Recently, I had a rather interesting realization. The massive reaction coming from the major "jouranlists" (I use the term loosely, and I will get to that) has absolutely nothing to do with the merits of ME3, or how they perceive the merits of ME3. Rather, it is a defense of their own reputations and their own merits. How do I mean this? Well, there is obviously a massive disjunction between the fans and major reviewers. Due to this, a very large amount of questions have been asked and brought light of the reviewing process. Now, I'm not saying that all of these raised questions have merit, but most certainly some do. This has created a bit of a backlash against the reviewing process as a whole, and the integrity of the reviewers and journalists themselves. So really, what we are seeing is *not* a defense of Bioware per se, but rather a defense of the reviewers themselves.Dark Knifer said:
That said, this brings another issue to front. I hardly view any of the reviewers as being critical in the least. If they had, they would have pointed out the many flaws ME3 has, from it's broken journal system, to it's repetitive gameplay, to the tacked on and pointless side-mission system that does nothing but create a facade of length, to the ridiculously short amount of time it takes to actually play the game (I clocked it in at just under 12 hours, with very little of substance to do within the game to lengthen this). The point is, there are a number of glaring flaws that were overlooked. The shallow and meaningless defense of their "perfect scores" exemplifies this. ME3 is a functional game, but hardly anything more than that.
Compare this with major film reviewers. A major film reviewer will not give a perfect score or rating or what-have-you to a film that is merely functional. Nor will they demean those that disagree with them, regardless of how loud they are. Rather they will be quite honest about the shortcomings a film may have, and will reserve perfect scores for those films that go far beyond being merely "functional".
When you break it down, this is why videogames fail miserably as art. The reviewers, who are supposed to be critical about the given subject, fail at doing so. And when they fail at doing so, rather than providing any more substance to their argument they make childish attacks against those that disagree with them, in the mindset of "The fans are being whiny children, which means we can also."
However, fans are not held to any standard as such. They don't need to be critical, nor do they need to provide substance for their argument. If they do, more power to them. But they are not required to do so by any stretch of the imagination, nor should they be expected to. As an audience and consumer of a given subject, they are merely allowed to do whatever they damn well please. Reviewers, however, need to be held to a much higher standard. Their entire purpose is to be critical of the subject matter, and approach it substantively. And yet, as the whole ME3 debacle has shown, they are completely incapable of doing so.
Really, regardless of what the fans say, the reviewers and "journalists" are completely out of place for calling them entitled, or any such nonsense. Their place is to be critical of the industry itself, critical of the subject matter. The fact that they are not, and instead resort to childish attacks on the fans, proves that they are not. They have no substance for their arguments, and are incapable of backing their opinions with merit. And in an effort to defend their flimsy reputation, they essentially label detractors as being childish.
