Starfield review controversy traces game journalism's orbital decay

It's been probably 10 years or so since I was writing reviews, and I have to say, I never felt pressure to skew a review one way or another.
The biggest heat I got was from fanboys when I had a sneak peek at PAX of Duke Nukem Forever and had to report how shitty it was. "YOU DON'T KNOW!!! YOU DIDN'T PLAY THE WHOLE GAME!!! YOU HACK!!!"
And I was like "Yeah, you're right, I didn't play the whole game, I played what their marketing team WANTED me to play and it sucked, you think the parts they DIDN'T want me to play are going to be better?"
Surprise... the game stunk up the joint.
But when it came to reviewing games, I approached every review as if the game were a 10/10, and then as I played I looked for reasons to subtract or add points. The plusses and minuses would balance out and I'd have a final score.
As a former teacher, I used school grades, which is why I think most sites are on a 7-10 scale.
A - 90%+
B - 80%+
C - 70%+
D - 60%+
F - 59% and down.
A game can be bad because it's a bad game or it can be bad because it's functionally broken. D is generally the Ralph Wiggum of games, possible to like, but you have to admit it's pretty bad.
I had to give a failing review to Assassin's Creed Liberty on the Playstation Vita even though I really liked how it looked and it played, because it had a game breaking bug that made your save file unloadable. Ubi took 2 months to fix it, rendering it unplayable for the first two months after launch.
Once it was fixed, I amended the review, but it was plainly unacceptable to release it in a broken state like that.
- What was the worst game that comes to mind from your time writing? I used to write album reviews for a metal site years ago and one of our writers got HIM’s latest album at the time. They really just didn’t like the album and I shit you not, the review garnered 1,000+ comments from pissed off fans. It got so out of hand, we had to close comments.
  
  Had to be Duke Nukem Forever. I was talking with one of the devs and I was legit curious as to how their process worked because it had been in hell for so long...
  "Were you able to use any of the original assets?"
  "Oh, all of them!" He seemed super excited.
  To use 14 year old assets and be incredibly proud of that? Eesh.
  Oh, and Brink! Brink was so incredibly disappointing. They had this well developed world and a fantastic movement system, solid class based shooter... but then it all fell apart in the actual implementation of it.
  I really, really, wanted to like Brink, but it was unplayable.
  Say you have a level where the enemy is escorting a VIP and your goal is to eliminate the VIP before they get to the destination.
  You roll in, wipe the team, wipe the VIP, then someone respawns, revives the VIP, and you keep going back and forth until the clock runs out.
  It didn't matter how many times you killed the VIP, all that mattered was if they were alive or dead when the clock ran out. Win/lose. Just crap design.

"Decay"
What's left to decay? It's dust now. Remember when Eidos used a PR firm to strongarm websites into not publishing reviews of Tomb Raider: Underworld if they were less than an 8/10 till after launch?
"That's right. We're trying to manage the review scores at the request of Eidos." When asked why, the spokesperson said: "Just that we're trying to get the Metacritic rating to be high, and the brand manager in the US that's handling all of Tomb Raider has asked that we just manage the scores before the game is out, really, just to ensure that we don't put people off buying the game, basically."
That was 15 years ago, and despite the fact that Barrington Harvey went on to lie and pretend they never said that, everybody knew that kind of thing was old hat back then too. Mainstream gaming journalism is a captured industry.

big published reviews don't mean anything to me and I'm surprised they do to most people. everything is an 8-10 out of 10. how do people not find an issue with that
- The only conclusion to make is that the video game industry has matured to a point where only masterpieces are released. Bad games just don't exist anymore.
  Right??
  
  I think you can explain much of the lack of lower scores by the fact that the games that would get lower scores are also likely to be ignored by just about any established reviewer.
  There are thousands of games released every year that a site like IGN will never review. Would you find it valuable for IGN to scour Steam or the Switch eShop for terrible games just to use more of the score scale?
- Even gollum, by far the buggiest and most boring AAA game to come out in a few years was given a 64% by pc gamer. At least gamespot was honest and gave them a 2/10
- Exactly, it feels like 50/100 is the baseline and 75/100 is mediocre. 75/100 tells me I have to be a fan of the genre to enjoy it. This rating inflation really shows how dependent reviewers are. This is one of the reasons I like organisations like Stiftung Warentest instead of depending on some biased product comparison blogs.
  
  You may notice that this parallels the american school grading system to a T. Most major gaming review sites and such are done by americans that spent anywhere between 4-10+ years with that being the what grading/reviewing/scoring was done in almost every interaction they ever had past childhood, there's no wonder it's the standard here even if it's changed the scoring paradigm.
- I agree, but what are alternatives for people who want a written text?
  
  Find an independent critic you respect and listen to the tenor of why they say a game is good. Or ignore critics and develop your own taste and sense of which studios, directors, artists, composers, or otherwise will compel you to buy a game.
  
  i use word of mouth mostly but its not that all critics are bad, just what seems like most, but if you find that you consistently align with a critics opinion I'd trust them

Stuff like this is why I never buy new games. Not only can you not trust the critics, but players get so blinded by hype and buyers remorse that they’ll ignore everything bad about the games they love.
It’s always wiser to wait for the hype to die down and see what the retrospective consensus is
- You also get fixed bugs, discounts and "all DLCs included" bundles. Welcome to c/patientgamers@lemmy.ml!
  
  It's not like we'd be lack of games to play anyway (avoiding eye contact with my Steam library)

Apparently Jeff Gerstmann received the review code quite a bit later than other publications. He said it's quite a ridiculous story that perhaps he would talk about it someday (his tone sounds like this is a story in the far future)
Jeff is ex (old) Gamespot, ex Giantbomb, and the guy who got fired from Gamespot due to external pressure from Eidos after he gave Kane and Lynch a 6 out of 10.
- yeah but now he's just a guy in a spare bedroom with 4.5k patrons and under 40k youtube subscribers (of which I am one)
  it's not that hard to blame game studios for not really thinking he's worth it anymore
  
  More likely that they know he's probably not going to give it a glowing review, especially after Fallout 4, so he didn't get one. This is something many publishers have historically done. It keeps reviews higher at launch so that people looking at reviews or metacritic scores see more positive information than after the dust settles.
  
  I mean, if you phrase it that way, sure. Just a dude in his spare room. But then again, aside from the fact that he makes probably 20 000 dollar a month alone from his Patreon, almost everyone who is interested in video games knows this man's name for way over a decade. More like two decades, actually. And while he certainly hasn't anywhere near the same visibility as he had at Gamespot or Giantbomb, way more of the people who do follow him, actually pay him money directly. Reach alone isn't what's important these days. And yet, Jeff still has the potential to influence a lot of people who do not directly give him money. He also has a podcast, he streams and has 170k follower on Twitter. And if he has a very contrarian take on something, it will get noticed. Maybe not as much as 15 years ago but still noticed.
  A bit of a ramble, sorry! I guess it triggered some memories of me listening to Giantbomb with him, Ryan, Vinnie, Alex and Brad while going to work or cleaning the house. Bombcast was pretty much the first podcast I regularly listened to.
  
  Yeah, Ive followed Jeff for a long time and he's absolutely not afraid to say a game isn't good, and his tastes can be fickle and particular, if I were a publisher cynically selecting who to send advance codes to to manufacture a good score he would not be one of them.
  As a consumer, I love him because he has integrity, likes what he likes, and says what he means, and I even can tell sometimes when he dislikes a game that I'd still like.
- I've never even heard of Kane and Lunch so sounds like he was probably right.
  
  i heard the first one was actually pretty good, but the second one had issues including the length of FOUR HOURS

I miss the days of N64 Magazine and C&VG in the 90s. Those were reviews you could trust.
If a game was shit, they literally called it shit and gave it a review and score to match.
For example: https://gaminghell.co.uk/images/n64tribute-carmageddon64b.jpg
Review summary: "If you see Carmageddon 64 in the shops, take it off the shelves, rip up the box and throw the cart repeatedly against the wall until it breaks".
Classic
Edit: fuck me, fourty fucking quid for that game back then. That's £70 with inflation!!!!!
Edit edit: I'm looking at the prices of the games I got in the 90s...fucking hell, we have it good nowadays. Of course literally everything else is more expensive but eh
- I still look to Yahtzee when I'm curious about a game that's either new or I'm too broke to buy at the time.
  Fuck a out of score. Tell me what annoyed you about the game, or what you enjoyed. So much more worth my time than seeing numbers and not looking into why those numbers exist.
  Too many reviews just go through talking points from the publisher/dev anyway so they're useless.
  At least Yahtzee gets to the fucking point of it all and in short time.
  
  Never heard of Yahtzee but that sounds great.
  A lot like Digitiser here back in the day...might write up a good post about Digi when I get the time.

Its more like the problem of Neo-liberalism and hyper capitalism at this point.....
Journalism dying is just a by-product.
- Commercial media has always been collaborative with whatever power structures or industries it's associated with. Only good media is independent, and even then you get some really shitty journalists, and sometimes entire rotten publications.

Is there any reason to follow game journalism outlets anymore? Reading some positive/negative Steam reviews and watching some gameplay footage on its own gives a really good impression of what a game is like IMO.
- I see you haven't been introduced to Yahtzee Croshaw and his Zero Punctuation series. Also, Steam reviews are full of bots.
- I haven't followed professional outlets for a long time. It's pretty obvious most of them do not have enough time to give a proper review to these massive, 120+ hour long games. I used to read Computer Gaming World. Their reviewers would often mention that their rules required them to complete the game. Most of the reviews I see today, they don't even necessarily get the whole fuckin' game in their review copy. Just look at BG3.
  Phenomenal game, with a solid story, incredible characters, fun game play, and just... Bugs. Lotta bugs. Especially after the first act. You might not even realize you are getting them because so many are that things that should happen, don't. The reviews for it clearly only covered the first, most polished act. And even then, they didn't actually mention bugs there and while it's the most polished, it is still far from perfect. As time goes on and more people push further into the game, now those same review outlets put out editorials reporting on players bitching about the bugs on social media. Things that should have been covered in their own official reviews in the first damn place.
  If all they're going to do is write a bunch of bullshit they were likely paid to say, and then rely on users to generate more "news" content for them, I'm just going to stick with going straight to other players. There are still plenty that think for themselves and give honest, detailed descriptions of the game while trying to limit their personal opinions and bias. I want to be told how the thing actually is and make my own mind up based on my opinions; reviews can be objective.
  
  Sounds like the real problem is publishers not actually finishing their games before release, so even if reviewers did try to play the whole thing, they couldn't. The switch to digital downloads (over pressed media) has created an opportunity to do more with a game, but the reality is that it's simply made games more expensive (since there is no resale market) and, worse, created an entire generation of game developers and managers who think that the launch date product is like a rough draft copy of their book report for Freshman English.

Ratings. Are. Stupid.
When it comes to movies and audience scores, sure, look at the rotten tomatoes score or whatever. But everyone should realize that the average score of EVERY CRITIC is just going to be a useless number.
Not only that but reviewers who represent entire companies like the people at IGN and elsewhere aren’t giving an honest opinion. I know this because a few of them have given their honest opinion before. They got fired for low scores.
This is the reason that I enjoy watching reviews from people like ACG or SkillUp. They don’t need to give a score because their opinion isn’t a number. Enjoyability isn’t a number. Both of those reviewers enjoy games slightly different than I do, but when I watch their reviews I get a sense of if I will enjoy them.
Seriously if you go to outlets who give scores on games commonly, stop. Very little time is put into choosing these numbers and they reflect nothing about enjoying a game for you personally. Go watch a review from ACG or SkillUp. Outlets like IGN or PCGamer can’t hold a candle to these guys.
- They could easily all be giving their honest opinion at IGN: if the reviewers who tend to like everything are the ones who don't get fired, the output of mostly positive (or sometimes groupthink negative) reviews would be the same, even if individual reviewers never lied.
  
  Take a read of this summary (by IGN) of their Madden 22 review:
  “ Madden NFL 22 is a grab bag of decent – if frequently underwhelming – ideas hurt by poor execution. Face of the Franchise, to put it mildly, is a mess. Homefield advantage is a solid addition, but it doesn’t quite capture the true extent of real on-field momentum swings. The new interface is an eyesore, and the new presentation is cast in a strange and unflattering shade of sickly green. It’s smoother and marginally more refined, but in so many ways it’s the same old Madden. In short, if you’re hoping for a massive leap forward for the series on the new generation of consoles (or on the old ones), you’re apt to be disappointed”
  Now, I want you to read that and ask what you’d rate it based on this info (or the whole review).
  IGN has a scale approximately this: 10. Masterpiece 9. Excellent 8. Great 7. Good 6. Okay 5. Mediocre
  I don’t think I need to tell you that the user reviews for this game don’t even reach mediocre. Not to mention the gambling inclusion that IGN doesn’t take seriously in any sports game it reviews. But IGN still called Madden 22 a 6 or an “okay” game.
  I’m not saying they’re lying necessarily but the result is the same. The honest critiques are ignored to keep receiving review codes. That score should be left out entirely but they refuse because it drives clicks. It’s a joke.

I don't understand the purpose of big company reviewers (for subjective stuff like media at least). If I'm watching a smaller reviewer my goal is figure out their tastes so I can ignore the criticisms that I know don't bother me, and pay very close attention to where their tastes align with mine. Like if dunky calls a game buggy or slow paced, that's probably more a positive than a negative, but if he says the controls are clunky, I'll probably agree. ACG tends to like games that are less mechanically adventious and easy compared to what I like, and we have evry different tastes in storylines, but he's a really good barometer for sound and graphics.
If kotaku or whatever releases a review it's really hard for me to understand whose voice I'm getting, so the review is pretty useless, how do I know if the guy calling the game a challenge is that infamous cuphead reviewer or a guy that has been beating dark souls since he was 4.
- I have a hard time when people complain about loading screens. I've been gaming since the 70s guys, let me tell you about load times:
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commodore_Datasette
  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Starpath_Supercharger
  You'd start loading a game from tape and then you might as well go have dinner with your family because it would be 30 to 60 minutes before you could play.
  Or, it could hit a loading error 5 minutes after you walked away and now you have to start all over again...
  
  I bet you'd complain about your new car having roll up windows or no ac. Times have changed and we can do better. Especially with their budget and 6 years. It's pathetic.
  
  Also, the Commodore 1541 floppy drive had a serial transfer rate of 2 bytes per second. Nothing loaded quickly in the 80's either.
- Same here,
  Unfortunately most of the folks in gaming media that I follow don't write or produce proper "reviews" anymore. Reading a review from IGN or Gamespot... I don't know anything about the reviewer so I take it with a grain of salt. Like with Starfield, I give the same weight to IGN giving it a 7 as I do with some no-name whatever tiny website I never heard of giving it a 9.5
  Just have to read through the reviews. If someone docks the game for not letting you fly manually between solar systems like you do in Elite Dangerous then I just have to write-off the negativity because... of-course fucking not, did anyone expect that? With something like, the repeated knocks against the barren nature of the procedural generation leading to repetitive tedious travel - I take that more seriously, because it was something I was hoping they would have addressed when moving that direction. Something like the story sucking or the NPCs having cringey dialogue is completely subjective and means nothing without knowing the reviewer's tilt.
  
  If someone docks the game for not letting you fly manually between solar systems like you do in Elite Dangerous then I just have to write-off the negativity because… of-course fucking not, did anyone expect that?
  I think a lot of people expected that. This is the see-that-mountain-you-can-go-there studio.
- PC Gamer shows clearly who wrote the article, and generally they'll be clear about what subjective reasons they had for their final verdict.
  Personally, I feel they are prone to buying into marketing hype, but at least you can tell when that is the case.

This article made a damn good point about how much gaming websites depend on guides now. It hasn’t really clicked until now with me. I follow a bot on Mastodon that posts new articles from a bunch of different gaming sites, and it seems like half of them are for guides and walkthroughs. That’s where they get their ad bucks from, so that and SEO are the big focus.
- Yeah, after Reddit died (as far as I'm concerned) I set up a tracker for a load of RSS feeds. A lot of them are, as you say, updates concerning walkthroughs and guides. Predominantly Baldurs Gate 3 at the moment.
  Which is fine I guess, but it is very obvious what they're pushing...I'd rather just have news.
  
  yeah, it sucks and I just stick with the wiki source and proper sites I know. I am a hoarder so I don't want to miss some good items I can get by accidentally wiping a area or block myself from them because of a wrong decision. Some of the generated sites are still refer to old early access stuff.
  
  I just checked that gaming news Mastodon account I follow, and of the 20 most recent posts, 19 of them were guides.
- When I look up guides, I'm now spammed with game8 and screenrant links. I'm pretty sure they're just AI generated too.

I feel like this is an article without a real story. Or at least it didn't succeed in finding the story

It’s Microsoft’s problem now. LOL

I wrote reviews(early 2000) during the late magazine era and even back then there were taboos about local influential company's releases.(they only sign import deal and sell/distribute games locally.) Cause they survive on the ad money instead of subscription or individual purchases. Modern website sucks even more cause you made pennies for each view and if you don't have something that covers enough contents to drive views, you will be at the mercy of promotion partners, same for the youtuber/streamer/influencer.
I mostly write review/walk through for import games, as there was usually a couple months delay for localization, even had contacts with local publisher that consult with group of writers about maybe which game to sign and import. The US/Japan publisher aren't exactly nice guys you know, they will ask you to sign multiple games, including the games you know might not sell well as part of the deal. It's a risky business and if companies that import games will try to influence review scores, you know how desperate the publisher will try to defend their "investment".

Gaming journalism is in a sorry state. I am thankful that we live in an age where I can just watch someone play something for a while. Seeing how they react and how the game flows can be a far better gauge of quality than a published review.
Of course, it also makes you run the risk of spoilers, which sucks. There are a few YouTubers out there making what I would say are fair reviews, but that could change in an instant.