shooters and I consider Max Payne 3 to be one of the best. The controls are intuitive and sensitive and the action has a viscious and visceral feel to it, making the gameplay one of the most satisfying in the genre. Not only that but enemies and settings change in rapid succession as well(the office shoot-out is espescially awesome). It's absolutely superb though it drags on just a little too long. What it does it does extremely well though there is very little in terms of variety. Something the GTA games do better(espescially with GTA5 borrowing a lot of the basics of Max Payne 3's gunplay).

Firsly, I'd like to say TPSs are my thing before getting into every little thing MP3 did wrong, I played Metal Gear Online for 4 years straight every week against the very best TPS players. The controls of MP3 are bad at many levels. The shoulder swap is implemented poorly, you shouldn't have to take your thumb off the left stick to shoulder swap (so many TPSs fail at something so simple from Uncharted to Tomb Raider to MP3 to even Vanquish). There's no way to quick switch weapons, you have to bring up a damn wheel to switch weapons. Why can't the game just remember what weapon you last used? Then quick tapping the weapon wheel button will switch back to your previous weapon, holding it would bring up the wheel. The crouch button basically doesn't work, you have to hold crouch for about a full second for Max to crouch, and even then it's really useless. The cover system is horrible, you can't even crouch while in cover. There's a section where enemies drop in on you in an office room and you can take cover on the cubicle walls and the walls are destructible (which is cool). However, if the top part of the wall gets destroyed (the part that covers Max's head), Max will stay standing up and you can't even manually press crouch to crouch lower on the cover. And when you shoot dodge (or get knocked to last stand) and there's cover in front of you, you can't go from prone to cover, you have to standup like a dumbass and then go to cover. Max's overall movement just feels clunky, it doesn't have that smoothness of say MGS4, Ghost Recon Future Soldier, Vanquish, and even Uncharted is smoother. MP3 is obviously trying to be a fast-paced arcade shooter but Max is so sluggish and even more due to the controls that make him feel so mechanical.

The game actually plays pretty decently in small, closed areas like the police station level at the end. But there's so many sections of long range shooting with enemies at you 3 o'clock, 12 o'clock, and 9 o'clock that the game devolves into basically whack-a-mole as you have to wait for them to pop up to shoot them and you can't move around much or you'll get shot and killed rather quickly. What pissed me off so much more is that enemies even actually duck when you use bullet time, it's so fucking ridiculous. At the end of the game, with the shootout in the hanger (with the guy with the grenade launcher) pretty much emphasizes everything wrong with the game; you have enemies at your 3, 12, and 9 while not having any freedom of movement, the game will cutscene kill you if you go too far to your right or left and try to get in an actual good position.

 

[Maximum Bert]

Me and a friend were talking about this a while ago personally I dislike Rockstars games mostly especially the open world type ones it just feels like they make a world then go hmmmm what shall we do with it hence a load of boring quests and objectives and to be fair they are not alone in doing this which is why I dislike most open world type games.

My friend likes Rockstar but he still finds the plethora of glowing reviews on their games ridiculous I can see why some would like them but they are seriously overated.

I cant prove it but I believe that they exert serious pressure on a lot of people to give them good scores and I wouldnt be surprised if money changed hands in a fair amount of cases I mean after what they spent on GTA5 a little bit more just to ensure good scores wouldnt hurt and would just be a drop in the ocean financially. I also think theres a sort of self brainwashing effect going on whereby its made by Rockstar therefore its good and the decision is made even before playing the game and unless its an absolute trainwreck thats unplayable nothing will change that.

I did try GTA5 a while ago round a friends house and I wasnt impressed, from personal enjoyment I would rate it a 3 but being objectionable I can see it reaching a 7 or 8 out of 10 its definitely not something amazing though almost everyone I know dropped it within a week or two for something else which is pretty fast I only know one person who finished it and he said he was glad it was over (he likes achievement).

 

[Pseudonym]

I take it you were'nt around to see people flip their shit when GTA5 had got two or three non perfect scores?Reviewers are pressured to give big games high scores otherwise a legion of raving fans will descend upon them.

Now that you say it I was around when that happened. It was rather ridiculous. Even so, I can hardly believe that reviewers would collectively give GTA 10s just to avoid being trolled by fanboys. I quite easily believe that some reviewers are spineless enough to let fanboy rage influence their score a little bit but hardly that the 57/58 reviewers who make up de metacritic xbox 360 score who all gave GTA a 9 or higher all did that out of fear and not because they thought the game deserved that. More importantly I dont exactly know how reviewers can tell in advance how people will react to their scores. Sometimes gamers accuse reviewers of being too easy on big titles and at other times they try to get them fired for not giving away perfect scores to imperfect games. There's no pleasing everybody anyway.

 

[Ieyke]

And Dishonored was not made by Bethesda.

Bethesda's the publisher.
But that's exactly the point. Arkane used the Unreal engine for Dishonored and Dishonored was amazing. Meanwhile, every game made with Bethesda's 18 year-old engine is bland as hell.

 

[Ieyke]

I've never played a Rockstar game I liked. They managed to make even the wild west seem boring to me. Even the wild west!!

The Wild West is always boring, beyond a couple snapshot cliche moments. If' you're not having a shootout in the street or robbing a train....there's not much else to it.
Like the Revolutionary War, it's a terrible setting for a game. The USA in general is a really boring setting outside of huge modern cities like NYC, LA, Chicago, and Houston. ....unless it's post-apocalyptic or there's some sort of sci-fi/supernatural thing going on.

 

[OldDirtyCrusty]

Rockstar aren't gods,they are a company that makes great games that's all.

That would be my opinion too. I just got the feeling that it`s the newest trend to bash Rockstar here in these forums and it`s a bit tiresome to see those clickbait threads.
If Rockstar was so shitty they wouldn`t be this succesfull. High scores don`t equal sales in this kind of scale especially if you look at GTA5. But there are enough people here who would argue even that.

 

[omega 616]

I'm still amazed people read or watch reviews, I can pretty much predict what a game is going to be like all by a few minutes of gameplay. There are cases where I have to watch a few gameplay videos and first impression type stuff, such as thief ... it looks likes a good game but something seems off.

Other peoples reviews are there opinion and I don't know how much corruption each person or company has. Not to mention every site has to have stars or numbers, which is the height of stupid to me ... "here is a complex thing that has so many small parts all adding up to one thing ... lets just reduce a complex opinion to 3.5 out of 5", it tells me nothing about the game!

What stops it being a 5? Is the sound bad, the game play awful, the plot is none sense or what? So you actually have to read the review but if you do that, what is the point of the number or stars? You already know what the games strengths and weaknesses are!

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Me and a friend were talking about this a while ago personally I dislike Rockstars games mostly especially the open world type ones it just feels like they make a world then go hmmmm what shall we do with it hence a load of boring quests and objectives and to be fair they are not alone in doing this which is why I dislike most open world type games.

Exactly, almost all developers make open world games wrong. Mercenaries on PS2/Xbox is what ruined me to Rockstar's games. Instead of the world being made first and missions created afterward, the missions were made first with care to enemy placements and such (much like a mission in a linear game), then those missions were placed on a canvas to make the map. There were so many ways to do each mission it was like a puzzle game figuring out how to not piss off the factions. The US and China were factions in the game, you'd have to do a mission for the US doing something bad to China, then a mission for China doing something bad to the US, and there was always a way to do each mission without the faction knowing it was you.

And Dishonored was not made by Bethesda.

Bethesda's the publisher.
But that's exactly the point. Arkane used the Unreal engine for Dishonored and Dishonored was amazing. Meanwhile, every game made with Bethesda's 18 year-old engine is bland as hell.

I don't give a shit who the publisher is, I care about who the developer is. Bayonetta 2 is will be published by Nintendo instead of Sega, but it's still being made by Platinum, which is all that matters. Like with movies when the say "from the producers of...", I don't care, I only care about directors and writers.

I'm still amazed people read or watch reviews, I can pretty much predict what a game is going to be like all by a few minutes of gameplay. There are cases where I have to watch a few gameplay videos and first impression type stuff, such as thief ... it looks likes a good game but something seems off.

Same here. I can tell you Watch_Dogs is going to blow GTA completely out of the water just by watching the gameplay demos. I hadn't played Splinter Cell since the 1st game because the series was boring, it was just hiding in the shadows, then I saw a gameplay demo of Blacklist and I knew it was going to be good, I bought it on day 1 and platinum-ed it (the online was shit, but the single player was awesome).

The thing is that I've had a lot of posters across several message boards (even in this thread [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.843202-How-good-is-Red-Dead-Redemption] on the Escapist) over the years tell me to try RDR because it's much better than GTA (I made it known that I hate GTA). I can still end up liking RDR if the story, main missions, and characters end up being enjoyable. However, with all the issues RDR has, I don't understand how any reviewer can score it in the 9s. Even if the game wins me over, I just can't give it anything past an 8 due to all the issues. I played and absolutely loved Binary Domain, possibly in my top 10 favorite PS3 games but I only scored it a 7 due to all the issues the game has. I'm not asking how'd all these reviewers enjoy RDR more than me, I'm asking how these PROFESSIONAL reviewers don't take off points for all the issues RDR has.

 

[zelda2fanboy]

CHOOSE ONE

1. Story heavy games are rated higher than mechanically robust games (or REAL games, if you're one of THOSE people).
2. The gaming journalism field is corrupt, and the scores are purchased.
3. The gaming journalism field is full of incompetents, and there was no need to purchase scores.
4. Every AAA game is rated on a 9-10 scale anyway, so 9.5 is actually average.
5. It's a viscerally exciting game that shows well in short bursts, and reviewers are pressed for time.
6. They gave it a 59 and the numbers were inverted.
7. They liked the game.

I give this answer a 9.5. It just comes down to taste really. If the OP were saying all of this stuff about Metal Gear Solid or Resident Evil, I'd be right on board. Red Dead Redemption is just more what I'm used to when it comes to structure, writing, and controls.

 

[omega 616]

The thing is that I've had a lot of posters across several message boards (even in this thread [http://www.escapistmagazine.com/forums/read/9.843202-How-good-is-Red-Dead-Redemption] on the Escapist) over the years tell me to try RDR because it's much better than GTA (I made it known that I hate GTA). I can still end up liking RDR if the story, main missions, and characters end up being enjoyable. However, with all the issues RDR has, I don't understand how any reviewer can score it in the 9s. Even if the game wins me over, I just can't give it anything past an 8 due to all the issues. I played and absolutely loved Binary Domain, possibly in my top 10 favorite PS3 games but I only scored it a 7 due to all the issues the game has. I'm not asking how'd all these reviewers enjoy RDR more than me, I'm asking how these PROFESSIONAL reviewers don't take off points for all the issues RDR has.

Personally, I think RDR is total shite. All the guns feel and act the same (with the odd standout), the story is boring as fuck (until the rather obvious "big twist ending"), the hunting is pointless, the game play is nothing special and loads of annoying little animations (sitting down at camp fires and skinning animals).

Just nothing about the game feels good to me but I guess the ending is what really seals the deal with games, rdr is loads of boring but dat ending and mass effect was "zomg awesome!" till the ending and now people say "the ending of 3 ruined the whole series!" which in terms of an over reaction is up there with nuking Sweden 'cos you stubbed your toe on a bookcase!

 

[white_wolf]

I've rarely had any issues with the controls of games I adapt fast to nearly any game I play maybe due to the fact I stared on 16 bit so you can't get any worse then that! That said the glitches are what would get me one time I rode back to Armadillo and it was roof high in muddy water I was like, " What happen! Did this place have a damn I wasn't aware of?" but I was there so I decided to play around of the rooftops (as that was all that was left) and I fell through the jail house ceiling and it took a moment for me to see I was under the "water" and about two more seconds before the whole city literately pulled an Atlantis and emerged from the murky depths then John just fell on the ground like he was drunk the whole thing was quite hilarious other glitches not so much but they didn't happen often on my copy.

Story, the voice acting, interesting characters, and making my own fun free roaming was what made this game very enjoyable for me. GUN is more linear then this game sure the main missions are linear but do a few take a break enjoy the multiple areas the little hidden events or treasures maps and such. I actually really liked the horse once I learned through practice its flaws and how to overcome them I found the darn mountain lions to be more of a challenge ambushing me straight off my horse then playing mechanics. For Max Payne 3 I'd toyed with the idea of buying it for awhile then one my family members did and I'm glad I didn't commit to it because it was crappy like I feared it would be. His long monologs alone just ruin it for me. From what I've seen there isn't a story there worth getting into but with RDR there is, it can take awhile for you to get interested in it but once a scene does speak to you you're in the one that pulled me in was a side quest for mystery man from then on I wanted to really fallow John through the game.

I gave up fallowing the ratings on games long ago I've given up on looking to IGN, G4, or pretty much any major gaming site to score new games for me because at best they get the demo which was designed to be perfect for their consumption only I can't play the darn thing and decide for myself and at worst its like they got bribed as they constantly churn out 8 - 10s on crappy games and you look back at the scores and go what was that reviewer drinking to score this game like this? One of the latest casualties of trust between reviewer and consumer would be ME3 most people had huge issues with not just the lack of ending coverage I can only recall one reviewer saying, " you'll be surprised by the ending" did squat to prepare anyone for how contrived destroy and lore breaking and ridiculous control and synthesis could be but other things in the game as well were just not reveal anyone having LIs in ME2 for instance got shafted one way or another, the intro level we got in the game was the opening not some midway point or place holder mission to preserve consumer surprise it was a retcon of the prior trial sequence fans really wanted these reviewers gave fantastic scores for this game leaving the consumers feeling jaded, confused, cheated, or worse.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Personally, I think RDR is total shite. All the guns feel and act the same (with the odd standout), the story is boring as fuck (until the rather obvious "big twist ending"), the hunting is pointless, the game play is nothing special and loads of annoying little animations (sitting down at camp fires and skinning animals).

Just nothing about the game feels good to me but I guess the ending is what really seals the deal with games, rdr is loads of boring but dat ending and mass effect was "zomg awesome!" till the ending and now people say "the ending of 3 ruined the whole series!" which in terms of an over reaction is up there with nuking Sweden 'cos you stubbed your toe on a bookcase!

Like I said before I don't care if people loved or hated RDR, but the game just has too many flaws to be in 9/10 territory regardless. I just got to Mexico in RDR and the game is sitting in 4-5/10 territory for me now as nothing interesting has happened story-wise or gameplay-wise. Every mission is just go to Point B and kill X amount of enemies is rather dull gunfights.

I've rarely had any issues with the controls of games I adapt fast to nearly any game I play maybe due to the fact I stared on 16 bit so you can't get any worse then that!

It's not about adapting to controls, I have no problem doing that. For example, in Ghost Recon Future Soldier, you can cover swap while moving the camera and shoot while doing that. That requires you to hold down X and move the right stick at the same time, which is definitely not intuitive, but I adapted to becoming, perhaps, the best in the game at cover swapping. RDR's controls are just bad. The aiming and shooting isn't quite tight enough. The fact that you have to tap X to sprint is just asinine, there's no point for a game to even have a sprint button yet alone make you tap it to sprint. The cover system isn't very good. I shouldn't have to take my left thumb off the left stick to shoulder swap, but that's what you have to do in RDR. RDR has poor controls not because I can't adapt but because I could do things faster and more precise if the game had better controls.

 

[SKBPinkie]

http://www.forbes.com/sites/insertcoin/2013/09/20/what-percentage-of-players-will-actually-finish-gta-5/

Look at how many people actually completed GTA IV. About one in four players finish that game. Says a lot about how much people care about the story.

The only reason that people would play GTA otherwise is for the open-world-ness of it. But the problem with it is that the various activities you can take part in are either completely boring or have terrible controls. And everything else "interesting", like NPC dialogue, ads, TV shows, etc. is just stuff you can witness. It isn't stuff you can take part in or actually interact with.

And finally - the cops. The cops have frickin' ruined exploration and experimentation. You could literally be walking along a street, some dude calls the cops for no apparent reason, and you get an instant 1* rating. Yes, that actually happened to me.

Escaping from the cops, while not hard, is just frustrating and just takes way, way too long. Overall, the cops are on you if you want to do anything remotely fun and just take forever to evade. Hell, even killing a guy with a silenced gun on the top of a mountain with no other witnesses somehow summons a crapload of cops, on the fucking mountain trail.

This is not how an open world game is supposed to work. Having enemies / obstacles every once in a while is fine, but actively discouraging experimentation is just nonsense.

 

[EternallyBored]

It does happen with over hyped games though.For instance I would'nt be surprised if Titanfall gets near perfect scores even though it's a bland FPS with mechs and limited parkour.Major game critics often have to deal with readers who will flip their lids if a game does'nt get a 10/10 and that's not taking into account the pressure from certain developers/publishers.

I still shake my head at the fact a female reviewer who did a review of GTA5 got flamed because she though it'd be cool if one of the main characters was a woman.She wasn't even making a declaration or anything just expressing a thought yet fanboys gave her hell over it.Anyone who says the a major number of the gaming community aren't a bunch of sexist twats is bullshitting.

Or, yaknow, Titanfall could get good scores because people like competitive shooters and maybe they just like the game, what you see as bland, they see as snappy, easy to pick up and play in short bursts, and conducive to the type of multiplayer action they are looking for, especially considering that bland is one of the most uselessly subjective critiques you can give something, I played the beta, and while it's not a perfect game, it's definitely something I can see myself picking up and playing when I don't have a couple hours to engage in a good single player narrative.

Yes, there is pressure put on reviewers, but the actually persuasive pressure is more likely going to come from their bosses who make money on publishers advertising on their website, and the publishers themselves who use some shady tactics to influence reviews. I'm not even talking about bribes or threats, I'm talking about things like giving Call of Duty: Ghosts reviewers special events to show off and review the game, essentially using social psychology to manipulate mood and improve scores through a party like atmosphere. Angry fanboys are likely not a very big influence on whether a reviewer reviews a game well or not, I have yet to meet a reviewer whose been in the industry a while that gives two shits about what some anonymous facebook posts and forum topics say about them.

This is not how an open world game is supposed to work. Having enemies / obstacles every once in a while is fine, but actively discouraging experimentation is just nonsense.

This is your opinion, to some people, this is exactly how an open world game is supposed to work, for them, the cops are a part of the world that makes it feel more alive, and gives them consequences to their actions. To people like that, the cops don't discourage experimentation, they make the experimentation feel like an integrated part of the game world and are an enjoyable part of the experimentation and open world they love. For them, hitting a cop and getting into a car chase in the middle of a race is what they consider spontaneous fun, and I have multiple friends that regularly screw around in GTA V just to get the cops on them.

Of course, theres always that stupidly easy cheat to just drop your wanted level anyway, so if your screwing around you can go on a rampage and stop the cops with just a few simple button presses to lower your wanted level, I've never had a problem with the cops in GTA, maybe a cheat to totally turn them off in sandbox mode would be nice, but I've never had a problem with cops ruining my fun.

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Or, yaknow, Titanfall could get good scores because people like competitive shooters and maybe they just like the game, what you see as bland, they see as snappy, easy to pick up and play in short bursts, and conducive to the type of multiplayer action they are looking for, especially considering that bland is one of the most uselessly subjective critiques you can give something, I played the beta, and while it's not a perfect game, it's definitely something I can see myself picking up and playing when I don't have a couple hours to engage in a good single player narrative.

There's a difference between a game getting good scores and a game getting 9s across the board. What are the chances of around 50 or so people all thinking a game is 9/10 good? Just look at movies, how many movies on Rottentomatoes get over a 90% rating? And that rating is just that 90% of reviewers LIKED the movie, not that the reviewers' average rating for the movie was 9/10. I'm guessing you wouldn't give Titanfall a 9/10 even though you like it. With online competitive games, balance is key and most professional reviewers only play online for a few hours and don't even know if the guns, modes, maps, skills, etc. are actually balanced. I want to go to IGN, see a 9/10, then go GameSpot and see a 6/10 but that doesn't happen; you go to IGN to see a 9.5/10 and GameSpot rates it at a 9/10.

 

[The Random Critic]

Mutiplayer games are really not comparable to single player. As a person who waste most of his life in Dota (And loving most of it), it's still a terrible game in some respect. (And a frustrating one)

Personally I find most of the Elder Scroll games to be of most detailed of all the sandboxes games. The stuff you see, the stuff the player can find/create, and the ways the player can progress his skillz is better crazier then almost all the sandbox single players games (so stuff like EVE don't count) out there.

Still though, if one tells me that they don't like it cause it make no sense in a logic perspective. (All of them, even the older ones) while I would argue that they do try, I wouldn't be too hesitant to disagree.

Need to finally try out GTA/Mecenary.. Red Dead was pretty awesome (Even though I never really beaten it)

 

[EternallyBored]

Or, yaknow, Titanfall could get good scores because people like competitive shooters and maybe they just like the game, what you see as bland, they see as snappy, easy to pick up and play in short bursts, and conducive to the type of multiplayer action they are looking for, especially considering that bland is one of the most uselessly subjective critiques you can give something, I played the beta, and while it's not a perfect game, it's definitely something I can see myself picking up and playing when I don't have a couple hours to engage in a good single player narrative.

There's a difference between a game getting good scores and a game getting 9s across the board. What are the chances of around 50 or so people all thinking a game is 9/10 good? Just look at movies, how many movies on Rottentomatoes get over a 90% rating? And that rating is just that 90% of reviewers LIKED the movie, not that the reviewers' average rating for the movie was 9/10. I'm guessing you wouldn't give Titanfall a 9/10 even though you like it. With online competitive games, balance is key and most professional reviewers only play online for a few hours and don't even know if the guns, modes, maps, skills, etc. are actually balanced. I want to go to IGN, see a 9/10, then go GameSpot and see a 6/10 but that doesn't happen; you go to IGN to see a 9.5/10 and GameSpot rates it at a 9/10.

At first glance, over 60 movies in 2013 alone scored above a 90% on Rotten Tomatoes, with Gravity being a 97%. Of course, that ignores that RT uses a different algorithm to amalgamate scores than Metacritic does, and Rotten Tomatoes gathers many Many more reviews, since the number of movie critics vastly outweighs the number of game critics out there. That, and movie reviews are even more diverse in their rating mechanics than video games tend to be. That was a poor comparison on your part, but I get what your saying and you're not totally wrong.

As for Titanfall, based on the review scale, yeah I would give it a 9 out of 10, maybe an 8.5 based on the betas limited selection of weapons that weren't included in the build, but it is far and away one of the best small arena competitive shooters I have played in years, not since Tribes: Ascend came out a couple years ago have I had that much enjoyment out of the competitive shooter genre.

Review numbers are wonky, and every reviewer uses the scale in their own way, one reviewer may consider a 5 to be average and another considers 7 to be average. To the former, a 7 is still a good game, to the later nothing less than an 8 or 8.5 falls into the good category, and that's not even taking into account 5 star systems. Much like how Hollywood blockbuster tend to skew scores upwards, so too do AAA games, is it entirely fair, not entirely, but that was not the point of my post.

Just because eagle thinks Titanfall is bland (which is totally fine, it's a valid opinion, even if I disagree with it) does not mean we can immediately assume that the only reason it will get high scores is because of hype. There's a tendency in this line of thinking to assume that what an individual thinks is a terrible or bad game is always being given undeserving scores, but that's not always the case, people have a habit of thinking that there must be some objective reason for a difference in opinion. Like the OP that started this thread, Rockstar gets pretty consistent high scores, but just because someone thinks the game doesn't deserve them doesn't make every high review suspect. Yes, there probably is some score inflation from some reviewers, due to inertia, nostalgia, or any number of other reasons. Movies suffer from this same problem, that's part of the reason RT uses the algorithms it does, otherwise they would have the same problem metacritic does. However, that doesn't mean that Rockstar doesn't deserve much of its praise, score inflation or not, GTA V is still on almost every one I knows top 5 list for game releases last year, especially amongst more casual gamers, whose yearly buy list usually doesn't include much more than maybe 5 or so games the whole year.

With a game that broke momentous records at the tail end of a console generation, my own personal opinions, and the colossal support I've seen for it online and off, you'll have to forgive me if I support the notion that most of Rockstar's ratings and praise are actually earned by the quality of their games. Even without score inflation, I have not personally played a Rockstar game that I would rate below an 8 or 4 stars, whichever system you want to use. Feel free to disagree, but in Rockstar's case, I think they earn their AAA reputation, even if that means that some reviewers are probably cutting them more slack than they deserve from time to time.